Removing the Silencer : Coverage and Protection of Physician Speech Under the First Amendment

The physician–patient relationship rests on a bedrock of trust. Without trust, patients—and for that matter, physicians—are less willing to divulge information critical to providing accurate medical diagnoses and treatments. The state of Florida seemingly ignored this when its legislature, with support from the National Rifle Association and other pro-gun advocates, enacted the Firearm Owners Privacy Act (FOPA), a statute that restricts physicians from questioning their patients about firearm ownership. In Wollschlaeger v. Governor of Florida , the United States Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit held that FOPA did not regulate physician speech but, instead, regulated physician conduct. As such, the law was exempted from First Amendment scrutiny. But almost one year to the day after publishing its first Wollschlaeger opinion, the Eleventh Circuit sua sponte vacated its original opinion and substituted in its place a brand new opinion—one holding that FOPA was subject to First Amendment scrutiny, but nonetheless passed constitutional muster. This Note uses the diverging Wollschlaeger opinions as a vehicle to analyze the First Amendment’s coverage and protection of physician speech. Specifically, it argues that an uninhibited line of communication is required to protect the trust necessary for an effective physician–patient relationship. This logical underpinning leads to the conclusion that the First Amendment presumptively covers physician speech and, furthermore, that physician speech should be subject to intermediate scrutiny—a level of scrutiny that FOPA cannot meet

Resonant-state expansion for open optical systems: Generalization to magnetic, chiral, and bi-anisotropic materials

The resonant-state expansion, a recently developed powerful method in electrodynamics, is generalized here for open optical systems containing magnetic, chiral, or bi-anisotropic materials. It is shown that the key matrix eigenvalue equation of the method remains the same, but the matrix elements of the perturbation now contain variations of the permittivity, permeability, and bi-anisotropy tensors. A general normalization of resonant states in terms of the electric and magnetic fields is presented.Comment: 4 page

Testing Higher-Order Lagrangian Perturbation Theory Against Numerical Simulations - 1. Pancake Models

We present results showing an improvement of the accuracy of perturbation theory as applied to cosmological structure formation for a useful range of quasilinear scales. The Lagrangian theory of gravitational instability of an Einstein-de Sitter dust cosmogony investigated and solved up to the third order in the series of papers by Buchert (1989, 1992, 1993a), Buchert \& Ehlers (1993), Buchert (1993b), Ehlers \& Buchert (1993), is compared with numerical simulations. In this paper we study the dynamics of pancake models as a first step. In previous work (Coles \etal 1993, Melott \etal 1993, Melott 1993) the accuracy of several analytical approximations for the modeling of large-scale structure in the mildly non-linear regime was analyzed in the same way, allowing for direct comparison of the accuracy of various approximations. In particular, the ``Zel'dovich approximation'' (Zel'dovich 1970, 1973, hereafter ZA) as a subclass of the first-order Lagrangian perturbation solutions was found to provide an excellent approximation to the density field in the mildly non-linear regime (i.e. up to a linear r.m.s. density contrast of $\sigma \approx 2$). The performance of ZA in hierarchical clustering models can be greatly improved by truncating the initial power spectrum (smoothing the initial data). We here explore whether this approximation can be further improved with higher-order corrections in the displacement mapping from homogeneity. We study a single pancake model (truncated power-spectrum with power-index $n=-1$) using cross-correlation statistics employed inComment: TeX, 18 pages excl.figures; contact [email protected] ; [email protected] . submitted to Astron. & Astrophy

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