CORPORATIONS-ULTRA VIRES ACTS-GIFTS TO EDUCATIONAL INSTITUTIONS

Plaintiff, a New Jersey corporation, was engaged in the manufacture and sale of valves, fire hydrants and other special equipment for use in water and gas industries. The company employed about 300 persons at its plant in New Jersey. In 1951 the board of directors adopted a resolution appropriating $1,500 as a donation to Princeton University for university maintenance. When this appropriation was questioned by certain stockholders, the company instituted a declaratory judgment action to determine whether the proposed donation was ultra vires. The lower court ruled that the donation was intra vires. On appeal, held, affirmed. The gift was intra vires because it benefited the corporate donor and was authorized by statute. A. P. Smith Mfg. Co. v. Barlow, (N.J. 1953) 98 A. (2d) 581, app. dismissed 346 U.S. 861, 74 S.Ct. 107 (1953)

Corporations - Sale of Assets as a Means of Avoiding State Constitutional Limitation on Corporate Life

Defendant, a Michigan corporation, was incorporated in 1923 for a term of thirty years, the maximum term permitted by the Michigan constitution. Shortly before this thirty-year term was to expire, majority and minority stockholders engaged in unsuccessful negotiations, each group attempting to purchase the other\u27s interest in the corporation. A special stockholders\u27 meeting was then called to consider a proposed renewal of the corporate term. This proposal failed to gamer the vote of two-thirds of the outstanding shares which was required for approval. The attorneys representing the majority shareholders proceeded to organize a dummy corporation, which in tum offered the entire issue of its corporate stock to defendant corporation in consideration for all of the assets of defendant corporation. Defendant corporation, by a majority vote, accepted this offer. The newly acquired stock was distributed among the shareholders of defendant corporation, and thus the majority stockholders in effect caused defendant corporation to extend its corporate life for another thirty-year term. A request by the minority shareholders for an injunction prohibiting the sale of the entire assets of defendant corporation was dismissed by the circuit court. On appeal, held, affirmed. The acts of defendant corporation were constitutional and sanctioned by the Michigan General Corporation Act. Porter v. C.O. Porter Machinery Co., 336 Mich. 437, 58 N.W. (2d) 135 (1953)

MUNICIPAL CORPORATIONS-SPECIAL ASSESSMENTS-METHOD OF REVIEW WHERE A SPECIAL ASSESSMENT IS LEVIED ON A RAILROAD RIGHT-OF-WAY

Defendant municipality made surface and curb improvements on a street located near plaintiff railroad\u27s right-of-way. Four parcels of land, each containing a house, separated the right-of-way from the street on which the improvements were made. Plaintiff\u27s right-of-way contained a single set of railroad tracks over which plaintiff\u27s trains traveled. Property owners in the improvement district were assessed a total of $13,220.90 for the improvements,$4,715.53 of this special assessment being levied on plaintiff\u27s right-of-way. Plaintiff brought suit to enjoin collection of that part of the special assessment which was levied on its property. The trial court found that the improvement did not benefit the plaintiff\u27s right-of-way and granted the injunction. On appeal, held, affirmed. After reviewing the evidence, it was found that the right-of-way was not benefited by the street improvements, and therefore the special assessment on the plaintiff\u27s property was void. Chicago & N.W. Ry. Co. v. Omaha, 156 Neb. 705, 57 N.W. (2d) 753 (1953)

FEDERAL PROCEDURE-MANDAMUS-REVIEW OF FEDERAL DISTRICT COURT ORDER OF SEVERANCE AND TRANSFER PURSUANT TO 28 U.S.C. §1406 (a)

Petitioner instituted a treble damage suit alleging violation of the antitrust laws in the Federal District Court for the Southern District of Florida, naming the insurance commissioner of Georgia, the insurance commissioner of Florida, and four insurance companies residing and doing business in the Southern District of Florida as defendants. The Georgia insurance commissioner, who was personally served in the Northern District of Florida, entered a special appearance to dismiss the action for improper venue. Petitioner contended that the Georgia commissioner was found or has an agent in the Southern District of Florida on the theory that co-conspirators are each other\u27s agents, and since other members of the · alleged conspiracy were in the Southern District of Florida, venue in that district was proper as to all defendants. Respondent judge held that as to the Georgia commissioner venue was improper and ordered a severance and transfer of the action against him to the Northern District of Georgia where said commissioner resided. A petition to the Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit for a writ of mandamus to compel the district court in Florida to vacate and set aside the order of severance and transfer was dismissed as an inappropriate remedy. On certiorari the Supreme Court held, affirmed. The writ was not necessary or appropriate in aid of the court\u27s jurisdiction and it was not clear that appeal provided an inadequate remedy. Justices Frankfurter, Jackson, and Minton dissented on the ground that the respondent judge appeared to be so clearly correct that certiorari should not have been granted and therefore the case should have been dismissed without opinion. Bankers Life and Casualty Co. v. Holland, 346 U.S. 379, 74 S.Ct. 145 (1953)

MUNICIPAL CORPORATIONS-ZONING-VALIDITY OF ORDINANCES EXCLUDING RESIDENCES FROM INDUSTRIAL AREAS

Plaintiff purchased undeveloped land located in defendant municipality, intending to construct dwelling houses thereon. At the time of plaintiff\u27s purchase, the land was zoned for industrial use, but the applicable ordinance did permit use of the land for residential as well as industrial purposes. Defendant municipality, a town of about 9,000 persons, had experienced a minimum of industrial growth and the possibility of future industrial development was slight. Shortly after the plaintiff had made his purchase, defendant municipality amended the applicable zoning ordinance to prohibit the use of plaintiff\u27s land for residential purposes. However, the ordinance did permit the presence of hotels, hospitals, schools and public playgrounds in the area zoned industrial. The lower court enjoined enforcement of the amended ordinance as it applied to the plaintiff\u27s land. On appeal, held, affirmed. A zoning law which prohibits construction of dwelling houses in an area zoned as industrial may be valid, but as applied to an area lacking any substantial present or potential industry the ordinance is unreasonable and confiscatory and therefore void. Corthouts v. Town of Newington, (Conn. 1953) 99 A (2d) 112

Securities - Sufficiency of the Property Description and Its Relations to the Notice Provided by a Recorded Chattel Mortgage

The primary aims of this comment are to point out what the law requires in the nature of description, to analyze the value of these requirements in the light of the recording acts, to examine possible alternative security devices, and to suggest some useful steps that may be taken to augment the present system

Gradient‐enhanced TROSY described with Cartesian product operators

TROSY, Transverse Relaxation Optimized Spectroscopy, was developed more than a decade ago. Since that time, the 15 N‐ 1 H HSQC‐TROSY experiment has become the standard “fingerprint” correlation spectrum for proteins of high molecular weight. In addition, its implementation in protein triple resonance experiments has pushed the boundaries of NMR assignment up to about 100 kDa, making NMR a highly relevant technique in structural biology. TROSY exploits the dipole‐CSA cross‐correlated relaxation properties of the NH system and selects for the narrowest of the HSQC J‐correlation quartet in both dimensions. The original publications and reviews of TROSY use shift operators and/or single transition product operators to describe the TROSY coherence pathways selections. In this review, we offer a familiar Cartesian product operator approach to comprehensively describe all of the events in the modern TROSY pulse sequence such as multiplet selection, gradient coherence selection, gradient quadrature, and sensitivity enhancement. © 2011 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Concepts Magn Reson Part A 38: 280–288, 2011.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/88024/1/20228_ftp.pd

A Study of Quantum Error Correction by Geometric Algebra and Liquid-State NMR Spectroscopy

Quantum error correcting codes enable the information contained in a quantum state to be protected from decoherence due to external perturbations. Applied to NMR, quantum coding does not alter normal relaxation, but rather converts the state of a ``data'' spin into multiple quantum coherences involving additional ancilla spins. These multiple quantum coherences relax at differing rates, thus permitting the original state of the data to be approximately reconstructed by mixing them together in an appropriate fashion. This paper describes the operation of a simple, three-bit quantum code in the product operator formalism, and uses geometric algebra methods to obtain the error-corrected decay curve in the presence of arbitrary correlations in the external random fields. These predictions are confirmed in both the totally correlated and uncorrelated cases by liquid-state NMR experiments on 13C-labeled alanine, using gradient-diffusion methods to implement these idealized decoherence models. Quantum error correction in weakly polarized systems requires that the ancilla spins be prepared in a pseudo-pure state relative to the data spin, which entails a loss of signal that exceeds any potential gain through error correction. Nevertheless, this study shows that quantum coding can be used to validate theoretical decoherence mechanisms, and to provide detailed information on correlations in the underlying NMR relaxation dynamics.Comment: 33 pages plus 6 figures, LaTeX article class with amsmath & graphicx package

17O NMR: A "Rare and Sensitive" Probe of Molecular Interactions and Dynamics

This review summarizes recent developments in the area of liquid-state Nuclear Magnetic Resonance spectroscopy of the 17O nucleus. It is structured in Sections, respectively covering (a) general background information, with special emphasis on spin relaxation phenomena for quadrupolar nuclei and in paramagnetic environments, (b) methods for the calculation of 17O NMR parameters, with illustrative results, (c) applications in chemistry and materials science, (d) application to biomolecules and biological systems, (e) relaxation phenomena, including contrast agents for Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI). The 17O nucleus emerges as a very sensitive probe of the local environment ─ including both bonding and non-bonding interactions ─ and molecular motions

Studying Dynamics by Magic-Angle Spinning Solid-State NMR Spectroscopy: Principles and Applications to Biomolecules

International audienceMagic-angle spinning solid-state NMR spectroscopy is an important technique to study mo- lecular structure, dynamics and interactions, and is rapidly gaining importance in biomolecu- lar sciences. Here we provide an overview of experimental approaches to study molecular dy- namics by MAS solid-state NMR, with an emphasis on the underlying theoretical concepts and differences of MAS solid-state NMR compared to solution-state NMR. The theoretical foundations of nuclear spin relaxation are revisited, focusing on the particularities of spin re- laxation in solid samples under magic-angle spinning. We discuss the range of validity of Redfield theory, as well as the inherent multi-exponential behavior of relaxation in solids. Ex- perimental challenges for measuring relaxation parameters in MAS solid-state NMR and a few recently proposed relaxation approaches are discussed, which provide information about time scales and amplitudes of motions ranging from picoseconds to milliseconds. We also discuss the theoretical basis and experimental measurements of anisotropic interactions (chemical-shift anisotropies, dipolar and quadrupolar couplings), which give direct infor- mation about the amplitude of motions. The potential of combining relaxation data with such measurements of dynamically-averaged anisotropic interactions is discussed. Although the focus of this review is on the theoretical foundations of dynamics studies rather than their ap- plication, we close by discussing a small number of recent dynamics studies, where the dy- namic properties of proteins in crystals are compared to those in solution