Have Justices Stevens and Kennedy Forged a New Doctrine of Substantive Due Process? An Examination of McDonald v. City of Chicago and United States v. Windsor

As issues such as the nature of the sexual, marital, and other relationships and claims—both personal and economic—continue to face Americans and America’s lawyers, the question of how we as a people distinguish fundamental from non-fundamental rights is one of first importance. In constitutional law, the Supreme Court has addressed this question through the doctrine of “Substantive Due Process.” In his lengthy dissent in McDonald v. Chicago—his final opinion as a Supreme Court Justice—Justice John Paul Stevens claimed that substantive due process is fundamentally a matter of how we interpret the meaning of the word “liberty.” The issue as to whether the right is specifically enumerated in the Amendments is irrelevant, Stevens argues, if the interest is naturally within the definition of “liberty.” Moreover, Justice Stevens’s argument in McDonald was approved by his liberal colleagues on the Court, which indicates that his theory of liberty may well become the baseline for determining what are, and what are not, fundamental rights. However, in the recent case of United States v. Windsor, the Court refused to employ the substantive due process doctrine, as traditionally understood, as the basis for striking down the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA). Instead, the Court employed rational basis review, finding that the legislative purpose and effect behind DOMA was “to disparage and to injure” those wishing to enter into same-sex marriages, and thus served “no legitimate purpose.” Still, Justice Kennedy clearly signals in his Windsor opinion that some formulation of the substantive due process doctrine remains alive and well as a constitutional basis for deciding Fifth and Fourteenth Amendment Due Process “liberty” interests such as same-sex marriage. Indeed, both Justices share a conceptual core in their understandings of what constitutes a constitutionally protected liberty interest

Hidden variables with nonlocal time

To relax the apparent tension between nonlocal hidden variables and relativity, we propose that the observable proper time is not the same quantity as the usual proper-time parameter appearing in local relativistic equations. Instead, the two proper times are related by a nonlocal rescaling parameter proportional to |psi|^2, so that they coincide in the classical limit. In this way particle trajectories may obey local relativistic equations of motion in a manner consistent with the appearance of nonlocal quantum correlations. To illustrate the main idea, we first present two simple toy models of local particle trajectories with nonlocal time, which reproduce some nonlocal quantum phenomena. After that, we present a realistic theory with a capacity to reproduce all predictions of quantum theory.Comment: 16 pages, accepted for publication in Found. Phys., misprints corrected, references update

A time-dependent perturbative analysis for a quantum particle in a cloud chamber

We consider a simple model of a cloud chamber consisting of a test particle (the alpha-particle) interacting with two other particles (the atoms of the vapour) subject to attractive potentials centered in $a_1, a_2 \in \mathbb{R}^3$. At time zero the alpha-particle is described by an outgoing spherical wave centered in the origin and the atoms are in their ground state. We show that, under suitable assumptions on the physical parameters of the system and up to second order in perturbation theory, the probability that both atoms are ionized is negligible unless $a_2$ lies on the line joining the origin with $a_1$. The work is a fully time-dependent version of the original analysis proposed by Mott in 1929.Comment: 23 page

Complete Plastome Sequences from Glycine syndetika, and Six Additional Perennial Wild Relatives of Soybean

Organelle sequences have a long history of utility in phylogenetic analyses. Chloroplast sequences when combined with nuclear data can help resolve relationships among flowering plant genera, and within genera incongruence can point to reticulate evolution. Plastome sequences are becoming plentiful because they are increasingly easier to obtain. Complete plastome sequences allow us to detect rare rearrangements and test the tempo of sequence evolution. Chloroplast sequences are generally considered a nuisance to be kept to a minimum in bacterial artificial chromosome libraries. Here, we sequenced two bacterial artificial chromosomes per species to generate complete plastome sequences from seven species. The plastome sequences from Glycine syndetika and six other perennial Glycine species are similar in arrangement and gene content to the previously published soybean plastome. Repetitive sequences were detected in high frequencies as in soybean, but further analysis showed that repeat sequence numbers are inflated. Previous chloroplast-based phylogenetic trees for perennial Glycine were incongruent with nuclear gene\u2013based phylogenetic trees. We tested whether the hypothesis of introgression was supported by the complete plastomes. Alignment of complete plastome sequences and Bayesian analysis allowed us to date putative hybridization events supporting the hypothesis of introgression and chloroplast \u201ccapture.\u201

Simulation methods in the healthcare systems

International audienceHealthcare systems can be considered as large-scale complex systems. They need to be well managed in order to create the desired values for its stakeholders as the patients, the medical staff and the industrials working for healthcare. Many simulation methods coming from other sectors have already proved their added value for healthcare. However, based on our experience in the French heath sector (Jean et al. 2012), we found these methods are not widely used in comparison with other areas as manufacturing and logistic. This paper presents a literature review of the healthcare issue and major simulations methods used to address them. This work is design to suggest how more systematic creation of solutions may be performed using complementary methods to resolve a common issue. We believe that this first work can help to better understand the simulation approaches used for health workers, deciders or researchers of any responsibility level

Active School Transport among Children from Canada, Colombia, Finland, South Africa, and the United States: A Tale of Two Journeys

Walking and biking to school represent a source of regular daily physical activity (PA). The objectives of this paper are to determine the associations of distance to school, crime safety, and socioeconomic variables with active school transport (AST) among children from five culturally and socioeconomically different country sites and to describe the main policies related to AST in those country sites. The analytical sample included 2845 children aged 9–11 years from the International Study of Childhood Obesity, Lifestyle and the Environment. Multilevel generalized linear mixed models were used to estimate the associations between distance, safety and socioeconomic variables, and the odds of engaging in AST. Greater distance to school and vehicle ownership were associated with a lower likelihood of engaging in AST in sites in upper-middle- and high-income countries. Crime perception was negatively associated to AST only in sites in high-income countries. Our results suggest that distance to school is a consistent correlate of AST in different contexts. Our findings regarding crime perception support a need vs. choice framework, indicating that AST may be the only commuting choice for many children from the study sites in upper-middle-income countries, despite the high perception of crime

Analytic approximations for the broadening of the spectral lines of hydrogen-like ions

Broadband approximate expressions for calculating the broadening of the spectral lines of hydrogenlike ions in a multicomponent plasma are derived taking into account both the influence of the interaction between plasma particles on the distribution function of the plasma microfield and the effect of the microfield dynamics on the broadening of the central component of the spectral line. With the approximate expressions proposed, the calculation of the shape of a given spectral line of a certain ion in a plasma with a given ion composition requires only a few seconds of computer time. The approximate expressions provide a good computational accuracy not only for the central component of the spectral line but also for the spectral line wings

Time-dependent bending rigidity and helical twist of DNA by rearrangement of bound HU protein

HU is a protein that plays a role in various bacterial processes including compaction, transcription and replication of the genome. Here, we use atomic force microscopy to study the effect of HU on the stiffness and supercoiling of double-stranded DNA. First, we measured the persistence length, height profile, contour length and bending angle distribution of the DNA–HU complex after different incubation times of HU with linear DNA. We found that the persistence and contour length depend on the incubation time. At high concentrations of HU, DNA molecules first become stiff with a larger value of the persistence length. The persistence length then decreases over time and the molecules regain the flexibility of bare DNA after ~2 h. Concurrently, the contour length shows a slight increase. Second, we measured the change in topology of closed circular relaxed DNA following binding of HU. Here, we observed that HU induces supercoiling over a similar time span as the measured change in persistence length. Our observations can be rationalized in terms of the formation of a nucleoprotein filament followed by a structural rearrangement of the bound HU on DNA. The rearrangement results in a change in topology, an increase in bending flexibility and an increase in contour length through a decrease in helical pitch of the duplex.Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technolog