The Constitutional Prism of Louis-Philippe Pigeon and Jean Beetz

Après avoir expliqué ce qu'il entend par notion de constitution (“image of a constitution”, l'auteur examine les écrits judiciaires et doctrinaux des juges Pigeon et Beetz dans le but de voir quelle idée l'un et l'autre se faisaient de ce qu'est une constitution. Ces écrits, selon lui, se fondent sur des conceptions articulées du rôle des textes comme source du droit, du rôle des normes comme prétention de départ de l'analyse constitutionnelle, du rôle scientifique du juriste et, enfin, des positions respectives des différentes règles de droit. L'auteur conclut que cette façon de voir s'inscrit à l'intérieur d'une conception globale du droit dont les tenants et aboutissants n'ont jamais été vraiment étudiés.After introducing the concept of an "image of a constitution", Mr Conklin examines the federalism writings and judgments of Justices Pigeon and Beetz with a view to identifying the bounderies of their respective concepts of a constitution. He argues that their writings presuppose coherent answers to such boundaries as the role of a text as the primary source of law, the posited character of rules, rules as the starting point of constitutional analysis, the scientistic role of a lawyer, and a horizontal / vertical spectrum of posited rules. Mr. Conklin claims that their understanding of law collapses into a more primordial image of law whose boundaries we have for too long left unexamined

Chaos For the Halibut?

A generalized method for analyzing stability potential in discrete time renewable resource models subject to market-driven harvest is discussed. Two means by which harvest activity can influence dynamical properties of renewable resource models are identified: the "growth factor" and the "market response effect". The growth factor is a systematic influence on stability tied to changes in the position of the bioeconomic equilibrium point along a given open access supply locus. The market response effect involves variation in harvest in response to stock level changes. The analysis is applied to a model of the Pacific Halibut Fishery: a modified discrete-time version of the traditional Schaefer model. In order to investigate potential instability, we vary certain parameters of the model and study the resulting effects on stability. We find that enhancing harvest response by changing the slope of the demand schedule can thrust the model into instability, chaos, and extinction, without changing the bioeconomic equilibrium point for the Pacific Halibut Fishery Model. We also show that enhancing harvest response via slope preserving increases in market demand can push the model into instability, chaos, and even extinction. Finally, we show that similar adjustments in market demand may be capable of eliminating instability and chaos rooted in powerful intrinsic growth of the stockStability Analysis, Chaos, Open-Access Fisheries, Renewable Resource Models., Environmental Economics and Policy, Production Economics,

A Practical Legal Education

One of the central issues in regard to legal education during the past half century has been whether law faculties ought to have a theoretical or practical character. The debate has been an intense one. It has taken on many forms and grown from many diverse circumstances. Law societies periodically resurrect the issue. Professional law faculties interminably debate it. Positions are taken, factions are formed, and the unresolved outcome of the debate has left curriculum and initial assumptions relatively unchatged. This essay questions one of the most important assumptions of that debate - namely, that a practical legal education is a non-evaluative, non-philosophical one. Sometimes a practical legal education is conceived to be non-philosophical in that it is believed to be bound up with the discovery of legal rules as opposed to some normative evaluation of those rules. More recently, a practical legal education has been conceived to be non-philosophical in that it has been believed to be bound up with experience (most notably presumed to be found in a law clinic). And experience has been bound up with feelings or preferences rather than ideas

Public Issues in a Private Law World: The Appointment of a Receiver as a Case Study

This essay aims to bypass the doctrine/policy approach to contemporary legal analysis. Instead of resting content with an elaboration of legal doctrine, the authors incorporate social and economic evidence surrounding the call of a demand loan. This evidence creates an understanding of the practice of receivership law; a practice which legal doctrine inadequately describes. Secondly, instead of being content with an assertion of policy, the authors attempt to understand the practice by assessing the evidence in the light of the Greek forms of corrective justice and distributive justice

Development of CubeSat Spacecraft-to-Spacecraft Optical Link Detection Chain for the CLICK B/C Mission

The growing interest in and expanding applications of small satellite constellation networks necessitates effective and reliable high-bandwidth communication between spacecraft. The applications of these constellations (such as navigation or imaging) rely on the precise measurement of timing offset between the spacecraft in the constellation. The CubeSat Laser Infrared CrosslinK (CLICK) mission is being developed by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), the University of Florida (UF), and NASA Ames Research Center. The second phase of the mission (CLICK-B/C) will demonstrate a crosslink between two CubeSats (B and C) that each host a \u3c 2U laser communication payload. The terminals will demonstrate full-duplex spacecraft-to-spacecraft communications and ranging capability using commercial components. As part of the mission, CLICK will demonstrate two-way time-transfer for clock synchronization and data transfer at a minimum rate of 20 Mbps over separation distances ranging from 25 km to 580 km. The payloads of CLICK B and C include a receiver chain with a custom photodetector board, a Time-to-Digital Converter (TDC), a Microchip Chip-Scale Atomic Clock (CSAC), and a field-programmable gate array (FPGA). The payloads can measure internal propagation delays of the transmitter and the receiver, and cancel environmental effects impacting timing accuracy. The photodetector board is 2.5 cm x 2.5 cm and includes an avalanche photodiode (APD) and variable-gain amplifiers through which the detected signal is conditioned for the TDC to be time-stamped. This design has been developed from the UF and NASA Ames CubeSat Handling Of Multisystem Precision Time Transfer (CHOMPTT) project and associated MOCT (Miniature Optical Communication Transceiver) demonstration. The TDC samples the signal at four points: twice on the rising edge at set thresholds, and twice at the falling edge at those same thresholds. These four time-offset samples are sent to the FPGA, which combines the measurements for a reported timestamp of the detected laser pulse. These timestamps can then be used in a pulse-position modulation (PPM) demodulation scheme to receive data at up to 50 Mbps, to calculate range down to 10 cm, and for precision time-transfer with \u3c 200 ps resolution. In this paper, we will discuss the designed capabilities and noise performance of the CLICK TDC-based optical receiver chain

The International Gene Trap Consortium Website: a portal to all publicly available gene trap cell lines in mouse

Gene trapping is a method of generating murine embryonic stem (ES) cell lines containing insertional mutations in known and novel genes. A number of international groups have used this approach to create sizeable public cell line repositories available to the scientific community for the generation of mutant mouse strains. The major gene trapping groups worldwide have recently joined together to centralize access to all publicly available gene trap lines by developing a user-oriented Website for the International Gene Trap Consortium (IGTC). This collaboration provides an impressive public informatics resource comprising ∼45 000 well-characterized ES cell lines which currently represent ∼40% of known mouse genes, all freely available for the creation of knockout mice on a non-collaborative basis. To standardize annotation and provide high confidence data for gene trap lines, a rigorous identification and annotation pipeline has been developed combining genomic localization and transcript alignment of gene trap sequence tags to identify trapped loci. This information is stored in a new bioinformatics database accessible through the IGTC Website interface. The IGTC Website () allows users to browse and search the database for trapped genes, BLAST sequences against gene trap sequence tags, and view trapped genes within biological pathways. In addition, IGTC data have been integrated into major genome browsers and bioinformatics sites to provide users with outside portals for viewing this data. The development of the IGTC Website marks a major advance by providing the research community with the data and tools necessary to effectively use public gene trap resources for the large-scale characterization of mammalian gene function

Modeling Insertional Mutagenesis Using Gene Length and Expression in Murine Embryonic Stem Cells

Background. High-throughput mutagenesis of the mammalian genome is a powerful means to facilitate analysis of gene function. Gene trapping in embryonic stem cells (ESCs) is the most widely used form of insertional mutagenesis in mammals. However, the rules governing its efficiency are not fully understood, and the effects of vector design on the likelihood of genetrapping events have not been tested on a genome-wide scale. Methodology/Principal Findings. In this study, we used public gene-trap data to model gene-trap likelihood. Using the association of gene length and gene expression with gene-trap likelihood, we constructed spline-based regression models that characterize which genes are susceptible and which genes are resistant to gene-trapping techniques. We report results for three classes of gene-trap vectors, showing that both length and expression are significant determinants of trap likelihood for all vectors. Using our models, we also quantitatively identifie

Gene Expression Profiles of the NCI-60 Human Tumor Cell Lines Define Molecular Interaction Networks Governing Cell Migration Processes

Although there is extensive information on gene expression and molecular interactions in various cell types, integrating those data in a functionally coherent manner remains challenging. This study explores the premise that genes whose expression at the mRNA level is correlated over diverse cell lines are likely to function together in a network of molecular interactions. We previously derived expression-correlated gene clusters from the database of the NCI-60 human tumor cell lines and associated each cluster with function categories of the Gene Ontology (GO) database. From a cluster rich in genes associated with GO categories related to cell migration, we extracted 15 genes that were highly cross-correlated; prominent among them were RRAS, AXL, ADAM9, FN14, and integrin-beta1. We then used those 15 genes as bait to identify other correlated genes in the NCI-60 database. A survey of current literature disclosed, not only that many of the expression-correlated genes engaged in molecular interactions related to migration, invasion, and metastasis, but that highly cross-correlated subsets of those genes engaged in specific cell migration processes. We assembled this information in molecular interaction maps (MIMs) that depict networks governing 3 cell migration processes: degradation of extracellular matrix, production of transient focal complexes at the leading edge of the cell, and retraction of the rear part of the cell. Also depicted are interactions controlling the release and effects of calcium ions, which may regulate migration in a spaciotemporal manner in the cell. The MIMs and associated text comprise a detailed and integrated summary of what is currently known or surmised about the role of the expression cross-correlated genes in molecular networks governing those processes