Hey, Hey! Ho, Ho! These Mass Arrests Have Got to Go! : The Expressive Fourth Amendment Argument

The racial justice protests ignited by the murder of George Floyd in May 2020 constitute the largest protest movement in the United States. Estimates suggest that between fifteen and twenty-six million people protested across the country during the summer of 2020 alone. Not only were the number of protestors staggering, but so were the number of arrests. Within one week of when the video of George Floyd’s murder went viral, police arrested ten thousand people demanding justice on American streets, with police often arresting activists en masse. This Essay explores mass arrests and how they square with Fourth Amendment protections, as conceived by its Framers. The first part of this Essay provides an account of mass arrests during the George Floyd protests in Los Angeles, the city with the largest number of reported arrests in the initial demonstrations. The second part of this Essay begins by briefly reviewing the Expressive Fourth Amendment, a doctrine the author previously introduced, which posits that the Framers designed the Fourth Amendment to protect freedom of expression, in addition to the prevailing understanding of its safeguard of bodily integrity. The Expressive Fourth Amendment shields from government overreach individuals engaged in political expressive conduct. Here, this Essay expands upon this doctrine by querying how this protection should apply to mass arrests during protests and ultimately concludes that courts should demand both that a police officer establish probable cause for each protester swept up in a mass arrest and that judges positively weigh an individual’s expressive conduct when determining whether an arrest was reasonable in the totality of the circumstances

An Argument Against Unbounded Arrest Power: The Expressive Fourth Amendment and Protesting While Black

Protesting is supposed to be revered in our democracy, considered “as American as apple pie” in our nation’s mythology. But the actual experiences of the 2020 racial justice protesters showed that this supposed reverence for political dissent and protest is more akin to American folklore than reality on the streets. The images from those streets depicted police officers clad in riot gear and armed with shields, batons, and “less than” lethal weapons aggressively arresting protesters, often en masse. In the first week of the George Floyd protests, police arrested roughly 10,000 people, and approximately 78 percent of those arrests were for nonviolent misdemeanor offenses or criminal violations. Moreover, troubling figures regarding the racial breakdown of protest-related arrests, along with anecdotes from activists, suggest that just as with routine policing, the experiences of Black and white people differ during protests—even when they protest side by side—with police potentially targeting Black activists for arrest. This Article exposes how police officers’ easy access to a wide arsenal of criminal charges serves to trample on expressive freedoms and explains how a new and clearer understanding of the Fourth Amendment’s application to expressive conduct should curb the police’s seemingly unbounded power to arrest protesters. In Part I of this Article, I revisit and review the roots and rationale of the Expressive Fourth Amendment doctrine, which posits that there is an expressive component to Fourth Amendment protection. In Part II, I discuss the criminal statutes that police often use to make arrests during protests and then focus more narrowly on the arrests in New York City in the early days of the George Floyd demonstrations, including the racial makeup of arrestees. In Part III, I explain how the presiding understanding of the Fourth Amendment places minimal limits on a police officer’s ability to arrest, regardless of an individual’s engagement in expressive political conduct. Thereafter, I describe how the Expressive Fourth Amendment should apply to arrests and serve to curtail an officer’s ability to engage in warrantless arrests of protesters for nonviolent misdemeanors

Dynamic nozzles for drop generators

received: 2015-06-03 accepted: 2015-10-16 published: 2015-11-03received: 2015-06-03 accepted: 2015-10-16 published: 2015-11-03This work was funded by the UK Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (Grant No. EP/H018913/1), the John Fell Oxford University Press Research Fund, and the Royal Society

The self-stimulated capillary jet

Inspired by a Savart’s pioneering work, we study the self-stimulated dynamics of a capillary jet. The feedback loop is realised by extracting surface perturbations from a section of the jet itself via a laser–photodiode pair, whose amplified signal drives an electromechanical actuator which, in turn, produces pressure perturbations at the exit chamber. Under specific conditions, this loop establishes phase-locked stimulation regimes that overcome the otherwise random natural breakup. For each laser position along the jet, the gain of the amplifier acts as a selector across a discrete set of observable frequencies. The main observed features are explained by a linear theory which combines the transfer function of each stage in the loop. Our findings are relevant to continuous inkjet technologies for the production of equally sized droplets

Inversión de los patrones estacionales de la absorción de carbono en un stand de eucalipto en Portugal

This paper summarizes results between 2002 and 2010 from eddy covariance measurements of carbon uptake in the 12 month annual growing period eucalypt site of Espirra in Southern Portugal (38° 38’N, 8° 36’ W) . This site, aimed for pulp production is part of an intensively 300 ha eucalypt coppice, with about 1100 trees ha–1. The climate is of Mediterranean type. During the measurement period (2002-2010) two main events changed the annual sink pattern of the forest: a drought period of two years (2004-2005) and a tree felling (November and December 2006). Before the felling, annual net ecosystem exchange (NEE) diminished from 865.56 gCm–2 in 2002 to 356.64 gCm–2 in 2005 together with a deep decrease in rainfall from 748 mm in 2002 to 378.58 mm and 396.64 mm in 2004 and 2005, respectively. The eucalypt stand recovered its carbon sink ability in June 2007 with a cumulated NEE of 151 gCm–2 from January to September 2010. A quantitative approach using generalized estimating equations (GEEs) was made to relate monthly NEE, gross primary production (GPP) and soil moisture with the main meteorological variables. Seasonal patterns of carbon uptake were almost opposite in the periods before and after the felling with maxima in April and August, respectively, and this seasonal change is gradually reversing to the pattern before 2006. Drought was the main meteorological driver of these temporal tendencies in carbon uptake.Este documento resume los resultados entre 2002 y 2010 a partir de mediciones de covarianza turbulenta de la absorción de carbono en los 12 meses anuales a los sitios de crecimiento de eucalipto período de Espirra en el sur de Portugal (38° 38’N, 8° 36’ W). Este sitio, con el objetivo para la producción de celulosa es parte de un monte bajo de intensidad 300 hectáreas de eucaliptos, con cerca de 1.100 árboles ha–1. El clima es de tipo mediterráneo. Durante el período de medición (2002-2010) dos eventos principales cambiado el patrón fregadero anual de la selva: un período de sequía de dos años (2004-2005) y la tala de árboles (noviembre y diciembre de 2006). Antes de la tala, el intercambio anual neta de los ecosistemas (NEE) se redujo de 865,56 g cm–2 en 2002 a 356,64 g cm–2 en 2005, junto con una disminución profunda de las precipitaciones de 748 mm en 2002 a 378,58 mm y 396,64 en 2004 y 2005, respectivamente. El eucalipto de pie recupera su capacidad de sumidero de carbono en junio de 2007 con un acumulado de 151 gcm NEE–2 de enero a septiembre de 2010.Una aproximación cuantitativa mediante ecuaciones de estimación generalizada (GEES) se hizo para relacionar mensual NEE, la producción primaria bruta (GPP) y la humedad del suelo con las variables meteorológicas principales.Los patrones estacionales de la absorción de carbono eran casi opuestas en los períodos antes y después de la tala, con máximos en abril y agosto, respectivamente, y este cambio de temporada se va de marcha atrás para el patrón antes de 2006. La sequía fue el principal impulsor de estas tendencias meteorológicas temporal en la absorción de carbono

Optical-NIR spectroscopy of the puzzling gamma-ray source 3FGL 1603.9-4903/PMN J1603-4904 with X-shooter

The Fermi/LAT instrument has detected about two thousands Extragalactic High Energy (E > 100 MeV) gamma-ray sources. One of the brightest is 3FGL 1603.9-4903, associated to the radio source PMN J1603-4904. Its nature is not yet clear, it could be either a very peculiar BL Lac or a CSO (Compact Symmetric Object) radio source, considered as the early stage of a radio galaxy. The latter, if confirmed, would be the first detection in gamma-rays for this class of objects. Recently a redshift z=0.18 +/- 0.01 has been claimed on the basis of the detection of a single X-ray line at 5.44 +/- 0.05 keV interpreted as a 6.4 keV (rest frame) fluorescent line. We aim to investigate the nature of 3FGL 1603.9-4903/PMN J1603-4904 using optical to NIR spectroscopy. We observed PMN J1603-4904 with the UV-NIR VLT/X-shooter spectrograph for two hours. We extracted spectra in the VIS and NIR range that we calibrated in flux and corrected for telluric absorption and we systematically searched for absorption and emission features. The source was detected starting from ~6300 Ang down to 24000 Ang with an intensity comparable to the one of its 2MASS counterpart and a mostly featureless spectrum. The continuum lacks absorption features and thus is non-stellar in origin and likely non-thermal. On top of this spectrum we detected three emission lines that we interpret as the Halpha-[NII] complex, the [SII] 6716,6731 doublet and the [SIII] 9530 line, obtaining a redshift estimate of z= 0.2321 +/- 0.0004. The equivalent width of the Halpha-[NII] complex implies that PMN J1603-4904 does not follow the observational definition of BL Lac, the line ratios suggest that a LINER/Seyfert nucleus is powering the emission. This new redshift measurement implies that the X-ray line previously detected should be interpreted as a 6.7 keV line which is very peculiar.Comment: Published in Astronomy and Astrophysic

Atelier da rua: A participated street design process

Streets are key elements on the city urban structure. Despite the importance of this structural and living urban element, the contemporary Portuguese situation is characterized by the lack of investment in the realization, use and maintenance of many streets. Moreover it is noted the local authorities difficulties to deal with citizens everyday life problems within the street and to approach diffuse and weakened civic structures. These are some of the problems encountered in small and local scale architectural projects of the public space of the streets in Portugal. Participated project processes tackle these issues through the understanding of the existing problems and promoting new processes to face them. This paper is done in the scope of the research of Atelier da Rua (Street Atelier) that is developed to meet contemporary needs of intervention in the street public space. The methodological hypothesis is to use the strategy of Atelier da Rua, a citizen participative process applied to propose effective design projects in order to improve community living and physical spaces. This paper aims to explore the combination of street intervention methodology of Atelier da Rua (Pita, 2014 b) and the values presented in the text A ladder of citizen participation written by Sherry Arnstein (1969), focusing in the particular issue of achieving “partnership” on the Atelier da Rua investigation and practice.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

A fate-alternating transitional regime in contracting liquid filaments

The fate of a contracting liquid filament depends on the Ohnesorge number, the initial aspect ratio and surface perturbation. Generally, it is believed that there exists a critical aspect ratio such that longer filaments break up and shorter ones recoil into a single drop. Through computational and experimental studies, we report a transitional regime for filaments with a broad range of intermediate aspect ratios, where there exist multiple thresholds at which a novel breakup mode alternates with a no-break mode. We develop a simple model considering the superposition of capillary waves, which can predict the complicated new phase diagram. In this model, the breakup results from constructive interference between the capillary waves that originate from the ends of the filament