A Fourth Amendment for the Poor Alone: Subconstitutional Status and the Myth of the Inviolate Home

For much of our nation’s history, the poor have faced pervasive discrimination in the exercise of fundamental rights. Nowhere has the impairment been more severe than in the area of privacy. This Article considers the enduring legacy of this tradition with respect to the Fourth Amendment right to domestic privacy. Far from a matter of receding historical interest, the diminution of the poor’s right to privacy has accelerated in recent years and now represents a powerful theme within the jurisprudence of poverty. Triggering this development has been a series of challenges to aggressive administrative practices adopted by localities in the wake of federal welfare-reform legislation. As a precondition to public assistance, some jurisdictions now require that all applicants submit to a suspicionless home search by law-enforcement investigators seeking evidence of welfare fraud. In turning back challenges to these intrusions, contemporary courts have significantly curtailed the protections of the Fourth Amendment as applied to the poor. While the courts that sanction these practices disclaim any sort of poverty-based classification underlying their analysis, no other rationale withstands scrutiny. Neither precedent nor the principled extension of existing doctrine justifies recent outcomes or explains why the holdings should not be applied to authorize a vast - and, thus, unacceptable - expansion of suspicionless search practices directed at the homes of the less destitute. The developing jurisprudence accordingly represents an implicit concession that the poor constitute a subconstitutional class for purposes of the Fourth Amendment. Framed most charitably, the decisions understand poverty as a condition of moral culpability and thus accept it as a surrogate for the individualized suspicion that otherwise would be required to justify the intrusions at issue. The premise of the dissolute poor, tracing back centuries, remains alive and well in American law, and we have a bifurcated Fourth Amendment to prove its enduring vitality

Pledge Your Body for Your Bread: Welfare, Drug Testing, and the Inferior Fourth Amendment

Proposals to subject welfare recipients to periodic drug testing have emerged over the last three years as a significant legislative trend across the United States. Since 2007, over half of the states have considered bills requiring aid recipients to submit to invasive extraction procedures as an ongoing condition of public assistance. The vast majority of the legislation imposes testing without regard to suspected drug use, reflecting the implicit assumption that the poor are inherently predisposed to culpable conduct and thus may be subject to class-based intrusions that would be inarguably impermissible if inflicted on the less destitute. These proposals are gaining increasingly substantial political support, suggesting that the enactment of drug testing legislation is now a real and immediate prospect. Given the gravity of the suspicionless searches at issue, the proposals raise serious concerns under conventional Fourth Amendment doctrine. Nevertheless, there is considerable doubt whether the federal courts will accede to that authority and prohibit the proposed intrusions, given the long tradition of relegating the privacy rights of the poor to inferior and indifferent enforcement. This Article explores these legislative developments and the constitutional context within which they arise, and makes the case for using the impending battle over suspicionless drug testing to reclaim for the indigent the full reach of the Fourth Amendment’s privacy right

ROSAT Observations of the Flare Star CC Eri

The flare/spotted spectroscopic binary star CC Eri was observed with the Position Sensitive Proportional Counter (PSPC) on the X-ray satellite ROSAT on 1990 July 9-11 and 1992 January 26-27. During the observations, the source was variable on time scales from a few minutes to several hours, with the X-ray (0.2-2 keV) luminosity in the range $\sim 2.5-6.8\times 10^{29} erg s^{-1}$. An X-ray flare-like event, which has a one hour characteristic rise time and a two hour decay time, was observed from CC Eri on 1990 July 10 16:14-21:34 (UT). The X-ray spectrum of the source can be described by current thermal plasma codes with two temperature components or with a continuous temperature distribution. The spectral results show that plasma at $Te\sim 10^{7}$ K exists in the corona of CC Eri. The variations in the observed source flux and spectra can be reproduced by a flare, adopting a magnetic reconnection model. Comparisons with an unheated model, late in the flare, suggest that the area and volume of the flare are substantially larger than in a solar two ribbon flare, while the electron pressure is similar. The emission measure and temperature of the non-flaring emission, interpreted as the average corona, lead to an electron pressure similar to that in a well-developed solar active region. Rotational modulation of a spot related active region requires an unphysically large X-ray flux in a concentrated area.Comment: 14 pages, compressed and uuencoded postscript file, to be published in MNRA

Sensitivity of CO2 migration estimation on reservoir temperature and pressure uncertainty

The density and viscosity of supercritical CO2 are sensitive to pressure and temperature (PT) while the viscosity of brine is sensitive primarily to temperature. Oil field PT data in the vicinity of WESTCARB's Phase III injection pilot test site in the southern San Joaquin Valley, California, show a range of PT values, indicating either PT uncertainty or variability. Numerical simulation results across the range of likely PT indicate brine viscosity variation causes virtually no difference in plume evolution and final size, but CO2 density variation causes a large difference. Relative ultimate plume size is almost directly proportional to the relative difference in brine and CO2 density (buoyancy flow). The majority of the difference in plume size occurs during and shortly after the cessation of injection. © 2009 Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

Be-10/Be-7 tracer of atmospheric transport and stratosphere-troposphere exchange

The 10Be/7Be ratio is a sensitive tracer of atmospheric transport and stratosphere-troposphere exchange (STE). Data from five NASA aircraft field missions (PEM: West A and B, Tropics A; SONEX; and SUCCESS) have been assembled to produce the largest data set of 10Be,7Be, and their ratio collected to date (\u3e300 samples). Ratios near 0.60 are indicative of tropospheric air with little stratospheric influence, while higher ratios are found in stratospheric air. Samples from the lower stratosphere were all collected within 2.5 km of the tropopause and had ratios \u3e1.27. Of these lower stratosphere samples only 16% had ratios in excess of 3.0, suggesting that higher ratio air resides away from the tropopause. Seasonality observed in the10Be/7Be ratios results from the downwelling of air with elevated ratios from higher in the stratosphere in the spring and summer (midlatitudes) and from the decay of 7Be during descent in the winter polar vortex (high latitudes). Our results illustrate the complexity of STE and some of the mechanisms through which it occurs, including tropopause folding, mixing associated with subtropical jets, and the effect of synoptic systems such as hurricanes and northeasters. The10Be/7Be ratio provides important information beyond that which can be derived from studies that rely on chemical mixing ratios alone

Stochastic dynamics of a Josephson junction threshold detector

We generalize the stochastic path integral formalism by considering Hamiltonian dynamics in the presence of general Markovian noise. Kramers' solution of the activation rate for escape over a barrier is generalized for non-Gaussian driving noise in both the overdamped and underdamped limit. We apply our general results to a Josephson junction detector measuring the electron counting statistics of a mesoscopic conductor. Activation rate dependence on the third current cumulant includes an additional term originating from the back-action of the measurement circuit.Comment: 5 pages, 2 figures, discussion of experiment added, typos correcte

The letters of Charlotte Mary Yonge (1823-1901) edited by Charlotte Mitchell, Ellen Jordan and Helen Schinske.

Charlotte Yonge is one of the most influential and important of Victorian women writers; but study of her work has been handicapped by a tendency to patronise both her and her writing, by the vast number of her publications and by a shortage of information about her professional career. Scholars have had to depend mainly on the work of her first biographer, a loyal disciple, a situation which has long been felt to be unsatisfactory. We hope that this edition of her correspondence will provide for the first time a substantial foundation of facts for the study of her fiction, her historical and educational writing and her journalism, and help to illuminate her biography and also her significance in the cultural and religious history of the Victorian age