The Judicial Behavior of Justice Souter in Criminal Cases and the Denial of a Conservative Counterrevolution

[Excerpt] “The following article documents the judicial career of Justice David Souter from his time served as an attorney general and state judge in New Hampshire until his recent tenure on the U.S. Supreme Court. Based upon his written opinions and individual votes, Justice Souter clearly has evolved into a more liberal jurist than ideological conservatives would have preferred in the area of criminal justice. Over the course of his judicial career, Justice Souter has gained respect as an intellectual scholar by attempting to completely understand both sides of a dispute and applying precedent and legal rules in a flexible—albeit technical—manner in the hope of achieving justice. However, Justice Souter may be remembered most as the justice who disappointed ideological conservatives by failing to complete a conservative counterrevolution that had begun with President Richard Nixon‘s first appointment to the Court in 1969.

A generalization of the Lyndon--Hochschild--Serre spectral sequence with applications to group cohomology and decompositions of groups

We set up a Grothendieck spectral sequence which generalizes the Lyndon--Hochschild--Serre spectral sequence for a group extension K\mono G\epi Q by allowing the normal subgroup $K$ to be replaced by a subgroup, or family of subgroups which satisfy a weaker condition than normality. This is applied to establish a decomposition theorem for certain groups as fundamental groups of graphs of Poincar\'e duality groups. We further illustrate the method by proving a cohomological vanishing theorem which applies for example to Thompson's group $F$.Comment: 22 page

How Many Universes Do There Need To Be?

In the simplest cosmological models consistent with General Relativity, the total volume of the Universe is either finite or infinite, depending on whether or not the spatial curvature is positive. Current data suggest that the curvature is very close to flat, implying that one can place a lower limit on the total volume. In a Universe of finite age, the "particle horizon" defines the patch of the Universe which is observable to us. Based on today's best-fit cosmological parameters it is possible to constrain the number of observable Universe sized patches, N_U. Specifically, using the new WMAP data, we can say that there are at least 21 patches out there the same volume as ours, at 95% confidence. Moreover, even if the precision of our cosmological measurements continues to increase, density perturbations at the particle horizon size limit us to never knowing that there are more than about 10^5 patches out there.Comment: 5 pages, 1 figure; received "honourable mention" in 2006 GRF essay contest; v2: improved analysis with newly available WMAP Monte Carlo Markov Chain; version published in IJMP

Valuing Financial Flexibility

Two facts that corporations, underwriters and investors have been forced to confront are increased capital market volatility and increased complexity in the design of securities. However, these two facts, increased volatility and increased complexity, are not unrelated. Virtually all of the complexity in securities can be viewed as the inclusion of different options in a straight debt contract. Given the fact that the value of options is driven most significantly by volatility, the advantage of including options, i.e. financial flexibility, in securities has increased with increased market volatility. This would appear to explain why corporate issuers and institutional investors have shown substantial interest in securities which improve their flexibility in volatile markets. Therefore, techniques which can consistently reflect the role of volatility in the value of options or flexibility, should be of interest to issuers, underwriters, and investors.This paper summarizes the results of some research by Jones, Masonand Rosenfeld (MR), (1984), and presents some new results, which test the ability of a CCA model based on Black and Scholes' option pricingprinciples to predict the market price of callable corporate debt, andtherefore, the price of such common debt covenants as call provisions andcall protection, In addition, some numerical CCA results are reportedwhich demonstrate the impact of changing interest rate volatility on the value of call provisions and call protection.

An equivalence result for VC classes of sets

Let R and θ be infinite sets and let A # R × θ. We show that the class of projections of A onto R is a Vapnik–Chervonenkis (VC) class of sets if and only if the class of projections of A onto θ is a VC class. We illustrate the result in the context of semiparametric estimation of a transformation model. In this application, the VC property is hard to establish for the projection class of interest but easy to establish for the other projection class