Active repositioning of storage units in Robotic Mobile Fulfillment Systems

In our work we focus on Robotic Mobile Fulfillment Systems in e-commerce distribution centers. These systems were designed to increase pick rates by employing mobile robots bringing movable storage units (so-called pods) to pick and replenishment stations as needed, and back to the storage area afterwards. One advantage of this approach is that repositioning of inventory can be done continuously, even during pick and replenishment operations. This is primarily accomplished by bringing a pod to a storage location different than the one it was fetched from, a process we call passive pod repositioning. Additionally, this can be done by explicitly bringing a pod from one storage location to another, a process we call active pod repositioning. In this work we introduce first mechanisms for the latter technique and conduct a simulation-based experiment to give first insights of their effect

The Original Understanding of Constitutional Legitimacy

This Article argues that three influential schools of originalism, which we might label libertarian, progressive, and conservative, adhere to particular understandings of constitutional legitimacy, which then inform their particular constitutional hermeneutics. The Article demonstrates that as originally understood by the Founders, however, constitutional legitimacy depended on all three conceptions advocated by these schools of thought—that is, the Constitution had to protect natural rights, it had to enable self-government, and it had to be ratified by popular sovereignty. Further, the Article gives considerable treatment—remarkably for the first time in the law review literature— to James Madison’s letter in response to Thomas Jefferson’s famous “dead hand of the past” argument, in which we might find an understudied ground for constitutional obedience: prudence. The discussion on the Founders’ original understanding of constitutional legitimacy provides two principal insights: First, it provides us with a more holistic case for constitutional obedience than modern originalist theories, whose narrower theories of legitimacy may be unpersuasive standing alone. Second, it demonstrates that broader hermeneutics are necessary as an originalist matter or simply because we find the Founders’ understanding more persuasive. The Article will also suggest, in the conclusion, that the more holistic account of constitutional legitimacy might provide a new justification for originalism

Reversing Incorporation

It is originalist gospel that the Fourteenth Amendment’s Privileges or Immunities Clause was intended, at a minimum, to incorporate the Bill of Rights against the states. This Article revisits forty years of scholarship and concludes that this modern consensus is likely mistaken. Reconstructing antebellum discourse on fundamental rights reveals that the historical players assumed that every state must, as all free governments had to, guarantee and secure natural rights to their citizens. But that did not mean the states regulated these rights in the same way, nor did that dictate what the federal government’s role would be in guaranteeing and securing such rights. The record reveals that the antislavery and Republican concern, both before and after the adoption of the Fourteenth Amendment, was equality in civil rights however de-fined and regulated under state law. In making this claim, this Article identifies a significant conceptual error pervasive in the literature: conflating the rights the first eight amendments secure with the first eight amendments themselves. Merely identifying the freedom of speech or the right to bear arms as a privilege or immunity of United States citizenship tells us nothing about how various constitutional provisions would guarantee and secure them

Jeane Kirkpatrick and the End of the Cold War: Dictatorships, Democracy, and Human Rights

Part I: An Intellectual and Political History. Chapter One: Cold War Consensus Shattered. Chapter Two: Dictatorships and Double Standards. Chapter Three: The Carter Years: Was Kirkpatrick Right? Part II: Kirkpatrick and the Reagan Administration Chapter Four: The Kirkpatrick and Reagan Doctrines Chapter Five: Putting Policy to Practice: Chile and El Salvado

The Origins of Substantive Due Process

In the antebellum nineteenth century, courts often voided legislative acts for substantive unreasonableness or for exceeding the scope of legitimate police powers. Contrary to the assertions of a number of modern scholars, however, this tradition does not support the concept of economic substantive due process. Courts voided municipal acts exceeding the scope of legitimate police powers on two grounds—the law of delegation and the law of municipal corporations—that did not apply to acts of state legislatures. The states themselves were limited to reasonable exercises of the police power only when their asserted authority came into potential collision with federal constitutional requirements, most prominently the Commerce and Contracts Clauses. It was only late in the century, after the adoption of the Fourteenth Amendment, that a police-power version of substantive due process emerged as a limitation on state legislatures as courts began conflating, under the guise of “due process of law,” earlier doctrines that had used a similar vocabulary but for distinct purposes. Police-power limitations on state legislatures regulating purely internal matters therefore probably cannot be justified by any antebellum legal conception of due process of law. A police-power analysis might, however, play some role in a Privileges or Immunities Clause challenge by analogy to antebellum Commerce Clause and Contracts Clause jurisprudence

In Search of Prerogative

The standard formalist account of Article II’s Executive Vesting Clause is that “the executive power” refers to all the powers and authorities possessed by the executive magistrate in Great Britain prior to the Constitution’s adoption, subject to the assignment of such powers and authorities to the other departments of the national government. In recent papers, a handful of scholars have challenged this “residual vesting thesis” by amassing evidence that “the executive power” textually referred only to the power to carry law into execution and not to the bundle of other royal prerogatives—for example over foreign affairs and national security—enjoyed by the British monarch. According to the advocates of both accounts, the scope and nature of the executive is dramatically altered depending on which account one adopts. This Article dissents from both views. “The executive power” was indeed about law execution and was not a residual grant of power; but both the Founding generation and its key guide, Blackstone, likely shared a “thick” understanding of this power. Their writings and statements suggest that “the executive power,” even in its narrower law-execution sense, plausibly included the powers to appoint, remove, and direct executive officers and to promulgate regulations as necessary incidents to law execution. Not only is this account consistent with Blackstone and the historical meaning of “the executive power,” but it better fits the available data from the Constitutional Convention and early practice than either of the other two accounts. The residual vesting thesis requires us to believe that the Committee of Detail ignored the instructions of the delegates in the Constitutional Convention, to infer that the delegates themselves were unaware of the implications of what they had written, and to ignore the fact that not a single opponent of the Constitution during ratification so much as mentioned the possibility of a residual grant. On the other hand, the law-execution thesis, at least a “thin” version of it, may not account for important practices and precedents. The “thick” view of “the executive power” advanced in this Article is the theory of best fit: it is the only one that fits the text, the Framers’ apparent intent, and the historical practice. The upshot of this approach is that the president probably has more power in the domestic sphere than under a thin law-execution account but less in foreign affairs than under the residual vesting thesis

Qualified Immunity and Statutory Interpretation

Before the 1989 case of Graham v. Connor, excessive force cases were pursued under either state law or the insuperable “shocks the conscience” test of the Fourteenth Amendment. Only after Graham did excessive force cases—now under the Fourth Amendment and 42 U.S.C. § 1983—inundate the federal courts, which had by then granted far-reaching immunities to officers for their constitutional torts. As a result of federal qualified immunity doctrine, which many states have adopted for themselves, excessive force cases rarely get to trial, plaintiffs often cannot recover, and courts struggle to find principled distinctions from one qualified immunity case to the next. This Article examines the evolution of excessive force cases in the federal courts, along with the evolution of qualified immunity doctrine. This Article makes the theoretical case under both constitutional and statutory interpretation for replacing modern qualified immunity doctrine with a return to its common law variety in excessive force actions—an approach that would also be far more judicially workable than the current doctrine

The Original Understanding of Constitutional Legitimacy

This Article argues that three influential schools of originalism, which we might label libertarian, progressive, and conservative, adhere to particular understandings of constitutional legitimacy, which then inform their particular constitutional hermeneutics. The Article demonstrates that as originally understood by the Founders, however, constitutional legitimacy depended on all three conceptions advocated by these schools of thought—that is, the Constitution had to protect natural rights, it had to enable self-government, and it had to be ratified by popular sovereignty. Further, the Article gives considerable treatment—remarkably for the first time in the law review literature— to James Madison’s letter in response to Thomas Jefferson’s famous “dead hand of the past” argument, in which we might find an understudied ground for constitutional obedience: prudence. The discussion on the Founders’ original understanding of constitutional legitimacy provides two principal insights: First, it provides us with a more holistic case for constitutional obedience than modern originalist theories, whose narrower theories of legitimacy may be unpersuasive standing alone. Second, it demonstrates that broader hermeneutics are necessary as an originalist matter or simply because we find the Founders’ understanding more persuasive. The Article will also suggest, in the conclusion, that the more holistic account of constitutional legitimacy might provide a new justification for originalism