In Defense of “Footnote Four”: A Historical Analysis of the New Deal’s Effect on Land Regulation in the U.S. Supreme Court

At the turn of the nineteenth century, the US Supreme Court established and reinforced numerous so-called economic rights. During the Lochner v. New York era, the Court invalidated almost 200 federal and state economic and labor regulations for interfering with the right to contract and for violating substantive due process. In 1937, however, Justice Stone\u27s famous footnote four in United States v. Carolene Products Co. closed the coffin on Lochner. After Carolene Products, the Court stopped applying heightened scrutiny to economic legislation, and it began consciously protecting discrete and insular minorities. Here, Dodrill explains the Lochner-era Supreme Court\u27s standard of review through an analysis of land-regulation cases decided between 1909 and 1937. He also describes the approach taken by the Court after Carolene Products, between 1937 and 1980, and demonstrates that the Court\u27s approach did not become more government-friendly, but if anything, became more landowner-friendly

Does Judicial Philosophy Matter?: A Case Study

A leading theory in the study of judicial behavior is the attitudinal model. This theory maintains that a judge\u27s political ideology can be used to predict how a judge will decide certain cases; other factors, such as the judge\u27s judicial philosophy, tend to be unimportant. Under this theory, two judges with the same political ideology, but different judicial philosophies, should virtually always vote the same way in cases with pre­dicted ideological outcomes. This manuscript tests the attitudinal model by examin­ing opinions by two judges with very similar political ideologies but different judicial philosophies: Judge Michael Luttig and Judge Harvie Wilkinson III of the US. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit. After defining the judges\u27 political ideologies and judicial philosophies, this study examines political cases in which one of these judges wrote the majority opinion and the other dissented. The result of the study is that when these judges came to different conclusions in these ideological cases, it is likely they did so on the basis of their judicial philosophies. In short, contra the attitudinal model, at least in some cases judi­cial philosophy does matter

Coronal Heating as Determined by the Solar Flare Frequency Distribution Obtained by Aggregating Case Studies

Flare frequency distributions represent a key approach to addressing one of the largest problems in solar and stellar physics: determining the mechanism that counter-intuitively heats coronae to temperatures that are orders of magnitude hotter than the corresponding photospheres. It is widely accepted that the magnetic field is responsible for the heating, but there are two competing mechanisms that could explain it: nanoflares or Alfv\'en waves. To date, neither can be directly observed. Nanoflares are, by definition, extremely small, but their aggregate energy release could represent a substantial heating mechanism, presuming they are sufficiently abundant. One way to test this presumption is via the flare frequency distribution, which describes how often flares of various energies occur. If the slope of the power law fitting the flare frequency distribution is above a critical threshold, $\alpha=2$ as established in prior literature, then there should be a sufficient abundance of nanoflares to explain coronal heating. We performed $>$600 case studies of solar flares, made possible by an unprecedented number of data analysts via three semesters of an undergraduate physics laboratory course. This allowed us to include two crucial, but nontrivial, analysis methods: pre-flare baseline subtraction and computation of the flare energy, which requires determining flare start and stop times. We aggregated the results of these analyses into a statistical study to determine that $\alpha = 1.63 \pm 0.03$. This is below the critical threshold, suggesting that Alfv\'en waves are an important driver of coronal heating.Comment: 1,002 authors, 14 pages, 4 figures, 3 tables, published by The Astrophysical Journal on 2023-05-09, volume 948, page 7