Search and Seizure Budgets

This Article proposes a new means of restraining police power: quantitative limits on the number of law enforcement intrusions—searches and seizures—that may occur over a given period of time. Like monetary constraints, search and seizure budgets would aim to curb abusive policing and improve democratic oversight. But unlike their monetary counterparts, budgets would be indexed directly to the specific police activities that most enable escalation and abuse. What is more, budgets are a tool that finds support, conceptually, in the American framing experience. The Fourth Amendment has long been understood to require procedural limits, such as probable cause, on specific police intrusions. But such requirements are only part of the story; limits on overall police capacity, we argue, are also hardwired into the Fourth Amendment via its founding era history. Search and seizure budgets would help reinvigorate that promise, offering an important tool in the ongoing effort to curb over-criminalization and the ever-expanding technologies of surveillance

Role-Reversibility, AI, and Equitable Justice - Or: Why Mercy Cannot Be Automated

A few years ago, we developed the concept of “role-reversibility” in AI governance: the idea that it matters whether a party exercising judgment is reciprocally vulnerable to the effects of judgment. This idea, we argued, supplies a deontic reason to maintain certain spheres of human judgment even if (or when) truly intelligent machines become demonstrably superior in every utilitarian sense. While computer science remains far from that holy grail, generative AI is raging through systems as diverse as healthcare, finance, advertising, law, and academe, making it imperative to further shore up our claim. We do so by situating role-reversibility within the long arc of criminal justice philosophy, from Anaximander to Aristotle to Seneca. Simply put, role-reversibility facilitates mercy. And mercy is both (1) central to the operation of a humane legal system and (2) impossible, even in principle, to automate

Fourth Amendment Anxiety

In Birchfield v. North Dakota (2016), the Supreme Court broke new Fourth Amendment ground by establishing that law enforcement\u27s collection of informa­tion can be cause for anxiety, meriting constitutional protection, even if subsequent uses of the information are tightly restricted. This change is significant. While the Court has long recognized the reality that police cannot always be trusted to follow constitutional rules, Birchfield changes how that concern is implemented in Fourth Amendment law, and importantly, in a manner that acknowledges the new realities of data-driven policing. Beyond offering a careful reading of Birchfield, this Article has two goals. First, we compare Birchfield to two fixtures of Fourth Amendment law that likewise stem from distrust of state power: the warrant requirement and the exclusionary rule. Like traditional warrants, Birchfield warrants have a prophylactic quality; they enable ex ante judicial supervision. But Birchfield warrants also go further than traditional warrants; they aim to anticipate-and preempt-disregard for the rules later on, not just to safeguard particularity in the immediate search or seizure. In this sense, Birchfield warrants do ex ante what the exclusionary rule does ex post: deter abuse. Second, we connect Birchfield\u27s anti-anxiety logic to two other areas of constitutional criminal procedure. The first are settings-speedy trial and double jeopardy cases, most notably-where the Court has recognized that potential uses of state power can provoke anxiety and, accordingly, require constitutional accommodation. We refer to this as the Sword of Damocles problem. The second area is Miranda, which, like Birchfield, deals with a problem of closed-door policing. In both Miranda and Birchfield, protective rules are necessary because law enforcement decisions happen in the dark-in Miranda, due to the realities of traditional custodial interrogation, and in Birchfield, because collected information simply disappears into a government vault. Birchfield is, in effect, the Court\u27s first big data collection case, having doctrinal implications for the seizure and use of any information-rich evidence, including support for Fourth Amendment use restrictions. In this sense, Birchfield is best understood as continuous with other recent jurisprudence-most notably, United States v. Jones and Riley v. California-in which the Supreme Court has revitalized the ideal of judicial supervision in the age of data-driven policing

New Species, New Combinations and New Synonymies Towards a Treatment of Acanthaceae for the Manual de Plantas de Costa Rica

In preparation for the publication of the Manual de Plantas de Costa Rica, new species, names, combinations, and synonymies are provided in six genera of Acanthaceae: Anisacanthus, Chamaeranthemum, Dicliptera, Justicia, Ruellia and Stenostephanus. The new species are A. grace-woodiae, J. altior, J. lithophila and S. chavesii. A new name at the species level, R. leonardiana, is provided for R. tubiflora var. hirsuta. With Habracanthus, Hansteinia, Kalbreyeriella and Razisea being subsumed within Stenostephanus, the new combinations S. blepharorhachis, S. citrinus, S. leiorhachis (= Razisea spicata non S. spicatus), S. strictus, S. ventricosus, S. villosus and S. wilburii are formalized. Seven new synonymies are presented for species of Chamaeranthemum, Dicliptera, Justicia and Stenostephanus, as well as lectotypifications in the first and latter two genera

Galactic neutron stars I. Space and velocity distributions in the disk and in the halo

Aims. Neutron stars (NSs) produced in the Milky Way are supposedly ten to the eighth - ten to the ninth, of which only $\sim 2 \times 10^{3}$ are observed. Constraining the phase space distribution of NSs may help to characterize the yet undetected population of stellar remnants. Methods. We perform Monte Carlo simulations of NS orbits, under different assumptions concerning the Galactic potential and the distribution of progenitors and birth velocities. We study the resulting phase space distributions, focusing on the statistical properties of the NS populations in the disk and in the solar neighbourhood. Results. It is shown that $\sim 80$ percent of NSs are in bound orbits. The fraction of NSs located in a disk of radius 20 kpc and width 0.4 kpc is $\lesssim 20$ percent. Therefore the majority of NSs populate the halo. Fits for the surface density of the disk, the distribution of heights on the Galactic plane and the velocity distribution of the disk, are given. We also provide sky maps of the projected number density in heliocentric Galactic coordinates (l, b). Our results are compared with previous ones reported in the literature. Conclusions. Obvious applications of our modelling are in the revisiting of accretion luminosities of old isolated NSs, the issue of the observability of the nearest NS and the NS optical depth for microlensing events. These will be the scope of further studies.Comment: 11 pages, 15 figures, accepted for publication in Astronomy and Astrophysic

Imaging Active Infection in vivo Using D-Amino Acid Derived PET Radiotracers.

Occult bacterial infections represent a worldwide health problem. Differentiating active bacterial infection from sterile inflammation can be difficult using current imaging tools. Present clinically viable methodologies either detect morphologic changes (CT/ MR), recruitment of immune cells (111In-WBC SPECT), or enhanced glycolytic flux seen in inflammatory cells (18F-FDG PET). However, these strategies are often inadequate to detect bacterial infection and are not specific for living bacteria. Recent approaches have taken advantage of key metabolic differences between prokaryotic and eukaryotic organisms, allowing easier distinction between bacteria and their host. In this report, we exploited one key difference, bacterial cell wall biosynthesis, to detect living bacteria using a positron-labeled D-amino acid. After screening several 14C D-amino acids for their incorporation into E. coli in culture, we identified D-methionine as a probe with outstanding radiopharmaceutical potential. Based on an analogous procedure to that used for L-[methyl-11C]methionine ([11C] L-Met), we developed an enhanced asymmetric synthesis of D-[methyl-11C]methionine ([11C] D-Met), and showed that it can rapidly and selectively differentiate both E. coli and S. aureus infections from sterile inflammation in vivo. We believe that the ease of [11C] D-Met radiosynthesis, coupled with its rapid and specific in vivo bacterial accumulation, make it an attractive radiotracer for infection imaging in clinical practice