Shady Grove, the Rules Enabling Act, and the Application of State Summary Judgment Standards in Federal Diversity Cases

(Excerpt) Part I of this Article briefly summarizes the relevant history of the Erie doctrine, including its origins in both the Rules of Decision Act and the Rules Enabling Act, and concludes with a discussion of Shady Grove, the latest landmark in the Supreme Court\u27s Erie jurisprudence. Part II summarizes the summary judgment standards in federal and state courts, highlighting how certain state courts have distinguished their summary judgment rules from the interpretation of the federal rule set forth in Celotex. Part III argues that, based upon the controlling precedent from Justice Stevens\u27s concurring opinion in Shady Grove, the federal court should apply the state standard. A district court could reach this outcome through either a Rules Enabling Act analysis or, less likely, a Rules of Decision Act analysis. In fact, the results of several lower court decisions applying Shady Grove suggest that the case has revived the possibility that a Federal Rule of Civil Procedure that otherwise controls the issue in dispute might be invalidated under the Rules Enabling Act. A lasting-and perhaps unintended-legacy of the fractured Shady Grove case, therefore, may be that it has opened the door to the increased application of state rules-and, potentially, state summary judgment standards-by federal courts sitting in diversity. The Court\u27s steady shift towards the procedural disposition of suits in the federal courts10 and the concomitant pushback in the state courts make this an area ripe for further development of the Court\u27s Erie jurisprudence

Shady Grove, the Rules Enabling Act, and the Application of State Summary Judgment Standards in Federal Diversity Cases

(Excerpt) Part I of this Article briefly summarizes the relevant history of the Erie doctrine, including its origins in both the Rules of Decision Act and the Rules Enabling Act, and concludes with a discussion of Shady Grove, the latest landmark in the Supreme Court\u27s Erie jurisprudence. Part II summarizes the summary judgment standards in federal and state courts, highlighting how certain state courts have distinguished their summary judgment rules from the interpretation of the federal rule set forth in Celotex. Part III argues that, based upon the controlling precedent from Justice Stevens\u27s concurring opinion in Shady Grove, the federal court should apply the state standard. A district court could reach this outcome through either a Rules Enabling Act analysis or, less likely, a Rules of Decision Act analysis. In fact, the results of several lower court decisions applying Shady Grove suggest that the case has revived the possibility that a Federal Rule of Civil Procedure that otherwise controls the issue in dispute might be invalidated under the Rules Enabling Act. A lasting-and perhaps unintended-legacy of the fractured Shady Grove case, therefore, may be that it has opened the door to the increased application of state rules-and, potentially, state summary judgment standards-by federal courts sitting in diversity. The Court\u27s steady shift towards the procedural disposition of suits in the federal courts10 and the concomitant pushback in the state courts make this an area ripe for further development of the Court\u27s Erie jurisprudence

Do probiotics reduce C diff risk in hospitalized patients?

Review of: Shen NT, Maw A, Tmanova LL, et al. Timely use of probiotics in hospitalized adults prevents Clostridium difficile infection: a systematic review with meta-regression analysis. Gastroenterology. 2017;152:1889-1900. e9.Do probiotics reduce C diff risk in hospitalized patients? A systematic review and meta-analysis says, "Yes," but that doesn't necessarily mean they will start appearing on hospital formularies. Practice changer: Start probiotics within 1 to 2 days of starting antibiotics in hospitalized patients to reduce the risk of Clostridium difficile infection.Matthew Simpson, MD, MPH; Corey Lyon, DO, University of Colorado, Family Medicine Residency, DenverIncludes bibliographical reference

Redefining Summary Judgment by Statute: The Legislative History of Tennessee Code Annotated Section 20-16-101

In its 2011 session, the Tennessee General Assembly purported to overrule a landmark decision of the Tennessee Supreme Court that had clarified the burden of production on summary judgment motions. The stage was set for this legislation by the November 2010 election, in which Republicans won majorities of twenty to thirteen in the State Senate and sixty-four to thirty-four (plus one GOP-leaning independent) in the House of Representatives. In addition, Bill Haslam, the Republican Mayor of Knoxville, won the election for Governor handily, leaving Republicans large and in charge and in control of the executive branch and both houses of the legislature in Tennessee for the first time since 1869. Republicans took control of power in Nashville vowing that they would govern responsibly, despite hard feelings resulting from years of Democratic control, not to mention the surprise, last-minute denial of the Speaker of the House position to the Republican leader in the 106th General Assembly. The Republican leadership stated at the outset that its top priority at the beginning of the legislative session was job creation, and this goal translated into the passage of a slew of legislative proposals friendly to the business community, many of which had stalled under the previous Democratic regime. The most notable of these was a tort reform package that limited non-economic damages to $750,000, and capped punitive damages at two times the amount of compensatory damages awarded or$500,000, whichever is greater. While this initiative and others, such as the abolition of collective bargaining for teachers, received greater public attention, the new legislative majority also set its sights on overruling certain Tennessee Supreme Court decisions that the business community had interpreted as unfriendly to its interests

Spatio-Angular Convolutions for Super-resolution in Diffusion MRI

Diffusion MRI (dMRI) is a widely used imaging modality, but requires long scanning times to acquire high resolution datasets. By leveraging the unique geometry present within this domain, we present a novel approach to dMRI angular super-resolution that extends upon the parametric continuous convolution (PCConv) framework. We introduce several additions to the operation including a Fourier feature mapping, global coordinates, and domain specific context. Using this framework, we build a fully parametric continuous convolution network (PCCNN) and compare against existing models. We demonstrate the PCCNN performs competitively while using significantly less parameters. Moreover, we show that this formulation generalises well to clinically relevant downstream analyses such as fixel-based analysis, and neurite orientation dispersion and density imaging

Broadband Achromatic Phase Shifter for a Nulling Interferometer

Nulling interferometry is a technique for imaging exoplanets in which light from the parent star is suppressed using destructive interference. Light from the star is divided into two beams and a phase shift of radians is introduced into one of the beams. When the beams are recombined, they destructively interfere to produce a deep null. For monochromatic light, this is implemented by introducing an optical path difference (OPD) between the two beams equal to lambda/2, where lambda is the wavelength of the light. For broadband light, however, a different phase shift will be introduced at each wavelength and the two beams will not effectively null when recombined. Various techniques have been devised to introduce an achromatic phase shift a phase shift that is uniform across a particular bandwidth. One popular technique is to use a series of dispersive elements to introduce a wavelength-dependent optical path in one or both of the arms of the interferometer. By intelligently choosing the number, material and thickness of a series of glass plates, a nearly uniform, arbitrary phase shift can be introduced between two arms of an interferometer. There are several constraints that make choosing the number, type, and thickness of materials a difficult problem, such as the size of the bandwidth to be nulled. Several solutions have been found for bandwidths on the order of 20 to 30 percent (Delta(lambda)/lambda(sub c)) in the mid-infrared region. However, uniform phase shifts over a larger bandwidth in the visible regime between 480 to 960 nm (67 percent) remain difficult to obtain at the tolerances necessary for exoplanet detection. A configuration of 10 dispersive glass plates was developed to be used as an achromatic phase shifter in nulling interferometry. Five glass plates were placed in each arm of the interferometer and an additional vacuum distance was also included in the second arm of the interferometer. This configuration creates a phase shift of pi radians with an average error of 5.97 x 10(exp -8) radians and standard deviation of 3.07 x 10(exp -4) radians. To reduce ghost reflections and interference effects from neighboring elements, the glass plates are tilted such that the beam does not strike each plate at normal incidence. Reflections will therefore walk out of the system and not contribute to the intensity when the beams are recombined. Tilting the glass plates, however, introduces several other problems that must be mitigated: (1) the polarization of a beam changes when refracted at an interface at non-normal incidence; (2) the beam experiences lateral chromatic spread as it traverses multiple glass plates; (3) at each surface, wavelength- dependent intensity losses will occur due to reflection. For a fixed angle of incidence, each of these effects must be balanced between each arm of the interferometer in order to ensure a deep null. The solution was found using a nonlinear optimization routine that minimized an objective function relating phase shift, intensity difference, chromatic beam spread, and polarization difference to the desired parameters: glass plate material and thickness. In addition to providing a uniform, broadband phase shift, the configuration achieves an average difference in intensity transmission between the two arms of the interferometer of 0.016 percent with a standard deviation of 3.64 x 10(exp -4) percent, an average difference in polarization between the two arms of the interferometer of 5.47 x 10(exp -5) percent with a standard deviation of 1.57 x 10(exp -6) percent, and an average chromatic beam shift between the two arms of the interferometer of -47.53 microns with a wavelength-by-wavelength spread of 0.389 microns