The Abortion Controversey: A Study in Law and Politics

The Supreme Court\u27s 1973 decision in Roe v. Wade, which held that women have a federal constitutional right to an abortion, has generated considerable controversy. The abortion issue became politically significant in the 1960\u27s, when, emboldened by the Supreme court\u27s recognition of a constitutionally based right of privacy, activists initiated a series of legal challenges to the validity of state abortion laws. Their efforts finally succeeded in 1973 when the Supreme Court in Roe and Doe v. Bolton struck down as unconstitutional the Texas and Georgia abortion laws. For those who objected to the result in Roe, however, the occasion was not necessarily one of final defeat. Though Roe was a decisive victory for the pro-abortion forces, it was only the first battle in what was to become a fierce struggle over fundamental principle. The purpose of this article is not to explore the evolution of Supreme Court doctrine concerning abortion. Rather, the purpose is to look at the abortion controversy in terms of the political reaction that it engendered. This study concentrates on two aspects of what since 1973 can be described as the ongoing guerilla war against Roe. the first concerns the post-Roe legislation at both the state and federal levels purporting to regulate abortion through time, place and manner restrictions. Much of this legislation was an attempt to circumvent Roe or at the least to minimize its consequences. The second aspect of the study concerns the various proposals designed not merely to mitigate the effects of Roe, but to overrule it either directly or indirectly. The bulk of this discussion deals with the rather surprising variety of constitutional amendments put forward in Congress. A significant part, however, focuses on legislative substitutes for a constitutional amendment. These include proposed jurisdictional restrictions on the Supreme Court and lower federal courts, and proposed substantive legislation based on Section 5 of the Fourteenth Amendment, which defines life for constitutional purposes. While it is true that limiting the jurisdiction of the federal courts to hear abortion cases would not explicitly overrule Roe because of the doctrine of stare decisis, it would effect a shift of power to the state courts which alone would have the ability to grant remedies in abortion cases. In effect, the force of Roe would be greatly reduced. The opponents of Roe, however, have not been able to unite on an approach for overruling it because some believe that the primary problem with the decision is a moral one, namely its approbation of abortion, while others object to it because of its implications for federalism and the policy-making role of the judiciary. This split in the anti-abortion ranks, which we shall call the moralist - federalist split. has gravely hindered the opponents of Roe, rendering it unlikely that the Congress will pass a measure designed to overrule Roe in the near future. Given the current political climate, the most serious and immediate threat to Roe is the possibility of a change in the composition of the Supreme Court

Alternative Models of Ante-Mortem Probate and Procedural Due Process Limitations on Succession

Ante-mortem probate stands as a significant recent development in the American law of wealth succession. It confronts a problem that seriously impairs our probate system, the depredatious will contest, and promises to help revitalize the probate process. Already enacted in several states and currently under active study by the Joint Editorial Board of the Uniform Probate Code and the National Conference of Commissioners on Uniform State Laws, ante-mortem probate is likely to be widely implemented in some form. But while legislators and academics alike support ante-mortem probate as a general idea, disagreement has emerged over the specific form it should take. A recent exchange in the Michigan Law Review offered two alternative schemes for ante-mortem probate, both of which contemplate a procedural design materially different from that of the few existing ante-mortem probate statutes. That new design was termed the conservatorship model, contrasting with the more traditional contest model. The exchange reflected a disagreement over what the authors assumed to be an unavoidable trade-off between two objectives: protection against post-mortem strike suits, and confidentiality of a will\u27s contents during the testator\u27s lifetime. The exchange did not, however, explore the possibility of an ante-mortem probate scheme that would achieve both objectives. What made these objectives appear incompatible was the assumption that any version of ante-mortem probate that would preclude post-mortem attacks on the will must necessarily provide due process protective features, requiring notice to all expectant heirs and legatees under earlier wills and the opportunity for them to appear in the proceeding. In this Article, we shall challenge that assumption and propose a workable scheme of ante-mortem probate that both protects the testamentary plan against strike suits and preserves the confidentiality of the plan during the testator\u27s lifetime. Section I reviews the conservatorship model as developed by Professor Langbein and identifies its objectionable features. In Section II, we address the general constitutional question of what property interests command due process protection. This context poses the constitutional problem narrowly, but our analysis has broad implications regarding constitutional notice requirements for any probate reform. Concluding in that Section that due process does not compel notice and a right to appear for expectant heirs and legatees, we prepare in Section III an administrative design for a no-notice version of ante-mortem probate. Our discussion anticipates prudential objections to the model, offering a possible exception to the no-notice provisions to favor the nuclear family, an exception we ultimately reject

Alternative Models of Ante-Mortem Probate and Procedural Due Process Limitations on Succession

Ante-mortem probate stands as a significant recent development in the American law of wealth succession. It confronts a problem that seriously impairs our probate system, the depredatious will contest, and promises to help revitalize the probate process. Already enacted in several states and currently under active study by the Joint Editorial Board of the Uniform Probate Code and the National Conference of Commissioners on Uniform State Laws, ante-mortem probate is likely to be widely implemented in some form. But while legislators and academics alike support ante-mortem probate as a general idea, disagreement has emerged over the specific form it should take. A recent exchange in the Michigan Law Review offered two alternative schemes for ante-mortem probate, both of which contemplate a procedural design materially different from that of the few existing ante-mortem probate statutes. That new design was termed the conservatorship model, contrasting with the more traditional contest model. The exchange reflected a disagreement over what the authors assumed to be an unavoidable trade-off between two objectives: protection against post-mortem strike suits, and confidentiality of a will\u27s contents during the testator\u27s lifetime. The exchange did not, however, explore the possibility of an ante-mortem probate scheme that would achieve both objectives. What made these objectives appear incompatible was the assumption that any version of ante-mortem probate that would preclude post-mortem attacks on the will must necessarily provide due process protective features, requiring notice to all expectant heirs and legatees under earlier wills and the opportunity for them to appear in the proceeding. In this Article, we shall challenge that assumption and propose a workable scheme of ante-mortem probate that both protects the testamentary plan against strike suits and preserves the confidentiality of the plan during the testator\u27s lifetime. Section I reviews the conservatorship model as developed by Professor Langbein and identifies its objectionable features. In Section II, we address the general constitutional question of what property interests command due process protection. This context poses the constitutional problem narrowly, but our analysis has broad implications regarding constitutional notice requirements for any probate reform. Concluding in that Section that due process does not compel notice and a right to appear for expectant heirs and legatees, we prepare in Section III an administrative design for a no-notice version of ante-mortem probate. Our discussion anticipates prudential objections to the model, offering a possible exception to the no-notice provisions to favor the nuclear family, an exception we ultimately reject

Alternative Models of Ante-Mortem Probate and Procedural Due Process Limitations on Succession

In this Article, we shall challenge that assumption and propose a workable scheme of ante-mortem probate that both protects the testamentary plan against strike suits and preserves the confidentiality of the plan during the testator\u27s lifetime. Section I reviews the conservatorship model as developed by Professor Langbein and identifies its objectionable features. In Section II, we address the general constitutional question of what property interests command due process protection. This context poses the constitutional problem narrowly, but our analysis has broad implications regarding constitutional notice requirements for any probate reform. Concluding in that Section that due process does not compel notice and a right to appear for expectant heirs and legatees, we prepare in Section III an administrative design for a no-notice version of ante-mortem probate. Our discussion anticipates prudential objections to the model, offering a possible exception to the no-notice provisions to favor the nuclear family, an exception we ultimately reject

Visualizing dimensionality reduction of systems biology data

One of the challenges in analyzing high-dimensional expression data is the detection of important biological signals. A common approach is to apply a dimension reduction method, such as principal component analysis. Typically, after application of such a method the data is projected and visualized in the new coordinate system, using scatter plots or profile plots. These methods provide good results if the data have certain properties which become visible in the new coordinate system and which were hard to detect in the original coordinate system. Often however, the application of only one method does not suffice to capture all important signals. Therefore several methods addressing different aspects of the data need to be applied. We have developed a framework for linear and non-linear dimension reduction methods within our visual analytics pipeline SpRay. This includes measures that assist the interpretation of the factorization result. Different visualizations of these measures can be combined with functional annotations that support the interpretation of the results. We show an application to high-resolution time series microarray data in the antibiotic-producing organism Streptomyces coelicolor as well as to microarray data measuring expression of cells with normal karyotype and cells with trisomies of human chromosomes 13 and 21

Fluoromycobacteriophages for rapid, specific, and sensitive antibiotic susceptibility testing of Mycobacterium tuberculosis

Rapid antibiotic susceptibility testing of Mycobacterium tuberculosis is of paramount importance as multiple- and extensively- drug resistant strains of M. tuberculosis emerge and spread. We describe here a virus-based assay in which fluoromycobacteriophages are used to deliver a GFP or ZsYellow fluorescent marker gene to M. tuberculosis, which can then be monitored by fluorescent detection approaches including fluorescent microscopy and flow cytometry. Pre-clinical evaluations show that addition of either Rifampicin or Streptomycin at the time of phage addition obliterates fluorescence in susceptible cells but not in isogenic resistant bacteria enabling drug sensitivity determination in less than 24 hours. Detection requires no substrate addition, fewer than 100 cells can be identified, and resistant bacteria can be detected within mixed populations. Fluorescence withstands fixation by paraformaldehyde providing enhanced biosafety for testing MDR-TB and XDR-TB infections. © 2009 Piuri et al

The Cosmic Far-Infrared Background Buildup Since Redshift 2 at 70 and 160 microns in the COSMOS and GOODS fields

The Cosmic Far-Infrared Background (CIB) at wavelengths around 160 {\mu}m corresponds to the peak intensity of the whole Extragalactic Background Light, which is being measured with increasing accuracy. However, the build up of the CIB emission as a function of redshift, is still not well known. Our goal is to measure the CIB history at 70 {\mu}m and 160 {\mu}m at different redshifts, and provide constraints for infrared galaxy evolution models. We use complete deep Spitzer 24 {\mu}m catalogs down to about 80 {\mu}Jy, with spectroscopic and photometric redshifts identifications, from the GOODS and COSMOS deep infrared surveys covering 2 square degrees total. After cleaning the Spitzer/MIPS 70 {\mu}m and 160 {\mu}m maps from detected sources, we stacked the far-IR images at the positions of the 24 {\mu}m sources in different redshift bins. We measured the contribution of each stacked source to the total 70 and 160 {\mu}m light, and compare with model predictions and recent far-IR measurements made with Herschel/PACS on smaller fields. We have detected components of the 70 and 160 {\mu}m backgrounds in different redshift bins up to z ~ 2. The contribution to the CIB is maximum at 0.3 <= z <= 0.9 at 160{\mu}m (and z <= 0.5 at 70 {\mu}m). A total of 81% (74%) of the 70 (160) {\mu}m background was emitted at z < 1. We estimate that the AGN relative contribution to the far-IR CIB is less than about 10% at z < 1.5. We provide a comprehensive view of the CIB buildup at 24, 70, 100, 160 {\mu}m. IR galaxy models predicting a major contribution to the CIB at z < 1 are in agreement with our measurements, while our results discard other models that predict a peak of the background at higher redshifts. Our results are available online http://www.ias.u-psud.fr/irgalaxies/ .Comment: Accepted in Astronomy & Astrophysic

A scalable machine-learning approach to recognize chemical names within large text databases

MOTIVATION: The use or study of chemical compounds permeates almost every scientific field and in each of them, the amount of textual information is growing rapidly. There is a need to accurately identify chemical names within text for a number of informatics efforts such as database curation, report summarization, tagging of named entities and keywords, or the development/curation of reference databases. RESULTS: A first-order Markov Model (MM) was evaluated for its ability to distinguish chemical names from words, yielding ~93% recall in recognizing chemical terms and ~99% precision in rejecting non-chemical terms on smaller test sets. However, because total false-positive events increase with the number of words analyzed, the scalability of name recognition was measured by processing 13.1 million MEDLINE records. The method yielded precision ranges from 54.7% to 100%, depending upon the cutoff score used, averaging 82.7% for approximately 1.05 million putative chemical terms extracted. Extracted chemical terms were analyzed to estimate the number of spelling variants per term, which correlated with the total number of times the chemical name appeared in MEDLINE. This variability in term construction was found to affect both information retrieval and term mapping when using PubMed and Ovid

Multiwavelength Evidence for Quasi-periodic Modulation in the Gamma-ray Blazar PG 1553+113

We report for the first time a gamma-ray and multi-wavelength nearly-periodic oscillation in an active galactic nucleus. Using the Fermi Large Area Telescope (LAT) we have discovered an apparent quasi-periodicity in the gamma-ray flux (E >100 MeV) from the GeV/TeV BL Lac object PG 1553+113. The marginal significance of the 2.18 +/-0.08 year-period gamma-ray cycle is strengthened by correlated oscillations observed in radio and optical fluxes, through data collected in the OVRO, Tuorla, KAIT, and CSS monitoring programs and Swift UVOT. The optical cycle appearing in ~10 years of data has a similar period, while the 15 GHz oscillation is less regular than seen in the other bands. Further long-term multi-wavelength monitoring of this blazar may discriminate among the possible explanations for this quasi-periodicity.Comment: 8 pages, 5 figures. Accepted to The Astrophysical Journal Letters. Corresponding authors: S. Ciprini (ASDC/INFN), S. Cutini (ASDC/INFN), S. Larsson (Stockholm Univ/KTH), A. Stamerra (INAF/SNS), D. J. Thompson (NASA GSFC