Voices from the Field: From “Lesbian Activist” to Beloved Mayor of Houston: A Conversation with Annise Parker

Rebecca Pfeffer and Robert Sanborn interview former Houston Mayor Annise Parker

Losing Control: Regulating Situational Crime Prevention in Mass Private Space

In this article the author puts forth an approach to regulating Situational Crime Prevention (SCP) (i.e. steps to preemptively eliminate or reduce crime, such as preemptive exclusion and closed circuit TV monitoring in Mass Private Space (i.e. private property that has characteristics normally associated with public spaces, such as a large shopping mall). It has become increasingly common for owners of mass private space to employ SCP techniques such as close circuit television monitoring, exclusion of persons based upon behavior or risk factors and limits on attire, such as colors associated with gangs. While there has been a lively scholarly debate in this area, the primary literature provides fixed substantive solutions to the problem, which overlook the process by which such regulation is formulated as well as the variations among private spaces and their relationship to the community. The instant article, rather than simply seeking to come up with another place in which to draw the line between permissible and impermissible SCP techniques, puts forth a proposed structure by which regulation of SCP can be formulated. This proposal recognizes that not all mass private property is the same, particularly in regard to the role that mass private property plays in a given community. As such, the present article posits two main themes: 1) There is no one size fits all solution to the problem as to what steps the owner of a mall or similar property should be able to implement; rather what a given mass private property owner should or should not be able to do will depend on the unique characteristics of the property in question and the role it plays in the locale in which it is located; 2) the primary authority for regulating SCP in mass private space should reside in the representatives of the community in which the property is located, such as a city council

A 21st Century Approach to Personal Jurisdiction

[Excerpt] Personal jurisdiction doctrine plays a major role in many civil disputes in the United States. When the defendant resides in, is incorporated or headquartered in (in the case of a corporation or other business), or is otherwise found in the particular state where suit is brought, personal jurisdiction generally is found to exist and is unproblematic. Major personal jurisdiction issues usually arise when a plaintiff sues the defendant in a state other than the one in which the defendant is located. In many cases involving parties located in different states, where a suit takes place is as extensively litigated an issue as the underlying dispute that led to the litigation in the first place. In the last seventy years, most personal jurisdiction disputes have been litigated under the famous minimum contacts standard first articulated in International Shoe v. Washington. There is little dispute about what the Court said in that case. But the Supreme Court’s inability to cogently explain and consistently apply the standard annunciated in International Shoe has confounded litigants and lower courts alike. Predicting whether a particular state court has jurisdiction can be frustrating. Parties and courts are hard pressed to know whether jurisdiction in a particular forum will be upheld. The problem is not that personal jurisdiction has not been given sufficient attention; it is that it has gotten too much attention. Although I recognize the irony of writing an article about a topic while decrying the focus on that topic, my hope is that this article might nonetheless ultimately make personal jurisdiction doctrine simpler, more predictable, and therefore less important. Within the more than fifty jurisdictions in the United States, where a suit takes place really should not matter very much. Modern travel and communication makes suits throughout the country relatively easy for most parties. Federal and various state judicial systems are more alike than different. And, even though substantive law may vary from state to state, modern conflict of law approaches allow the application of appropriate substantive law irrespective of the location of litigation. The reason that personal jurisdiction has become so important is that modern case law made it so. The Court’s jurisprudential approach, which focuses on due process, state lines, and minimum contacts, assumes that personal jurisdiction involves a highly complex, constitutionally important area of law. But, it is not that personal jurisdiction is inherently complex or important. It is only that the Court’s unfortunate approach has made it so. Personal jurisdiction should be, and can be, straightforward, low drama, and simple. For defendants who are located in the United States personal jurisdiction should be primarily a matter of state policy, with minor policing by the Supreme Court and Congress. This article argues that a state-focused approach to personal jurisdiction is both theoretically sound and practically superior to the current minimum contacts approach. Section II of this article provides a critical history of personal jurisdiction. Section III provides an organized critique of the current landscape. With Section II having provided detail of the cases from International Shoe through the Court’s case law in its most recent term, Section III hones in on what is fundamentally wrong with the current approach. Section IV delineates a new approach to personal jurisdiction. With prior sections arguing that due process and minimum contacts are both a practical hindrance and a theoretical mismatch, this Section advocates for a non-constitutional approach to personal jurisdiction grounded primarily in state legislative policy choices. Section V evaluates the new proposal by considering how common personal jurisdiction scenarios will play out under the proposed approach. It demonstrates that if left primarily to state policy makers, with minor federal constitutional and legislative involvement, the resultant doctrine will be consistent with both constitutional and systemic structural norms. It will also result in fairer, more logical, and easier standards to apply than the current minimum contacts approach

Si Votan: Texas Latino Politicians Perspectives on Engaging Latino Voters in the Electoral Process

Drs. Pfeffer and Sanborn (JFS) conducted interviews with Texas politicians Adrian Garcia, former Houston City Councilmember and Sheriff of Harris County, Texas, and Texas State Senator Eddie Lucio Jr., to discuss the role that Latino voters play in the electoral process on both the state and national scale. Interviews have been edited for clarity

FLUIDIZATION OF NANOPOWDERS: EXPERIMENTS, MODELING, AND APPLICATIONS

Nanopowders are applied in a wide range of processes, and their use continues to increase. Fluidization is one of the best techniques available to disperse and process nanoparticles. However, nanoparticles cannot be fluidized individually; they fluidize as very porous agglomerates. Often, it is needed to apply an assisting method, such as vibration or microjets, to obtain proper fluidization. In this paper, we give a brief review of the developments in nanopowder fluidization

Evaluation of Assisted Fluidization of Nanoagglomerates by Monitoring Moisture in the Gas Phase and the Influence of Gas Viscosity

We have previously reported that the fluidization of nanoparticle agglomerates can be enhanced by the addition of external force fields such as vibration, acoustic waves, centrifugal force, and magnetic particles. The criteria usually used to evaluate the enhancement in fluidization quality are the fluidized bed expansion, pressure drop, and visual appearance of the fluidized bed to determine the presence of bubbles, large heavy agglomerates and/or channeling and spouting. Here we introduce a different approach based on measuring the rate of absorption/desorption of moisture (humidification/drying) of hydrophilic fluidized nanopowders. The fluidizing gas was humidified in a controlled manner, and the amount of moisture in the gas phase was measured before and after the fluidized bed by humidity sensors. The experiments show that the amount of moisture adsorbed or desorbed by the bed of powder is larger when the fluidized bed was assisted by vibration or moving magnetic particles than when the bed was conventionally fluidized. In addition, the effect of high temperature gas on the fluidization of nanopowders was studied by using neon as a fluidizing gas at room temperature. It is shown that due to the increase in gas viscosity, the minimum bubbling velocity is increased, bubbling is reduced and a smoother fluidization is obtained

The Bele Alis Sermon: Homiletic Song and Dance

This article provides a study and edition of a unique text, a Latin sermon based on the text of a popular Old French dance-song. The attribution of the text in Mss. A and C to Stephen Langton, Archbishop of Canterbury, has been challenged but has not yet been convincingly disproved. Analysis of the sermon reveals a complex inner structure that interlinks the popular song with its Marian interpretation by a series of subtle echoes and suggestive images. The study of the sermon's architecture sheds new light on the intertextuality and interpretation of the concurrent voices in polytextual motets. A new critical edition of the text is furnished, utilizing all seven manuscripts, based on Ms. A, translated into English for the first time

An EAGLE’s View of Ex-situ Galaxy Growth

Modern observational and analytic techniques now enable the direct measurement of star formation histories and the inference of galaxy assembly histories. However, current theoretical predictions of assembly are not ideally suited for direct comparison with such observational data. We therefore extend the work of prior examinations of the contribution of ex-situ stars to the stellar mass budget of simulated galaxies. Our predictions are specifically tailored for direct testing with a new generation of observational techniques by calculating ex-situ fractions as functions of galaxy mass and morphological type, for a range of surface brightnesses. These enable comparison with results from large FoV IFU spectrographs, and increasingly accurate spectral fitting, providing a look-up method for the estimated accreted fraction. We furthermore provide predictions of ex-situ mass fractions as functions of galaxy mass, galactocentric radius and environment. Using z = 0 snapshots from the 100cMpc3 and 25cMpc3 EAGLE simulations we corroborate the findings of prior studies, finding that ex-situ fraction increases with stellar mass for central and satellite galaxies in a stellar mass range of 2× 107 - 1.9× 1012 M⊙. For those galaxies of mass M*>5× 108M⊙, we find that the total ex-situ mass fraction is greater for more extended galaxies at fixed mass. When categorising satellite galaxies by their parent group/cluster halo mass we find that the ex-situ fraction decreases with increasing parent halo mass at fixed galaxy mass. This apparently counter-intuitive result may be due to high passing velocities within large cluster halos inhibiting efficient accretion onto individual galaxies