The Future of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act in the Hands of a Conservative Court

This Essay argues that the future of the majority-minority district is in peril, as a conservative majority on the Court stands poised to strike down section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. When the Court takes up the constitutionality of Section 2, binding precedent will play a secondary role at best. Instead, the Justices’ policy goals and ideological preferences - namely, their personal disdain for the use of race in public life - will guide the Court’s conclusion. In this vein, Justice Kennedy holds the fate of the Act in his hands. To be clear, this Essay is not trying to prognosticate the future of the Act. Instead, it is far more intrigued by the many lessons that the fate of the Act offers about the Court as an institution; the Court’s treatment of colored communities and their interests; and the role political attitudes play in guiding judicial behavior. As the Court continues to position itself at the center of many political controversies, these lessons gain greater urgency

The output distribution of important LULU-operators

Two procedures to compute the output distribution phi_S of certain stack filters S (so called erosion-dilation cascades) are given. One rests on the disjunctive normal form of S and also yields the rank selection probabilities. The other is based on inclusion-exclusion and e.g. yields phi_S for some important LULU-operators S. Properties of phi_S can be used to characterize smoothing properties of S. One of the methods discussed also allows for the calculation of the reliability polynomial of any positive Boolean function (e.g. one derived from a connected graph).Comment: 20 pages, up to trivial differences this is the final version to be published in Quaestiones Mathematicae 201

Simulating Postbuckling Behaviour and Collapse of Stiffened CFRP Panels

Advanced composite materials are well known for their outstanding potential in weight-related stiffness and strength leading to an ever increasing share in aerospace structural components out of Carbon Fibre Reinforced Plastics (CFRP). In order to fully exploit the load-carrying capacity of such structures an accurate and reliable simulation is indispensable. Local buckling is not necessarily the load bearing limit for stiffened panels or shells; their full potential can be tapped only by utilizing the postbuckling region. That, however, requires fast tools which are capable of simulating the structural behaviour beyond bifurcation points including material degradation up to collapse. The most critical structural degradation mode is skin stringer separation; delamination, especially within the stringer, is a critical material degradation. A reliable prediction of collapse requires knowledge of degradation due to static as well as low cycle loading in the postbuckling region. Earlier projects have shown that it needs considerable experience in simulating the postbuckling behaviour. Though a great deal of knowledge about CFRP structural and material degradation is available its influence on collapse is not yet sufficiently investigated. It is the aim of the project COCOMAT (Improved MATerial exploitation at safe design of COmposite airframe structures by accurate simulation of COllapse) to develop means for and gain experience in fast and accurate simulation of the collapse load of stringer stiffened CFRP curved panels taking degradation and cyclic loading as well as geometric nonlinearity into account. COCOMAT is a Specific Targeted Research Project supported by the EU 6th Framework Programme; it started 2004 and runs for 4 years. Main deliverables are: • test results for buckling and collapse of undamaged and pre-damaged stiffened CFRP panels under static and cyclic loading, • improved material properties and degradation models, computational tools for design and certification of stiffened fibre composite panels which take postbuckling behaviour, degradation and collapse into account, • and finally design guidelines and industrial validation. The work will lead to an extended experimental data base, relevant degradation models and improved simulation tools for certification as well as for design. These results should allow setting up a future design scenario which exploits the existing reserves in primary fibre composite structures. The paper starts out from results provided by the forerunners of COCOMAT, describes the main objectives of the project, gives a general status of the progress reached so far and presents first results

The Voting Rights in Winter: The Death of a Superstatute

The Voting Rights Act (“VRA”), the most successful civil rights statute in American history, is dying. In the recent Shelby County decision, the U.S. Supreme Court signaled that the anti-discrimination model, long understood as the basis for the VRA as originally enacted, is no longer the best way to understand today’s voting rights questions. As a result, voting rights activists need to face up to the fact that voting rights law and policy are at a critical moment of transition. It is likely the case that the superstatute we once knew as the VRA is no more and is never to return. If so, we need to figure out what, if anything, can, will, or should replace it. But before figuring out where to go from here, we need to understand first how we arrived at the moment of the VRA’s disintegration so as not to repeat the mistakes of the not too distant past. In this Article, we argue that the VRA is dying because the consensus over the existence and persistence of racial discrimination in voting has dissolved. From this premise, we outline three paths for the future of voting rights policy: (1) rebuilding a new consensus over the racial discrimination model; (2) forging a new consensus over what we call an autonomy model; or (3) reconceiving voting rights in universal terms

State’s Rights, Last Rights, and Voting Rights

There are two ways to read the Supreme Court’s decision in Shelby County Alabama v. Holder: as a minimalist decision or as a decision that undermines the basic infrastructure of voting rights policy, law, and jurisprudence. In this Article, we present the case for reading Shelby County as deeply destabilizing. We argue that Shelby County has undermined three assumptions that are foundational to voting rights policy, law, and jurisprudence. First, the Court has generally granted primacy of the federal government over the states. Second, the Court has deferred to Congress particularly where Congress is regulating at the intersection of race and voting. Third, the Court and Congress have understood that racial discrimination is a problem and have operated from a similar conception of what racial discrimination means. Shelby County undermines all three assumptions. We explore what this means for voting rights policy, law, and jurisprudence going forward

Habermas, the Public Sphere, and the Creation of a Racial Counterpublic

In The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, Jürgen Habermas documented the historical emergence and fall of what he called the bourgeois public sphere, which he defined as “[a] sphere of private people come together as a public . . . to engage [public authorities] in a debate over the general rules governing relations in the basically privatized but publicly relevant sphere of commodity exchange and social labor.” This was a space where individuals gathered to discuss with each other, and sometimes with public officials, matters of shared concern. The aim of these gatherings was not simply discourse; these gatherings allowed the bourgeoisie to use their reason to determine the boundaries of public and private and to self-consciously develop the public sphere. As Habermas writes, “[t]he medium of this political confrontation was . . . people’s public use of their reason.” The bourgeois public didn’t simply participate, but it did so both directly and critically. The development of the bourgeois public as a critical, intellectual public took place in coffeehouses, in salons, and table societies. In Great Britain, Germany, and France, particularly, the coffeehouses and the salons “were centers of criticism—literary at first, then also political—in which began to emerge, between aristocratic society and bourgeois intellectuals, a certain parity of the educated.” Intellectual equals came together and deliberated, an equality that was key in ensuring the requisite openness and deliberation. No one person dominated the discussion due to his status within the deliberative community. Instead, and above all else, the “power of the better argument” won out. Two conditions were critical to these deliberations. First, equality was key to the public sphere. Membership in the public sphere meant that no one person was above the other and all arguments were similarly treated and scrutinized. Second, the principle of universal access was crucial.8The doors of the deliberative space were open to all comers and no group or person was purposefully shut out. Seen together, these two conditions provide a blueprint for deliberative practices in a democratic society