Compelling Interests and Contraception

On the eve of Griswold v. Connecticut’s fiftieth anniversary, employers are bringing challenges under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) to federal laws requiring them to include contraception in the health insurance benefits that they offer their employees. In Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores, five Justices asserted that the government has compelling interests in ensuring employees access to contraception, but did not discuss those interests in any detail. In what follows, we clarify those interests by connecting discussion in the Hobby Lobby opinions and the federal government’s briefs to related cases on compelling interests and individual rights in the areas of race and sex equality. The government’s compelling interests, we argue, are best understood from within two horizons: they encompass not only core concerns of the community in promoting public health and facilitating women’s integration in the workplace, but also crucial concerns of the employees who are the intended beneficiaries of federal law’s contraceptive coverage requirement—interests that sound in bodily integrity, personal autonomy, and equal citizenship. Further, as we show, a full accounting of the government’s compelling interests attends both to their material and expressive dimensions. This more comprehensive account of the government’s compelling interests in providing employees access to contraception matters both in political debate and in RFRA litigation as courts determine whether the government has pursued its interests by the least restrictive means. The more comprehensive account offered here is less susceptible to compromise and tradeoffs than is an account focused only on material interests in public health and contraceptive cost

Causality in Covariant String Field Theory

Causality is studied in the covariant formulation of free string field theory (SFT). We find that, though the string field in the covariant formulation is a functional of the ghost coordinates as well as the space-time coordinate and the latter contains the time-like oscillators with negative norm, the condition for the commutator of two open string fields to vanish is simply given by $\int_0^\pi d\sigma\left(\Delta X^\mu(\sigma)\right)^2 >0$, which is the same condition as in the light-cone gauge SFT. For closed SFT, the corresponding condition is given in a form which is manifestly invariant under the rigid shifts of the $\sigma$ parameters of the two string fields.Comment: 11 pages + 1 eps figure, LaTe

Contraception as a Sex Equality Right

Challenges to federal law requiring insurance coverage of contraception are occurring on the eve of the 50th Anniversary of the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Griswold v. Connecticut. It is a good time to reflect on the values served by protecting women’s access to contraception. In 1965, the Court ruled in Griswold that a law criminalizing the use of contraception violated the privacy of the marriage relationship. Griswold offered women the most significant constitutional protection since the Nineteenth Amendment gave women the right to vote, constitutional protection as important as the cases prohibiting sex discrimination that the Court would decide in the next decade—perhaps even more so. Griswold is conventionally understood to have secured liberty for women. But the right to contraception also secures equality for women, as Ruth Bader Ginsburg saw clearly in the 1970s and as the Court eventually would explain in Planned Parenthood v. Casey

Gauge-covariant vertex operators

We derive Yang-Mills vertex operators for (super)string theory whose BRST invariance requires only the free gauge-covariant field equation and no gauge condition. Standard conformal field theory methods yield the three-point vertices directly in gauge-invariant form.Comment: 10 pages, no figure

'The claims of Asia and the Far East’: India and the FAO in the age of ambivalent internationalism

If any nation were poised to actualize the developmental promises that the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) extended to the international community, it was India. India's independence came in the wake of devastating famine in Bengal and the fears of its recurrence, and the nationalists who had midwifed India's freedom staked their legitimacy to the promise of food for all. Yet from independence, the FAO played only a marginal role in India's agricultural development, its projects reflecting a winnowing scale of ambition. From early investigations into the improved cultivation of basic food grains, the FAO's projects grew increasingly modest by the time of the Green Revolution, revolving around modest improvements to capitalist agriculture, from wool shearing to timber and fishery development. Instead, India drew more substantively upon resources made available by the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations, the United States Technical Cooperation Mission and occasional Soviet largesse. Meanwhile, the Indian most associated with the FAO, B.R. Sen (Director-General, 1956–1967), struggled to align the Organization's capacities with India's scarcity crises, even as his own understanding of famine drew upon his experience as India's Director of Food during the Bengal Famine.Accepted manuscrip

Bias and Perception

chapter on perception and bias including implicit bias

'Self-help which ennobles a nation': development, citizenship, and the obligations of eating in India's austerity years

In the years immediately following independence, India's political leadership, assisted by a network of civic organizations, sought to transform what, how, and how much Indians ate. These campaigns, this article argues, embodied a broader post-colonial project to reimagine the terms of citizenship and development in a new nation facing enduring scarcity. Drawing upon wartime antecedent, global ideologies of population and land management, and an ethos of austerity imbued with the power to actualize economic self-reliance, the new state urged its citizens to give up rice and wheat, whose imports sapped the nation of the foreign currency needed for industrial development. In place of these staples, India's new citizens were asked to adopt ‘substitute’ and ‘subsidiary’ foods—including bananas, groundnuts, tapioca, yams, beets, and carrots—and give up a meal or more each week to conserve India's scant grain reserves. And as Indian planners awaited the possibility of fundamental agricultural advance and agrarian reform, they looked to food technology and the promise of ‘artificial rice’ as a means of making up for India's perennial food deficit. India's women, as anchors of the household—and therefore, the nation—were tasked with facilitating these dietary transformations, and were saddled with the blame when these modernist projects failed. Unable to marshal the resources needed to undertake fundamental agricultural reform, India's planners placed greater faith in their ability to exercise authority over certain aspects of Indian citizenship itself, tying the remaking of practices and sentiments to the reconstruction of a self-reliant national economy.Accepted manuscrip