Refugee Roulette in an Administrative Law Context: The Deja vu of Decisional Disparities in Agency Adjudication

In Refugee Roulette: Disparities in Asylum Adjudication (the Asylum Study), Professors Ramji-Nogales, Schoenholtz, and Schrag provide a comprehensive analysis of new data to document decisional disparities that undermine the fairness of asylum adjudication. The Asylum Study is an empirical project of remarkable scope. It examines patterns of asylum decisions at four different adjudication levels: at the asylum office interview, in immigration court, on administrative appeal to the Board of Immigration Appeals (BIA), and on petition for review to the federal courts of appeals. At each level, the Asylum Study generates empirical findings to support what we knew mostly by anecdote - that there are eye-popping disparities in the grant rates of asylum adjudicators that cannot be explained by the underlying merits of the cases. What are we to make of these findings? One could derive an answer from a variety of perspectives; my response to the Asylum Study will employ two. First, I will situate the study within a territory that is noted but not explored by its authors: the work of political scientists who conduct empirical studies of judicial decision making. Second, I will examine the Asylum Study through the lens of administrative law, where we find a deja vu component to its findings. This essay has a dual purpose: to open a multidisciplinary window onto the Asylum Study, and to delve into the broader administrative law context of the intractable problem of decisional disparities in agency adjudication

William H. Simon: Thinking like a Lawyer - About Ethics

This is the edited text of a panel discussion held as part of the legal ethics curriculum at Duquesne University Law School on October 24, 1999. The speakers have had the opportunity to update and correct this text; therefore, this printed version may deviate slightly from what was presented

Roscoe Pound Round-Table Discussion

Conference of Chief Justices and Conference of State Court Administrators Annual Meeting July 29-August 2, 2006 Indianapolis, Indiana

P38 and JNK have opposing effects on persistence of in vivo leukocyte migration in zebrafish

The recruitment and migration of macrophages and neutrophils is an important process during the early stages of the innate immune system in response to acute injury. Transgenic pu.1:EGFP zebrafish permit the acquisition of leukocyte migration trajectories during inflammation. Currently, these high-quality live-imaging data are mainly analysed using general statistics, for example, cell velocity. Here, we present a spatio-temporal analysis of the cell dynamics using transition matrices, which provide information of the type of cell migration. We find evidence that leukocytes exhibit types of migratory behaviour, which differ from previously described random walk processes. Dimethyl sulfoxide treatment decreased the level of persistence at early time points after wounding and ablated temporal dependencies observed in untreated embryos. We then use pharmacological inhibition of p38 and c-Jun N-terminal kinase mitogen-activated protein kinases to determine their effects on in vivo leukocyte migration patterns and discuss how they modify the characteristics of the cell migration process. In particular, we find that their respective inhibition leads to decreased and increased levels of persistent motion in leukocytes following wounding. This example shows the high level of information content, which can be gained from live-imaging data if appropriate statistical tools are used

Estimating Water Supply Arsenic Levels in the New England Bladder Cancer Study

Background: Ingestion of inorganic arsenic in drinking water is recognized as a cause of bladder cancer when levels are relatively high (≥ 150 µg/L). The epidemiologic evidence is less clear at the low-to-moderate concentrations typically observed in the United States. Accurate retrospective exposure assessment over a long time period is a major challenge in conducting epidemiologic studies of environmental factors and diseases with long latency, such as cancer. Objective: We estimated arsenic concentrations in the water supplies of 2,611 participants in a population-based case–control study in northern New England. Methods: Estimates covered the lifetimes of most study participants and were based on a combination of arsenic measurements at the homes of the participants and statistical modeling of arsenic concentrations in the water supply of both past and current homes. We assigned a residential water supply arsenic concentration for 165,138 (95%) of the total 173,361 lifetime exposure years (EYs) and a workplace water supply arsenic level for 85,195 EYs (86% of reported occupational years). Results: Three methods accounted for 93% of the residential estimates of arsenic concentration: direct measurement of water samples (27%; median, 0.3 µg/L; range, 0.1–11.5), statistical models of water utility measurement data (49%; median, 0.4 µg/L; range, 0.3–3.3), and statistical models of arsenic concentrations in wells using aquifers in New England (17%; median, 1.6 µg/L; range, 0.6–22.4). Conclusions: We used a different validation procedure for each of the three methods, and found our estimated levels to be comparable with available measured concentrations. This methodology allowed us to calculate potential drinking water exposure over long periods

Criteria for the use of omics-based predictors in clinical trials.

The US National Cancer Institute (NCI), in collaboration with scientists representing multiple areas of expertise relevant to 'omics'-based test development, has developed a checklist of criteria that can be used to determine the readiness of omics-based tests for guiding patient care in clinical trials. The checklist criteria cover issues relating to specimens, assays, mathematical modelling, clinical trial design, and ethical, legal and regulatory aspects. Funding bodies and journals are encouraged to consider the checklist, which they may find useful for assessing study quality and evidence strength. The checklist will be used to evaluate proposals for NCI-sponsored clinical trials in which omics tests will be used to guide therapy

HST/NICMOS Imaging Polarimetry of Proto-Planetary Nebulae II: Macro-morphology of the Dust Shell Structure via Polarized Light

The structure of the dusty circumstellar envelopes (CSEs) of proto-planetary nebulae (PPNs) reveals the mass-loss history of these sources and how such histories may differ for elliptical (SOLE) and bipolar (DUPLEX) PPNs. To study the PPN structures via dust-scattered linearly polarized starlight, we have compiled the imaging-polarimetric data for all 18 evolved stars that have been obtained to date with NICMOS on-board the Hubble Space Telescope (HST). This alternative imaging technique provides a unique way to probe the distribution of dust grains that scatter light around evolved stars. The new perspective gained from the imaging-polarimetric data has revealed several new aspects to the structures of PPNs. Point-symmetry is a prevalent imaging-polarimetric characteristic resulting from the azimuthal density gradient in the CSEs. Among these point-symmetric nebulae, three detailed morphological types can be differentiated by their polarized intensity, I_pol, and polarization strength, P. While the azimuthal density gradient is reversed above and below the equatorial plane in optically thicker bipolar nebulae, there is no gradient reversal in optically thinner elliptical nebulae. The equatorial plane of the system defined by the integrated angle of polarization is not necessarily orthogonal to the axis of the apparent bipolar structure in the total intensity data.Comment: 27 pages, 14 figures, 3 tables; to appear in the Astronomical Journal March 2007 issu