CORE: Frustrated Magnets, Charge Fractionalization and QCD

I explain how to use a simple method to extract the physics of lattice Hamiltonian systems which are not easily analyzed by exact or other numerical methods. I will then use this method to establish the relationship between QCD and a special class of generalized, highly frustrated anti-ferromagnets.Comment: Invited talk at Light-Cone 2004, 16 pages, 10 figure

Revenge of Mullaney v. Wilbur: United States v. Booker and the Reassertion of Judicial Limits on Legislative Power to Define Crimes, The

This article offers a historically grounded account of the twists and turns in the Supreme Court\u27s sentencing jurisprudence from the end of World War II to the Court\u27s stunning rejection of the Federal Sentencing Guidelines. The doctrinal shifts that have roiled this area of the law can best be understood as the Court\u27s effort to respond to the changing political and social landscape of crime in America. In the mid 1970\u27s, legislative activity in the criminal law was largely focused on Model Penal Code influenced recodification. In that era, the Supreme Court took power from an ascendant judiciary and gave it to legislators who did not seem disposed to exercise their authority too broadly. By the late 1990\u27s the tide had shifted and the Court turned sentencing doctrine on its head to take power over criminal law from legislative bodies inclined to push the limits of their power and transfer it back to a newly cautious judiciary. This article explores how that shift in power was informed by changing social and political conditions and was accomplished through doctrines regulating the Sixth Amendment right to trial

Historical Roots of Regional Sentencing Variation, The Symposium

I am a law professor and a criminal defense lawyer, not a historian. It is with some trepidation that I stand before you to suggest that our very persistent regional sentencing variations have roots in the political struggles of Reformation England and the cultures of the subgroups that populated the first American colonies. I rely upon others for the historical proof, as you will see, but I think I do have standing to argue to you that we should consider whether or not there is room, even in federal sentencing, to account for deeply embedded regional variations in our basic conceptions of why and how we should punish. Aware as I am of the dangers of essentializing and the ugly history of regional variation in American penal practices, I still want to ask whether Pennsylvanians really should be expected to punish transgressors in exactly the same way as Virginians. I will suggest to you that perhaps we should respect a modicum of regional variation and not seek to eliminate every vestige of regional legal culture in America