The Influence of Government Defenders on Affirmative Civil Rights Enforcement

The focus of this brief Article will be on a conundrum, particularly in the area of civil rights enforcement: the federal government—in particular the DOJ—can be one of the most efficient and powerful vindicators of civil rights, while at the same time one of the most effective advocates for imposing barriers to affirmative civil rights enforcement. At the same time that the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division (CRD) is entering federal court to “vindicat[e] rights and remedy[] inequities,” attorneys in the Civil Division (either from Main Justice or in any number of U.S. Attorney’s offices) are appearing in court to prevent the same. No doubt the same observation applies to certain state governments that have active affirmative civil rights enforcement bodies while also maintaining well-resourced defensive litigation bureaus. For my purposes, this observation has important consequences. It might bear on the professional obligations of the government attorney who appears in a defensive posture, a topic that Bruce Green and others have addressed in many thoughtful articles. I will address some potential ethical implications toward the end of this Article, but it is not my principal focus because I am not convinced that that is where the solution lies. Instead, I want to concentrate on what the observation means for executive branch law enforcement priorities, how the dynamic impacts broad access-to-justice concerns, and the implications for institutional design. I am going to try to do so in four parts. First, this Article contrasts agenda setting in defensive bureaus with agenda setting in the affirmative posture. Part I compares the defensive positions taken in two extremely similar cases—Ashcroft v. Iqbal and Ziglar v. Abbasi—that were litigated by the DOJ across two different presidential administrations. This is to help illustrate (admittedly by anecdote) that, even while affirmative enforcement priorities can change significantly from one administration to the other, defensive litigating positions can remain remarkably stable. Parts II and III turn to showing what consequences this has in the context of civil rights enforcement. Part II starts with the DOJ’s affirmative bureaus themselves, with a focus on the CRD. The goal is to show that the defensive bureaus impact the work of the CRD in at least two ways: (1) by channeling enforcement priorities into areas that will not conflict with defensive litigating positions and (2) by making affirmative enforcement priorities more difficult to secure through the spread of transsubstantive doctrine that suppresses rights enforcement, even in the areas in which there are no conflicts with defensive positions. Part III moves beyond the direct impact on CRD because defensive litigation positions taken by the DOJ can also suppress affirmative rights enforcement by “private attorneys general,” enforcement that nonetheless is consistent with the affirmative priorities of Main Justice. Finally, Part IV offers some thoughts on what lessons we might draw from these observations. For the most part, I devote my attention to how institutional design might ameliorate the tensions I identify in this Article

Biped robot walking control on inclined planes with fuzzy parameter adaptation

The bipedal structure is suitable for a robot functioning in the human environment, and assuming assistive roles. However, the bipedal walk is a poses a difficult control problem. Walking on even floor is not satisfactory for the applicability of a humanoid robot. This paper presents a study on bipedal walk on inclined planes. A Zero Moment Point (ZMP) based reference generation technique is employed. The orientation of the upper body is adjusted online by a fuzzy logic system to adapt to different walking surface slopes. This system uses a sampling time larger than the one of the joint space position controllers. A newly defined measure of the oscillatory behavior of the body pitch angle and the average value of the pelvis pitch angle are used as inputs to the fuzzy adaptation system. A 12-degrees-of-freedom (DOF) biped robot model is used in the full-dynamics 3-D simulations. Simulations are carried out on even floor and inclined planes with different slopes. The results indicate that the fuzzy adaptation algorithms presented are successful in enabling the robot to climb slopes of 5.6 degrees (10 percent)

A color hand gesture database for evaluating and improving algorithms on hand gesture and posture recognition

With the increase of research activities in vision-based hand posture and gesture recognition, new methods and algorithms are being developed. Although less attention is being paid to developing a standard platform for this purpose. Developing a database of hand gesture images is a necessary first step for standardizing the research on hand gesture recognition. For this purpose, we have developed an image database of hand posture and gesture images. The database contains hand images in different lighting conditions and collected using a digital camera. Details of the automatic segmentation and clipping of the hands are also discussed in this paper

Credit risk rating at large U.S. banks

Large banks use internally developed credit rating systems to differentiate the riskiness of their commercial loans. Internal ratings are an essential ingredient of effective credit risk management for such banks, whose commercial borrowers may number in the tens of thousands. This article describes these rating systems, how their design varies across institutions, and how they are used in risk management. The article also outlines conceptual and practical difficulties currently faced by banks in achieving accurate and consistent ratings and describes ways in which some institutions have attempted to deal with these difficulties. This article is based on a detailed review of policy documents and internal management reports from the fifty largest U.S. bank holding companies and interviews by the authors at a selection of these institutions.Credit ratings ; Risk

Ethnographic Advocacy Against the Death Penalty

This article develops the concept of “ethnographic advocacy” to make sense of the humanizing, open‐ended knowledge practices involved in the defense of criminal defendants charged with capital murder. Drawing from anthropological fieldwork with well‐respected figures in the American capital defense bar, as well as my own professional experience as an investigator specializing in death penalty sentencing mitigation, I argue that effective advocacy for life occurs through qualitative knowledge practices that share notable methodological affinities with contemporary anthropological ethnography. The article concludes with a preliminary exploration of what the concept of ethnographic advocacy might reveal about academic anthropology\u27s own advocative engagements