Corrupt and Unequal, Both

Rick Hasen has presented the issue of money in politics as if we have to make a choice: it is either a problem of equality or it is a problem of corruption. Hasen’s long and influential career in this field has been a long and patient struggle to convince those on the corruption side of the fight (we liberals, at least, and, in an important sense, we egalitarians too) to resist the temptation to try to pass—by rendering equality arguments as corruption arguments, and to just come out of the closet. Hasen had famously declared that the corruption argument supporting Austin v. Michigan Chamber of Commerce was a fake and that the only basis for justifying the ban on corporate spending in Austin was equality, not corruption. And the U.S. Supreme Court famously (in our circles at least) agreed, in the process of striking down the ban on corporate spending in Austin and everywhere else. Thus, Hasen argues, it is a fool’s errand to fake the corruption argument. We need instead, Hasen has constantly counseled, a bit of egalitarian pride. Be true to ourselves, Hasen tells us, and give up the pretense of corruption talk

TRYING TO FIT AN OVAL SHAPED ISLAND INTO A SQUARE CONSTITUTION: ARGUMENTS FOR PUERTO RICAN STATEHOOD

This Comment focuses on the limits placed on Puerto Rico under the United States Constitution and concludes that Puerto Rico must become the 51st state to improve its status under the Constitution. It explores Puerto Rico\u27s relationship with the United States and its unusual position under the Constitution. This Comment then examines the voting rights issues facing Puerto Ricans, including a First Circuit case which denied Puerto Ricans the right to vote in presidential elections. The Comment concludes that this case was correctly decided and the Supreme Court, in other decisions, has only recognized a limited right to vote under the Equal Protection Clause. Based on this case law, the Comment argues that Puerto Rico must become the 51st state to alleviate these voting rights issues

Due Process Land Use Claims After Lingle

The Supreme Court held in Lingle v. Chevron U.S.A. Inc. that challenges to the validity of land use regulations for failing to advance governmental interests must be brought under the Due Process Clause, rather than the Takings Clause, and must be evaluated under a deferential standard. This Article analyzes and evaluates the probable course of such judicial review, and concludes that federal courts will resist due process review of land use decisions for good reasons but not always with an adequate doctrinal explanation. However, state courts can use due process review to provide state level supervision of local land use decisions in the absence of other legislative or administrative checks on local discretion. Such judicial review should focus on decisions reflecting distortions in the local political process

Joint source-channel coding with feedback

This paper quantifies the fundamental limits of variable-length transmission of a general (possibly analog) source over a memoryless channel with noiseless feedback, under a distortion constraint. We consider excess distortion, average distortion and guaranteed distortion ($d$-semifaithful codes). In contrast to the asymptotic fundamental limit, a general conclusion is that allowing variable-length codes and feedback leads to a sizable improvement in the fundamental delay-distortion tradeoff. In addition, we investigate the minimum energy required to reproduce $k$ source samples with a given fidelity after transmission over a memoryless Gaussian channel, and we show that the required minimum energy is reduced with feedback and an average (rather than maximal) power constraint.Comment: To appear in IEEE Transactions on Information Theor

Inequality and Participative Democracy A Self-Reinforcing Mechanism

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