cssi/SciSciGPT-SciSciNet huggingface dataset:
Mass Litigation Governance in the Post-Class Action Era: The Problems and Promise of Non-removable State Actions in Multi-district Litigation

Q1 : Given a string of decisions restricting the use and availability of the class action device, the world of mass litigation may well be moving into a postclass action era. In this era, newer devices of aggregation—perhaps principally among them multi-district litigation (“MDL”)—increasingly will be called upon to meet the age-old mass litigation goal of achieving global peace of numerous claims arising out of a related, widespread harm. Indeed, coordination of pretrial proceedings in the MDL frequently facilitates the achievement of this peace, given the reality that cases, once consolidated in the MDL, often settle en masse. However, one clear obstacle to the achievement of aggregate peace in the MDL, one that also plagues the achievement of that peace in the class action world, is our federal system of substantive and procedural law. In the MDL context, the problem arises because litigation involving state-law claims and non-diverse parties, which are not removable from state court, cannot be transferred to the MDL court. Despite their prevalence, little scholarly attention has been devoted to non-removable state-court actions in MDL. The few responses to this issue have largely focused upon the efficiencies that could be gained through increased, and perhaps total, consolidation of all related cases or, short of consolidation, through heightened coordination of pre-trial proceedings between state and federal judges. This Article questions whether these responses have led reform proposals in the wrong direction, and instead takes a different view. Rather than argue for increased consolidation, I offer for further consideration the possible ways in which the happenstantial existence of parallel tracks of related state and federal cases actually hold promise, if properly harnessed, as mechanisms for achieving the goals of aggregate litigation and for disciplining the contours of global settlements of mass disputes. In particular, I explore the possibility that the existence of parallel state and federal cases—frequently viewed as an obstacle to global resolution of claims unable to be consolidated in a single forum—may well fortuitously provide an opportunity to achieve the sorts of mass litigation resolution envisioned but unsuccessfully attempted in the class action context. In so doing, this Article adds new thoughts and theories to the specific debate regarding parallel state and federal claims in MDL, as well as to the larger debate about mass litigation governance in a post-class action world. *Corresponding author: J. Maria Glover, Georgetown University Law Center, Washington, DC, USA Q2 , E-mail: mglover@law.georgetown.edu
Merger Class Actions in Delaware and the Symptoms of Multi-Jurisdictional Litigation

Recent research on corporate litigation has focused on three trends: the growth in percentage of mergers that result in litigation, the migration of cases away from Delaware, and the increasing prevalence of merger litigation occurring simultaneously in multiple jurisdictions. This Article uses a new and unique dataset of public company litigation to track how these trends have affected filings and litigation tactics in the Delaware Court of Chancery from 2004 to 2011. The data confirm that Delaware appears to have experienced a decline in filings during the early and middle periods of the sample, but the data also shows that there has been a sharp increase in the number of the number of acqusition-related cases filed in Delaware in 2010 and 2011. The rise of concurrent, multi-jurisdictional litigation and the litigation tactics that it encourages are the likely reasons for the growth of acquisition-related cases in Delaware. While some plaintiffs’ attorneys may have left Delaware to escape the Chancery’s threats of lower attorneys’ fees and merit-based selection of lead counsel, in the current environment a Delaware filing may provide strategic advantages as foreign jurisdictions become saturated with filings. For example, lawyers may try to take control of a case by moving for expedited proceedings in Delaware or they may try to complicate negotations over the selection of lead plaintiffs’ counsel. The threat of using these tactics may increase the possibility that a plaintiff will receive some share of a fee award either in Delaware or in a case being litigated elsewhere. This Article explores how the rules Delaware uses to manage deal cases may enable strategic behavior in the context of multi-jurisdictional  Associate Professor of Law, Washington University in St. Louis Law School. I thank Susan Appleton, Ron Levin, Peter, Joy, Hillary Sale, Randall Thomas, Andrew Tuch, several anonymous Delaware attorneys, conference participants at the 2012 Institute for Law and Economic Policy Conference and workshop partcipants at the Washington University in St. Louis, Law School for valuable comments and discussion. I am indebted to the Center for Empirical Research in Law (“CERL”) at the Washington University in St. Louis Law School for the generous logistical and financial assistance that made this project possible. I also thank Clay Hane and Ben Nunez for exemplary research assistance. Washington University Open Scholarship 966 WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY LAW REVIEW [VOL. 90:965 litigation. This discussion provides reasons to believe that the use of tactics such as requesting expedited proceedings, contesting consolidation of cases, and involving out-of-state counsel earlier in proceedings should increase as multi-jurisdictional litigation increases. The empirical evidence provides substantial support for these theories. The Article concludes with an assessment of how the observed increase in strategic tactics may affect debates over how and whether to respond to the rise of multi-jurisdictional litigation.
Race effects on eBay

We investigate the impact of seller race in a field experiment involving baseball card auctions on eBay. Photographs showed the cards held by either a dark-skinned/African-American hand or a light-skinned/Caucasian hand. Cards held by African-American sellers sold for approximately 20% ($0.90) less than cards held by Caucasian sellers. Our evidence of race differentials is important because the online environment is well controlled (with the absence of confounding tester effects) and because the results show that race effects can persist in a thick real-world market such as eBay.
Religious Institutions, Liberal States, and the Political Architecture of Overlapping Spheres

Individual religious liberty enjoys strong legal protections supported by an underlying contemporary consensus in the United States. This legal and cultural consensus took root after a wave of individuals’ complaints of government interference with their ability to practice their religion’s dictates. But the current claims of religious interference have been increasingly asserted on behalf of an array of religiously affiliated institutions. Unlike previous claims, there is no normative consensus as to what, if any protections, these myriad institutions should receive. This uncertainty can be seen in the federal government’s chaotic responses—from recent Supreme Court case law to the Affordable Care Act’s contraception mandate. Scholars have staked out two opposing positions. One group has argued that churches and affiliated religious institutions should be entitled to legal autonomy. A second camp has argued that the state is the singular source of legal authority in modern politics and that all authority and status of a church is entirely derivative of its members’ rights of voluntary association and conscience. This article proposes a third framework to determine the appropriate relationship between religious institutions and the state, what it dubs the Religious Institution Principle. Drawing on John Rawls, this framework rejects both the view that religious institutions are jurisdictionally independent of the modern state, and that religious institutions’ status is derivative of its members’ rights of association and conscience. Instead, the Article argues that religious institutions cannot be reduced to the individuals who compose them, but instead that the protections they deserve may be “greater than the sum of the parts” of their constituent members. The Religious Institution Principle provides a principled approach
Habeas Corpus Proceedings in the High Court of Parliament in the Reign of James I, 1603–1625

English parliamentary habeas corpus proceedings have been neglected by scholars. This Article ends that neglect. This Article focuses on the parliamentary habeas corpus proceedings that occurred in the reign of King James. The Article corrects several misunderstandings relating to the history of the writ of habeas corpus in England and to the history of the English Parliament (which in the seventeenth century commonly was referred to as the High Court of Parliament). Part I of the Article provides answers to questions concerning the historical background and context of the parliamentary habeas corpus proceedings in the High Court of Parliament during James I's reign. What was the origin and significance of the term High Court of Parliament? What was the parliamentary privilege of freedom from arrest, the violation of which could lead to the granting of habeas corpus relief by the House of Lords or the House of Commons? What was the civil arrest system in effect in seventeenth century Englanda system which made it likely that from time to time the parliamentary privilege from arrest would be violated and the parliamentary habeas remedy thereupon invoked? What other remedies, apart from habeas corpus, were available to deal with infringements of the parliamentary arrest privilege? And what were the contours of the parliamentary habeas corpus remedy itself, which appears not to have been successfully invoked prior to the reign of James I? Parts II and III conclusively demonstrate that in the reign of James I the High Court of Parliament at times functioned as the High Habeas Court of Parliament. Part II provides an in-depth account of the habeas corpus proceedings in the House of Lords in the reign of James I, while Part III does the same for the habeas corpus proceedings in the House of Commons during the reign. The Article concludes with a detailed discussion of the three major changes this work mandates in our understanding of English legal history
A DISCRETE AND COSMOPOLITAN MINORITY: THE LOYALISTS, THE ATLANTIC WORLD, AND THE ORIGINS OF JUDICIAL REVIEW

Historical interest in popular constitutionalism has enlivened the search for the origins of judicial review. Several precursors of judicial review in the state courts during the 1780s, in particular, demand explanation. If early modern Anglo-Americans did not perceive courts as enforcers of constitutional limits on legislatures, what explains these attempts by judges to curtail legislation in the critical period before the Philadelphia Convention? This essay argues that anti-antiloyalism -- the reaction of some lawyers and judges against the antiloyalist legislation passed in the states during and just after the Revolution -- created the occasion and inspired the justifications for the earliest examples in American courts of what is now called judicial review of legislation. Precedents existed for the practice of courts and especially conciliar bodies of superior jurisdictions reviewing the legislative outputs of inferior ones in the Anglo-American world. And during the late colonial period, colonists penned countless protests in defense of customary fundamental law, usually called the liberties of Englishmen. But the proposition that one jurisdictions courts could nullify the legislative output of the highest lawmaking power in that same jurisdiction was a dubious one in the late eighteenth-century Anglophone world. Nonetheless, a handful of state courts in the 1780s began to innovate upon these diverse traditions and invoked the fundamental law of their own state constitutions and/or the Treaty of 1783 with Britain to minimize, revise, and even nullify state legislation targeting loyalists and interfering with transatlantic commerce. They did so primarily to help facilitate the integration of the United States into the Atlantic world of diplomacy, trade, and ideas.
Fear of Liftoff: Uncertainty, Rules, and Discretion in Monetary Policy Normalization

As the author describes it, the Federal Reserve’s muddled mandate to attain simultaneously the incompatible goals of maximum employment and price stability invites short-term-oriented discretionary policymaking inconsistent with the systematic approach needed for monetary policy to contribute best to the economy over time. Fear of liftoff—the reluctance to start the process of policy normalization after the end of a recession—serves as an example. Drawing on public choice and cognitive psychology perspectives, the author discusses causes of this problem: The Federal Reserve could adopt a framework that relies on a simple policy rule subject to periodic reviews and adaptation. Replacing meetingby- meeting discretion with a simple policy rule would eschew discretion in favor of systematic policy. Periodic review of the rule would allow the Federal Reserve the flexibility to account for and occasionally adapt to the evolving understanding of the economy. Congressional legislation could guide the Federal Reserve in this direction. However, the Federal Reserve may be best placed to select the simple rule and could embrace this improvement on its own, within its current mandate, with the publication of a simple rule along the lines of its statement of longer-run goals.
How does home equity affect mobility

Abstract The impact of the housing crash on household mobility is theoretically ambiguous. Households that have little or negative equity are less likely to move because the proceeds from the sale of the home may not be large enough to pay off the original mortgage and provide a sufficient down payment on a new home. On the other hand, at sufficiently negative levels of home equity, household mobility may actually increase through the foreclosure channel. In this paper we develop and empirically test a model that incorporates both of these mechanisms. Our empirical results – based on data for Florida homeowners – provide evidence of a non-monotonic relationship between home equity and mobility. Although default-induced mobility did increase following the financial crisis, this increase did little to offset the substantial decline in voluntary moves due to home equity lock-in; we find that on net, household mobility declined by roughly 25% in our sample because of reductions in equity.
Auditor Tenure and the Ability to Meet or Beat Earnings Forecasts

We examine the relation between auditor tenure and a firm's ability to use discretionary accruals to meet or beat analysts' earnings forecasts. Regulators have long expressed concern over the use of earnings management to attain earnings targets. These concerns are compounded by lingering questions over whether long-term auditor-client relationships impair an auditor's ability to independently stem such practices. The profession counter-argues that mandatory auditor rotation reduces auditors' familiarity with the client and adversely affects audit quality. Consistent with both arguments, we find that firms with both short (two to three years) and long (13-15 years or more) tenure are more likely to report levels of discretionary accruals that allow them to meet or beat earnings forecasts. The results suggest that while regulatory mandates for periodic auditor turnover have negative effects, sustained long term auditor-client relationships may be also detrimental to audit quality. The generalizability of our results may not extend to firms that are not covered by analysts, as these firms do not face the same public pressure to manage earnings in order to meet or beat expectations.
Weak vs. Strong Correlations: Bid-Ask Spreads for Weather-Contingent Options

We price weather-contingent options by use of Monte Carlo simulations. After calibrating the models to fit quoted prices, we analyze bid-ask spreads in terms of correlations across markets. Results are presented for a double-trigger Weather vs. Natural Gas call option.
We, the Peoples? Constitutionalizing the European Union*

This article reviews arguments in favour of a formal, written constitution for Europe, and concludes with a better suggestion - a Basic European Law. The article also criticizes the wholehearted embrace of ‘popular constitution-making”. It does so by drawing on comparative evidence from constitution-making processes in various historical time periods and world regions. It poses three essential questions to organize the debate. First, why a European constitution? Second, what kind of European constitution? Third, how a European constitution?
Nuremberg Lives on: How Justice Jackson's International Experience Continues to Shape Domestic Criminal Procedure

The end of Germany’s participation in World War II came with its formal surrender on May 8, 1945. After extensive debate over what would come of top Nazi leaders, twenty-two Nazi defendants were tried and ultimately convicted after 216 days of trials held in Nuremberg spread across eleven months between November 1945 and 1946. Associate Supreme Court Justice Robert H. Jackson took a leave of absence from the Court to lead the trial’s prosecutorial effort. Decades of scholarship have considered and evaluated the Nuremberg trials alongside Jackson’s role in them. But, no article has evaluated how Justice Jackson’s experience as Nuremberg Chief Prosecutor shaped his view of domestic criminal procedure issues when he returned to the Court after the Nazi trials. This Article makes two arguments. First, that Justice Jackson’s experience as Nuremberg Chief Prosecutor transformed his thinking about domestic criminal procedure. Second, that Jackson’s transformative Nuremberg experience remarkably continues to impact—even today—the law on search and seizure, confessions, and right to counsel. More than a handful of his post-Nuremberg opinions remain consistently cited by lower courts and the Supreme Court alike. Accordingly, this Article concludes, Nuremberg did more than affect international criminal law. Given that so many of Jackson’s postNuremberg opinions continue to impact everyday citizens, the famous war criminal trials that happened more than sixty years ago remain modernly and domestically relevant.
The internet as an information intermediary

The internet is an enormous and growing source of information for investors about the opinions of others. Virtually any individual with internet access can express opinions about firms and editorialize about company news. However, to date we know very little about the impact these nontraditional internet intermediaries have on markets. We develop a framework wherein internet information intermediaries fall along a spectrum of professionalism and document a nuanced relationship between coverage by these intermediaries and capital market effects. Using a novel dataset that tracks coverage of companies by individuals posting on thousands of websites, we find that coverage by professional and semi-professional intermediaries is associated with positive capital market effects but coverage by nonprofessional internet intermediaries has the opposite effect—hindering price formation. The detrimental effects of nonprofessional coverage are observed most strongly when the intermediaries have larger audiences.
The Federal Marriage Amendment: To Protect the Sanctity of Marriage or Destroy Constitutional Democracy?

For the several years, primarily as a political ploy, the President and Republican Congress, proposed an amendment to the US Constitution to prohibit marriage between people of the same sex - the Federal Marriage Amendment. This article analyzed this proposed amendment in light of the constitutional principles that govern our society, individual rights, federalism, separation of powers, and judicial review. The article concludes that the FMA is itself constitutionally suspect and is more destructive, on balance, of the basic democratic constitutional principles than any amendment previously adopted or proposed. The amendment violates every tenet of constitutional democracy by: (1) expressly limiting the due process and equality interests of a minority group; (2) precluding the Supreme Court from fulfilling its role as the protector of individual rights; and, (3) foreclosing the states from experimenting with progressive laws designed to promote equality within an area uniquely reserved to the state governments.
Information-based trading, price impact of trades, and trade autocorrelation

Abstract In this study we show that both the price impact of trades and serial correlation in trade direction are positively and significantly related to the probability of information-based trading (PIN). The positive relation remains significant even after controlling for the effects of stock attributes. Higher trading activity (i.e., shorter intervals between trades) induces both larger price impact and stronger positive serial correlation in trade direction. The effect of time interval between trades on quote revision is stronger for stocks with higher PIN values. These results provide direct empirical support for the information models of trade and quote revision.
Real Men Advance, Real Women Retreat: Stand Your Ground, Battered Women's Syndrome, and Violence as Male Privilege

Proponents of Stand Your Ground laws cynically exploit the image of vulnerable women to defend expansions of self-defense doctrine, despite the fact that such laws actually reinforce and exacerbate existing gender divides in self-defense law that disproportionately harm women. The appropriation of women’s right to self-defense by Stand Your Ground supporters masks the law’s hostility toward women’s use of force and obscures the real achievement of such legislation: the normalization and promotion of (often white) male violence in an ever-expanding variety of scenarios. Battered Women’s Syndrome, the chief narrative available to women who fight back, forces women to plead for mercy and subjects their behavior to extensive scrutiny and evaluation. Stand Your Ground, the chief narrative men can now use to justify provoking deadly fights, often allows men to escape evaluation altogether by granting immunity from prosecution and even from arrest. This two-track system of selfdefense—Battered Women’s Syndrome for women and Stand Your Ground for men—has far-reaching implications outside of the courtroom. Battered Women’s Syndrome sends the legal and social message that women should retreat even from their own homes in the face of objective, repeated harm to their bodies; Stand Your Ground sends the legal and social message that men can advance against strangers anywhere on the basis of vague, subjective perceptions of threats. Male violence is not only tolerated, but celebrated; women’s violence is not only discouraged, but stigmatized. Invoking the image of vulnerable women to promote aggressive self-defense rhetoric serves to distract from the reality that violence remains chiefly a male privilege.
Banks as Tax Planning Intermediaries

We provide the first large‐scale empirical evidence of banks functioning as tax planning intermediaries. We posit that some banks specialize in assisting corporate clients with tax planning. In this role, banks make use of their centrality in financial relationships; access to private information; and ability to structure, execute, and participate in tax planning transactions for clients. We measure bank‐client relationships using loan contracts and measure client tax planning using either the cash effective tax rate or the unrecognized tax benefit balance. Using a difference‐in‐differences design, we find that firms experience meaningful tax reductions when they begin a relationship with a bank whose existing clients engage in above‐median tax planning. The effects of pairing with such tax intermediary banks are concentrated in relationships with larger or longer maturity loans, clients with foreign income or greater credit risk, and when the bank is an industry specialist or has above‐median investment banking activities. Finally, we find that potential clients are more likely to choose tax intermediary banks than nontax intermediary banks, suggesting that tax intermediary banks benefit by attracting new business. Collectively, our results suggest that some banks act as tax planning intermediaries, a role beyond the traditional one of financial intermediary.
Bidder returns and merger anticipation: Evidence from banking deregulation☆

Abstract This paper examines the anticipated components of bidder returns by focusing on the banking industry around the passage of interstate deregulation (Riegle Neal Act of 1994). Overall, firms that became bidders after Riegle Neal have large significant positive returns during its passage. Moreover, these positive wealth effects are significantly larger than the effects at the merger announcement. These results suggest that bidder returns are anticipated and focusing only on narrow event windows underestimates gains to bidders. Finally, the positive bidder returns appear to provide evidence against both the entrenchment and hubris hypotheses. Additional tests provide evidence to suggest that mergers are motivated by synergy rather than disciplinary motives.
The Problem of the Expert Juror.

A fundamental principle of the Anglo-American adjudicative system is that cases must be decided based solely on evidence formally admitted through trial procedures. A jury may not base its decision on information received outside of those formal procedures. Yet jurors bring to the jury room a wealth of education and experience received prior to their service and not subject to the formal rules of proof. That kind of worldly knowledge is a prerequisite to jury service; without a basic level of common knowledge, jurors could not understand the evidence put before them. Problems can arise, however, when jurors bring expertise that exceeds the common knowledge that we expect, and need, them to have. This prospect raises the problem of the expert juror. Especially today, in an evidentiary system remade to require greater scrutiny of expert testimony, courts must be aware of the possibility that jurors will inject unexamined expertise into deliberations, thus subverting the adversarial model of proof we depend on for decisional accuracy and legitimacy. This article examines the problem of juror expertise and suggests an approach for addressing the problem that focuses first on jury selection and second, in extreme cases, on post-verdict review.
Abortion and Informed Consent: How Biased Counseling Laws Mandate Violations of Medical Ethics

More than half of the states place unique requirements on legally effective informed consent for abortion, requirements that are more stringent than those applicable to all other medical procedures. Some of these statutes have disturbing features, such as requiring that misleading statements be made to patients. These laws are putatively justified as necessary to ensure that consent to abortion is fully voluntary and informed. But an examination of the understanding of informed consent in the field of medical ethics shows that their worst features are actually harmful to the goals of the doctrine of informed consent and require health care providers to engage in unethical behavior. This article examines in detail the most problematic features of biased counseling laws, many of which have been become more popular with state legislatures in recent years. It goes on collect and explain the most influential ethical accounts of informed consent and demonstrate the deep ethical problems with biased counseling laws, including the ways they are detrimental to patient autonomy, patient well-being, and the essential moral properties of patients’ acts of consenting to treatment.
Design Implications of Extended Producer Responsibility for Durable Products

We analyze product design implications of extended producer responsibility (EPR)-based take-back legislation on durable goods. In particular, we observe that durable product design incentives under...
Reassessing Legitimacy in the European Union

Concern about the EU’s ‘democratic deficit’ is misplaced. Judged against existing advanced industrial democracies, rather than an ideal plebiscitary or parliamentary democracy, the EU is legitimate. Its institutions are tightly constrained by constitutional checks and balances: narrow mandates, fiscal limits, super–majoritarian and concurrent voting requirements and separation of powers. The EU’s appearance of exceptional insulation reflects the subset of functions it performs — central banking, constitutional adjudication, civil prosecution, economic diplomacy and technical administration. These are matters of low electoral salience commonly delegated in national systems, for normatively justifiable reasons. On balance, the EU redresses rather than creates biases in political representation, deliberation and output.
Learning in Cities

Abstract Alfred Marshall argues that industrial agglomerations exist in part because individuals learn from each other when they live and work in close proximity, and increasing amounts of evidence confirms this. This paper formalizes Marshall's theory in a model where individuals acquire skills by interacting with one another, and dense urban areas increase the speed of interactions. The model predicts that cities will have a higher mean and higher variance of skills, and will attract young people who are not too risk averse and who benefit most from learning (e.g., more patient people). Urbanization will rise when the returns to skills rise, when the ability to learn by imitation rises, and when the level of health in the economy rises.
Consumption based estimates of urban Chinese growth

Abstract This paper estimates the household income growth rates implied by food demand in a sample of urban Chinese households in 1993–2005. Our estimates, based on Engel curves for food consumption, indicate an average per capita income growth of 6.8% per year in 1993–2005. This figure is slightly larger than the 5.9% per year obtained by deflating nominal incomes by the CPI. We attribute this discrepancy to a small bias in the CPI, which is of a similar magnitude to the one often associated with the CPI in the United States. This result supports the view that Chinese price statistics are reliable. Our estimates indicate stronger gains among poorer households, suggesting that urban inflation up to 2005 in China was “pro-poor,” in the sense that the increase in the cost of living for poorer households was smaller than for the average one.
Education production functions using instructional time as an input

This paper contributes to the literature on the effectiveness of schools. The analysis is unique in using data on the minutes of instruction per day in each of four subjects taught in the public elementary schools in Illinois. Few education production function papers have information on the amount of instruction students receive in a given subject. The results generally indicate that time spent in mathematics and English instruction pays off in terms of improved mathematics and reading test scores. There is evidence that time spent in social studies instruction raises reading and writing scores. Additionally, the data span 3 years so that individual school‐specific fixed effects are estimated and found to be strongly significant. Inclusion of these fixed effects has dramatic consequences for the parameter estimates on several variables, in some cases raising and in others reducing the estimated parameter values.
A space-time filter for panel data models containing random effects

A space-time filter structure is introduced that can be used to accommodate dependence across space and time in the error components of panel data models that contain random effects. This specification provides insights regarding several space-time structures that have been used recently in the panel data literature. Markov Chain Monte Carlo methods are set forth for estimating the model which allow simple treatment of initial period observations as endogenous or exogenous. The performance of the approach is demonstrated using both Monte Carlo experiments and an applied illustration.
The Impact of Twitter Adoption on Lawmakers’ Voting Orientations

Social media has been found to be influential in a variety of contexts. From mobilizing the crowd in social movements to helping refugees settle into a new country, social media has had a significa...
From Isolation to Radicalization: Anti-Muslim Hostility and Support for ISIS in the West

What explains online radicalization and support for ISIS in the West? Over the past few years, thousands of individuals have radicalized by consuming extremist content online, many of whom eventually traveled overseas to join the Islamic State. This study examines whether anti-Muslim hostility might drive pro-ISIS radicalization in Western Europe. Using new geo-referenced data on the online behavior of thousands of Islamic State sympathizers in France, the United Kingdom, Germany, and Belgium, I study whether the intensity of anti-Muslim hostility at the local level is linked to pro-ISIS radicalization on Twitter. The results show that local-level measures of anti-Muslim animosity correlate significantly and substantively with indicators of online radicalization, including posting tweets sympathizing with ISIS, describing life in ISIS-controlled territories, and discussing foreign fighters. High-frequency data surrounding events that stir support for ISIS—terrorist attacks, propaganda releases, and anti-Muslim protests—show the same pattern.
Enforcement Redundancy and the Future of Immigration Law

It is commonplace for states to help enforce federal law. Indeed, "enforcement redundancy" is a widespread and typically unremarkable aspect of American federalism. Local police regularly arrest people for violating federal criminal law; states criminalize wide swaths of conduct, like dealing drugs, that are also federal offenses; and states often attach civil penalties to conduct, such as workplace discrimination, already proscribed by federal law. Nevertheless, in United States v. Arizona — the most significant immigration federalism case in decades — the Supreme Court vitiated Arizona’s efforts at redundant enforcement.This Article explores why the Arizona Court rejected redundant enforcement and what implications the rejection holds for the future of immigration law. The Court rejected redundant enforcement, I argue, by conceptualizing law as a set of prices rather than a series of obligations. This analytic framework constitutes a radical departure from conventional approaches to preemption. Moreover, the approach is one the Court cannot possibly embrace as a general way of analyzing intergovernmental conflicts. Doing so would eliminate vast swathes of state regulatory authority and dramatically reshape our federal system.The Court’s law-as-price approach makes Arizona much more a case about separation of powers than one about federalism. It consolidates tremendous immigration policymaking power in the Executive Branch, endorsing the idea that immigration law is centrally the product of executive “lawmaking” that bears little relation to immigration law on the books. The Court’s decision to ratify this sort of Presidential control over migration policy has important implications for the ongoing transformation of immigration law, as well as for the future of American federalism.
Behavioral Responses to Risk Promote Vaccinating High-contact Individuals First

If COVID-19’s reproduction number was constant, vaccinating elderly first minimized deaths. However, incorporating risk-driven behavior/policy changes enhances fit to data and prioritizes vaccinating high-contact individuals. Deaths grow exponentially until people are compelled to reduce contacts, stabilizing at levels obliging higher-contact groups to sufficiently cut interactions. Vaccinating those groups out of transmission saves lives and speeds everybody’s return to normal life.
Bandwidth-Adaptive Feature Sharing for Cooperative LIDAR Object Detection

Situational awareness as a necessity in connected and autonomous vehicles (CAV) domain is the subject of significant number of researches in recent years. The driver’s safety is directly dependent on robustness, reliability and, scalability of such systems. Cooperative mechanisms have provided a solution to improve situational awareness by utilizing high speed wireless vehicular networks. These mechanisms mitigate problems such as occlusion and sensor range limitation. However, the network capacity is a factor determining the maximum amount of information being shared among cooperative entities. The notion of feature sharing, proposed in our previous work, aims to address these challenges by maintaining a balance between computation and communication load. In this work, we propose a mechanism to add flexibility in adapting to communication channel capacity and a novel decentralized shared data alignment method to further improve cooperative object detection performance. The performance of the proposed framework is verified through experiments on Volony dataset. The results confirm that our proposed framework outperforms our previous cooperative object detection method (FS-COD) in terms of average precision.
Learning-based approach to plasticity in athermal sheared amorphous packings: Improving softness

The plasticity of amorphous solids undergoing shear is characterized by quasi-localized rearrangements of particles. While many models of plasticity exist, the precise relationship between the plastic dynamics and the structure of a particle’s local environment remains an open question. Previously, machine learning was used to identify a structural predictor of rearrangements called “softness.” Although softness has been shown to predict which particles will rearrange with high accuracy, the method can be difficult to implement in experiments where data are limited and the combinations of descriptors it identifies are often difficult to interpret physically. Here, we address both of these weaknesses, presenting two major improvements to the standard softness method. First, we present a natural representation of each particle’s observed mobility, allowing for the use of statistical models that are both simpler and provide greater accuracy in limited datasets. Second, we employ persistent homology as a systematic means of identifying simple, topologically informed, structural quantities that are easy to interpret and measure experimentally. We test our methods on two-dimensional athermal packings of soft spheres under quasi-static shear. We find that the same structural information that predicts small variations in the response is also predictive of where plastic events will localize. We also find that an excellent accuracy is achieved in athermal sheared packings using simply a particle’s species and the number of nearest neighbor contacts.
Transferable Visual Words: Exploiting the Semantics of Anatomical Patterns for Self-Supervised Learning

This paper introduces a new concept called “transferable visual words” (TransVW), aiming to achieve annotation efficiency for deep learning in medical image analysis. Medical imaging—focusing on particular parts of the body for defined clinical purposes—generates images of great similarity in anatomy across patients and yields sophisticated anatomical patterns across images, which are associated with rich semantics about human anatomy and which are natural visual words . We show that these visual words can be automatically harvested according to anatomical consistency via self-discovery, and that the self-discovered visual words can serve as strong yet free supervision signals for deep models to learn semantics-enriched generic image representation via self-supervision (self-classification and self-restoration). Our extensive experiments demonstrate the annotation efficiency of TransVW by offering higher performance and faster convergence with reduced annotation cost in several applications. Our TransVW has several important advantages, including (1) TransVW is a fully autodidactic scheme, which exploits the semantics of visual words for self-supervised learning, requiring no expert annotation; (2) visual word learning is an add-on strategy, which complements existing self-supervised methods, boosting their performance; and (3) the learned image representation is semantics-enriched models, which have proven to be more robust and generalizable, saving annotation efforts for a variety of applications through transfer learning. Our code, pre-trained models, and curated visual words are available at https://github.com/JLiangLab/TransVW .
X-Ray: Mechanical Search for an Occluded Object by Minimizing Support of Learned Occupancy Distributions

For applications in e-commerce, warehouses, healthcare, and home service, robots are often required to search through heaps of objects to grasp a specific target object. For mechanical search, we introduce X-Ray, an algorithm based on learned occupancy distributions. We train a neural network using a synthetic dataset of RGBD heap images labeled for a set of standard bounding box targets with varying aspect ratios. X-Ray minimizes support of the learned distribution as part of a mechanical search policy in both simulated and real environments. We benchmark these policies against two baseline policies on 1,000 heaps of 15 objects in simulation where the target object is partially or fully occluded. Results suggest that X-Ray is significantly more efficient, as it succeeds in extracting the target object 82% of the time, 15% more often than the best-performing baseline. Experiments on an ABB YuMi robot with 20 heaps of 25 household objects suggest that the learned policy transfers easily to a physical system, where it outperforms baseline policies by 15% in success rate with 17% fewer actions. Datasets, videos, and experiments are available at https://sites.google.com/berkeley.edu/x-ray.
Mankala Chronicles: Nuclear Energy Financing and Cooperative Corporate Form in Finland

Drawing on 32 months of interview-based ethnographic fieldwork, this paper examines Finland’s “mankala” nuclear energy companies through the lens of anthropological theories of corporate form. Mank...
The Sarbanes-Oxley Act: A Bird's-eye View

It is the goal of this article to provide a brief reference to the multitude of changes in the law wrought by the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 (SOX). The author’s hope is that this will be of use to students, scholars, and practitioners seeking an overview of the extensive changes resulting from this legislation. The discussion is broader than it is deep; indeed, a work attempting to examine SOX in depth would soon become a treatise and not just an article. The remainder of this article, then, will seek to provide a big-picture view of SOX: Part II of this article will address SOX regulation of professionals, including accountants, lawyers, and securities analysts. Part III will address SOX’s attempts to enhance corporate disclosure. Part IV will examine SOX’s efforts to reform corporate governance. Part V will examine SOX’s provisions dealing with enforcement of the law. Finally, Part VI will provide a brief conclusion.
How to win friends and influence functionals: deducing stochasticity from deterministic dynamics

The longstanding question of how stochastic behaviour arises from deterministic Hamiltonian dynamics is of great importance, and any truly holistic theory must be capable of describing this transition. In this review, we introduce the influence functional formalism in both the quantum and classical regimes. Using this technique, we demonstrate how irreversible behaviour arises generically from the reduced microscopic dynamics of a system-environment amalgam. The influence functional is then used to rigorously derive stochastic equations of motion from a microscopic Hamiltonian. In this method stochastic terms are not identified heuristically, but instead arise from an exact mapping only available in the path-integral formalism. The interpretability of the individual stochastic trajectories arising from the mapping is also discussed. As a consequence of these results, we are also able to show that the proper classical limit of stochastic quantum dynamics corresponds non-trivially to a generalised Langevin equation derived with the classical influence functional. This provides a further unifying link between open quantum systems and their classical equivalent, highlighting the utility of influence functionals and their potential as a tool in both fundamental and applied research.
Pediatric pulmonology year in review 2020: Physiology

Pulmonary physiology is a core element of pediatric pulmonology care and research. This article reviews some of the notable publications in physiology that were published in Pediatric Pulmonology in 2020.
Design rules for modulation-doped AlAs quantum wells

Owing to their multivalley, anisotropic, energy band structure, two-dimensional electron systems (2DESs) in modulation-doped AlAs quantum wells (QWs) provide a unique platform to investigate electron interaction physics and ballistic transport. Indeed, a plethora of phenomena unseen in other 2DESs have been observed over the past decade. However, a foundation for sample design is still lacking for AlAs 2DESs, limiting the means to achieve optimal quality samples. Here, we present a systematic study on the fabrication of modulation-doped AlAs and GaAs QWs over a wide range of ${\mathrm{Al}}_{x}{\mathrm{Ga}}_{1\ensuremath{-}x}\mathrm{As}$ barrier alloy compositions. Our data indicate clear similarities in modulation doping mechanisms for AlAs and GaAs, and provide guidelines for the fabrication of very high quality AlAs 2DESs. We highlight the unprecedented quality of the fabricated AlAs samples by presenting the magnetotransport data for low-density $(\ensuremath{\simeq}1\ifmmode\times\else\texttimes\fi{}{10}^{11}\phantom{\rule{0.28em}{0ex}}{\mathrm{cm}}^{\ensuremath{-}2})$ AlAs 2DESs that exhibit high-order fractional quantum Hall signatures.
Unconditional well-posedness for the Kawahara equation

Abstract This article is concerned with the unconditional well-posedness for the Kawahara equation on the real line and shows that this holds true for initial data in L 2 ( R ) . This is achieved by applying an infinite iteration scheme of normal form reductions.
Counterfactual Representation Learning with Balancing Weights

A key to causal inference with observational data is achieving balance in predictive features associated with each treatment type. Recent literature has explored representation learning to achieve this goal. In this work, we discuss the pitfalls of these strategies - such as a steep trade-off between achieving balance and predictive power - and present a remedy via the integration of balancing weights in causal learning. Specifically, we theoretically link balance to the quality of propensity estimation, emphasize the importance of identifying a proper target population, and elaborate on the complementary roles of feature balancing and weight adjustments. Using these concepts, we then develop an algorithm for flexible, scalable and accurate estimation of causal effects. Finally, we show how the learned weighted representations may serve to facilitate alternative causal learning procedures with appealing statistical features. We conduct an extensive set of experiments on both synthetic examples and standard benchmarks, and report encouraging results relative to state-of-the-art baselines.
On the Commutation Properties of Finite Convolution and Differential Operators I: Commutation.

We introduce and fully analyze a new commutation relation $${\overline{K}} L_1 = L_2 K$$ between finite convolution integral operator K and differential operators $$L_1$$ and $$L_{2}$$ , that has implications for spectral properties of K. This work complements our explicit characterization of commuting pairs $$KL=LK$$ and provides an exhaustive list of kernels admitting commuting or sesquicommuting differential operators.