Akhil Amar’s Unusable Past

A Review of The Words That Made Us: America’s Constitutional Conversation, 1760–1840. By Akhil Reed Amar

Sovereign Metaphors in Indian Law

This exploration reveals that tribes were not as anomalous as the Supreme Court of the United States has suggested. Even while the Court proclaimed the Tribes\u27 uniqueness, it readily applied doctrines developed in the context of foreign nations, states and U.S. territories to Native nations, ignoring the differences between the situation of tribes and other sovereigns. This narrative about what tribes lack when compared to other sovereigns has become a constant, and pernicious, trope within the discourse of Indian law

The Rise of Federal Title

Why did, and does, the federal government own most of the public domain within the United States? The standard historical answers—that states ceded their lands to the federal government and that the Property Clause confirmed this authority—turn out to be incomplete, masking a neglected process in the 1780s and '90s in which legitimate ownership came to derive primarily from the federal government. This transformation, which I call the rise of federal title, involved two intertwined controversies. The first was a federalist struggle over whether the federal government could retain land in former territories admitted as states notwithstanding the promise of equal footing. The second concerned the nature of ownership: as states' unregulated land grants created endless litigation, claimants turned to the federal government to resolve conflicting rights and to create a land system that offered certain title. Both processes vindicated federal ownership, with the consequence that the federal government enjoyed a monopoly on one of the nation's most important sources of wealth. This history proves highly relevant. The rise of federal title is under threat, as many western states, and the Republican Party platform, have spun a theory based on erroneous history that argues federal landholding is unconstitutional. Simultaneously, in constructing a principle of equal state sovereignty, the Supreme Court's recent Shelby County decision relied on equal footing cases that ignored this early history. But the implications transcend immediate doctrinal concerns. For property scholars, this Article posits a greater role for the state and its regulation of property than current accounts emphasize. For those focused on public law, this history suggests a more expansive early federal government and a more modest court role in policing federalism—than most scholarship on the early United States acknowledges.</p

Layered graphical models for tracking partially-occluded moving objects in video (PhD thesis)

Tracking multiple targets using fixed cameras with non-overlapping views is a challenging problem. One of the challenges is predicting and tracking through occlusions caused by other targets or by fixed objects in the scene. Considerable effort has been devoted toward developing appearance models that are robust to partial occlusions, tracking algorithms that cope with short-term loss of observations, and algorithms that learn static occlusion maps. In this thesis we consider scenarios where it is impossible to learn a static occlusion map. This is often the case when the scene consists of both people and large objects whose position is not permanently fixed. These objects may enter, leave or relocate within the scene during a short time span. We call such objects "relocatable objects" or "relocatable occluders." We develop a representation for scenes containing relocatable objects that can cause partial occlusions of people in a camera's field of view. In many practical applications, relocatable objects tend to appear often; therefore, models for them can be learned off-line and stored in a database. We formulate an occluder-centric representation, called a graphical model layer, where a person's motion in the ground plane is defined as a first-order Markov process on activity zones, while image evidence is aggregated in 2D observation regions that are depth-ordered with respect to the occlusion mask of the relocatable object. We represent real-world scenes as a composition of depth-ordered, interacting graphical model layers, and account for image evidence in a way that handles mutual overlap of the observation regions and their occlusions by the relocatable objects. These layers interact: proximate ground plane zones of different model instances are linked to allow a person to move between the layers, and image evidence is shared between the observation regions of these models. We demonstrate our formulation in tracking low-resolution, partially-occluded pedestrians in the vicinity of parked vehicles. In these scenarios some tracking formulations that rely on part-based person detectors may fail completely. Our pedestrian tracker fares well and compares favorably with the state-of-the-art pedestrian detectors---lowering false positives by twenty-nine percent and false negatives by forty-two percent---and a deformable-contour--based tracker