Judging in a Vacuum, Or, Once More, Without Feeling: How Justice Scalia\u27s Jurisprudential Approach Repeats Errors Made in Plessy v. Ferguson

James Fleming argues that “[Justice Clarence] Thomas’s concurrence in Adarand and dissent in Grutter reflect the Plessy worldview.” I argue in Part V of this article that Justice Antonin Scalia follows the Plessy approach in several of his dissenting opinions. One of this article’s goals is to explain these incongruencies—how can it be that each of these Justices believes he is true to the legacy of Brown, but is inadvertently adopting the reasoning used by the majority in Plessy? The key to resolving this paradox depends on identifying precisely how Plessy went wrong in its reasoning and how Brown corrected Plessy’s errors —tasks this article takes on in Parts II, III, and IV. I argue in Part II that Plessy failed to take into account social and historical context, the real world of race relations in 1896, and, in Part III, that the Court ignored Homer Plessy’s direct request that the Justices use empathy to imagine themselves in his position as an African American living under Jim Crow. As Goodwin Liu observes, part of Plessy’s failure involved “the radical formalism of constitutional interpretation in the face of contrary social facts.” Or, to enlist language from a Supreme Court decision handed down forty years after Plessy and involving different issues, the Plessy Court essentially “shut [its] eyes to the plainest facts of . . . life and deal[t] with the [issues before it] in an intellectual vacuum.

What Drives the Variability in AGN? Explaining the UV-Xray Disconnect Through Propagating Fluctuations

Intensive broadband reverberation mapping campaigns have shown that AGN variability is significantly more complex than expected from disc reverberation of the variable X-ray illumination. The UV/optical variability is highly correlated and lagged, with longer lags at longer wavelengths as predicted, but the observed timescales are longer than expected. Worse, the UV/optical lightcurves are not well correlated with the X-rays which should drive them. Instead, we consider an intrinsically variable accretion disc, where slow mass accretion rate fluctuations are generated in the optical-UV disc, propagating down to modulate intrinsically faster X-ray variability from the central regions. We match our model to Fairall 9, a well studied AGN with $L \sim 0.1L_{\rm{Edd}}$, where the spectrum is dominated by the UV/EUV. Our model produces lightcurves where the X-rays and UV have very different fast variability, yet are well correlated on longer timescales, as observed. It predicts that the intrinsic variability has optical/UV leading the X-rays, but including reverberation of the variable EUV from an inner wind produces a lagged bound-free continuum which matches the observed UV-optical lags. We conclude that optical/UV AGN variability is likely driven by intrinsic fluctuations within the disc, not X-ray reprocessing: the observed longer than expected lags are produced by reverberation of the EUV illuminating a wind not by X-ray illumination of the disc: the increasing lag with increasing wavelength is produced by the increased contribution of the (constant lag) bound-free continuum to the spectrum, rather than indicating intrinsically larger reverberation distances for longer wavelengths.Comment: 15 Pages, 11 Figures, 2 Appendices - Accepted for publication in MNRA

L-plastin is essential for alveolar macrophage production and control of pulmonary pneumococcal infection

We report that mice deficient for the hematopoietic-specific, actin-bundling protein L-plastin (LPL) succumb rapidly to intratracheal pneumococcal infection. The increased susceptibility of LPL(−/−) mice to pulmonary pneumococcal challenge correlated with reduced numbers of alveolar macrophages, consistent with a critical role for this cell type in the immediate response to pneumococcal infection. LPL(−/−) mice demonstrated a very early clearance defect, with an almost 10-fold-higher bacterial burden in the bronchoalveolar lavage fluid 3 h following infection. Clearance of pneumococci from the alveolar space in LPL(−/−) mice was defective compared to that in Rag1(−/−) mice, which lack all B and T lymphocytes, indicating that innate immunity is defective in LPL(−/−) mice. We did not identify defects in neutrophil or monocyte recruitment or in the production of inflammatory cytokines or chemokines that would explain the early clearance defect. However, efficient alveolar macrophage regeneration following irradiation required LPL. We thus identify LPL as being key to alveolar macrophage development and essential to an effective antipneumococcal response. Further analysis of LPL(−/−) mice will illuminate critical regulators of the generation of alveolar macrophages and, thus, effective pulmonary innate immunity

Untangling the Complex Nature of AGN Variability in Fairall 9

The accretion flow in active galactic nuclei (AGN) is not well understood, motivating intensive monitoring campaigns of multiwavelength variability to probe its structure. One of the best of these is the 3 yr optical/UV/X-ray approximately daily monitoring campaign on Fairall 9, a fairly typical moderate accretion rate AGN. The UV light curve shows a clear increase over ~50 d between years 1 and 2, strongly coherent with the X-ray light curve rise. This changes the average spectral energy distribution (SED) such that the disc component is stronger while the X-ray spectrum steepens, so that the total X-ray power remains roughly constant. Outside of this global change, we apply a Fourier-resolved analysis to test stochastic models where intrinsic fluctuations in the UV disc propagate down into the hard X-ray emission region via both changing the seed photon flux for Compton scattering (short light travel time-scale) and changing the electron density (longer propagation time-scale). Unlike these models, the hard X-rays are not particularly well correlated with the UV, and also have the wrong sign in that the hard X-rays marginally lead the UV fluctuations. We show that this is instead consistent with uncorrelated stochastic fluctuations in both the UV (slow) and X-ray (fast), which are linked together only weakly via light travel time. These variability properties, as well as the changes in the SED, have implications for our understanding of AGN structure and physics, as well as future monitoring campaigns

Emergency presidential power ::from the drafting of the Constitution to the War on Terror /

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