Legislative Districting

America never knew the rotten boroughs that John Locke called "gross absurdities" and condemned as being incompatible with the right of equal representation (Locke, 1812, at 433). Rotten boroughs were towns "of which there remain[ed] not so much as the ruins, where scarce so much housing as a sheepcote, or more inhabitants than a shepherd [were] to be found, [but that sent] as many representatives to the grand assembly of law-makers, as a whole county numerous in people, and powerful in riches" (id., at 432). The United States did inherit from Britain the so-called Westminster system, in which legislators are elected, usually one apiece, from geographically defined districts, with the candidate receiving the most votes declared the winner. Perhaps the system was inevitable in a time with neither full-fledged political parties nor modem devices of transportation and communication. In any event, the system has been permanently embedded in American political thought and practice

Campaign Finance and the Constitution

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On the trace identity in a model with broken symmetry

Considering the simple chiral fermion meson model when the chiral symmetry is explicitly broken, we show the validity of a trace identity -- to all orders of perturbation theory -- playing the role of a Callan-Symanzik equation and which allows us to identify directly the breaking of dilatations with the trace of the energy-momentum tensor. More precisely, by coupling the quantum field theory considered to a classical curved space background, represented by the non-propagating external vielbein field, we can express the conservation of the energy-momentum tensor through the Ward identity which characterizes the invariance of the theory under the diffeomorphisms. Our ``Callan-Symanzik equation'' then is the anomalous Ward identity for the trace of the energy-momentum tensor, the so-called ``trace identity''.Comment: 11 pages, Revtex file, final version to appear in Phys.Rev.

Hyperbolic outer billiards : a first example

We present the first example of a hyperbolic outer billiard. More precisely we construct a one parameter family of examples which in some sense correspond to the Bunimovich billiards.Comment: 11 pages, 8 figures, to appear in Nonlinearit

Chern-Simons Theory as the Large Mass Limit of Topologically Massive Yang-Mills Theory

We study quantum Chern-Simons theory as the large mass limit of the limit $D\to 3$ of dimensionally regularized topologically massive Yang-Mills theory. This approach can also be interpreted as a BRS-invariant hybrid regularization of Chern-Simons theory, consisting of a higher-covariant derivative Yang-Mills term plus dimensional regularization. Working in the Landau gauge, we compute radiative corrections up to second order in perturbation theory and show that there is no two-loop correction to the one-loop shift $k\rightarrow k+ c_{\scriptscriptstyle V},\,\,k$ being the bare Chern-Simons parameter. In passing we also prove by explicit computation that topologically massive Yang-Mills theory is UV finite.Comment: 64 pages without figures (10 figures), DAMTP 91-34, LPTHE 91-61, NBI-HE 91-55, UGMS 91-2

The Failure of the Act: Conceptions of the Law in \u3ci\u3eThe Merchant of Venice, Bleak House, Les Miserables\u3c/i\u3e, and Richard Weisberg’s \u3ci\u3ePoethics\u3c/i\u3e

Richard Weisberg is a leading participant in the academic subfield known as Law and Literature, which is dedicated to what Weisberg aptly describes as the delightful task of associating two major human enterprises: establishing justice and telling stories. In his most recent book, Poethics: And Other Strategies of Law and Literature, Weisberg attempts to provide, more systematically . . . than elsewhere, a guidebook to Law and Literature theory and practice. Several of the chapters in Poethics were written for other occasions and previously published; accordingly, it is no surprise that Weisberg succeeds more in demonstrating his critical acuity, the breadth of his literary interests, and his graceful writing style than in providing a systematic guide to the field