THE TRANSPARENCY FIX: ADVOCATING LEGAL RIGHTS AND THEIR ALTERNATIVES IN THE PURSUIT OF A VISIBLE STATE

The administrative norm of transparency, which promises a solution to the problem of government secrecy, requires political advocacy organized from outside the state. The traditional approach, typically the result of organized campaigns to make the state visible to the public, has been to enact freedom of information laws (FOI) that require government disclosure and grant enforceable rights to the public. The legal solution has not proven wholly satisfactory, however. In the past two decades, numerous advocacy movements have offered different fixes to the information asymmetry problem that the administrative state creates. These alternatives now augment and sometimes compete with legal transparency regimes. This Article surveys and analyzes transparency advocacy campaigns and the “fix” that each proposes to the problems created by the state’s asymmetrical information advantage over the public. It sketches the history of four campaigns: the FOI movement in the U.S., the global anti-corruption movement (spearheaded by Transparency International), the digital transparency movement, and WikiLeaks. The Article offers two insights. First, although these movements share a basic set of assumptions and tell a similar policy story — secrecy is a pressing administrative problem that can be fixed with the right policies and institutional arrangements — they diverge significantly in how they understand not only the problem’s causes but the state itself. Second, and as a result, the Article unveils transparency as a contested political issue which masquerades as an administrative tool. Rooted in contestable claims about the state’s legitimacy and performance, the transparency fix leads to tendentious prescriptions about law, policy, and the state

Toward the total synthesis of spirastrellolide A. Part 3: Intelligence gathering and preparation of a ring-expanded analogue

Different methods for the formation of the C.25–C.26 bond of spirastrellolide A (1) are evaluated that might qualify for the end game of the projected total synthesis, with emphasis on metathetic ways to forge the macrocyclic frame

The Takings Clause, Version 2005: The Legal Process of Constitutional Property Rights

The three takings decisions that the Supreme Court issued at the end of its October 2004 Term marked a stunning reversal of the Court’s efforts the past three decades to use the Takings Clause to define a set of constitutional property rights. The regulatory takings doctrine, which once loomed as a significant threat to the modern regulatory state, now appears after Lingle v. Chevron to be a relatively tame, if complicated, check on exceptional instances of regulatory abuse. At the same time, the Public Use Clause, formerly an inconsequential limitation on the state’s eminent domain authority, now appears ripe for revision and tightening after a stirring four-justice dissent in Kelo v. City of New London and an enormous public protest decrying the majority decision. Notwithstanding this reversal, the 2005 decisions offer a coherent approach to Takings Clause enforcement—albeit one that is likely to frustrate commentators, theorists, and property rights advocates. More clearly than ever before, the Court in its 2005 decisions abandoned the difficult, if not impossible, task of providing a clear normative justification for the Takings Clause. Instead, its decisions reveal a marked preference for preserving and furthering its vision of an institutional system of governance—a jurisprudence that is focused on the question of who should decide rather than on the substantive issue of what should be decided, and that is committed to the passive virtue of deference. In short, the Rehnquist Court explicitly chose to adopt a “legal process” approach to takings. Because it privileges structure and process over explicit considerations of substantive legal and normative issues, this approach is unsatisfactory to property and constitutional theorists; because it defers to government decisions, it is maddening to property rights advocates; and because it is technocratic and abstract, it is unsatisfactory to the public. Given the prominence of the legal process approach to constitutional review of state regulatory action in the post-New Deal era, however, judicial passivity remains attractive, if unromantic, to judicial actors. Ultimately, recognizing the Court’s shift away from defining constitutional property rights via the Takings Clause offers important descriptive and prescriptive insights into the future of takings law in the Roberts Court, especially if a majority of justices decide to tighten review of eminent domain actions or otherwise heighten judicial review under the Takings Clause

Vertebrate endothelial lipase: comparative studies of an ancient gene and protein in vertebrate evolution

Endothelial lipase (gene: LIPG; enzyme: EL) is one of three members of the triglyceride lipase family that contributes to lipoprotein degradation within the circulation system and plays a major role in HDL metabolism in the body. In this study, in silico methods were used to predict the amino acid sequences, secondary and tertiary structures, and gene locations for LIPG genes and encoded proteins using data from several vertebrate genome projects. LIPG is located on human chromosome 18 and is distinct from other human 'neutral lipase' genes, hepatic lipase (gene: LIPC; enzyme: HL) and lipoprotein lipase (gene: LPL; enzyme: LPL) examined. Vertebrate LIPG genes usually contained 10 coding exons located on the positive strand for most primates, as well as for horse, bovine, opossum, platypus and frog genomes. The rat LIPG gene however contained only 9 coding exons apparently due to the presence of a 'stop' codon' within exon 9. Vertebrate EL protein subunits shared 58-97% sequence identity as compared with 38-45% sequence identities with human HL and LPL. Four previously reported human EL N-glycosylation sites were predominantly conserved among the 10 potential N-glycosylation sites observed for the vertebrate EL sequences examined. Sequence alignments and identities for key EL amino acid residues were observed as well as conservation of predicted secondary and tertiary structures with those previously reported for horse pancreatic lipase (PL) (Bourne et al. 1994). Several potential sites for regulating LIPG gene expression were observed including CpG islands near the LIPG gene promoter and a predicted microRNA binding site near the 3'-untranslated region. Promoter regions containing functional polymorphisms that regulate HDL cholesterol in baboons were conserved among primates but not retained between primates and rodents. Phylogenetic analyses examined the relationships and potential evolutionary origins of the vertebrate LIPG gene subfamily with other neutral triglyceride lipase gene families, LIPC and LPL. It is apparent that the triglyceride lipase ancestral gene for the vertebrate LIPG gene predated the appearance of fish during vertebrate evolution[500 million years ago.Full Tex