Ethics for Examiners

The inquisitorial bankruptcy examiner is sui generis in our system. He faces unique ethical quandaries and considerations, which require a code of ethics tailored to his role if he is to achieve fully the promise of improving Chapter 11 through the introduction of inquisitorial investigative methods. This Article attempts to point the way toward guidelines that will regulate the conduct of examiners to mitigate real, potential, and perceived abuses

Mine and me: exploring the neural basis of object ownership.

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When "It" becomes "Mine": attentional biases triggered by object ownership.

Abstract Previous research has demonstrated that higher-order cognitive processes associated with the allocation of selective attention are engaged when highly familiar self-relevant items are encountered, such as one's name, face, personal possessions and the like. The goal of our study was to determine whether these effects on attentional processing are triggered on-line at the moment self-relevance is established. In a pair of experiments, we recorded ERPs as participants viewed common objects (e.g., apple, socks, and ketchup) in the context of an “ownership” paradigm, where the presentation of each object was followed by a cue indicating whether the object nominally belonged either to the participant (a “self” cue) or the experimenter (an “other” cue). In Experiment 1, we found that “self” ownership cues were associated with increased attentional processing, as measured via the P300 component. In Experiment 2, we replicated this effect while demonstrating that at a visual–perceptual level, spatial attention became more narrowly focused on objects owned by self, as measured via the lateral occipital P1 ERP component. Taken together, our findings indicate that self-relevant attention effects are triggered by the act of taking ownership of objects associated with both perceptual and postperceptual processing in cortex.</jats:p

Counting Complex Disordered States by Efficient Pattern Matching: Chromatic Polynomials and Potts Partition Functions

Counting problems, determining the number of possible states of a large system under certain constraints, play an important role in many areas of science. They naturally arise for complex disordered systems in physics and chemistry, in mathematical graph theory, and in computer science. Counting problems, however, are among the hardest problems to access computationally. Here, we suggest a novel method to access a benchmark counting problem, finding chromatic polynomials of graphs. We develop a vertex-oriented symbolic pattern matching algorithm that exploits the equivalence between the chromatic polynomial and the zero-temperature partition function of the Potts antiferromagnet on the same graph. Implementing this bottom-up algorithm using appropriate computer algebra, the new method outperforms standard top-down methods by several orders of magnitude, already for moderately sized graphs. As a first application, we compute chromatic polynomials of samples of the simple cubic lattice, for the first time computationally accessing three-dimensional lattices of physical relevance. The method offers straightforward generalizations to several other counting problems.Comment: 7 pages, 4 figure

Textualism\u27s Failures: A Study of Overruled Bankruptcy Decisions

Judges and legal scholars are engaged in a contentious, wide- ranging, and long-running debate over methods of statutory interpretation. Stripping the debate of some of its nuance without misrepresenting its essence, there are two camps: the textualists and the pragmatists. Cass Sunstein recently argued that the question of interpretive method should be considered in light of evidence whether textualist methods work better or worse than pragmatic ones. To date, however, only limited empirical evidence has been systematically brought to bear on this question. This Article presents new empirical evidence gleaned from twenty years of interpretation of the United States Bankruptcy Code on the question of the comparative efficacy of textualism as a method of statutory interpretation. Analysis of bankruptcy decisions superseded by amendments to the Code indicates that cases adopting textualist methods of statutory interpretation are disproportionately found within the universe of cases overruled by statute. To the extent that the goal of statutory interpretation is the rational and efficient development and administration of complex statutory schemes in a manner consistent with policy goals democratically selected, this evidence should cause textualists to reconsider their allegiance to their method. It should also reinforce pragmatists\u27 commitment to pragmatic interpretation. Independently of the textualism/pragmatism debate, analysis of legislatively overruled decisions also gives insight into the types of bankruptcy decisions that get overruled by statute. Additional study of overruled cases in this and other statutory areas may produce valuable policy recommendations for judges and policymakers. This Article is divided into three parts. Part I describes the debate over textualism and illustrates the competing modes of interpretation using well-known bankruptcy cases decided by the Supreme Court. Part II describes the research design and results from a statistical analysis of the method of interpretation adopted in fifty-eight bankruptcy decisions subsequently overruled by statute. Finally, Part III presents significant subsidiary findings, independent of interpretive method, derived from analysis of the overruled cases. A short conclusion follows