Not Peace, but a Sword: Navy v. Egan and the Case Against Judicial Abdication in Foreign Affairs

In the United States\u27 system of separation of powers, the judiciary must safeguard the rights of individuals from abuses by the political branches of government. Yet, when it comes to matters touching foreign affairs, scholars such as John Yoo and jurists such as Antonin Scalia argue that the executive branch is entitled to virtually unreviewable discretion. They point to Navy v. Egan for support. There, the Court held that an administrative body that hears appeals from adverse actions against government employees was precluded from reviewing the merits of security clearance determinations because the executive branch deserves super-strong deference in foreign affairs. An examination of the disastrous consequences of Egan crystallizes the constitutional and functional arguments against super-strong deference to the executive-both in foreign affairs generally and in the security clearance process specifically. The case has prompted lower courts to deny plaintiffs an independent forum in which to bring constitutional claims related to security clearance denials and revocations. Egan\u27s progeny flouts the longstanding principle that an individual who suffers a constitutional injury is entitled to an appropriate remedy. Furthermore, by abdicating its duty to check executive power in the security clearance context, the judiciary has fortified deficiencies inherent to executive agency decisionmaking, namely tunnel vision, path dependency, and imperialist tendencies. Abdication has also enabled a systematic denial of clearances to candidates with foreign connections. Without a diverse counterterrorism workforce, the United States lacks the operational proficiency and the legitimacy to wage a successful war on terrorism. This Note is the first to call on the judiciary to reclaim the right to exercise judicial review of the merits of security clearance determinations. Furthermore, it charts a path for lower courts to reopen judicial review of the merits of security clearance determinations, provide injured plaintiffs with a remedy, deter future racial discrimination, and avert a chilling effect on agency decisionmakers

The Arc and Architecture of Private Enforcement Regimes in the United States and Europe: A View Across the Atlantic

The United States and Europe have traditionally taken very different approaches to the regulation of harmful conduct. Previously, European nations relied almost entirely on the public enforcement of laws, whereas the United States relied on a mix of public and private actors. In the United States, private rights of action have played a central role deterring illegal conduct—and, in fact, provided greater deterrence than public enforcers in some areas of law. They have also allowed injured parties to obtain compensation. Despite their very different histories, the private enforcement systems in the United States and Europe are showing signs of convergence today. Since the 1970s, industry in the United States has waged a potent public relations campaign against private rights of action. This pro-business crusade has depicted corporations as victims of a litigation explosion and cast plaintiffs and their attorneys as unscrupulous mercenaries. This narrative has little, if any, empirical support. Nonetheless, based on this mythology, the Supreme Court and other federal courts have erected a number of procedural obstacles to effective private enforcement of law. While private enforcement is in retreat in the United States, the European Union seeks to strengthen private rights of action, with an emphasis on private enforcement of antitrust law. Recent EU initiatives established some of the foundations for private parties to protect their rights in court. European policymakers, however, have as yet declined to establish effective claims’ aggregation and litigation funding mechanisms, citing the business victimhood mythology spread by private industry in the United States. Encouragingly, a few EU Member States have rejected this paradigm and established some of the elements of strong private rights of action. In particular, Denmark, the Netherlands, Portugal, and the United Kingdom have passed laws that are likely to foster effective private litigation. A comparative analysis of enforcement institutions on both sides of the Atlantic reveals a complex picture. American and European consumers, workers, and other large groups will generally face major obstacles to vindicating their rights. In cases generating larger individual claims, American and European plaintiffs’ lawyers may still be able to use aggregate settlement procedures to hold corporate defendants to account. When understanding its contribution to the deterrence of harmful conduct, private enforcement has to be viewed together with public enforcement. Because much of the enhancement of private enforcement in the European Union arises in the context of antitrust, it is an area ripe for cross-continent examination. With antitrust, the overall enforcement landscapes in the United States and European Union will likely be drastically different in the medium term. Due to limited public enforcement, a decrease in private lawsuits will severely compromise overall antitrust enforcement in the United States. In Europe, strong public enforcement will offset generally weak private enforcement and result in far more effective protection of consumer rights

Parametrized Complexity of Expansion Height

Deciding whether two simplicial complexes are homotopy equivalent is a fundamental problem in topology, which is famously undecidable. There exists a combinatorial refinement of this concept, called simple-homotopy equivalence: two simplicial complexes are of the same simple-homotopy type if they can be transformed into each other by a sequence of two basic homotopy equivalences, an elementary collapse and its inverse, an elementary expansion. In this article we consider the following related problem: given a 2-dimensional simplicial complex, is there a simple-homotopy equivalence to a 1-dimensional simplicial complex using at most p expansions? We show that the problem, which we call the erasability expansion height, is W[P]-complete in the natural parameter p

A Rare Primary Pelvic Hydatid Cyst Presenting as Sciatica

Primary hydatid cyst in the pelvis is rare, and usually presents with pressure symptoms affecting the adjacent abdominal organs. We describe a rare hydatid cyst which was eroding the sacral hallow, protruding into the right sciatic foramen and presenting as a radiating pain and weakness of right lower limb due to compression of the lumbosacral nerve roots. Laparotomy with removal of cyst and postoperative treatment with albendazole is effective in controlling the disease and preventing recurrence

An Explicit Finite Element Integration Scheme for Linear Eight Node Convex Quadrilaterals Using Automatic Mesh Generation Technique over Plane Regions

This paper presents an explicit integration scheme to compute the stiffness matrix of an eight node linear convex quadrilateral element for plane problems using symbolic mathematics and an automatic generation of all quadrilateral mesh technique , In finite element analysis, the boundary problems governed by second order linear partial differential equations,the element stiffness matrices are expressed as integrals of the product of global derivatives over the linear convex quadrilateral region. These matrices can be shown to depend on the material properties and the matrix of integrals with integrands as rational functions with polynomial numerator and the linear denominator (4+ ) in bivariates over an eight node 2-square (-1 ).In this paper,we have computed these integrals in exact and digital forms using the symbolic mathematics capabilities of MATLAB. The proposed explicit finite element integration scheme is illustrated by computing the Prandtl stress function values and the torisonal constant for the square cross section by using the eight node linear convex quadrilateral finite elements.An automatic all quadrilateral mesh generation techniques for the eight node linear convex quadrilaterals is also developed for this purpose.We have presented a complete program which automatically discritises the arbitrary triangular domain into all eight node linear convex quadrilaterals and applies the so generated nodal coordinate and element connection data to the above mentioned torsion problem. Key words: Explicit Integration, Gauss Legendre Quadrature, Quadrilateral Element, Prandtl’s Stress Function for torsion, Symbolic mathematics,all quadrilateral mesh generation technique

Bayesian Dark Knowledge

We consider the problem of Bayesian parameter estimation for deep neural networks, which is important in problem settings where we may have little data, and/ or where we need accurate posterior predictive densities, e.g., for applications involving bandits or active learning. One simple approach to this is to use online Monte Carlo methods, such as SGLD (stochastic gradient Langevin dynamics). Unfortunately, such a method needs to store many copies of the parameters (which wastes memory), and needs to make predictions using many versions of the model (which wastes time). We describe a method for "distilling" a Monte Carlo approximation to the posterior predictive density into a more compact form, namely a single deep neural network. We compare to two very recent approaches to Bayesian neural networks, namely an approach based on expectation propagation [Hernandez-Lobato and Adams, 2015] and an approach based on variational Bayes [Blundell et al., 2015]. Our method performs better than both of these, is much simpler to implement, and uses less computation at test time.Comment: final version submitted to NIPS 201

Criminalization and the Politics of Migration in Brazil

In May 2017, the government of Brazil enacted a new immigration law, replacing a statute introduced in 1980 during the country’s military dictatorship with progressive legislation that advances human rights principles and adopts innovative approaches to migration management. One of the most notable features of the new law is its explicit rejection of the criminalization of migration, and its promotion of efforts to regularize undocumented migrants. Although the law itself is new, the values embedded in the law reflect recent trends in Brazilian immigration policy, which has embraced legalization, and has generally resisted the use of criminal law to punish unauthorized migration. Indeed, in Brazil, an initial unlawful entry does not carry criminal consequences, and at the level of society, public discourse and policy debates display minimal concern regarding this act. This posture is especially intriguing, given Brazil’s otherwise aggressive focus on criminality and incarceration.This paper seeks to understand the circumstances that have led to this non-embrace of the criminalization of migration, and in particular, the scarce use of criminal law tools to punish and deter unlawful entry and related acts. The paper explores how a combination of historical factors, present-day conditions, and political forces have largely suppressed practices that dominate in the United States and in parts of Europe. Contemporary Brazilian immigration policies have generally adopted norms of forgiveness and integration — values buoyed by broader geopolitical interests that the Brazilian government has pursued in recent times. Additional factors unique to Brazil undergird the current approach, including Brazil’s history of immigration, current migration flows, and criminal justice priorities. The paper concludes with some cautionary notes, suggesting that the disavowal of criminalization in Brazil may be ephemeral in Brazil’s volatile political climate, and may mask other conditions that create structural vulnerability for noncitizens in the country

Deep Metric Learning via Facility Location

Learning the representation and the similarity metric in an end-to-end fashion with deep networks have demonstrated outstanding results for clustering and retrieval. However, these recent approaches still suffer from the performance degradation stemming from the local metric training procedure which is unaware of the global structure of the embedding space. We propose a global metric learning scheme for optimizing the deep metric embedding with the learnable clustering function and the clustering metric (NMI) in a novel structured prediction framework. Our experiments on CUB200-2011, Cars196, and Stanford online products datasets show state of the art performance both on the clustering and retrieval tasks measured in the NMI and Recall@K evaluation metrics.Comment: Submission accepted at CVPR 201