10,913 research outputs found
Infrared astronomy: seeing the heat : from William Herschel to the Herschel space observatory
No full textUncover the Secrets of the Universe Hidden at Wavelengths beyond Our Optical GazeWilliam Herschel's discovery of infrared light in 1800 led to the development of astronomy at wavelengths other than the optical. Infrared Astronomy - Seeing the Heat: from William Herschel to the Herschel Space Observatory explores the work in astronomy that relies on observations in the infrared. Author David L. Clements, a distinguished academic and science fiction writer, delves into how the universe works, from the planets in our own Solar System to the universe as a whole. The book first presents the major
Our government: how founded by David L. Pierson
No full textThis is an item in the Clements family papers collection. (Published By National Society, Sons of the American Revolution
MDL as Public Administration
No full textFrom the Deepwater Horizon disaster to the opioid crisis, multidistrict litigation—or simply MDL—has become the preeminent forum for devising solutions to the most difficult problems in the federal courts. MDL works by refusing to follow a regular procedural playbook. Its solutions are case specific, evolving, and ad hoc. This very flexibility, however, provokes charges that MDL violates basic requirements of the rule of law.
At the heart of these charges is the assumption that MDL is simply a larger version of the litigation that takes place every day in federal district courts. But MDL is not just different in scale than ordinary litigation; it is different in kind. In structure and operation, MDL parallels programs like Social Security in which an administrative agency continuously develops new procedures to handle a high volume of changing claims. Accordingly, MDL is appropriately judged against the “administrative” rule of law that emerged in the decades after World War II and underpins the legitimacy of the modern administrative state.
When one views MDL as an administrative program instead of a larger version of ordinary civil litigation, the real threats to its legitimacy come into focus. The problem is not that MDL is ad hoc. Rather, it is that MDL lacks the guarantees of transparency, public participation, and ex post review that administrative agencies have operated under since the middle of the twentieth century. The history of the administrative state suggests that MDL’s continued success as a forum for resolving staggeringly complex problems depends on how it addresses these governance deficits
Pooling of Forecasts
No full textWe consider forecasting using a combination, when no model coincides with a non-constant data generation process (DGP). Practical experience suggests that combining forecasts adds value, and can even dominate the best individual device. We show why this can occur when forecasting models are differentially mis-specified, and is likely to occur when the DGP is subject to deterministic shifts. Moreover, averaging may then dominate over estimated weights in the combination. Finally, it cannot be proved that only non-encompassed devices should be retained in the combination. Empirical and Monte Carlo illustrations confirm the analysis.
The New Conflicts Law
No full textThe deterrent and remedial power of civil litigation in U.S. courts is justifiably famous. But as Kiobel and other cases underscore, such litigation is only one of many possible ways to regulate harms that affect multiple sovereigns. Globalization, increased cross-border activity, and the lightweight limits on extraterritorial jurisdiction imposed by international law combine to create an environment in which it is common for multiple legal systems to regulate a single course of conduct. When sovereigns disagree over how to regulate harm, the ensuing conflicts expose U.S. legal systems to a new and unfamiliar form of political backlash.
This Article identifies, explains, and critically analyzes a new body of law that responds to these conflicts in a novel and problematic way. Beginning in the 1980s and accelerating in recent terms, the Supreme Court has interpreted indeterminate legal materials that are not obviously about regulatory conflict to create a set of clear, ex ante rules restricting private regulatory enforcement in U.S. courts. This set of rules--"the new conflicts law"-- prevents conflicts between domestic litigation and other nations' approaches to regulating harm and transfers authority for regulatory conflict from frontline decisionmakers to the U.S. Supreme Court. But in seeking to limit interference with foreign regulation, the new law undermines U.S. regulatory systems with no clear welfare payoff. And it often precludes democratically accountable policymakers from revisiting the Supreme Court's conclusions about the appropriate relationship between U.S. litigation and foreign regulation.
To address these concerns, the Article proposes incremental changes to four doctrines within the new conflicts law. The more basic and urgent task, however, is to recognize the new conflicts law for the significant development it is. With little fanfare, the Supreme Court has dramatically changed the way in which the U.S. legal system manages regulatory conflict
Regulating Arbitration
No full textEnabled by Supreme Court decisions that grant contract drafters broad authority over the procedures used to resolve legal claims, agreements to arbitrate have proliferated in consumer and employment contracts. As arbitration has spread, so have demands for Congress and federal administrative agencies to regulate it. But when does arbitration warrant regulation through new legislation and administrative action? The most prominent policy arguments for regulating arbitration focus on its effects on consumer welfare and democratic governance. By and large, the standard policy arguments for regulating arbitration do not grapple with arbitration’s effects on specific regulatory statutes.
This Article explains arbitration’s effects on the implementation and enforcement of federal regulatory statutes and argues that controlling these effects should be a central focus of efforts to regulate arbitration through new legislation and agency action. In hundreds of statutes, Congress has created financial incentives for private litigants to enforce its laws. The enactment of incentives for private civil litigation allows litigants to assert claims that would be too expensive to prosecute under ordinary procedural rules, and, more importantly, allows Congress to calibrate enforcement of federal law. By establishing stronger incentives for private enforcement of a statute—e.g., provisions that shift attorneys’ fees to successful plaintiffs and provide enhanced damages—Congress drives enforcement of the statute. By providing weaker incentives, Congress directs enforcement elsewhere.
Arbitration can dramatically alter the returns from enforcement of statutes with incentives for private civil litigation. In doing so, it may subvert or completely undermine congressional efforts to mobilize and calibrate private enforcement of federal law. These “enforcement effects” threaten Congress’s ability to accomplish substantive regulatory objectives through private civil litigation but have received only passing attention in discussions about the policy response to arbitration. To illustrate how greater attention to them would impact efforts to regulate arbitration, the Article analyzes the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s proposed arbitration regulation under § 1028 of the Dodd-Frank Act and shows how it falls short of ensuring that certain consumer financial protection laws administered by the agency are enforced in the manner and to the extent contemplated by Congress.The publication agreement authorizes me to post this article on the university repositor
What do MDL leaders do?: evidence from leadership appointment orders
No full textIn federal multidistrict litigation (MDL), district courts regularly appoint attorneys to manage the litigation of cases that are transferred to a single district court for coordinated pretrial proceedings. Orders appointing MDL leaders serve as a constitution or charter for a particular MDL, reallocating functions that otherwise would be performed by individually retained plaintiff’s attorneys to court-appointed leaders. As such, they perform a crucial role in the “MDL model” of aggregate litigation and settlement. Yet in spite of their importance, knowledge of these orders is mostly folk wisdom.
This Article, prepared for the Pound Civil Justice Institute symposium on "Class Actions, Mass Torts, and MDLs: The Next 50 Years," presents preliminary findings from a study of leadership appointment orders in all MDLs pending in the federal courts in June 2019. The principal finding is that, while leadership appointment orders are a standard feature of contemporary MDL, they vary significantly in how they structure plaintiff’s leadership, the functions they assign to court-appointed leaders, and how orders conceive of the relationships among court-appointed leaders, non-lead attorneys, and MDL plaintiffs. These findings shed light on debates over the nature of contemporary MDL, the duties court-appointed leaders owe to non-client plaintiffs, and the costs and benefits of MDL’s dependence on decentralized, ad hoc procedure-making
Arbitration Conflicts
No full textAmong the most important recent developments in U.S. civil procedure is the rise of arbitration as a substitute for litigation in public courts. Seeking to lower legal costs and protect themselves from entrepreneurial litigation, firms from Amazon to Wells Fargo have added arbitration clauses to their standard form contracts and invoked them to defend against all manner of litigation. Increased use of arbitration--underpinned by the Supreme Court's view that the Federal Arbitration Act (FAA) requires arbitration agreements to be enforced according to their terms--has transformed arbitration from a method for resolving contractual differences into an all-purpose private justice system.
In this new environment, regulation by federal administrative agencies has emerged as a crucial check against the most problematic uses of arbitration. But agencies' efforts to regulate arbitration have been plagued by persistent questions about the extent of their statutory authority to do so. Those questions have played a central role in the Trump administration’s efforts to roll back Obama-era arbitration regulations, as agencies cited doubts about their statutory authority to justify reversing Obama-era rules. And the issue has divided courts. In its first encounter with an agency arbitration regulation, the Supreme Court in Epic Systems v. Lewis divided sharply over the lawfulness of a National Labor Relations Board ruling that regulated arbitral class action waivers under the National Labor Relations Act.
This Article offers a theory of how the FAA relates to other federal laws, the legal issue at the heart of conflicts over agency arbitration revolution. That theory of the FAA proceeds from two basic propositions: (1) the FAA establishes default rules governing the status and enforceability of arbitration agreements; and (2) whether another law modifies the FAA’s background commands presents an ordinary question of statutory interpretation. The FAA is not, on any accepted theory of statutory interpretation, a "super-statute" that occupies a special position in federal law.
This theory challenges several common assumptions about the law governing arbitration. Under ordinary interpretive principles, the FAA's default rules of dispute resolution procedure are not only modified by statutes that expressly address the validity, enforceability, or revocability of arbitration agreements--a point that is generally accepted in doctrine and scholarship--but also by a range of statutes that modify the FAA impliedly. Among those statutes are laws governing primary conduct, laws that define procedures and remedies for statutory claims, laws that subject regulated parties' contracting to administrative oversight, and laws that direct an agency to implement subsidiary statutory policies that are negatively affected by arbitration. Between them, these statutes supply authority for many contested agency arbitration regulations. But in contrast to much of the scholarly literature, this Article demonstrates that the issue is not governed by Chevron USA Inc. v. Natural Resources Defense Council, Inc
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