Major Civil Research Articles

AIDS Activists, FDA Regulation, and the Amendment of America's Drug Constitution

This Article explores how AIDS activists, desperate for access to potentially life-saving pharmaceuticals, permanently transformed America’s “drug constitution.” Their advocacy altered the FDA’s interpretation and application of the federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act (FDCA) so as to expedite the availability of new, unproven drugs for critical illnesses, thus enhancing individual patients’ autonomy to make therapeutic choices without government interference.The FDCA is more than simple set of instructions to a federal agency — it is a source of vitally important and deeply entrenched institutional and normative frameworks. Like major civil rights, antitrust, and environmental statutes, the FDCA should be viewed as a quasi-constitutional “superstatute.” Therefore, the AIDS activists’ FDA reform campaign of the late 1980s and early 1990s should be understood as a “constitutional” movement, even though it rarely invoked the United States Constitution and pursued its goals entirely outside of court. As a result of the AIDS movement’s efforts, federal drug regulation today reflects not only the FDCA’s original foundational principle of protecting consumers from hazardous protects, but also the (often contrary) fundamental goal of promoting the expeditious release of potentially effective treatments for severe illnesses. The AIDS activists’ successful advocacy regarding drug access permanently shifted decision-making power previously exercised by the FDA to individual patients and their physicians.In addition to linking the AIDS movement to other major civil rights campaigns focused on the implementation of statutes, this Article details a particularly remarkable advocacy effort that has gone mostly overlooked in the legal literature. The Article examines how a movement composed largely of members of a scorned and marginalized population — HIV-positive gay men — significantly altered a crucial body of law administered by one of the country’s most powerful federal agencies. As the Article describes, the AIDS movement achieved this success in a seemingly incongruous alliance with conservative libertarians. Rather than simply telling a triumphal story, however, this Article explores how the AIDS movement was ultimately torn apart by deep schisms that prevented it from ever coalescing around a fully coherent medical libertarian philosophy. The most profound of these divisions, rooted in the very nature of controlled clinical research, concerned the moral acceptability of limiting terminally ill people’s freedom to try experimental drugs to ensure the production of reliable data regarding the treatments’ effectiveness. Ambivalence about the proper resolution of this quandary — among activists and society as a whole — has inhibited a radical dissolution of the FDA’s gatekeeping power. Nevertheless, as this Article concludes, federal regulation of medical products is now very different than it would have been without the AIDS activists’ determined efforts.

Class and Politics in the Mississippi Movement: An Analysis of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party Delegation

A NEW GENERATION OF CIVIL RIGHTS HISTORIANS HAS BEGUN TO subvert top-down, uplifting narrative that characterized earlier literature. These not only have extended standard movement time line of Montgomery Memphis both backward and forward but also have tried shift spotlight from black elite who led national organizations that tried influence policy in Washington, D.C., such as Roy Wilkins at National Association for Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and Martin Luther King Jr. at Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), shine on equally deserving, lesser-known, and more often lower-class activists in local communities. In contrast a prevailing civil rights literature that consisted mainly of studies of major national civil rights leaders and their organizations, historians are digging deeper into local struggles against racism rescue these brave activists from oblivion. (1) They lament that most scholarship on movement gives credit famous, national civil rights leaders at expense of grassroots, local activists who, according David J. Garrow, were the actual human catalysts of movement, people who really gave direction movement's organizing work, individuals whose records reflect greatest substantive accomplishments.... [and] who had greatest personal impact upon course of southern (2) Their pointillistic histories describe how before, and even after, legislative victories were secured in Washington, local people in remote southern communities had win civil rights county by county, town by town, and even swimming pool by swimming pool. But advantages of bottom-up perspective go beyond merely restoring credit those who have been overlooked. Such studies also have laid a foundation for reshaping movement and demand a rethinking of what and who we think is important. According Emilye Crosby, studying ... movement's local indigenous base fundamentally alters our picture of movement and its significance and call[s] into question many of top-down generalizations introduced and reinforced by studies of national leaders, major events, and pivotal legal and political milestones. (3) Clayborne Carson contends that a local perspective broadens our sense of civil rights movement include leaders and groups that displayed a wide range of ideologies and proto-ideologies, involving militant racial or class consciousness that went beyond King's Christian-Gandhianism. (4) As J. Todd Moye writes, The way civil rights historians tended frame their narratives placed well-educated African Americans with good, stable jobs at center of stories. But as a result of new, local bottom-up history, scholars now understand civil rights movement have been more female, more grass roots, less philosophically nonviolent, and less pulpit-directed than they understood it be thirty years ago. (5) Jeanne Theoharis asserts that a focuse[d] on specific--on a locality, an organizer, or a campaign--has started to map black freedom struggle in new and important ways, including question[ing] most basic aspects of story--who led and undertook these movements, what movement was actually about, where it took place, when it happened, and why people engaged. (6) Charles M. Payne summarizes all ways new civil rights scholarship requires rethink critical issues such as the top-down and triumphal underpinnings of narrative; overemphasis on South as a site of struggle; extent of nonviolence; character of white resistance, including idea that it was mostly a problem of South; continued marginalization of women; chronology; role of liberals; equation of Black Power with end of movement; separation between civil rights history and labor history; and related tendency underemphasize economic goals of movement. …

Impact of Past Project on the Educational Experience of Civil Engineering Students

Civil engineering lecturers need to develop effective early emphasis and educational challenges in order to prepare the current students with in-depth fundamental principles, applicable technical knowledge, and realistic appreciation on challenges faced by practicing civil engineers. In view of its importance, the use of past civil engineering projects as case studies have been integrated into the existing civil engineering curriculum at the University of Nottingham Malaysia Campus. In order to enhance our undergraduate students’ understanding, cognitive learning desire, and overall learning experience, an additional module has been incorporated in the past five years to investigate major past civil engineering projects. Students are free to choose any of past projects as their case studies and are required to find, sort, synthesize, and present critical elements that contributed to the overall success of the past projects in the form of discussion essays. In this paper, the universal consensus between the lecturers and the students on the effectiveness of past civil engineering projects as case studies to enhance students’ lifelong learning desire and aspiration towards ethical practice are investigated. The lecturers’ and students’ views on the extent of coverage of the key elements and the preferred disciplines from the past projects are furthermore evaluated. The outcomes indicate that the use of past projects as case studies enhanced students’ educational experiences that conduce for cognitive learning desires (73% of lecturers & 81% of students), motivated for future ethical practice (82% of lecturers & 86% of students), and reassured aspiration (100% of lecturers & 97% of students) in becoming practicing civil engineers upon graduation. A common view derives from this study is that the curriculum needs to further its extent of coverage on the industry practices.

Sistema de Generación Energía Sumergible Basado en un Vórtice Gravitacional con Sifón para Comunidades Aisladas

En este trabajo se presenta un sistema de generación de energía eléctrica basado en un vórtice gravitacional con sifón para comunidades aisladas, manufacturado en la provincia de Loja Ecuador. El sistema es sumergible funciona como una central de paso y por su diseño se lo puede instalar directamente en canales de riego, ríos, etc. sin obras civiles importantes. La unidad de generación denominada UTG (Underwater Turbine Generator) está conformada por una turbina Kaplan, un generador sumergible síncrono multi-polo con imanes permanentes, un rectificador, un inversor, un vórtice gravitacional y un sifón de evacuación para ganar energía potencial. Además, incluye un control integrado que permite realizar mediciones de los parámetros eléctricos del sistema. De acuerdo con los resultados de la medición de campo, el prototipo UTG basado en un vórtice gravitacional puede ofrecer de forma estable la energía eléctrica a las cargas conectadas, con un factor de planta del 60%.

The Borderlands of Race: Mexican Segregation in a South Texas Town by Jennifer R. Nájera

Reviewed by: The Borderlands of Race: Mexican Segregation in a South Texas Town by Jennifer R. Nájera Tracy Brown The Borderlands of Race: Mexican Segregation in a South Texas Town. By Jennifer R. Nájera. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2015. ix + 177 pp. Photographs, maps, notes, references, index. $45.00 cloth. In her book The Borderlands of Race: Mexican Segregation in a South Texas Town, Jennifer R. Nájera uses evidence from both public education and the Catholic Church to trace the development of what she calls a “culture of Mexican segregation” in La Feria, a small South Texas town on the United States–Mexico border. Her historical ethnography traces the development chronologically through the 20th century. She concludes that despite the advances in breaking down the culture of segregation—especially following the social movements of the 1960s and the efforts of Mexican American activists in both the public schools and the Catholic Church—practices of segregation “endured well past the passage of the major civil rights legislation” in La Feria (9). Indeed, it appears to exist today, based on her description of class (if not racial) segregation that she witnessed at high school football games that she attended during her fieldwork, which she describes in the book’s epilogue. Nájera uses primary and secondary sources and oral histories to describe how the culture of Mexican segregation developed over time. The strength of the book is that by doing so, she links “global” or structural and racialized processes at work on the US-Mexico border to the local experiences of La Feria residents with those processes. Since racism is alive and well in the United States (despite popular claims that America is “postracial”), Nájera’s finding that a culture of segregation continues to exist in La Feria should not surprise any of her readers. Yet the strength of her work is also a weakness: one wonders if she might have located more archival evidence of La Feria residents’ personal experiences in order to more fully substantiate her narrative. Because she relies on the oral testimony of a small number of individuals as evidence of the local and personal impact of segregation, the evidence can seem anecdotal at points. Nevertheless, the personal and quotidian experiences of segregation outlined in the book should be a welcome addition to the literature on race in the US-Mexico borderlands. [End Page 139] Tracy Brown Central Michigan University Copyright © 2016 Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska–Lincoln

Note: A concrete erosion sensor based on a chirped fibre optic Bragg grating.

Erosion of concrete surfaces in major civil structures is a common problem, which in certain circumstances can undermine the structural and operational integrities of the structure. The manual monitoring of the erosion process can be difficult and dangerous under certain circumstances (such as within hydrotunnels and spillways of dams). This paper describes a concrete erosion sensor based on a chirped fibre Bragg grating (FBG) which is able to monitor the extent of concrete erosion at a single point to sub-millimetre accuracy. The chirped FBG length embedded below the concrete surface decreases as a result of concrete erosion and consequently the reflected light spectrum bandwidth narrows. A simple procedure is presented to determine the extent of erosion, and this procedure is applied to an experimental demonstration of the sensing device.

Independent and effective? The post-Leveson framework for press regulation

This paper aims to show how the legal framework for independent self-regulation of the press in the United Kingdom has developed in the three years since the publication of the Leveson Report in November 2012. The paper begins by providing a brief summary of the negotiations between major newspaper publishers, politicians and civil society organisations which led to the development of a legal framework that is similar to but distinct from the framework recommended by Lord Justice Leveson. This framework is referred to here as the ‘post-Leveson framework’. The paper goes on to show how the post-Leveson framework has been implemented in the relevant provisions of the Royal Charter on Self-Regulation of the Press, the Enterprise and Regulatory Reform Act 2013 and the Crime and Courts Act 2013. It then provides a first-hand account of the development of a new self-regulatory body, IMPRESS: The Independent Monitor for the Press CIC, which is designed to inhabit this framework. The paper concludes by arguing that the Leveson recommendations, despite legal and political challenges, may yet have a significant and beneficial impact on the future of media regulation in the United Kingdom.

Decent Work, Human Rights and the Sustainable Development Goals

In September 2015, the United Nations General Assembly will adopt the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), which will guide international development policy and practice for a fifteen-year period from 2015 to 2030. The SDGs are critically important as most international development efforts over those fifteen years – including those of donors, major development institutions, national governments and civil society – will likely be directed toward achieving these goals. The SDGs follow on the heels of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), which have guided international development from 2000 to 2015. An extensive global public consultation has been underway for three years leading up to the UN General Assembly meeting planned for September 2015 that will finalize the new SDGs and targets. Much of the SDG discussion builds upon the lessons learned from the MDG experience, addressing both the achievements and the criticisms. This article uses a human rights lens to reflect back over the successes and shortcomings of the MDG framework generally, and then examines in particular the target and indicators on full employment and decent work for all. Against this background, the article considers whether the decent work goal, targets and indicators proposed for the post-2015 framework truly integrate human rights and ILO standards into the international development agenda in a way that is consistent with the international legal obligations of the States parties.

Local Protest and Federal Policy: The Impact of the Civil Rights Movement on the 1964 Civil Rights Act

When and how do movements influence policy change? We examine the dynamics leading up to Kennedy's decision to pursue major civil rights legislation in 1963. This marked a key turning point in shifting the executive branch from a timid and gradualist approach. Although it is widely taken for granted that the civil rights movement propelled this shift, how the movement mattered is less clear. While most protest targeted local economic actors, movement influence was exerted at the national level on political actors. Thus, movement influence was indirect. We focus on the relationship between local movement efforts to desegregate public accommodations (restaurants, movie theaters, hotels, etc.) and federal responses to movement demands. Although exchanges between movement actors and the federal government took place throughout the period, the logic of federal response evolved as political actors sought strategies to minimize racial conflict. Specifically, the Kennedy administration shifted to a dual strategy. First, the Department of Justice attempted to promote “voluntary” desegregation by working with executives of national companies and civic groups. Second, administration officials worked with these same groups to build support for major legislation among key interest groups. This shift toward a more assertive and proactive intervention in civil rights stands in contrast to the pessimism regarding the prospects for federal policy only a few months earlier. We examine the logic of this response including the impact of civil rights protest on the administration's policy proposals.

Of One Shotters and Repeat-Hitters: A Retrospective on the Role of the European Parliament in the EU-US PNR Litigation

EU International Relations has long been an Executive and Member State-dominant domain. Yet while the European Parliament is now recently empowered in international relations, with information and veto rights, its rights are enhanced only modestly by Inter-Institutional Agreements. The European Parliament has a history of expanding the constitutional boundaries of its own powers through litigation but has made limited inroads into international relations. In non-legal accounts of EU-US relations, the Parliament is portrayed as having reached the height of its empowerment, no longer able to improve the substantive content of EU-US Agreements. However, the Parliament also secured the annulment of the EU-US PNR Agreement in 2006, taken in 2004, and has acted thereafter as political guardian of citizens’ rights. Currently, there is Parliament-initiated litigation ongoing to enhance the transparency of EU transatlantic relations.The EU-US PNR litigation represents one of one of the first major civil liberties challenges taken by the European Parliament. However, the case is not renowned for its victory on these grounds. Rather, there the Court annulled the controversial EU-US PNR agreement with sparse reasoning, and in the views of many, thereby enabled the US to avail of the legal fall-out and compel the EU to negotiate an even ‘worse’ deal.In the midst of the recent NSA surveillance saga, the European Parliament has sought to raise its voice and conduct an inquiry and meaningfully influence EU-US relations. Thus its specific legal powers in EU-US relations and its powers to object to and suspend international agreements have come to the fore again. This paper offers a retrospective look at this litigation taken in 2004, almost a decade ago and considers its legacy upon EU law, EU-US relations, institutional balance and the role of the European Parliament as litigator.

Capac Women and the Politics of Marriage in Early Colonial Peru

During the major Inca civil wars, Atahualpa had almost exterminated Huascar’s kin. Only a few capac women, those who descended from Manco Capac, the founder of the Inca dynasty, remained alive. Atahualpa had planned to take them as his principal wives since only this type of marriage could successfully maintain the authority of the Incas over a large Andean territory. The Spanish arrival in 1532 interrupted his plans, but it did not eliminate Inca claims of sovereignty through marriage. In fact, it was through marriage that Atahualpa aimed to establish political alliances with Francisco Pizarro. While both Incas and Spaniards understood marriage on their own terms, there were many instances in which both were willing to redefine their own concepts of marriage in their struggle for power. In all of these, the women engaged in these unions were not only conscious about their political roles, but agents in the main historical events of this period.

Achieving inclusive design: consultation with disabled people

Transport for Greater Manchester (TfGM) recognises the importance of continuing to innovate and improve accessibility across all modes of transport and associated infrastructure within the conurbation. In 2008, when work began to expand the Metrolink light rail system, TfGM established a consultative group entitled the Disability Design Reference Group (DDRG) to support this major civil engineering project. The DDRG enables TfGM to discharge its legal and ethical duties by providing a means of influencing the next generation of inclusive design by anticipating and proposing practical solutions in relation to gaps in existing accessibility guidance and standards. This paper details the approach taken to enable the DDRG to support meaningful and appropriate consultation using the life experience and technical knowledge of disabled people to support delivery of tangible project outcomes. The DDRG consultation process, recognised as a model of best practice by the UK Equality and Human Rights Commission, encompasses the whole project life cycle, from concept design stage, through detailed design, through to physically testing the installed works. The paper concludes with suggestions on how the model could be applied to other projects.

Новые аспекты дискурса о “реальполитик” Берлина

The article investigates approaches taken by major political parties and civil society in the FRG toward the Transatlantic partnership. It reveals the tendencies of the prospective promotion of Berlin’s cooperation with Washington; the article also gives a forecast of further interaction between the EU and the USA, indicates the direction of discourse regarding the future Russia–Germany relations model in the context of the Ukrainian crisis and in reference to the increased transatlantic solidarity. Disputes in German socio-political circles on the issue of the FRG’s policy toward the U.S. are emerging all the time, but they have to be considered within a concrete historical and political context. Being of primary significance for all German chancellors, the Trans-Atlantic factor has been shaping itself in a controversial way as to the nation’s public opinion. This has been confirmed by many opinion polls, including the survey on the signing of the EU–U.S. Agreement on the Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership. Chancellor A. Merkel is playing an important role: she is either ascribed full compliancy with Washington, or is being tentatively shown as a consistent government figure in advancing and upholding of Germany's and the EU's interests. A. Merkel has implemented her peace-seeking drive in undoing the Ukrainian tangle by setting up the “Normandy format” involving the leaders of Germany, France, Russia and Ukraine while having cleared it through with the U.S. President B. Obama well in advance. Despite the increasing criticism of Washington’s policy among some part of Germans, for the majority of German voters, the USA remains a country of implementable hopes, the only power in the world possessing a high education level and the most advanced technologies. Americans, for their part, are confident of the important role that Berlin plays in world politics, particularly in what concerns the maintenance of unity within the EU. Berlin aims at further constructive interaction with the USA in the frame of NATO as well as within other Trans-Atlantic formats. Notwithstanding the steady tendency toward increasing of the Washington policy’s critical perception degree in German society, officially Berlin continues as Washington’s true ally, partner and friend. There is every reason to believe that after the 2017 Bundestag elections, the new (the former) Chancellor will have to face a modernized Trans-Atlantic partnership philosophy, with a paradigm also devised in the spirit of the bloc discipline and commitments to allies. The main concern for Berlin is not to lose its sovereign right of decision-making, including the one that deals with problems of European security and relations with Moscow. Regrettably, Germany is not putting forward any innovative ideas on aligning a new architecture of European security with Russia’s participation. Meanwhile, German scholars and experts are trying to work out a tentative algorithm of a gradual return to the West’s full-fledged dialogue with Russia, which, unfortunately, is qualified as an opponent by many politicians. Predictably, the Crimea issue will remain a long-lasting political irritant in relations between Russia and Germany. Although not every aspect of Berlin’s activation in its foreign policy finds support of the German public, and the outburst of anti-American feeling is obvious, experts believe that the government of the FRG is “merely taking stock of these phenomena and ignores them”. Evident is the gap between the government's line and the feeling of the German parties’ basis – the public. It is noteworthy that the FRG has not yet adopted the Law on Holding General Federal Referendums on key issues of the domestic and foreign policy. There is every indication to assume that the real causes of abandoning the nationwide referendums are the reluctance of the German ruling bureaucracy and even its apprehensions of the negative voting returns on sensitive problems, – such as basic documents and decisions of the EU, the export of German arms, relations with the U.S., etc. The harmony between Berlin’s "Realpolitik" and German public opinion is not yet discernible within the system of Trans-Atlantic axes.

A Conversation with Edie Windsor

Suzanne Goldberg [SG): It is not often that a law school gets to welcome a rock star. But in our world, Edie Windsor is a rock star. She is one of the major civil rights plaintiffs of our lifetime, whose lawsuit challenged--and triumphed over--the federal Defense of Marriage Act. Her victory in that suit has been vital to changing the landscape of marriage equality for all Americans. It is a tremendous honor, Edie, to have you here at Columbia Law School, and we welcome you. Edie Windsor [EW]: Thank you so much. SG: will start off by asking the first question in our conversation this afternoon, and then Andrew Chesley and Madeline Gomez, who are both Columbia Law School students, will be following up with questions we have collected from students throughout the law school. Edie, you have shown courage in every imaginable way: entering the computer science field as a young woman at a time where there were few women computer scientists--in fact, there were barely computer scientists; making the decision to get divorced and then coming to New York City to find other lesbians; and then coming out in so many ways. So when Time Magazine called you the unlikely it was not quite right because in so many ways, for so many years, you have been an activist, and you have been willing to challenge conventions. (1) Let's start the conversation by you just talking about how it was as a young lesbian coming to New York and confronting this world, and then also about some of the activism that you've done along the way before you filed your lawsuit against the United States government. EW: First of all, came out late enough in life that missed a lot of the pain of adolescence when you're gay and don't belong. first had any kind of real relationship with a woman when was a first-year student in college. And didn't fall in love seriously with a woman until was in my third year in college. Meanwhile had become engaged to be married to a great guy, who was my big brother's best friend. He and did get married, but when saw two women together on a Saturday night, was jealous. had never been out with a girlfriend even on a Saturday night. went out with boyfriends. So it was a whole different world. told my husband, Honey, you deserve more and need something else. But as said, missed most of the pain. came to New York and there was nothing but bars, and 1 didn't even know how to find them. The first time went to a bar, really wasn't living in New York yet. came in for a wedding, and then got on the Fifth Avenue bus and went downtown. stopped a woman on the street who had on a trenchcoat. And said, Do you know a bar where only women go? She sent me to Thompson Street, L's Bar. sat down at the bar, and ordered a drink; had never paid for a drink myself in my life until then. And nobody talked to me. was dressed to the T, and nobody said hello, nobody said anything. sat there for two hours and then left. Okay. thought, this is not going to be easy. My first real experience with being afraid of being gay came when worked on the UNIVAC at NYU, which was mostly subsidized by the government and used primarily by the Atomic Energy Commission. (2) We had to have security clearances. got a notice from the FBI inviting me to a meeting and saying did not need a lawyer at this point. got a book to get ready--and the book was the first time saw the word (3) It also had an appendix with the states and what was illegal in each state. It said that as far as women were concerned, that in New York, as long as you weren't imitating a man or pretending you were a man, you were safe. And in the bars, everybody said that so long as you were wearing two pieces of women's underwear, you would be safe if the police raided. So didn't want to lie. If they asked me, wanted to say, I am gay. I'll probably lose my job, but won't be arrested. …

Coastal climate risk and adaptation studies: The importance of understanding different classes of problem

Economic intensification continues to increase along many of the world's coastlines. This intensification, which includes asset and infrastructure intensification, along with the increasing likelihood of inundation associated with sea level rise, implies an increasing risk profile for many coastal communities. In response, many cities and owners of major civil infrastructure have commissioned climate risk and adaptation studies in order to develop adaptation strategies. In many cases the same methods, terminology and approaches have been applied in studies of adaptation options for entire communities as for individual structures and assets. It is argued here that as a result of the different scales and complexity between whole communities and individual assets or structures, it is desirable that tailored approaches to identifying adaptation options need to be applied. In particular, it is recommended that categorising settlement and infrastructure studies into either community-scale, or infrastructure-scale problems will help to ensure that the most appropriate methodological approaches are be used.

Machine learning in concrete strength simulations: Multi-nation data analytics

Machine learning (ML) techniques are increasingly used to simulate the behavior of concrete materials and have become an important research area. The compressive strength of high performance concrete (HPC) is a major civil engineering problem. However, the validity of reported relationships between concrete ingredients and mechanical strength is questionable. This paper provides a comprehensive study using advanced ML techniques to predict the compressive strength of HPC. Specifically, individual and ensemble learning classifiers are constructed from four different base learners, including multilayer perceptron (MLP) neural network, support vector machine (SVM), classification and regression tree (CART), and linear regression (LR). For ensemble models that integrate multiple classifiers, the voting, bagging, and stacking combination methods are considered. The behavior simulation capabilities of these techniques are investigated using concrete data from several countries. The comparison results show that ensemble learning techniques are better than learning techniques used individually to predict HPC compressive strength. Although the two single best learning models are SVM and MLP, the stacking-based ensemble model composed of MLP/CART, SVM, and LR in the first level and SVM in the second level often achieves the best performance measures. This study validates the applicability of ML, voting, bagging, and stacking techniques for simple and efficient simulations of concrete compressive strength.

Modeling instantaneous heavy gas releases with FDS5

Releases of heavy flammable gases are responsible of many major civil and industrial incidents with very large property loss and number of victims. Fire Dynamics Simulator 5 (FDS5) is a fire modeling CFD code developed by NIST that is widely known in the fire engineering community.The code is specifically suited to deal with multicomponent buoyancy driven natural flow, where the low Mach number assumption holds and the pressure is only slightly different from the background atmospheric value. This study presents the comparison between experimental results relevant to heavy gas or vapors instantaneous releases and FDS5 predictions. Comparison with experimental results shows that concentrations and cloud arrival times in the heavy gas cloud regime, when concentrations of the heavy component in the plume are high, can be predicted by the code. The present work is focused on gravitationally driven heavy gas dispersion in calm environments.

Unsettling the lawyers: Other forms of justice in Indigenous claims of expropriation, abuse, and injustice

This article considers, from the experience of the Indian Residential Schools Settlement, the limitations of the current formal justice system and the common ways that lawyers and parties act within it. Looking at the combinations of lawsuits, settlement negotiations, structured compensation schemes, truth and reconciliation processes, and memorial and education programs now provided for in the IRSS, the article suggests that we may need ‘process pluralism’ and different orientations to deal with modern mass harms: now recognized harms (like loss of culture, family, language, as well as physical, mental, and social injury) that the formal legal system has not yet developed the capacity to address. Placing the IRSS in a larger international context, the article suggests that some legal and social recognition of ‘new’ human harms and injuries has necessitated the development of different legal and quasi-legal processes. Whether called ‘restorative,’ ‘transitional,’ or ‘alternative’ justice, new forms of dealing with wrongs, harms, and conflicts will require redesigning legal processes and institutions; legal professional education; and social, cultural, and philosophical orientations to human injuries and ‘redress.’ Not all who are injured (both individually and in groups) want or require the same ‘remedies,’ and our conventional and historical common law and adversarial system must be adapted to the diverse needs of those who are injured by past and unconscionable wrongs, especially when inflicted by major governmental, religious, and civil society institutions and practices.

Who put the “lie” in LIBOR (and who should take it out)? Civil LIBOR litigation in the US

The ongoing LIBOR crisis could potentially prove to be one of the most significant legal and policy dilemmas of the financial crisis. Although considerable effort has been underway to reimagine the regulatory apparatus that oversees and administers the setting of LIBOR, much of the significant regulatory activity thus far has been retrospective – through legal proceedings. Particularly within the United States, civil litigation has begun to play a prominent role in this process. This paper surveys and assesses the major extant LIBOR-related civil lawsuits to date, ranging from antitrust to securities to fiduciary to contract to common law fraud. We conclude that many of these theories of liability are plausible, but that they will face considerable challenges either in establishing liability or in proving significant damages (or both). In the light of these limitations, we conclude that civil liability is not likely to provide sufficient deterrence benefits going forward, and that various forms of “ex ante” regulatory reform must play a central role.

The Civil War in Photographs: New Perspectives From the Robin Stanford Collection by Anne Peterson (review)

Reviewed by: The Civil War in Photographs: New Perspectives From the Robin Stanford Collection by Anne Peterson Bob Cavendish The Civil War in Photographs: New Perspectives From the Robin Stanford Collection. By Anne Peterson. (Dallas: DeGloyer Library, 2013. Pp 104. Color, sepia, and black and white illustrations, works cited.) “If he has not brought bodies and laid them in our door yards . . .” the New York Times said of Matthew Brady’s photographs of Antietam’s casualties, “he has done something very like it.” Photography matured during the U.S. Civil War, expanding beyond the key and the commonplace participants. Nineteenth- century Americans who would not typically travel more than ten miles from their “door yards” and neighborhoods saw a broader, war-ravaged America of battlefield sites, hospitals, camp grounds, and villages through a camera lens; photographs became the basis of newspaper sketches accompanying war dispatches published in the Times and Harpers Weekly. Photographers like Brady, Alexander Gardner, G. H. Houghton, Samuel Cooley, and dozens of others amassed extensive inventories of glass plate images, which ultimately became so commonplace that all too many wound up as windowpanes in postwar greenhouses if not lost altogether. Yet hundreds of others survived in the National Archives and in private collections of limited access. Fortunately for scholars and Civil War aficionados, Robin Stanford of Houston, Texas, spent forty years building a collection of primarily stereoscopic images based on well-known and also less familiar photographs. The Stanford Collection, the subject of this brief volume, completed its appearance in March 2013 at the DeGolyer Library on the Southern Methodist University campus in Dallas. Visitors saw antebellum and wartime images by less famous southern photographers, images of daily military life, slave life, and battle-site photographs from locales in Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Texas. Exhibit curator Anne Peterson’s Civil War in Photographs (CWP) is an introduction to the Stanford collection. In eighteen sections, she includes various stereoscope images, sepia-toned and some hand tinted. Included in CWP are rarely (if ever) seen before views of Brownsville, Texas, during occupation and poignant images of the country in mourning following Lincoln’s murder in 1865. Captions explain the background and subject matter for most of the sample images but there are occasional errors. A Winfield Hancock photograph caption scrambles the order of those in the picture and misidentifies Union general Francis C. Barlow (a future prosecutor of New York’s Tweed Ring) as Seth M. Barton, a Confederate general unlikely to appear in the same picture alongside Hancock in 1864. Peterson’s narration throughout CWP moves quickly. The raison d’être, however, is the corpus of photographs behind the glimpses afforded in these ninety-plus pages, a sample of images compiled by a less well-known body of men whose images we did not often see. This is not a major Civil War work but it does not purport to be. For the casual reader, CWP is an interesting commentary on our most devastating war. For the scholar, CWP is a treasure that escaped the fate of its greenhouse windowpane counterparts and made available thanks to the teamwork of the DeGolyer staff and Anne Peterson and the generosity of Robin Stanford. [End Page 441] Bob Cavendish Austin, Texas Copyright © 2014 The Texas State Historical Association