To help prevent discrimination, particularly against women and ethnic minorities, policymakers in the United States (US) have written and passed civil rights laws that require employers to address hate or harassment at workplaces. Sometimes, however, the programs that corporate managers create do not actually give workers a full opportunity to resolve their complaints; the programs are, instead, symbolic attempts to comply with federal and state civil rights legislation. Moreover, judges have come to see the mere existence of these programs, inadequate as they are, as evidence that corporations protect workers' rights.

We consider an SIR (susceptible $\to$ infective $\to$ recovered) epidemic in a closed population of size n, in which infection spreads via mixing events, comprising individuals chosen uniformly at random from the population, which occur at the points of a Poisson process. This contrasts sharply with most epidemic models, in which infection is spread purely by pairwise interaction. A sequence of epidemic processes, indexed by n, and an approximating branching process are constructed on a common probability space via embedded random walks. We show that under suitable conditions the process of infectives in the epidemic process converges almost surely to the branching process. This leads to a threshold theorem for the epidemic process, where a major outbreak is defined as one that infects at least $\log n$ individuals. We show further that there exists $\delta \gt 0$, depending on the model parameters, such that the probability that a major outbreak has size at least $\delta n$ tends to one as $n \to \infty$.

The end of Roe v. Wade has significant implications for the autonomy of pregnant patients at the end of life. At least thirty states restrict the choice to withhold/withdraw life-sustaining treatments from pregnant patients without decisional capacity, invalidating prior advance directives and prohibiting others from choosing these options for the patient. Many restrictions are based on the Roe framework, applying after “viability” or similar considerations of fetal development or prospect for live birth. Scholars have also relied on the abortion framework, arguing that the restrictions impose an undue burden. The end of Roe will free states from having to craft limited restrictions designed to work around prior abortion jurisprudence. Similarly, advocates will no longer be able to draw support from the abortion framework, forcing them to rely instead on cases supporting rights to autonomy/bodily integrity in medical decision-making.

Urban green spaces are indispensable for the conservation of biodiversity in Germany. In addition, the availability of green areas often provides citizens with the only opportunity to experience nature. Lichens are an important component of urban environments in terms of both species diversity, and ecosystem functions and services. However, they are rarely the subject of biodiversity education. To bolster awareness on their diversity and appreciation, a transformative biodiversity education in both the formal and informal sectors is necessary. This transformative biodiversity education should not only provide knowledge about species and habitats, but also on all dimensions of biodiversity, viz., the three levels of biodiversity, drivers of biodiversity loss, and ecosystem services. For this reason, the design of biodiversity education may be particularly challenging for educators and teachers. This paper shows how biodiversity education projects on urban lichens can be developed in accordance with the principles of transformative education, supporting nature experience, knowledge transfer (species knowledge in a broad sense and interdisciplinary aspects), participation and cooperation, as well as the use of digital media. Two best-case projects, tested in Germany, are presented as examples for the design and implementation of a transformative lichen education in urban areas. A similar approach can be easily applied in other education systems beyond national boundaries.

This essay examines the right of health care freedom of choice contained in some state constitutions. It explores how courts have, and could, use this constitutional health care right as a basis for recognizing or reinforcing a fundamental right to choose an abortion.

Abortion stories have always played a powerful role in advancing women’s rights. In the abortion sphere particularly, the personal is political. Following the Court’s reversal of Roe v. Wade, abortion politics, and abortion storytelling, take on an even deeper political role in challenging the bloodless judicial language of Dobbs with the lived experience of women.

The Hill House by Charles Rennie Mackintosh (1902-04) is widely considered a seminal work of early modern architecture. Today, after more than a century of saturating Scottish weather, the house is crumbling from water damage and needing renovation. In 2019, the first stage of works to stabilise the house and rectify its damp walls began in radical fashion with the ’Hill House Box’ by London-based architects Carmody Groarke. Like an oversized architectural raincoat, this roof and chainmesh-walled structure completely encases the house, allowing it to dry out before conservation works can begin. The design also incorporates a series of walkways through the interstitial volume, enabling visitors to observe the old building from new vantage points during its renovation. As such, the enclosure not only forms a protective case, but effectively turns the building - and its conservation - into a museological exhibit.

The architectural interest of the Hill House Box, however, lies in its encounter with Mackintosh’s temporally and stylistically distinct design, and the perverse strategy of placing one building inside another. For this essay, the Hill House and its new box highlight the underexamined architecture of buildings-in-buildings and, in particular, the creation of spaces that are neither interior nor exterior, but both, simultaneously. Drawing upon a diverse array of buildings and texts, this paper will attempt to outline a theoretical framework through which such composite constructions might be better understood. In particular, it will argue that, while there are countless ways that buildings have historically become encased within other buildings, it is within museums and sites of preservation, like the Hill House Box, that these fantastic architectural encounters find their most exciting and emphatic expressions.