We theorize that if law matters in Supreme Court decision making, it matters not as a mechanistic force that dictates decisions, but as an institutional construct created by justices who possess political attitudes. Jurisprudential regimes identify relevant case factors and/or set the level of scrutiny or balancing the justices will use. These jurisprudential regimes have the potential to make a significant difference in the decisions of the justices. We identify a candidate jurisprudential regime, content-neutrality, which appears to govern the general area of free expression law. The Court applies the strictest standard of review to regulations of expression that target the content or viewpoint of expression. Relying on a series of statistical tests using logistic regression, we find that the justices take seriously this jurisprudential regime.

Membrane protein interactions with lipids are crucial for their native biological behavior, yet traditional characterization methods are often carried out on purified protein in the absence of lipids. We present a simple method to transfer membrane proteins expressed in mammalian cells to an assay-friendly, cushioned, supported lipid bilayer platform using cell blebs as an intermediate. Cell blebs, expressing either GPI-linked yellow fluorescent proteins or neon-green fused transmembrane P2X2 receptors, were induced to rupture on glass surfaces using PEGylated lipid vesicles, which resulted in planar supported membranes with over 50% mobility for multipass transmembrane proteins and over 90% for GPI-linked proteins. Fluorescent proteins were tracked, and their diffusion in supported bilayers characterized, using single molecule tracking and moment scaling spectrum (MSS) analysis. Diffusion was characterized for individual proteins as either free or confined, revealing details of the local lipid membrane heterogeneity surrounding the protein. A particularly useful result of our bilayer formation process is the protein orientation in the supported planar bilayer. For both the GPI-linked and transmembrane proteins used here, an enzymatic assay revealed that protein orientation in the planar bilayer results in the extracellular domains facing toward the bulk, and that the dominant mode of bleb rupture is via the "parachute" mechanism. Mobility, orientation, and preservation of the native lipid environment of the proteins using cell blebs offers advantages over proteoliposome reconstitution or disrupted cell membrane preparations, which necessarily result in significant scrambling of protein orientation and typically immobilized membrane proteins in SLBs. The bleb-based bilayer platform presented here is an important step toward integrating membrane proteomic studies on chip, especially for future studies aimed at understanding fundamental effects of lipid interactions on protein activity and the roles of membrane proteins in disease pathways.

In this research note, we apply the construct of jurisprudential regimes as described in our recent article in American Political Science Review to the area of Establishment Clause jurisprudence. We hypothesize that Lemon v. Kurtzman represented a jurisprudential regime in the Supreme Court's decisionmaking in this area of law. Our analysis shows that the predictors of the Court's decisions in the two periods differed in ways that are very consistent with the types of changes one would expect the hypothesized regime shift to produce.

In this research note/replication, we apply the construct of jurisprudential regimes as described in our recent article to the jurisprudential area of search and seizure. Given the centrality of this area of Supreme Court decision making in the core studies supporting the attitudinal model, replicating our analysis of the jurisprudential regime construct in this area provides an important test of the concept. Our results produce strong support for the proposition that post-Mapp decision making can be separated into distinct regimes, with a set of important cases decided in 1983-1984 demarcating the regimes. The predictors of decisions in the two periods are consistent with the types of changes one would expect the regime shift to produce. Our findings challenge the attitudinalists’proposition that there is at best negligible statistical evidence that law influences Supreme Court decision making.

Lipid–protein interactions are essential for modulating membrane protein structures and biological functions in the cell plasma membrane. In this review we describe the salient features of classical and emerging methodologies for studying protein–lipid interactions and their limitations.

In this article we evaluate whether the Supreme Court's much-discussed decision in Chevron v Natural Resources Defense Council (1984) signaled a lasting difference in how the justices decide administrative law cases, by comparing and testing the predictions of three distinct theories of Supreme Court behavior. The legal model predicts an increase in deference to administrative agencies. This prediction is shared by the jurisprudential regime model, which also predicts that the justices evaluate key case factors differently before and after Chevron . The attitudinal model predicts no change in the justices' behavior as a result of Chevron . Although we find that attitudes matter, the fact that we also find support for the legal and jurisprudential regime models undermines the assertion of the attitudinal model that law cannot explain Supreme Court votes on the merits.

A new method is presented to separate, enrich, and sort membrane-bound biomolecules based on their affinity for different coexisting lipid phases in a supported lipid bilayer using a two-dimensional, continuous extraction procedure. Analogous to classic liquid-liquid phase extraction, we created two distinct lipid phases in our planar membrane system: a liquid-ordered (l(o)) phase and a liquid-disordered (l(d)) phase arranged in parallel stripes inside a microfluidic device. Membrane-bound biomolecules in an adjacent supported lipid bilayer are convected in plane along the microfluidic channel and brought into contact with a different lipid phase using hydrodynamic force. A mixture of two lipid species, a glycolipid and a phospholipid, with known affinities for the two lipid phases employed here are used to demonstrate continuous extraction of the lipid-microdomain preferring glycolipid to the lo phase, while the phospholipid remains primarily in the ld phase. In this demonstration, we characterize the performance of this affinity-based separation device by building models to describe the velocity profile and transport in the two-phase coexistent membrane. We then characterize the impact of residence time on the extraction yield of each species. This new procedure sorts membrane species on the basis of chemical properties and affinities for specific lipid phases within a membrane environment near physiological conditions, critical for extending this method to the separation of lipid-linked proteins and transmembrane proteins while minimizing denaturation. This platform could facilitate the separation and identification of lipid membrane domain residents, or the characterization of changes in membrane affinity due to post-translational modifications or environmental conditions.

Abstract-The performance of Particle Swarm Optimization can be improved by strategically selecting the starting positions of the particles. This work suggests the use of generators from centroidal Voronoi tessellations as the starting points for the swarm. The performance of swarms initialized with this method is compared with the standard PSO algorithm on several standard test functions. Results suggest that CVT initialization improves PSO performance in high-dimensional spaces.