Digital Commons Network^™

Does The Constitutional Process Matter?, Zachary Elkins

Zachary Elkins

Constitution-making is a ubiquitous but poorly understood phenomenon. There is much speculation but relatively little evidence about the impact of different design processes on constitutional outcomes. Much of the debate reduces to the question of who is involved in the process and when. We consider two central issues in this regard. The first is the problem of institutional self-dealing, or whether governmental organs that have something to gain from the constitutional outcome should be involved in the process. The second has to do with the merits of public involvement in the process. Both of these concerns have clear normative implications …

Ancillary Powers Of Constitutional Courts, Zachary Elkins, Tom Ginsburg

Zachary Elkins

No abstract provided.

Cross-Price Elasticity And Income Elasticity Of Demand: Are Your Students Confused?, Philip E. Graves, Robert L. Sexton

Robert L Sexton

The authors demonstrate that most textbooks are ambiguous at best in their treatment of cross-price elasticity and income elasticity of demand. There is also no discussion of what initiates a price increase in discussions of substitutes and complements in the textbooks examined. The authors offer a remedy for these deficiencies.

Saateks, Rain Liivoja

Rain Liivoja

This is an introductory essay to accompany the Estonian translation of Jean Henri Dunant's Un Souvenir de Solférino. The text explains the history of the book and its impact on the subsequent development of the law of armed conflict.

Assur Is King Of Persia: Illustrations Of The Book Of Esther In Some Nineteenth-Century Sources, Steven W. Holloway

Steven W Holloway

No abstract provided.

Fitting Punishment, Juliet P. Stumpf

Juliet P Stumpf

Proportionality is conspicuously absent from the legal framework for immigration sanctions. Immigration law relies on one sanction – deportation – as the ubiquitous penalty for any immigration violation. Neither the gravity of the violation nor the harm that results bears on whether deportation is the consequence for an immigration violation. Immigration law stands alone in the legal landscape in this respect. Criminal punishment incorporates proportionality when imposing sentences that are graduated based on the gravity of the offense; contract and tort law provide for damages that are graduated based on the harm to others or to society. This Article represents …

Three Terms Of The Kennedy Court: Projecting The Future Of Constitutional Doctrine, Kenneth M. Murchison

Kenneth M Murchison

This Article evaluates the likely direction of constitutional doctrine now that Justice Kennedy is clearly the pivotal justice on most controversial constitutional issues. The article begins with a summary of Justice Kennedy’s positions on a range of constitutional issues and of his influence on constitutional doctrine in the decade before Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Alito joined the Court. It then examines the closely divided decisions of the last three terms and projects how constitutional doctrine is likely to change for the foreseeable future. Finally, it considers the extent to which stare decisis, changes in Justice Kennedy’s thought, and the …

Evaluation Of Design 4 Studio's Role In Professional Abilities Of Yazd University Graduates In Architecture, Farhad Shariatrad, Hosein Mahdavipur

Farhad Shariatrad

Responding To Deception: The Case Of Fraud In Financial Markets, Elisabeth Brooke Harrington

Brooke Harrington

The economic history of the 21st century reads like a litany of Biblical plagues: instead of locusts,frogs and boils, we have Enron, WorldCom and Tyco, followed by the options-backdating scandal, and now the sub-prime mortgage meltdown. It is perhaps even more disheartening to realize that American investors are still in much the same position as Emerson was over 150 years ago: dismayed to find themselves on the receiving end of deceptive corporate practices. BusinessWeek summed up this crisis in financial markets with the headline: “Can You Trust Anybody Anymore?”

Introduction: Beyond True And False, Elisabeth Brooke Harrington

Brooke Harrington

It seems fitting to follow Murray Gell-Mann’s Foreword with a story involving two other illustrious physicists. During the 1940s, Leó Szilárd—who discovered the nuclear chain reaction—decided to keep a diary of his work on the Manhattan Project. He told Hans Bethe, one of his colleagues on the project, that he didn’t intend to publish the diary, but only “to record the facts for the information of God.” “Don't you think God knows the facts?” Bethe asked. “Yes,” Szilárd responded, “He knows the facts, but He does not know this version of the facts.”

Trust And Estate Planning, Elisabeth Brooke Harrington

Brooke Harrington

This paper offers a fresh perspective on the connection between professional work and socio-economic inequality by tracing the emergence of the trust and estate planning profession in America. Unlike studies of inequality and the professions that focus on the status attainment of individuals and their families, or on labor market segregation, this paper explores professional work as a means of creating and reproducing larger systems of socio-economic stratification. Trust and estate planners contribute to macrolevel inequality by helping wealthy clients accumulate large fortunes and pass them on to their descendants; this, in turn, has shaped the status and composition of …

Building The Momentum For The Ilo’S Maritime Labour Convention, 2006, Cleopatra Doumbia-Henry

Cleopatra Doumbia-Henry

No abstract provided.

Adequate (Non)Provocation And Heat Of Passion As Excuse Not Justification, Reid Griffith Fontaine, Jd, Phd

Reid G. Fontaine

For a number of reasons, including the complicated psychological nature of reactive homicide, the heat of passion defense has remained subject to various points of confusion. One persistent issue of disagreement has been whether the defense is a partial justification or excuse. In this Article, I highlight and categorize a series of varied American homicide cases in which the applicability of heat of passion was supported although adequate provocation (or significant provocation by the victim) was absent. The cases are organized to illustrate that even in circumstances in which there is no actual provocation, or the provocation is not sourced …

Pirates Of The Caribbean: The Seiu's Failed Bid In Puerto Rico, César F. Rosado Marzán

César F. Rosado Marzán

No abstract provided.

Component Unit Pricing Theory, David W. Cattell

David Cattell

Building contractors are often commissioned using unit price based contracts. They, nevertheless, often compete on the basis of their overall project bids and yet are paid on the basis of these projects’ constituent item prices.

If a contractor decides these prices by way of applying an uneven mark-up to their estimates of their costs, this is known as unbalanced bidding.

This research provides proof and explanation that different item pricing scenarios produce different levels of reward for a contractor, whilst exposing them to different degrees of risk. The theory describes the three identified sources of these rewards as well as …

Impact Of Social Issues On Public Sector Employees: Research Summary And Implications For Workplace Conflict Professionals, Sherrill W. Hayes

Sherrill W. Hayes

The Dilemma Of The Vengeful Client: A Prescriptive Framework For Cooling The Flames Of Anger, Robin Slocum

Robin Slocum

Lawyers are presented with a challenging dilemma when counseling angry clients who seek to use the legal system as a weapon for vengeance. Legal scholars have argued that lawyers should, where appropriate, dissuade their angry clients from litigation strategies that are immoral or arguably unethical. However, angry clients are remarkably resistant to appeals based on morality and reason. Thus, it is not surprising that lawyers have been largely ineffective in their efforts to dissuade angry clients from using the legal system as a battlefield. Instead, lawyers often reluctantly defer to clients whose judgment is impaired by their emotional reactivity.

This …

Loneliness As A Partial Mediator Of The Relation Between Low Social Preference In Childhood And Anxious/Depressed Symptoms In Adolescence, Reid Griffith Fontaine, Chongming Yang, Virginia Salzer Burks, Kenneth A. Dodge, Joseph M. Price, Gregory S. Pettit, John E. Bates

Reid G. Fontaine

This study examined the mediating role of loneliness (assessed by self-report at Time 2; Grade 6) in the relation between early social preference (assessed by peer report at Time 1; kindergarten through Grade 3) and adolescent anxious/depressed symptoms (assessed by mother, teacher, and self-reports at Time 3; Grades 7–9). Five hundred eighty-five boys and girls (48% female; 16% African American) from three geographic sites of the Child Development Project were followed from kindergarten through Grade 9. Loneliness partially mediated and uniquely incremented the significant effect of low social preference in childhood on anxious/depressed symptoms in adolescence, controlling for early anxious/depressed …

Exhibition Catalogue - "Indigo: Laura Kina And Shelly Jyoti", Laura Kina

Laura Kina

Indigo: Laura Kina and Shelly Jyoti The torrid history of Indigo is reimagined by artists from Chicago, USA and Gujarat, India. Indigo: Laura Kina and Shelly Jyoti presents complementary bodies of artwork by Indian artist Shelly Jyoti and US artist Laura Kina in a range of media including hand-embroidery on khadi fabric, indigo resist dyeing, Sanskrit calligraphy and mixed-media on canvas. The narrative threads running throughout the artists’ work evoke India’s colonial history, stories of immigration, and the tensions and transformations of cultures evolving in a changing world. This traveling exhibition was featured in three venues in India in 2009-2010 …

Regulating Middlesex, Anne Bloom

Anne Bloom

No abstract provided.

Are (The Log-Odds Of) Hospital Mortality Rates Normally Distributed In Ontario? Implications For Studying Variations In Outcomes Of Medical Care, Peter C. Austin

Peter Austin

Objective: Hierarchical regression models are used to examine variations in outcomes following the provision of medical care across providers. These models frequently assume a normal distribution for the provider-specific random effects. Poincaré said, “Everyone believes in the normal law, the experimenters because they imagine it a mathematical theorem, and the mathematicians because they think it an experimental fact”. Our objective was to examine the appropriateness of this assumption when examining variations in mortality.

Study design and setting: We used Bayesian model selection methods to compare hierarchical regression models in which the provider-specific random effects were either a normal distribution or …

Eschatalogicallandscape, Kirby Farrell Prof

kirby farrell

Nazi obsession with art can be understood as a strategy for managing death-anxiety. The venerable trope of "immortal art" took on fetishistic qualities in the fantasies of the Nazi leadership. For many of them, art compensated for the trauma of World War I by framing idealized vitality invested with visionary self-expansiveness, as in the hyperbolic nudes of Thorak and Brekker, combined with a nostalgic recuperation of lost Victorian-era authority. In Ernest Becker’s terms, as creaturely motives, the manic looting of art works described in Lynn Nicholas’ The Rape of Europa acts out greed for life, appropriating hypostatized vitality as the …

Debunking The Myth Of Civil Rights Liberalism: Visions Of Racial Justice In The Thought Of T. Thomas Fortune, 1880-1890 Symposium: The Lawyer's Role In A Contemporary Democracy: Promoting Social Change And Political Values, Susan D. Carle

Susan D. Carle

Dr. Skateboard’S Action Science: Transforming Science Education For Middle School Students, William H. Robertson

William H. Robertson

The main objective of this article is to describe an example of unique and creative classroom materials that are built around a real world interest of Middle School students. Dr. Skateboard’s Action Science is a curriculum supplement that integrates both skateboarding and BMX. As an example of transformative education, it is built around student interests with a direct link to specific science knowledge and skills that need to be learned. It incorporates a four part video series and twenty classroom activities for students and teachers to use in the classroom. The video and classroom materials focus on the physical science …

Skateboard: Ciencia De Acción De Doctor Skateboard: Educacion Transformativa En Física, William H. Robertson

William H. Robertson

This article, written in Spanish, describes a transformative process for teaching physics in the middle school science classroom through an analysis of the use of Dr. Skateboard’s Action Science. Additionally, the article attempts to bridge efforts in the US, specifically in El Paso, Texas to opportunities that exist in Spanish speaking countries, including Mexico and Chile. The provided abstracts, in Spanish and English, describe how “action science” can be used in presenting fundamental science concepts and that this approach can be expanded from Middle schools to high schools and universities. Action science is an active learning methodology for teaching physics …

Bridging The Gap Between Real World Polar Science And The Classroom, William H. Robertson, Vanessa Lougheed, Craig Tweedie, Aaron Velasco, Claudia V. Garcia

William H. Robertson

The International Polar Year - Research and Educational Opportunities in Antarctica for Minorities (IPY-ROAM) program was designed to increase minority participation in polar science by immersing participants in an academic program that included a trip to Antarctica. The IPY-ROAM program was focused on increasing the public understanding of the Polar Regions and stimulating a new interest in polar science. This effort was coordinated by faculty from the University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP) and was implemented to positively contribute to the intense, internationally coordinated IPY scientific campaign. Through a grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF), a team of …

Not Just Key Numbers And Keywords Anymore: How User Interface Design Affects Legal Research, Julie M. Jones

AALL/LexisNexis Call for Papers

Legal research is one of the foundational skills for the practice of law. However, law school graduates frequently do not enter the bar with adequate competencies in this regard. Applying both information-foraging theory and current standards in optimal web design, Ms. Jones considers through a heuristic analysis whether the user interfaces of Westlaw and Lexis help or hinder the process of legal research and the development of effective research skills.