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Crossing The Digital Divide: An Integrated Technology And Learning Project For The 21st-Century Schoolhouse, Grace D. Healey

Abraham S. Fischler College of Education ETD Archive

This applied dissertation project developed a plan to design, implement, and disseminate innovative technology models produced by elementary students. With the integration of state curriculum frameworks, student-centered models were built to showcase student achievement and to champion technology as a viable learning tool.

The research site of this applied dissertation project was the Brown Elementary School. The Brown teachers needed to reach 85% technology literacy by 2003 according to the Massachusetts Department of Education. Due to a small school budget, outdated technology equipment, and limited software training for teachers and students, a digital divide had occurred that separated the Brown …

Citizens To Preserve Overton Park V. Volpe, Peter L. Strauss

Faculty Scholarship

This essay is one of a series destined to appear in a Foundation Press book, Administrative Law Stories, now set for publication in the fall of 2005. The decision in Citizens to Preserve Overton Park v. Volpe represents a transition from political to judicial controls over decisions broadly affecting a wide range of community interests. Unmistakable and dramatic as it is, that transition is not universally applauded. But the transition was striking and quick. The late sixties and early seventies saw an explosion of new national legislation on social and environmental issues, that often provided explicitly or implicitly for citizen …

Mome In Hindsight, Ronald J. Gilson, Reinier Kraakman

Faculty Scholarship

Two decades ago, the Virginia Law Review published our article “The Mechanisms of Market Efficiency” (MOME), in which we tried to discern the institutional underpinnings of financial market efficiency. We concluded that the level of market efficiency with respect to a particular fact depends on which of several market mechanisms — universally informed trading, professionally informed trading, derivatively informed trading, and uninformed trading (each of which we explain below) — operates to reflect that fact in market price. Which mechanism is operative, in turn, depends on how widely the fact is distributed among traders, which, I turn, depends on the …

Assessment And Accountability Through Data-Driven Instructional Decision Making: A Software Management Tool For The No Child Left Behind Act, Gayle Sweet Wood

Abraham S. Fischler College of Education ETD Archive

School-based educators face the task of aligning and integrating accountability measures such as high-stakes testing, state-mandated standards, and local curriculum programs with individual instructional strategies for student learning. In a pragmatic effort to compile and correlate the mandated accountability measures and numerous standards, a software program was designed. The intended outcome of the software program was twofold: to increase student mastery of the essential knowledge and skills in the four core content areas of English, mathematics, social studies, and science as legislated and measured by statewide accountability programs; and to establish the pedagogical strategies of using released, mandated high-stakes tests …

More Is Less, Philip A. Hamburger

Faculty Scholarship

Is the First Amendment's right of free exercise of religion conditional upon government interests? Many eighteenth-century Americans said it was utterly unconditional. For example, James Madison and numerous contemporaries declared in 1785 that "the right of every man to exercise ['Religion'] ... is in its nature an unalienable right" and "therefore that in matters of Religion, no mans right is abridged by the institution of Civil Society." In contrast, during the past forty years, the United States Supreme Court has repeatedly conditioned the right of free exercise on compelling government interests. The Court not merely qualifies the practice of the …

What Caused Enron? A Capsule Social And Economic History Of The 1990s, John C. Coffee Jr.

Faculty Scholarship

The sudden explosion of corporate accounting scandals and related financial irregularities that burst over the financial markets between late 2001 and the first half of 2002 – Enron, WorldCom, Tyco, Adelphia and others – raises an obvious question: Why now? What explains the concentration of financial scandals at this moment in time? Much commentary has rounded up the usual suspects and placed the blame on a decline in business morality, an increase in "infectious greed," or other similarly subjective trends that cannot be reliably measured. Although none of these possibilities can be dismissed out of hand, approaches that simply reason …

The Origins Of The American Public Trust Doctrine: What Really Happened In Illinois Central, Joseph D. Kearney, Thomas W. Merrill

Faculty Scholarship

The public trust doctrine has always been controversial. The general rule in American law favors ownership of natural resources as private property. The public trust doctrine, a jarring exception of uncertain dimensions, posits that some resources are subject to a perpetual trust that forecloses private exclusion rights. For environmentalists and preservationists who view private ownership as a source of the degradation of our natural and historical resources, the public trust doctrine holds out the hope of salvation through what amounts to a judicially enforced inalienability rule that locks resources into public ownership. For those who view private property as the …

On Gun Registration, The Nra, Adolf Hitler, And Nazi Gun Laws: Exploding The Gun Culture Wars (A Call To Historians), Bernard Harcourt

Faculty Scholarship

Say the words "gun registration" to many Americans – especially pro-gun Americans, including the 3.5 million-plus members of the National Rifle Association ("NRA") – and you are likely to hear about Adolf Hitler, Nazi gun laws, gun confiscation, and the Holocaust. More specifically, you are likely to hear that one of the first things that Hitler did when he seized power was to impose strict gun registration requirements that enabled him to identify gun owners and then to confiscate all guns, effectively disarming his opponents and paving the way for the genocide of the Jewish population. "German firearm laws and …

Destabilization Rights: How Public Law Litigation Succeeds, Charles F. Sabel, William H. Simon

Faculty Scholarship

"Public law litigation" – civil rights advocacy seeking to restructure public agencies - has changed course over the last three decades. It has moved away from remedial intervention modeled on command-and-control bureaucracy toward a kind of intervention that can be called "experimentalist." Instead of top-down, fixed-rule regimes, the experimentalist approach emphasizes ongoing stakeholder negotiation, continuously revised performance measures, and transparency. Experimentalism is evident in all the principal areas of public law intervention – schools, mental health institutions, prisons, police, and public housing. This development has been substantially unanticipated and unnoticed by both advocates and critics of public law litigation. In …

Private Property And The Politics Of Environmental Protection, Thomas W. Merrill

Faculty Scholarship

Private property plays two opposing roles in stories about the environment. In the story favored by most environmentalists, private property is the bad guy. It balkanizes an interconnected ecosystem into artificial units of individual ownership. Owners of these finite parcels have little incentive to invest in ecosystem resources and every incentive to dump polluting wastes onto other parcels. Only by relocating control over natural resources in some central authority like the federal government, can we make integrated decisions designed to preserve the health of the entire ecosystem. For these traditional environmentalists, private property is the problem; public control is the …

Vampirism And The Degeneration Of The Imperial Race - Stoker's Dracula As The Invasive Degenerate Other, Monika Tomaszweska

Journal of Dracula Studies

No abstract provided.

A Clutch Of Vampires: Or, An Examination Of The Contemporary Dracula Texts, James Craig Holte

Journal of Dracula Studies

No abstract provided.

Keeping The Faith: Catholicism In Dracula And Its Adaptations, D. Bruno Starrs

Journal of Dracula Studies

No abstract provided.

Sex, Blood And (Un)Death: The Queer Vampire And Hiv, Carlen Lavigne

Journal of Dracula Studies

No abstract provided.

Be Careful What You Wish For: Legal Sanctions And Public Safety Among Adolescent Offenders In Juvenile And Criminal Court, Jeffrey Fagan, Aaron Kupchik, Akiva Liberman

Faculty Scholarship

Three decades of legislative activism have resulted in a broad expansion of states' authority to transfer adolescent offenders from juvenile to criminal (adult) courts. At the same time that legislatures have broadened the range of statutes and lowered the age thresholds for eligibility for transfer, states also have reallocated discretion away from judges and instituted simplified procedures that permit prosecutors to elect whether adolescents are prosecuted and sentenced in juvenile or criminal court. These developments reflect popular and political concerns that relatively lenient or attenuated punishment in juvenile court violates proportionality principles for serious crimes committed by adolescents, and is …

Sexual Tensions Of Post-Empire, Katherine M. Franke

Faculty Scholarship

In this essay Katherine Franke examines two contemporary cites in which state efforts to eradicate the traces of empire and to resurrect an authentic post-colonial nation have produced sexual subjects that serve as a kind of existential residue and reminder of a demonized colonial past and absence. Looking first at post-colonial Zimbabwe, Franke argues that President Mugabe's aggressively homophobic policies have played a key role in fortifying his leadership as authentically African and post-colonial.

Franke then turns to current efforts by the Mubarak government in Egypt to publically prosecute men for having sex with men. The Mubarak government has used …

The Rise Of State Bankruptcy-Directed Legislation, Ronald J. Mann

Faculty Scholarship

The papers at this conference generally focus on the rise of securitization and the possibility that statutes designed to remedy abuses of securitization will wreak undue havoc on our capital markets. I take my starting point from the relatively intractable policy questions that those problems raise. It seems well accepted that securitization provides financing at lower cost to the large companies that use those transactions. If so, rules fostering securitization could enhance the overall performance of our economy. At the same time, there are legitimate concerns that the rise of securitization makes it less likely that large companies in financial …

Credit Card Policy In A Globalized World, Ronald J. Mann

Faculty Scholarship

This paper relies on data from countries around the world to present a comprehensive analysis of policy issues related to credit cards. The first part discusses the rise of credit cards and debit cards and how their uses differ from country to country. It closes with a framework for explaining why cards are more and less successful in different countries, focusing in large part on the ready availability of detailed consumer credit information. The second part considers the relation between credit card use and bankruptcy. Relying on a time series of data from the United States, Canada, Great Britain and …

Marriage, Cohabitation, And Collective Responsibility For Dependency, Elizabeth S. Scott

Faculty Scholarship

Marriage has fallen on hard times. Although most Americans say that a lasting marriage is an important part of their life plans, the institution no longer enjoys its former exclusive status as the core family form. This is so largely because social norms that regulate family life and women's social roles have changed. A century (or even a couple of generations) ago, marriage was a stable economic and social union that, for the most part, lasted for the joint lives of the spouses. It was the only option for a socially sanctioned intimate relationship and was the setting in which …

Copyright's Communications Policy, Tim Wu

Faculty Scholarship

There is something for everyone to dislike about early twenty-first century copyright. Owners of content say that newer and better technologies have made it too easy to be a pirate. Easy copying, they say, threatens the basic incentive to create new works; new rights and remedies are needed to restore the balance. Academic critics instead complain that a growing copyright gives content owners dangerous levels of control over expressive works. In one version of this argument, this growth threatens the creativity and progress that copyright is supposed to foster; in another, it represents an "enclosure movement" that threatens basic freedoms …

Understanding The Meaning Of Collaboration In The Supply Chain, Mark Barratt

Management Faculty Research and Publications

Despite its infancy, some authors are already suggesting that the writing may be on the wall for supply chain collaboration. It has been reported that supply chain collaboration has proved difficult to implement; there has been an over‐reliance on technology in trying to implement it; a failure to understand when and with whom to collaborate; and fundamentally a lack of trust between trading partners. This paper proposes that a supply chain segmentation approach, based on customer buying behaviour and service needs, is the most appropriate context for collaboration. The paper also proposes the need for a greater understanding of the …

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Three Essays On The Relationship Between Labor Disputes And Employee Performance: Dissertation Summary, Alexandre Mas

Dissertation Awards

Industrial relations events such as strikes, slowdowns, or work stoppages can have important economic consequences for firms. These episodes may impact firm-level measures of productivity and output, especially if workers refrain from producing. In cases where output is contractible, adverse conditions of employment may induce workers to lower effort in other dimensions of production, for example, through diminishing the quality of the product. However, a relationship between worker treatment and the quality of production has proved difficult to establish. Since quality is often unobserved or hard to measure, little is known about the impact of adverse labor relations on workers' …

The "Inexorable Zero", Bert I. Huang

Faculty Scholarship

[F]ine tuning of the statistics could not have obscured the glaring absence of minority [long-distance] drivers .... [T]he company's inability to rebut the inference of discrimination came not from a misuse of statistics but from "the inexorable zero."

The Supreme Court first uttered the phrase "inexorable zero" a quarter-century ago in International Brotherhood of Teamsters v. United States, a landmark Title VII case. Ever since, this enigmatic name for a rule of inference has echoed across legal argument about segregation, discrimination, and affirmative action. Justice O'Connor, for instance, cited the "inexorable zero" in a major sex discrimination decision upholding an …

Unconstitutional Police Searches And Collective Responsibility, Bernard E. Harcourt

Faculty Scholarship

Then the police officer told the suspect, without just cause, "I bet you are hiding [drugs] under your balls. If you have drugs under your balls, I am going to fuck your balls up."

Jon Gould and Stephen Mastrofski document astonishingly high rates of unconstitutional police searches in their groundbreaking article, "Suspect Searches: Assessing Police Behavior Under the U.S. Constitution." By their conservative estimate, 30% of the 115 police searches they studied – searches that were conducted by officers in a department ranked in the top 20% nationwide, that were systematically observed by trained field observers, and that were coded …

Do Outside Blockholders Influence Corporate Governance Practices?, Sarah Peck

Finance Faculty Research and Publications

This study investigates whether block acquisitions lead to changes in board and CEO compensation characteristics and finds that block purchasers do not play a significant role in improving the firm’s governance practices. However, the majority of professional investors have sold their block within a year, suggesting that they do not own their stock long enough to alter governance policies nor to benefit from such changes. For the smaller number of firms where a new blockholder maintains their investment for more than a year, the use of equity based CEO compensation increases while the use of cash based compensation decreases.