Comment: Complex Causal Questions Require Careful Model Formulation: Discussion of Rubin on Experiments with "Censoring" Due to Death

Comment on Complex Causal Questions Require Careful Model Formulation: Discussion of Rubin on Experiments with ``Censoring'' Due to Death [math.ST/0612783]Comment: Published at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/088342306000000295 in the Statistical Science (http://www.imstat.org/sts/) by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org

Finding Law

That the judge\u27s task is to find the law, not to make it, was once a commonplace of our legal culture. Today, decades after Erie, the idea of a common law discovered by judges is commonly dismissed -- as a fallacy, an illusion, a brooding omnipresence in the sky. That dismissive view is wrong. Expecting judges to find unwritten law is no childish fiction of the benighted past, but a real and plausible option for a modern legal system. This Essay seeks to restore the respectability of finding law, in part by responding to two criticisms made by Erie and its progeny. The first, positive criticism is that law has to come from somewhere: judges can\u27t discover norms that no one ever made. But this claim blinks reality. We routinely identify and apply social norms that no one deliberately made, including norms of fashion, etiquette, or natural language. Law is no different. Judges might declare a customary law the same way copy editors and dictionary authors declare standard English -- with a certain kind of reliability, but with no power to revise at will. The second, realist criticism is that this law leaves too many questions open: when judges can\u27t find the law, they have to make it instead. But uncertain cases force judges to make decisions, not to make law. Different societies can give different roles to precedent (and to judges). And judicial decisions can have many different kinds of legal force -- as law of the circuit, law of the case, and so on -- without altering the underlying law on which they\u27re based. This Essay claims only that it\u27s plausible for a legal system to have its judges find law. It doesn\u27t try to identify legal systems that actually do this in practice. Yet too many discussions of judge-made law, including the famous ones in Erie, rest on the false premise that judge-made law is inevitable -- that judges simply can\u27t do otherwise. In fact, judges can do otherwise: they can act as the law\u27s servants rather than its masters. The fact that they can forces us to confront, rather than avoid, the question of whether they should. Finding law is no fallacy or illusion; the brooding omnipresence broods on

Alaska Office of Victims’ Rights: A Model for America

En utmärkande egenskap hos nästintill all dagens teknik är att den innehar funktioner med syfte att utöka och stödja människans kognitiva förmågor. Det kan vara funktioner som stödjer vårt minne, som styr vår uppmärksamhet eller hjälper oss att planera och organisera aktiviteter. I Sverige har det blivit allt vanligare att teknologi i form av smartphones, surfplattor och datorer används på ett utbrett sätt i elevernas skolgång. Enligt tidigare forskning är däremot lärarnas inre föreställningar och attityder gentemot teknologin en avgörande faktor för huruvida lärarna i slutändan väljer att integrera teknologin i sin undervisning, och på vilket sätt som de väljer att göra detta. Den aktuella studiens syfte var att undersöka lärarnas föreställningar och attityder gentemot fem kognitiva funktioner som finns i teknologiska enheter som smartphones och surfplattor. Dessa fem funktioner var en larmfunktion, en vägledande funktion, en funktion som kan spara och presentera information, en distraherande funktion samt en påminnelsefunktion. Studien genomfördes med en internetbaserad enkät som skickades ut till 416 lärare på grundskole- och gymnasienivå i de tre kommunerna Linköping, Mjölby och Borlänge. Det slutliga deltagarantalet var 39 lärare som besvarade hela enkäten. Enkäten innehöll både slutna frågor med förvalda svarsalternativ, samt öppna frågor som lärarna besvarade fritt. Det insamlade materialet analyserades sedan med en statistisk analys av de slutna frågorna och med en tematisk analys av de öppna frågorna. Resultatet visade att lärarna uppskattade en funktion som kan spara och presentera information som den funktion som vore mest förmånligt för elevernas lärande. Det var även den funktion som flest lärare kunde tänka sig att rekommendera till någon av sina elever. Påminnelsefunktionen och den vägledande funktionen var de två funktioner som uppskattades som mest förmånliga för såväl relationerna mellan eleverna, samt för lärarnas relationer till eleverna. Alarmfunktionen var däremot den funktion som uppskattades som minst förmånlig för alla dessa tre aspekter. Studiens resultat kan fungera som vägledning för utvecklare av tekniska kognitiva stödfunktioner som används i pedagogiska ändamål. Genom att studera varför lärarna accepterar eller avvisar olika former av teknologi i klassrummet så kan man få fram vilka faktorer som är avgörande för en framgångsrik teknikintegration i undervisningen. Man kan även påvisa vilka mönster som finns vid användandet av teknik i undervisningen, som till exempel under vilka förhållanden som lärare anser att tekniken ger mest fördelar och på vilket sätt de anser att tekniken förändrar lärandemiljön och relationerna i skolan. <img src="https://ssl.gstatic.com/ui/v1/icons/mail/images/cleardot.gif" /

The Uneasy Case for the Affordable Care Act

The constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act is sometimes said to be an easy question, with the Act\u27s opponents relying more on fringe political ideology than mainstream legal arguments. This essay disagrees. While the mandate may win in the end, it won\u27t be easy, and the arguments against it sound in law rather than politics. Written to accompany and respond to Erwin Chemerinsky\u27s essay in the same symposium, this essay argues that each substantive defense of the mandate is subject to doubt. While Congress could have avoided the issue by using its taxing power, it chose not to do so. Congress has power to regulate commerce among the several States, but that might not extend to every individual decision involving economic considerations -- walking rather than taking the bus, stargazing rather than renting movies, or carrying a gun in a school zone rather than hiring private bodyguards. Even the necessary-and-proper power, the strongest ground for the mandate, may stop short of letting Congress claim extraordinary powers to fix the problems created by its exercise of ordinary ones. Because the mandate\u27s opponents can find some support in existing doctrines, a decision striking down the mandate needn\u27t be a drastic break from past practice. By contrast, a decision upholding the mandate would raise serious questions about the limits of Congress\u27s powers. To many, these questions offer good reasons for doubting whether existing doctrine gets it right -- reasons having more to do with constitutional theory than political preference

Originalism Without Text

Originalism is not about the text. Though the theory is often treated as a way to read the Constitution’s words, that conventional view is misleading. A society can be recognizably originalist without any words to interpret: without a written constitution, written statutes, or any writing at all. If texts aren’t fundamental to originalism, then originalism isn’t fundamentally about texts. Avoiding that error helps us see what originalism generally is about: namely, our present constitutional law, and its dependence on a crucial moment in the past

Privacy and Confidentiality in an e-Commerce World: Data Mining, Data Warehousing, Matching and Disclosure Limitation

The growing expanse of e-commerce and the widespread availability of online databases raise many fears regarding loss of privacy and many statistical challenges. Even with encryption and other nominal forms of protection for individual databases, we still need to protect against the violation of privacy through linkages across multiple databases. These issues parallel those that have arisen and received some attention in the context of homeland security. Following the events of September 11, 2001, there has been heightened attention in the United States and elsewhere to the use of multiple government and private databases for the identification of possible perpetrators of future attacks, as well as an unprecedented expansion of federal government data mining activities, many involving databases containing personal information. We present an overview of some proposals that have surfaced for the search of multiple databases which supposedly do not compromise possible pledges of confidentiality to the individuals whose data are included. We also explore their link to the related literature on privacy-preserving data mining. In particular, we focus on the matching problem across databases and the concept of ``selective revelation'' and their confidentiality implications.Comment: Published at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/088342306000000240 in the Statistical Science (http://www.imstat.org/sts/) by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org

The “Constitution in Exile” as a Problem for Legal Theory

How does one defend a constitutional theory that’s out of the mainstream? Critics of originalism, for example, have described it as a nefarious “Constitution in Exile,” a plot to impose abandoned rules on the unsuspecting public. This framing is largely mythical, but it raises a serious objection. If a theory asks us to change our legal practices, leaving important questions to academics or historians, how can it be a theory of our law? If law is a matter of social convention, how can there be conventions that hardly anybody knows about? How is a constitution in exile even possible? This objection is overblown. Legal rules don’t always directly reflect common agreement; they can also reflect those agreements indirectly, through conventions that operate at a higher level of abstraction. (We can have social agreement that we’re bound by the Internal Revenue Code, even though we don’t all agree on—let alone remember—everything the Code requires.) So long as we share certain conventions that lead to unconventional conclusions, out-of-the-mainstream theorists can accurately claim to describe our own legal system rather than a foreign or invented one that they hope to impose. The theorists’ job is to identify shared premises and to show that they really are shared, even in the face of widespread disagreement at the level of conclusions. In any case, if this kind of objection did have force, it wouldn’t be a problem just for out-of-the- mainstream theories like originalism. Virtually no modern legal theory accepts every change in constitutional practice as actually changing the Constitution. Because history moves at its own pace, any theory with meaningful conditions for legal change will often be violated in practice. In other words, any Constitution worth its salt will spend a good bit of time in exile