The Fair Labor Standards Act: A Historical Sketch of the Overtime Pay Requirements of Section 13(a)(1)

CRS_May_2005_FLSA_Historical_Sketch.pdf: 5904 downloads, before Oct. 1, 2020

The Public Justification Approach to Statutory Interpretation

Legislative history seems inextricably intertwined with the concept of legislative intentexamining legislative history makes sense only if one wishes to determine legislative intent. The contestants on both sides of the current battle over using legislative history may agree on little, but they seem to agree on this point. Legislative history’s devotees argue that determining legislative intent is the goal of statutory interpretation, and the legitimacy of referring to legislative history seems to follow without much argument. That is, legislative history merely serves as a tool to find illusive legislative intent, but, in itself, lacks significance. Those who attack legislative history also view it as inexorably coupled with the concept of legislative intent. Thus, they argue against the use of legislative history by attempting to show that legislative intent does not provide a proper basis for interpreting statutes. Alternatively, they argue that legislative history provides poor evidence of legislative intent, and thus holds scant value because it is useful only as evidence of intent. In this paper, I show that one can accept the arguments that legislative intent is chimerical and that legislative history provides a poor tool for discovering any legislative intent that exists, and yet continue to believe that some legislative history retains an important place in the interpretive enterprise

Active Discovery of Network Roles for Predicting the Classes of Network Nodes

Nodes in real world networks often have class labels, or underlying attributes, that are related to the way in which they connect to other nodes. Sometimes this relationship is simple, for instance nodes of the same class are may be more likely to be connected. In other cases, however, this is not true, and the way that nodes link in a network exhibits a different, more complex relationship to their attributes. Here, we consider networks in which we know how the nodes are connected, but we do not know the class labels of the nodes or how class labels relate to the network links. We wish to identify the best subset of nodes to label in order to learn this relationship between node attributes and network links. We can then use this discovered relationship to accurately predict the class labels of the rest of the network nodes. We present a model that identifies groups of nodes with similar link patterns, which we call network roles, using a generative blockmodel. The model then predicts labels by learning the mapping from network roles to class labels using a maximum margin classifier. We choose a subset of nodes to label according to an iterative margin-based active learning strategy. By integrating the discovery of network roles with the classifier optimisation, the active learning process can adapt the network roles to better represent the network for node classification. We demonstrate the model by exploring a selection of real world networks, including a marine food web and a network of English words. We show that, in contrast to other network classifiers, this model achieves good classification accuracy for a range of networks with different relationships between class labels and network links

Rhetoric, Legislation, and the Felony Offender

Rhetoric is arguably of more importance than the message that is being overtly conveyed. Therefore, it is of great importance to understand how rhetoric can be utilized to convey one message while simultaneously transmitting another distinct message (Walter 2017). In this study, discourse analysis was conducted by examining the rhetoric associated with the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act (VCCLE), through the use of legislative speeches and newspaper articles, to determine how language has effectively resulted in the relegation of felony offenders within a class-based society. Utilizing two theories, class structure theory and distributive justice theory, an understanding was gained as to how the rhetoric utilized for the enactment of the VCCLE has affected the lives of felony offenders overall. The main question posed for this research is how did the use of certain language to enact the VCCLE effect felony offenders post release, broadly? The conclusions of this research suggest that the use of language embedded with messages of division and preference helped to facilitate separations in society based on class, as well as facilitated ways to order individuals regarding benefits and resources. It was ultimately concluded, based on the following analysis, that felony offenders were portrayed as being inferior to other citizens and considered less worthy as a result. Thus, the rhetoric utilized before the enactment of this legislation demonstrated how the characteristics of a newly formed caste system was created, and subsequently led to the overall relegation of felony offenders regarding society

Integrating natural language processing and pragmatic argumentation theories for argumentation support

Natural language processing (NLP) research and design that aims to model and detect opposition in text for the purpose of opinion classification, sentiment analysis, and meeting tracking, generally excludes the interactional, pragmatic aspects of online text. We propose that a promising direction for NLP is to incorporate the insights of pragmatic, dialectical theories of argumentation to more fully exploit the potential of NLP to offer sound, robust systems for various kinds of argumentation support

Congressional Accountability and Denial: Speech or Debate Clause and Conflict of Interest Challenges to Unionization of Congressional Employees

In 1995, Congress passed the Congressional Accountability Act, which applied federal workplace and anti-discrimination laws to Congress. Under the terms of the Act, Congress can prevent legislative staff from unionizing if the presence of organized employees would raise constitutional problems or present a conflict of interest. In this Article, Professor Brudney argues that these constitutional conflicts and issues do not pose sufficient concern to outweigh the workplace rights of congressional staff. Rather, he maintains that Congress, should either fulfill its obligations under the Act and allow legislative staff to unionize, or else enact a statute and explain the need for such an exception

Lost Legislative Intent: What Will Montanans Do When the Meaning Isn\u27t Plain?

Lost Legislative Inten