Farewell national champions

Nicolas Véron presents and analyses new data about the internationalisation of Europe's largest companies and their US counterparts, and discusses some policy implications.

Cause for alarm?: A multi-national, multi-institutional study of student-generated software designs

This paper reports a multi-national, multi-institutional study to investigate Computer Science students' understanding of software design and software design criteria. Students were recruited at two levels: those termed 'first competency' programmers, and those completing their Bachelor degrees. The study, including participants from 21 institutions over the academic year 2003/4, aimed to examine students' ability to generate software designs, to elicit students' understanding and valuation of key design activities, and to examine whether students at different stages in their undergraduate education display different understanding of software design. Differences were found in participants' recognition of ambiguity in requirements; in their use of formal (and semi-formal) design representation and in their prioritisation of design criteria

Research, Analysis and Insight into National Standards (RAINS) Project Final Report: National Standards and the Damage Done

This is the final report of the Research Analysis and Insight into National Standards (RAINS) project, a three-year study of the enactment of the National Standards policy in six diverse primary and intermediate schools. This report provides an overview discussion of the pros and cons of the National Standards policy as experienced by staff, children and parents in the RAINS schools. It summarises the policy and methodological background to the research and the findings of the two previous RAINS reports. The report is also being accompanied by online case studies and other data files

Random matrices: The Universality phenomenon for Wigner ensembles

In this paper, we survey some recent progress on rigorously establishing the universality of various spectral statistics of Wigner Hermitian random matrix ensembles, focusing on the Four Moment Theorem and its refinements and applications, including the universality of the sine kernel and the Central limit theorem of several spectral parameters. We also take the opportunity here to issue some errata for some of our previous papers in this area.Comment: 58 page

Research, Analysis and Insight into National Standards (RAINS) Project. Second Report: Understanding New Zealand’s Very Local National Standards

This is the second report of the Research, Analysis and Insight into National Standards (RAINS) project, a three-year study of the introduction of National Standards into New Zealand primary and intermediate schools

Research, Analysis and Insight into National Standards (RAINS) Project. First Report: Researching Schools’ Enactments of New Zealand’s National Standards Policy

This is the first report of the Research, Analysis and Insight into National Standards (RAINS) project, one year into a three-year study of the introduction of National Standards into New Zealand primary and intermediate schools

National Injunctions and Preclusion

Critics of national injunctions are lining up. Attorney General Jeff Sessions labeled these injunctions “absurd” and “simply unsustainable.” Justice Clarence Thomas called them “legally and historically dubious,” while Justice Neil Gorsuch mockingly referred to them as “cosmic injunctions.” Scholars in leading law reviews have called for their demise. Critics argue that national injunctions encourage forum shopping, unfairly burden the federal government, and depart from the history of equity. They also claim that national injunctions contradict the Supreme Court’s decision in United States v. Mendoza to exempt the federal government from offensive nonmutual issue preclusion—a doctrine that permits nonparties to benefit from a prior finding against a party from an earlier case. Critics are right to identify the connection between national injunctions and nonmutual preclusion. Both of these doctrines describe when judgments can benefit nonparties. But critics are wrong to see Mendoza as an argument against national injunctions. For one thing, the rise of nonmutual preclusion that prompted Mendoza undercuts crucial arguments against national injunctions by offering an alternative explanation for the absence of analogous injunctions in the history of equity. For another, Mendoza was not preordained; instead, it was a highly policy-driven decision. And Mendoza’s policy arguments were dubious when it was decided and even more dubious today. Scrutinizing these arguments should make us less comfortable in extending Mendoza to a new context—as the Supreme Court may be poised to do. Indeed, this Article goes one step further. The Supreme Court or Congress should take advantage of the attention on nonparty relief to reconsider, and overrule, Mendoza. Federal-government litigants do not deserve special treatment with respect to preclusion in every case, and the existing rules of preclusion adequately protect the interests purportedly at stake in Mendoza. Moreover, rejecting Mendoza has feedback effects for the national-injunctions debate. Overruling Mendoza would not only reduce the need for national injunctions (because preclusion could do some of the work) but also provide a framework for limiting national injunctions without eliminating them completely. This is especially important given recent decisions that make relying on class actions a tenuous response. More generally, overruling Mendoza would create a system that is fairer to governmental and nongovernmental litigants alike while reaffirming each branch’s role in the making of national policy

Introduction : special issue on ‘policing, migration and national identity’

For some time, the mobility of the global poor has been framed as a national security problem and policy priority for governments and inter-governmental institutions across the world (D’Appollonia and Reich, 2008; Guild, 2003; Huysmans, 2006). In this context, the police have been routinely tasked with detecting unwanted foreigners and routing them out of the country (Armenta, 2017; Weber, 2013) or, as Giulia Fabini (2017) explained in the case of Italy, with managing ‘illegality’. Increasingly, the policing of the border occurs inland and migration controls are becoming ingrained in ‘homeland policing’ (Gundhus and Aas, 2016; Weber and Bowling, 2004)