Teaching Substantive Environmental Law and Practice Skills Through Interest Group Role-Playing

Most law students take their first introductory course in environmental law during their second year of law school. The traditional first-year curriculum does little to prepare students for the complex statutory and regulatory models for most environmental regulation. Law students at the end of their first year often have had little exposure to statutory interpretation. Further, they often have no exposure to administrative law and regulatory implementation. These students may expect statutes to provide clear statements of rules rather than guidelines for administrative rulemaking. They also tend to view the lawmaking and interpretive process through the traditional lens of congressional legislation and common-law-style judicial interpretation in a bipolar scheme of implementation--where the regulatory agencies and the regulated industries are the only players. In fact, environmental regulatory programs constantly evolve through a complex interaction of legislative amendment, administrative rulemaking, and judicial interpretation. Influencing these programs are the multipolar interaction of regulated industries, environmental groups, state agencies, and federal regulators. Law students accustomed to the bipolar model of common-law legal development and who expect statutory law to consist of a simple reading of clear statutory texts can find this interest group pluralist model of law development bewildering. One way to help give context to this complex interaction is to place students in the roles of the various advocates and decision-makers in the environmental law processes. Assigning students to adopt the perspective of various distinct players in the regulatory process, such as agency lawyer, industry lawyer, and environmental NGO lawyer, helps make this complex interaction more accessible to students. This also provides an introduction into the skills of statutory interpretation and regulatory implementation. At Pace Law School, we have had considerable success integrating this approach into an Environmental Law Skills course. This course combines a comprehensive study of the Clean Water Act (CWA) regulatory program with skills-based exercises in administrative rulemaking, judicial review, regulatory permitting, negotiation, and enforcement. The course was added to the curriculum in the 1990s in response to the growing recognition by the legal academy that the traditional case-oriented method of instruction failed to result in law graduates with basic competencies expected of lawyers. The course has been refined over the years to incorporate the Carnegie Report\u27s more recent critiques: the legal education\u27s failure to foster students\u27 development of their professional identities and their understanding of lawyers\u27 role in representing clients. By integrating role-playing, problem solving, and doctrinal instruction, the course seeks to engage students in active learning and professional identity development. The course also seeks to implement recommendations for the improvement of legal instruction contained in Professor Stuckey\u27s influential 2007 report, Best Practices for Legal Education. In particular, the course seeks to “teach doctrine, theory, and practice as part of a unified, coordinated program of instruction” as recommended in that report

Numerical simulation of centrifugal pumps

The power computers increase and the specific calculation software development have made possible, nowadays, the numerical simulation of flow and energy transfer inside the turbomachinery. To teach Fluid Mechanics is not easy not only for the professors but also for the students because the theoretical part must be complemented with a technical part where students can see the phenomena. However, specially in hydraulic turbomachinery, we canít see the phenomena except if we have a specific material, for example a PIV. Even if we would have this material, the access to specific parts of turbomachinery is not possible due to its constructive layout. The use of numerical simulation tools allows us to obtain data in inaccessible positions for the experimentation, as well as the study of unusual or dangerous performances. With the numerical simulation, the pressure fluctuation at any point of the pump can be easily obtained. Other important results are the radial forces on the impeller, which have a significant variation with the working points. One of the advantages of this kind of modelling is the ease to carry out changes in the geometry, parametric studies and analysis of anomalous operation conditions

National Security Pedagogy: The Role of Simulations

This article challenges the dominant pedagogical assumptions in the legal academy. It begins by briefly considering the state of the field of national security, noting the rapid expansion in employment and the breadth of related positions that have been created post-9/11. It considers, in the process, how the legal academy has, as an institutional matter, responded to the demand. Part III examines traditional legal pedagogy, grounding the discussion in studies initiated by the American Bar Association, the Carnegie Foundation, and others. It suggests that using the law-writ-large as a starting point for those interested in national security law is a mistake. Instead, it makes more sense to work backwards from the skills most essential in this area of the law. The article then proposes six pedagogical goals that serve to distinguish national security law: (1) understanding the law as applied, (2) dealing with factual chaos and uncertainty, (3) obtaining critical distance—including, inter alia, when not to give legal advice, (4) developing nontraditional written and oral communication skills, (5) exhibiting leadership, integrity, and good judgment in a high-stakes, highly-charged environment, and (6) creating continued opportunities for self-learning. Equally important to the exercise of each of these skills is the ability to integrate them in the course of performance. These goals, and the subsidiary points they cover, are neither conclusive nor exclusive. Many of them incorporate skills that all lawyers should have—such as the ability to handle pressure, knowing how to modulate the mode and content of communications depending upon the circumstances, and managing ego, personality, and subordination. To the extent that they are overlooked by mainstream legal education, however, and present in a unique manner in national security law, they underscore the importance of more careful consideration of the skills required in this particular field. Having proposed a pedagogical approach, the article turns in Part IV to the question of how effective traditional law school teaching is in helping to students reach these goals. Doctrinal and experiential courses both prove important. The problem is that in national security law, the way in which these have become manifest often falls short of accomplishing the six pedagogical aims. Gaps left in doctrinal course are not adequately covered by devices typically adopted in the experiential realm, even as clinics, externships, and moot court competitions are in many ways ill-suited to national security. The article thus proposes in Part V a new model for national security legal education, based on innovations currently underway at Georgetown Law. NSL Sim 2.0 adapts a doctrinal course to the special needs of national security. Course design is preceded by careful regulatory, statutory, and Constitutional analysis, paired with policy considerations. The course takes advantage of new and emerging technologies to immerse students in a multi-day, real-world exercise, which forces students to deal with an information-rich environment, rapidly changing facts, and abbreviated timelines. It points to a new model of legal education that advances students in the pedagogical goals identified above, while complementing, rather than supplanting, the critical intellectual discourse that underlies the value of higher legal education

Do business games foster skills? A cross-cultural study from learners’ views

Purpose: This study seeks to analyse students’ perception of the effectiveness of business games as an e-learning method in management training. This analysis of games’ effectiveness is centred in the generic and managerial skills acquired, through the comparison of students’ opinions in different cultural contexts within Europe. Design/methodology: The analysis focuses on 120 management students at postgraduate level who use the same business game at different universities in five European countries: Spain, Ireland, Portugal, Italy and Germany. Findings: The results indicate that students positively assessed the generic and specific managerial skills fostered by the business game. The generic skills most valued were information and decision-making, and leadership. Regarding the specific skills, the most valued were management skills and the least valued, skills related to planning and the acquisition of theoretical knowledge. However, significant differences were found between students in different cultural contexts and education systems in the case of certain specific managerial skills. Practical implications: This finding suggests that the students’ perception of how a business game helps them acquire specific managerial skills is influenced by cultural aspects and previous exposure to experiential learning, which determine that the teachers’ role and the teaching process should be adapted to the students’ learning model. Originality/value: With this study, a better knowledge about the students’ perception of this e-learning method is obtained, not just considering a specific educational environment, but comparing opinions of students from different cultural contexts, which adds value to the analyses developed.Peer Reviewe

Tinjauan terhadap pengetahuan, kemahiran dan minat dalam bidang keusahawanan di kalangan peserta kursus jangka pendek anjuran Jabatan Pendidikan Teknik dan Vokasional

The purpose of this research is to determine the knowledge, skill and enthusiasm among participants short term course organized by Jabatan Pendidikan Teknik dan Vokasional (JPTV). Fifty-four participants from three short term courses, Kursus Usahawan Berasas Kimpalan, Kursus Penyelenggaraan dan Pemasangan Komputer dan Kursus Chargeman AO are selected as respondents to gather feedbacks based on the questionnaire distributed. Collected data is analyzed by using Statistical Package For Social Science (SPSS), 11.0 version, which were represented using mean scores, percentage and Correlations Pearson. The result of this research shows that majority of the participants are enthusiasm towards entrepreneurship but they are lack of knowledge and skill in entrepreneurship basic. "Garis Panduan Asas Keusahawanan " had been created to give knowledge and skill entrepreneurship basic for participants short term course organized by JPTV