Concept, principle, and norm—equality before the law reconsidered

Despite the attention equality before the law has received, both laudatory and critical, peculiarly little has been done to precisely define it. The first ambition of this paper is to remedy this, by exploring the various ways in which a principle of equality before the law can be understood and suggest a concise definition. With a clearer understanding of the principle in hand we are better equipped to assess traditional critique of the principle. Doing so is the second ambition of this paper. I will argue that traditional criticisms are unpersuasive, but that there is a different, powerful argument against equality before the law. The third ambition of the paper is to argue that there is a sense, overlooked by both proponents and critics, in which the principle still captures something important, albeit at the cost of shifting from intrinsic to instrumental value

Learning the Designer's Preferences to Drive Evolution

This paper presents the Designer Preference Model, a data-driven solution that pursues to learn from user generated data in a Quality-Diversity Mixed-Initiative Co-Creativity (QD MI-CC) tool, with the aims of modelling the user's design style to better assess the tool's procedurally generated content with respect to that user's preferences. Through this approach, we aim for increasing the user's agency over the generated content in a way that neither stalls the user-tool reciprocal stimuli loop nor fatigues the user with periodical suggestion handpicking. We describe the details of this novel solution, as well as its implementation in the MI-CC tool the Evolutionary Dungeon Designer. We present and discuss our findings out of the initial tests carried out, spotting the open challenges for this combined line of research that integrates MI-CC with Procedural Content Generation through Machine Learning.Comment: 16 pages, Accepted and to appear in proceedings of the 23rd European Conference on the Applications of Evolutionary and bio-inspired Computation, EvoApplications 202

Technology Solutions for Developmental Math: An Overview of Current and Emerging Practices

Reviews current practices in and strategies for incorporating innovative technology into the teaching of remedial math at the college level. Outlines challenges, emerging trends, and ways to combine technology with new concepts of instructional strategy

Does ADR’s “Access to Justice” Come at the Expense of Meaningful Consent?

Over the last forty years, ADR processes, in particular mediation and arbitration, have been advanced as vehicles to secure access to justice for individual litigants and to improve efficiency in overburdened court systems. These processes have functioned as alternatives to the court adjudication of disputes, complementing the judicial system, and operating in what has been famously described as “the shadow of the law. The primary benefits promised by ADR were party autonomy and empowerment. ADR processes would allow parties to “fit the forum to the fuss.” These processes would give parties the opportunity to create their own mosaic of justice, personalized and individualized justice, not unlike the fairness remedies that equity courts had historically provided I argue that claims about ADR’s ability to provide access to justice should be more modest. As it turns out, ADR falls short on its original promises, giving short shrift to the value of consent. Over the last few decades, party autonomy has diminished in both mediation and arbitration, and it is not clear that ADR has resulted in greater efficiencies for the courts. In this Article, I question whether ADR processes have provided the kind of access to justice envisioned by proponents, or whether they have been stumbling blocks to achieving that goal. My skepticism is prompted by the withering away of consent in arbitration and mediation, two of the most commonly used ADR processes

Metarepresentation, tense, aspect and narratives: the case of Behdini-Kurdish and Estonian

This paper looks at three sets of data, two from Behdini-Kurdish and one from Estonian, where a metarepresentational use analysis enhances the linguistic analysis of certain linguistic forms. The aspective marker da in Behdini is used in two ways, as a near counterfactual past and a distant habitual past: (1) ew da genim-ê çîn-in They IM wheat-OBL.M.SG grow-3PL 1. 'They set out to sow wheat (but where prevented from doing it)' 2. 'They used to grow wheat (in old times; of the people of a village)' My claim is that da encodes a procedure to embed the proposition expressed under a higher order respresentation such as 'the speaker intends the addressee to imagine a situation where P holds,' and I'll argue that the attested uses can be pragmatically explained on the basis of this semantics. Thus it appears that metarepresentations can explain some phenomena normally attributed to the category of aspect. The future marker dê in Behdini is used syntactically in a very similar way: (2) ew dê xwarin-ê çêk-in they FUT meal-OBL.F.SG prepare-3PL 'they will prepare the meal' I present arguments both from within Behdini as well as cross-linguistically that the future tense in Behdini should be analysed as procedurally encoding metarepresentational use: the proposition expressed is to be embedded under a higher-order representation of the form 'the speaker intends the addressee to imagine a situation where P holds and P has not yet occured'. This analysis raises a number of questions for the analysis of future tense markers cross-linguistically. Finally, I argue that the so-called 'quotative mood' in Estonian is better analysed as attributive interpretive use marker. One of the many advantages of this analysis is the fact that it sheds light on the use of the quotative in narratives, especially folk tales: narrative exploits metarepresentations in various ways, hence it is not surprising to find interpretive use markers used as narrative forms. This raises the question whether other so-called 'narrative verb forms' in other langauges should be re-analysed as interpretive use markers

Who should make corporate law? : EC legislation versus regulatory competition

This paper makes a case for the future development of European corporate law through regulatory competition rather than EC legislation. It is for the first time becoming legally possible for firms within the EU to select the national company law that they wish to govern their activities. A significant number of firms can be expected to exercise this freedom, and national legislatures can be expected to respond by seeking to make their company laws more attractive to firms. Whilst the UK is likely to be the single most successful jurisdiction in attracting firms, the presence of different models of corporate governance within Europe make it quite possible that competition will result in specialisation rather than convergence, and that no Member State will come to dominate as Delaware has done in the US. Procedural safeguards in the legal framework will direct the selection of laws which increase social welfare, as opposed simply to the welfare of those making the choice. Given that European legislators cannot be sure of the ‘optimal’ model for company law, the future of European company law-making would better be left with Member States than take the form of harmonized legislation