Incarceration without Representation: Race-Based Panel Effects in Prisoner Civil Rights Litigation

Studies have come to differing conclusions regarding the importance of racial and ethnic identity in the way that judges cast their votes. Some of those who claim that identity is a critical factor in judicial decisions have documented a panel effect, which refers to the potential for the presence of a minority judge on an appellate panel to affect the votes of their peers. This thesis seeks to investigate the role of race of the judge in decisions on the U.S. Court of Appeals, analyzing outcomes in the civil rights claims of prisoners through a logistic regression model. Ultimately, it finds no meaningful linkage between the race of a jurist and the vote that they cast. Similarly, it does not document a race-based panel effect. It does, however, find an ideological one, where having one Democratic jurist on a panel materially affects the votes of the panel’s other jurists.Bachelor of Art

A Constructionist Approach to Multilingualism in First Language Acquisition: An Analysis of Grammatical Organization in Bilingual Italian/English Children during the Critical Period

Through the analysis of neuroplasticity and critical periods for language acquisition, brain malleability as a result of linguistically-enriched environments, i.e. bilingual and multilingual settings, is explored. Furthermore, the two major approaches in first language acquisition, the nativist approach and the usage-based, constructionist approach are investigated and a case is made that native languages are acquired through the processes of statistical learning combined with cognitive abilities, social skills, a tendency to imitate and vast linguistic input from mothers to their children. Furthermore, diary studies involving the author and her bilingual children are presented, negative transfer due to crosslinguistic influence is investigated and bilingual error fossilization due to sibling influence is hypothesized. Moreover, metalinguistic awareness of divergent constructions in English and Italian is investigated through an acceptability test administered to twenty-one Italian/English, elementary school-aged children during the critical period for language acquisition