The Legal Employment Market: Determinants of Elite Firm Placement, and How Law Schools Stack Up

Data collected on 15,293 law firm associates from 1295 employers who graduated from law school between 2001 and 2003 were used to develop a “total quality score” for every ABA-accredited law school, both nationally and for nine geographic regions. Quantitative methods were then used to identify factors that help explain the variation in a law school’s national career placement success at elite law firms. The findings revealed that while a law school’s academic reputation is the single biggest predictor of placement, several other factors were also highly significant. Differences in grading system, class rank disclosure policies, and the number of first year courses required were responsible for significant variation. Numbers grade systems, such as those used at the University of Chicago, and honors/pass/fail grading systems, such as those used by Yale, both have a strong negative impact on placement when all else is held equal, likely because both systems impair the middle of the class’s job prospects relative to traditional letter grade systems. Law schools that do not disclose class rank to students or employers place better than schools that disclose rank, when all else is held constant, although it is unclear whether this is due to employer preferences or due to disparate psychological effects on students that impact their career placement strategies. Law schools that require a greater number of first year classes, however, can make up for deficiencies in these other areas

TERRITORIAL PATERNALISM

This Article strives to deconstruct and dismantle the most prominent misconceptions and outright lies being used to justify the continued withholding of constitutional rights and liberties from American Samoa, Guam, the Northern Mariana Islands, Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands. Part II addresses the claim that territories are not self- governing or are otherwise effectively ruled from Washington, D.C., by a Congress that is completely unresponsive to any of their concerns. Part III examines the portrayal of the territories as geographically isolated, crumbling, lacking safe drinking water, and otherwise substantially underdeveloped compared to the mainland United States. Finally, Part IV proposes several empowering strategies that the territories and their allies could pursue to improve their current status-quo, which are not grounded in paternalism and would not require surrendering the long-term struggle for equal rights

Judicial Antifederalism

The United States has a colonies problem. The more than 3.5 million Americans who live in the U.S. territories of American Samoa, Guam, the Northern Mariana Islands, Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands lack some of the most fundamental rights and protections, such as the right to vote. This is due to a series of decisions decided more than a century ago, collectively known as the Insular Cases, in which the U.S. Supreme Court held that the “half-civilized,” “savage,” “ignorant and lawless” “alien races” that inhabited America’s overseas territories were not entitled to the same constitutional rights and protections afforded to Americans residing in the mainland United States, based on the idea of the white man’s burden and similar, then prevalent theories of white supremacy. For decades, the Insular Cases have had “nary a friend in the world,” with even the Supreme Court repeatedly imploring that they “should not be further extended.” Yet despite their firm placement within the constitutional anticanon and having “long been reviled” by all corners of the legal community for several decades, the Insular Cases have never been overruled by the Supreme Court. Perhaps most surprisingly, the lower federal courts in recent years have ignored the Supreme Court’s admonition and extended the Insular Cases to cover a whole host of new situations. The failure of the Supreme Court to overrule the Insular Cases—and the lower federal courts’ extension of them even after the Supreme Court instructed them to the contrary—is unprecedented. Why, then, do the Insular Cases not only persist, but thrive, despite virtually unanimous condemnation from all sides of the political and legal spectrums? This Essay attributes the longevity of the Insular Cases to an unlikely source: the failure of Congress to timely extend the well-known principle of judicial federalism, operative in all fifty states, to the five presently unincorporated territories

HUMAN-WILDLIFE CONFLICT AND ROAD COLLISIONS WITH UNGULATES. A RISK ANALYSIS AND DESIGN SOLUTIONS IN TRENTINO, ITALY

This study investigates wildlife vehicle collisions with wild ungulates in the Italian Autonomous Province of Trento (PAT) located in the Eastern Italian Alps with a consistent anthropic population and pervasive summer and winter tourism. Both the populations of wild ungulates and vehicular traffic are increasing as well as road collisions leading to animals killed, vehicles damaged and human injuries and fatalities. The purpose of this work was to use FOSS4G to identify the road sections with a high number of collisions and then propose and design practical engineering solutions tailored to each of these hotspots. QGIS 3.16.6, GRASS 7.8.5 and GRASS 8.2 were used to standardize the data set, process georeferenced road collision with ungulates registered by local authorities, perform the hotspot analysis and the final maps. Field surveys were carried out to investigate the local morphology at each hotspot and once the more appropriate practical solutions were chosen, a specific detailed project was proposed including its costs. A cost benefit analysis comparing the cost of the infrastructures with the cost of roadkills shows that the infrastructures are effective in reducing the costs in the medium-long term. The construction of the five proposed infrastructures would reduce deer investments by 6% (about 250 collisions avoided in five years). Such solutions should be more numerous and widely distributed in order to have a greater impact. This FOSS4G procedure can be replicated elsewhere to plan the position of crossing structures, and for application to EU funds, thus mitigating Human-wildlife conflicts (HWC)

Object-based image analysis for historic maps classification

Heritage maps represent fundamental information for the study of the evolution of a region, especially in terms of landscape and ecologic features. Historical maps present two kinds of hurdle before they can be used in a modern GIS: they must be geometrically corrected to correspond to the datum in use and they must be classified to exploit the information they contain. This study deals the latter problem: the Historical Cadaster Map, created between 1851 and 1861, for the Trentino region in the North of Italy is available as a collection of maps in the ETRS89/UTM 32N datum. The map is a high resolution scan (230 DPI, 24 bit) of the original map and has been used in several ecological studies, since it provides detailed information not only about land property but also about land use. In the past the cadaster map has been manually digitized and for each area a set of attributes has been recorded. Since this approach is time consuming and prone to errors, automatic and semi-automatic procedures have been tested. Traditional image classification techniques, such as maximum likelihood classification, supervised or un-supervised, pixelwise and contextual, do not provide satisfactory results for many reasons: map colors are very variable within the same area, symbols and characters are used to identify cadaster parcels and locations, lines, drawn by hand on the original map, have variable thickness and colors. The availability of FOSS tools for the Object-based Image Analysis (OBIA) has made possible the application of this technique to the cadaster map. This paper describes the use of GRASS GIS and R for the implementation of the OBIA approach for the supervised classification of the historic cadaster map. It describes the determination of the optimal segments, the choice of their attributes and relevant statistics, and their classification. The result has been evaluated with respect to a manually digitized map using Cohens Kappa and the analysis of the confusion matrix. The result of the OBIA classification has also been compared to the classification of the same map using maximum likelihood classification, un-supervised and supervised, both pixelwise and contextual. The OBIA approach has provided very satisfactory results with the ability to automatically remove the background and symbols and characters, creating a ready to be used classified map. This study highlights the effectiveness of the OBIA processing chain available in the FOSS4G ecosystem, and in particular the added value of the interoperability between GRASS GIS and R

Modeling of forest landscape evolution at regional level: a FOSS4G approach

In the last decades the Alpine landscape has dramatically changed due to social and economic factors. The most visible impact has been the reduction of the population for mid and high altitude villages and the shrinking of the part of the land used for agriculture and grazing, with a progressive reduction of pastures and meadows and the expansion of the forested areas. For these reasons, a dataset describing the forest, meadows and pasture coverage for the Trentino region, in the eastern Italian Alps, has been created. A set of heterogeneous sources has been selected so that maps and images cover the longest possible time span on the whole Trentino region with comparable quality, creating a Land Use/Land Cover (LULC) map based on historical maps from 1859 to 1936 and aerial images from 1954 to 2015. The achieved accuracy ranges from 98% for historical maps to 94% for aereal imagery. The analysis of selected landscape metrics provided preliminary results about the forest distribution and patterns of recolonization during the last 155 years. It has been possible to create future scenarios for the forest evolution for the next 85 years. Given the large number of maps involved, the great flexibility provided by FOSS for spatial analysis, such as GRASS, R, QGIS and GAMA and the possibility of scripting all the operations have played a pivotal role in the success both in the creation of the dataset and in the extraction and modeling of land use change

Intrasexual vibrational behavior of Philaenus spumarius in semi-field conditions

Insects that communicate by vibrational signals live in a complex interactive network of communication. Most studies on insect intrasexual behavior, based on plant-borne vibrational signals, have targeted few individuals. Despite their importance, behaviors that occur within groups were often overlooked. The study of multiple individuals, when insects occur in high density could simulate the environment in which they live and provide more reliable information on their behavior. In semi-field conditions, we investigated the intrasexual behavior of the meadow spittlebug, Philaenus spumarius. Vibrational signals exchanged among individuals of the same sex were recorded throughout their adult stage, from late spring to early autumn, and during the day, from the morning to the evening using a laser vibrometer. Males were less active than females throughout the season and their interactions were less frequent compared to females. Intrasexual interactions were characterized by signal overlapping in both unisex groups, in addition to signal alternating only in the case of males. In conclusion, the study of signaling behavior in intrasexual groups contributed to a better understanding of P. spumarius social behavior. We discuss the hypothesis of a possible competitive behavior between males and cooperative behavior between female