Reckless Endangerment of an Employee: A Proposal in the Wake of \u3cem\u3eFilm Recovery Systems\u3c/em\u3e to Make the Boss Responsible for His Crimes

This Note argues that the traditional regulatory, civil, and criminal mechanisms are both ineffective and inappropriate to deter or punish corporate decisionmakers for decisions that pose risks to the safety or health of employees in the workplace. The Note proposes a new criminal offense to prevent and punish culpable corporate decisionmaking that results in employee deaths or injuries. Part I explains the novel application of the traditional murder offense in Film Recovery Systems and demonstrates that the case fails to lay the foundation for a standardized response to employee endangerment. Part II analyzes the traditional responses of the regulatory and civil systems to workrelated employee deaths. Because the regulatory and civil mechanisms have proved ineffective in dealing with employee-endangering activities, prosecutors are looking to criminal law solutions. Part III reviews the traditional criminal law mechanisms available to prosecutors and shows why these are inadequate to deter and punish activities that endanger employees. Part IV suggests a statutory solution, the Reckless Endangerment of an Employee Offense, to respond more effectively to corporate decisions that wrongfully endanger the health and safety of employees

Learning About Plate Tectonics Through Argument-Writing

In a quasi-experimental study (N=60), grade 7/8 teachers students were taught to write arguments in content-area subjects. After instruction, students drew on document portfolios to write on a new topic: “Do the continents drift?” In a MANCOVA, students who participated in argument instruction scored significantly higher than a control class on the combination of dependent variables. A stepwise discriminant analysis indicated that instruction most strongly affected argument genre knowledge, which in turn accounted for variance in the other dependent variables. The features of argument texts that were most strongly associated with science learning were: the number of argument moves, the number of science propositions taken up from source documents, text length, and text coherence. These results support a constructivist model of writing to learn in which students use genre knowledge to select information from source documents and construct genre-specific relationships among ideas

Utilizing Title VI As A Means to Eradicate Health Discrimination

Health disparities among people of color are persistent and detrimental to the overall wellness of these groups. Discrimination in the provision of health care services is one of the primary causes of health disparities. Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964’s availability as a tool to prevent discrimination and, in turn, disparities among these groups is underdocumented. The legislative intent of Title VI and the historical context of the law have been helpful in its use outside of the health care arena to prevent discrimination. This sheds light on the ways that the law can influence the health care sector to decrease the prevalence of discrimination and improve the health of people of color. The government must make civil rights laws, policies, and procedures unambiguous; it must vigorously utilize its enforcement powers; and it must monitor the health care facilities required to adhere to the law. Additionally, beneficiaries must be educated of their rights and the processes for pursuing action when those rights have been violated. Noncompliance with civil rights laws to the detriment of an often-marginalized population is deplorable. However, Title VI provides a powerful avenue for change