Teaching Torts by Integrating Ethical, Skills, Policy and Real-World Issues, and Using Varied Pedagogical Techniques: Reflections on Using the Henderson, Pearson and Siliciano Casebook

In brief, the Henderson, Pearson, and Siliciano casebook includes materials on ethics, problems and other skill-based activities, a diverse set of ideological perspectives presented in a non-preachy way, and addresses numerous real-world issues and concerns. The casebook also lends itself to the variety of teaching and active learning methods I employ in my Torts classes

Teaching Torts by Integrating Ethical, Skills, Policy and Real-World Issues, and Using Varied Pedagogical Techniques: Reflections on Using the Henderson, Pearson and Siliciano Casebook

In brief, the Henderson, Pearson, and Siliciano casebook includes materials on ethics, problems and other skill-based activities, a diverse set of ideological perspectives presented in a non-preachy way, and addresses numerous real-world issues and concerns. The casebook also lends itself to the variety of teaching and active learning methods I employ in my Torts classes

For Whom the School Bell Tolls but Not the Statute of Limitations: Minors and the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act

This Article explores whether claims under the federal special education statute should be tolled on account of minority. Adult disabled students typically assert this type of tolling claim when alleging statutory violations dating back ten or more years, when they were minors. However this tolling claim is decided, there may be undesired results. First, even if the student has a very strong case, the merits are never reached if the court dismisses the hearing request as untimely. Second, if the hearing request is timely and the case proceeds to the merits, the student must remain in her current educational placement, potentially at great cost, during the lengthy IDEA hearing and appeals process as mandated by the IDEA\u27s stay put provision. Moreover, the school may face difficulties defending the claim on the merits because under the IDEA, schools must allow parents and adult students to request destruction of their special education records to the extent the records are not currently required in order to provide services. Finally, unique challenges arise for schools because parents help develop their child\u27s special education program. Accordingly, schools rely on both the parents\u27 approval of the educational program, as well as the parents\u27 choice not to request a due process hearing for their minor child. The IDEA specifically assigns the right to make this decision to the parents of minor students, and not the minor students themselves, as part of the IDEA\u27s panoply of procedural safeguards. Congress first addressed statute of limitations issues under the IDEA in the 2004 amendments. This Article surveys the relevant case law on whether to borrow tolling provisions from state statutes and reveals great variation among the courts. Specifically, the courts vary in their adherence to Supreme Court precedent, their application of this precedent, and their conclusions about whether tolling on account of minority should apply in IDEA disputes. The Article concludes that, because of the unique role the IDEA assigns to parents, the correct approach under the pre-2004 amendments is not to toll claims for minors. The Article then examines the new IDEA language, which creates explicit statutes of limitation, but does not explicitly address the issue of tolling for minor students. Consequently, in future litigation, students and parents are likely to claim that tolling for minors should be judicially read into the IDEA\u27s new statutes of limitations. However, this Article concludes, through an application of the Supreme Court\u27s guidance in this area, that a tolling rule for legal minors should not be read into the IDEA\u27s new statutes of limitation. Tolling for minors is inconsistent with congressional intent as evidenced by the pre-2004 amendments analysis, and further strengthened by the new amendments. Finally, the consequences of tolling are harsher than those of not tolling

Doing the Right Thing: Disability Discrimination and Readmission of Academically Dismissed Law Students

The Article explores an issue with which many law schools, law students, and courts struggle. It begins with an overview of the relevant federal disability discrimination statutes, with particular attention to recent United States Supreme Court decisions that strictly interpret the “disabilities” protected by these statutes, and to recent cases in which lower courts have accordingly held that a student’s impairment is not a statutorily protected disability. As it turns out, many dismissed law students submitting documentation of a disability are not legally disabled in the first instance. The statutory overview also compares the markedly different approach of the federal preK-12 special education statute (the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (“IDEA”)), under which many such students were served earlier in their educational careers, and which creates expectations on the part of the students about their eligibility and protection under higher education disability law. The Article also reviews and examines the Supreme Court’s tradition of deference to higher education academic decisions, recently reiterated in the University of Michigan affirmative action cases, in which higher education admissions decisions were challenged as racially discriminatory. The Article then reviews the body of law (both actual lower court cases and OCR administrative opinions) in which academically dismissed higher education students denied readmission have made disability discrimination claims. In the overwhelming majority of these cases and opinions, including all of the court cases involving law schools, schools have prevailed without going to trial, normally by receiving summary judgment. Moreover, courts in these cases have regularly announced a policy of deferring to the school’s academic decisions concerning academic dismissal and readmission. Examination of the few court cases in which (non law) schools were not granted summary judgment offers helpful guidance to law schools faced with such claims. The Article finds that the courts’ approach in these cases is appropriate, although no doubt frustrating to students whose planned careers may well have ended. The Article concludes by offering guidelines for law schools trying to do the right thing (i.e. make a decision which is both principled and nondiscriminatory) when faced with readmissions petitions by Student or other dismissed students claiming a disability

Implementation of 3D spatial indexing and compression in a large-scale molecular dynamics simulation database for rapid atomic contact detection

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Molecular dynamics (MD) simulations offer the ability to observe the dynamics and interactions of both whole macromolecules and individual atoms as a function of time. Taken in context with experimental data, atomic interactions from simulation provide insight into the mechanics of protein folding, dynamics, and function. The calculation of atomic interactions or contacts from an MD trajectory is computationally demanding and the work required grows exponentially with the size of the simulation system. We describe the implementation of a spatial indexing algorithm in our multi-terabyte MD simulation database that significantly reduces the run-time required for discovery of contacts. The approach is applied to the Dynameomics project data. Spatial indexing, also known as spatial hashing, is a method that divides the simulation space into regular sized bins and attributes an index to each bin. Since, the calculation of contacts is widely employed in the simulation field, we also use this as the basis for testing compression of data tables. We investigate the effects of compression of the trajectory coordinate tables with different options of data and index compression within MS SQL SERVER 2008.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>Our implementation of spatial indexing speeds up the calculation of contacts over a 1 nanosecond (ns) simulation window by between 14% and 90% (i.e., 1.2 and 10.3 times faster). For a 'full' simulation trajectory (51 ns) spatial indexing reduces the calculation run-time between 31 and 81% (between 1.4 and 5.3 times faster). Compression resulted in reduced table sizes but resulted in no significant difference in the total execution time for neighbour discovery. The greatest compression (~36%) was achieved using page level compression on both the data and indexes.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>The spatial indexing scheme significantly decreases the time taken to calculate atomic contacts and could be applied to other multidimensional neighbor discovery problems. The speed up enables on-the-fly calculation and visualization of contacts and rapid cross simulation analysis for knowledge discovery. Using page compression for the atomic coordinate tables and indexes saves ~36% of disk space without any significant decrease in calculation time and should be considered for other non-transactional databases in MS SQL SERVER 2008.</p