The Uneven Application of Twombly in Patent Cases: An Argument for Leveling the Playing Field, 8 J. Marshall Rev. Intell. Prop. L. 1 (2008)

The Supreme Court\u27s recent Twombly decision has tightened pleading standards by retiring Conley v. Gibson’s “no set of facts” language. While Twombly has been applied beyond antitrust law, its impact on patent pleadings is not yet settled. Currently, a troubling dichotomy has emerged: lower courts are holding defendants to a heightened pleading standard for affirmative defenses and counterclaims, while allowing plaintiffs to continue the pre-Twombly “bare-bones” pleadings practice. This dichotomy is inconsistent with the Twombly Court’s goal of controlling the ballooning size of and costs of complex civil litigation. Holding patent plaintiffs to a heightened pleading standard would be at most a negligible added burden in light of Rule 11’s pre-filing investigation requirement, and level the playing field by allowing defendants to better formulate specific defense theories

Coping with verbal and social bullying in middle school

Becoming a victim of verbal and social bullying in middle school can lead to illness, psychological stress, and maladjustment. The coping strategies that students utilize when they are bullied may influence the likelihood and severity of these negative effects. In this study, we examined the predictions made by students in two middle schools about the ways that they would cope with becoming a victim of verbal and social bullying. We also analyzed influences for coping strategies and student willingness to seek help with bullying at school. The results show that middle school students generally expect that they will utilize adaptive approach strategies in trying to solve the problem or obtain support from others, but those who had been victimized in the last month were more likely than those not involved in bullying, to predict that they would engage in maladaptive avoidance coping strategies if victimized in the future. Willingness to seek help was found to be enhanced by approach coping strategies, less aggressive attitudes, and lower perceptions of school bullying. Policy implications for efforts to encourage approach coping strategies in middle school students through educational interventions and school counseling are discussed.peer-reviewe

A Multicultural Grassroots Effort to Reduce Ethnic and Racial Social Distance among Middle School Students

Raising tolerance for people of different ethnic and racial groups is the goal of the Multicultural Mosaic program, a grass-roots multicultural education effort initiated by a small group of middle school teachers in a private school in the northeast. After years of enjoying the comforts of a modern, but European-based, curriculum, these teachers took the initiative to pursue an ambitious transformation of their entire school\u27s approach to pedagogy. Not only would the English teachers introduce new texts by foreign authors and the social studies teachers introduce new materials on the history of non-Western cultures, but also the teachers of mathematics and physical education would integrate specific foreign cultures to their teaching in the classroom and on the playground. Extracurricular activities, many of which rely upon the support of parents and volunteers, would be changed also to reflect specific themes in the multicultural movement at the school

Lifetime Differences in Heavy Mesons With Time Independent Measurements

Heavy meson pairs produced in the decays of heavy quarkonium resonances at e+ e- machines (beauty and tau-charm factories) have the useful property that the two mesons are in the CP-correlated states. By tagging one of the mesons as a CP eigenstate, a lifetime difference of heavy neutral meson mass eigenstates width difference may be determined by measuring the leptonic branching ratio of the other meson. We discuss the use of this and related methods both in the case where time dependent mixing is small and when it is significant. We consider the impact of possible CP-violating effects and present the complete results for CP-entangled decay rates with CP-violation taken into account.Comment: 14 pages, 0 figures; 2 references added, results unchange

Status of the KTeV Experiment at Fermilab

The KTeV experiment is a fixed target experiment at Fermilab. Its primary goal is the search for direct CP violation in the decay of neutral kaons. Its current status and some preliminary results will be discussed.Comment: 5 pages Latex, 4 figures; to be published in the proceedings of the XVI International Workshop on Weak Interactions and Neutrinos, WIN '97, Capri, Italy, June 22-28, 199