Learning the \u27How\u27 of the Law: Teaching Procedure and Legal Education

This article examines the approaches to teaching civil procedure in five common law jurisdictions (Canada, Australia, United States, Israel, and England). The paper demonstrates the important transition of civil procedure from a vocational oriented subject to a rigorous intellectual study of policies, processes, and values underpinning our civil justice system, and analysis of how that system operates. The advantages and disadvantages of where civil procedure fits within the curriculum are discussed and the significant opportunities for ‘active’ learning are highlighted. The inclusion of England where civil procedure is not taught to any significant degree in the law degree provides a valuable comparator. Common findings from the other jurisdictions suggest that teaching civil procedure enhances the curriculum by bringing it closer to what lawyers actually do as well as enabling a better understanding of the development of doctrinal law

Learning the \u27How\u27 of the Law: Teaching Procedure and Legal Education

This article examines the approaches to teaching civil procedure in five common law jurisdictions (Canada, Australia, United States, Israel, and England). The paper demonstrates the important transition of civil procedure from a vocational oriented subject to a rigorous intellectual study of policies, processes, and values underpinning our civil justice system, and analysis of how that system operates. The advantages and disadvantages of where civil procedure fits within the curriculum are discussed and the significant opportunities for ‘active’ learning are highlighted. The inclusion of England where civil procedure is not taught to any significant degree in the law degree provides a valuable comparator. Common findings from the other jurisdictions suggest that teaching civil procedure enhances the curriculum by bringing it closer to what lawyers actually do as well as enabling a better understanding of the development of doctrinal law

Flexible Modeling of Epidemics with an Empirical Bayes Framework

Seasonal influenza epidemics cause consistent, considerable, widespread loss annually in terms of economic burden, morbidity, and mortality. With access to accurate and reliable forecasts of a current or upcoming influenza epidemic's behavior, policy makers can design and implement more effective countermeasures. We developed a framework for in-season forecasts of epidemics using a semiparametric Empirical Bayes framework, and applied it to predict the weekly percentage of outpatient doctors visits for influenza-like illness, as well as the season onset, duration, peak time, and peak height, with and without additional data from Google Flu Trends, as part of the CDC's 2013--2014 "Predict the Influenza Season Challenge". Previous work on epidemic modeling has focused on developing mechanistic models of disease behavior and applying time series tools to explain historical data. However, these models may not accurately capture the range of possible behaviors that we may see in the future. Our approach instead produces possibilities for the epidemic curve of the season of interest using modified versions of data from previous seasons, allowing for reasonable variations in the timing, pace, and intensity of the seasonal epidemics, as well as noise in observations. Since the framework does not make strict domain-specific assumptions, it can easily be applied to other diseases as well. Another important advantage of this method is that it produces a complete posterior distribution for any desired forecasting target, rather than mere point predictions. We report prospective influenza-like-illness forecasts that were made for the 2013--2014 U.S. influenza season, and compare the framework's cross-validated prediction error on historical data to that of a variety of simpler baseline predictors.Comment: 52 page

Design and Conduct of the Cost of Justice Survey

The “Everyday Legal Problems and the Cost of Justice in Canada” survey (“CoJ survey”) 1 is a national everyday legal problems survey carried out as part of the Canadian Forum on Civil Justice’s Cost of Justice project (CFCJ). 2 The CoJ survey was conducted by the Institute for Social Research (ISR), York University, on behalf of the CFCJ, between September 2013 and May 2014. The 3,051 main study interviews were completed with randomly selected adults from randomly selected households over land line telephones. An additional set of 212 cell phone interviews were also conducted (discussed further below). The interviews averaged just over 21 minutes in length and the response rate was 42%. This technical report briefly outlines the design and conduct of the survey

Everyday Legal Problems and the Cost of Justice in Canada: Survey

The Cost of Justice project (2011-2017) examines the social and economic costs of Canada’s justice system. It is guided by two questions: What is the cost of delivering access to justice? And what is the cost of not delivering access to justice? Comprised of leading researchers investigating various dimensions of access to justice and cost across the country, the Cost of Justice project is producing empirical data that will inform the future of access to justice in Canada and abroad. The lead research team includes: Trevor C.W. Farrow (Principal Investigator), Nicole Aylwin, Les Jacobs, Lisa Moore, and Diana Lowe

Everyday Legal Problems and the Cost of Justice in Canada: Overview Report

Law and legal problems are part of everyday life. If you have ever been harassed at work, unfairly fired or evicted, divorced, not received support payments, disputed a will or a cell phone contract, or had your credit rating challenged, you may have already experienced one of these types of everyday legal problems. If so, you are not alone. Almost half (48.4%) of Canadians over 18 will experience at least one civil or family justice problem over any given three-year period. Even though many Canadians do not understand, feel connected to or welcomed by the justice system, essentially all of us will experience at least one everyday legal problem over the course of our lifetime

Everyday Legal Problems and the Cost of Justice in Canada: Overview Report

Law and legal problems are part of everyday life. If you have ever been harassed at work, unfairly fired or evicted, divorced, not received support payments, disputed a will or a cell phone contract, or had your credit rating challenged, you may have already experienced one of these types of everyday legal problems. If so, you are not alone. Almost half (48.4%) of Canadians over 18 will experience at least one civil or family justice problem over any given three-year period. Even though many Canadians do not understand, feel connected to or welcomed by the justice system,2 essentially all of us will experience at least one everyday legal problem over the course of our lifetime

Heterostructures of GaN with SiC and ZnO enhance carrier stability and separation in framework semiconductors

A computational approach, using the density functional theory, is employed to describe the enhanced electron-hole stability and separation in a novel class of semiconducting composite materials, with the so-called double bubble structural motif, which can be used for photocatalytic applications. We examine the double bubble containing SiC mixed with either GaN or ZnO, as well as related motifs that prove to have low formation energies. We find that a 24-atom SiC sodalite cage inside a 96-atom ZnO cage possesses electronic properties that make this material suitable for solar radiation absorption applications. Surprisingly stable, the inverse structure, with ZnO inside SiC, was found to show a large deformation of the double bubble and a strong localisation of the photo-excited electron charge carriers, with the lowest band gap of ca. 2.15 eV of the composite materials considered. The nanoporous nature of these materials could indicate their suitability for thermoelectric applications