Herding CATS: Building Student Engagement in Remote Learning in the U.S. and Uzbekistan

Reflecting on the experience of faculty at Boston College Law School and Tashkent State University of Law in Uzbekistan during the early months of the covid-19 pandemic, this essay discusses how law teachers can promote student engagement in remote learning by adapting classroom assessment techniques, or CATs, to the remote learning environment. Originally promoted in a 1988 book by Thomas A. Angelo and K. Patricia Cross as tools “to help teachers find out what students are learning in the classroom and how well they are learning it,” CATs are well-designed and well-tested in-class activities that require students to interact with the teacher and with content; thus, in addition to providing information about learning, CATs can be used as methods to engage students in learning. CATs adapt easily from the physical to the virtual classroom, which to many law teachers in the U.S. offers the promise of engaging students in a manner similar to the physical classroom. In light of drawbacks of the virtual classroom, however, U.S. law teachers may find instructive the experience of teachers at TSUL, who have devised ways to employ activities that function similarly to CATs in lower bandwidth contexts

Teaching in Practice: Legal Writing Faculty as Expert Writing Consultants to Law Firms

As experts in the pedagogy and substance of legal writing, full-time legal writing faculty who serve as writing consultants to law firms help fill an increasing need for training and support of lawyers. In addition to providing a direct benefit to lawyers and their firms, this practice benefits the legal academy by providing fresh ideas for teaching and scholarship. This article discusses generally the practice of legal writing consulting in law firms by full-time legal writing faculty. The article provides background in theory and practice, addressing why law firms seek outside consultants for this type of training and support and why full time legal writing faculty are appropriate writing consultants. For this, the Article draws on, among other sources, the recently published Carnegie Study and Best Practices in Legal Education. The Article then describes the nuts and bolts of a consulting practice, including various ways services might be configured, and asks whether realistic goals can be set and met. Finally, the article addresses ethical and other challenging issues that may arise in this type of consulting practice

A Methodology for Mentoring Writing in Law Practice: Using Textual Clues to Provide Effective and Efficient Feedback

Becoming a successful legal writer is a process that begins in law school and continues intensively during the beginning years of a lawyer\u27s career. Throughout this process, in both contexts, a writer benefits enormously from feedback on his analysis, and how that analysis is conveyed, from those more experienced. Much has been written about how legal educators should respond to student written work, yet little addresses the role that supervising attorneys can play in mentoring the writing of less experienced colleagues. This article therefore proposes a methodology to help supervisor-mentors provide, in an efficient manner, effective feedback on junior lawyers\u27 writing. The article begins by discussing why a mentor should focus her feedback initially on the analytical foundation of a piece of writing and put off until later copy-editing and commenting on basic clarity of expression. It goes on to recommend a methodology by which a mentor can draw on her experience as a lawyer to identify, from the face of a document, a range of textual and structural clues that likely indicate analytical problems, even when time pressures prevent her from gaining an independent understanding of the document\u27s substance. The article explains how, based on these clues, a mentor can provide feedback that will help a junior lawyer revise a current piece of writing and develop skills to write more successfully in the future. The article concludes by applying this methodology to a hypothetical problem to illustrate this process and to provide the reader with a hands-on practicum using the suggested methodology

High Resolution K-band Spectroscopy of MWC 480 and V1331 Cyg

We present high resolution (R=25,000-35,000) K-band spectroscopy of two young stars, MWC 480 and V1331 Cyg. Earlier spectrally dispersed (R=230) interferometric observations of MWC 480 indicated the presence of an excess continuum emission interior to the dust sublimation radius, with a spectral shape that was interpreted as evidence for hot water emission from the inner disk of MWC 480. Our spectrum of V1331 Cyg reveals strong emission from CO and hot water vapor, likely arising in a circumstellar disk. In comparison, our spectrum of MWC 480 appears mostly featureless. We discuss possible ways in which strong water emission from MWC 480 might go undetected in our data. If strong water emission is in fact absent from the inner disk, as our data suggest, the continuum excess interior to the dust sublimation radius that is detected in the interferometric data must have another origin. We discuss possible physical origins for the continuum excess.Comment: 29 pages, 5 figures, to appear in Ap

Suppressing Electroweak Precision Observables in 5D Warped Models

We elaborate on a recently proposed mechanism to suppress large contributions to the electroweak precision observables in five dimensional (5D) warped models, without the need for an extended 5D gauge sector. The main ingredient is a modification of the AdS metric in the vicinity of the infrared (IR) brane corresponding to a strong deviation from conformality in the IR of the 4D holographic dual. We compute the general low energy effective theory of the 5D warped Standard Model, emphasizing additional IR contributions to the wave function renormalization of the light Higgs mode. We also derive expressions for the S and T parameters as a function of a generic 5D metric and zero-mode wave functions. We give an approximate formula for the mass of the radion that works even for strong deviation from the AdS background. We proceed to work out the details of an explicit model and derive bounds for the first KK masses of the various bulk fields. The radion is the lightest new particle although its mass is already at about 1/3 of the mass of the lightest resonances, the KK states of the gauge bosons. We examine carefully various issues that can arise for extreme choices of parameters such as the possible reintroduction of the hierarchy problem, the onset of nonperturbative physics due to strong IR curvature or the creation of new hierarchies near the Planck scale. We conclude that a KK scale of 1 TeV is compatible with all these constraints.Comment: 44 pages, 11 figures, references adde