Finishing a Friendly Argument: The Jury and the Historical Origins of Diversity Jurisdiction

This Article argues that diversity jurisdiction was intended to funnel politically significant litigation into the federal courts principally because federal officials would have the power to dictate the composition of federal juries. All existing accounts for the origins of diversity jurisdiction ultimately rely upon putative differences between the state and federal benches for their explanations of the jurisdiction's origin. This emphasis on the bench is anachronistic, however, because the jury possessed far more power than the bench to decide cases in eighteenth-century American courts. American juries during this period customarily had the right to decide issues of law as well as fact and were largely beyond the control of the bench. The Framers saw state court juries - independent bodies of citizens with almost unfettered power to resolve legal disputes -as one of the greatest dangers in allo wing ordinary citizens too much control over the governance of the nation. By wresting adjudicative power out of the hands of state court juries and bestowing it upon federal juries whose compositions could be tightly controlled by federal officials, diversity jurisdiction accomplished the Constitution's overarching purpose of checking the operation of "unrestrained" democracy in the states. Once the federal courts were established, federal officials controlled the composition of federal juries in several ways. In most districts, federal marshals dictated the composition of federal juries by hand-selecting jurors of their choice. In addition, Congress ensured that the political, economic, and social characteristics of federal juries would differ dramatically from their state counterparts by providing that the federal courts would draw their juries overwhelmingly from the urban, commercial centers of the nation. The state courts, by contrast, drew their juries predominantly from the agrarian populations living outside those centers. It is highly unlikely that this pervasive control over the composition of federal juries was an unintended consequence of the Constitution. Instead, as this Article argues, the evidence strongly suggests that the federal officials' control over the composition of federal juries constituted the single most important impetus behind the creation of diversity jurisdiction and a significant rationale for the establishment of the lower federal courts

A language comparison for scientific computing on MIMD architectures

Choleski's method for solving banded symmetric, positive definite systems is implemented on a multiprocessor computer using three FORTRAN based parallel programming languages, the Force, PISCES and Concurrent FORTRAN. The capabilities of the language for expressing parallelism and their user friendliness are discussed, including readability of the code, debugging assistance offered, and expressiveness of the languages. The performance of the different implementations is compared. It is argued that PISCES, using the Force for medium-grained parallelism, is the appropriate choice for programming Choleski's method on the multiprocessor computer, Flex/32

Integrating Experiential Learning into the Law School Curriculum

On June 13-15, 2014, the Second National Symposium on Experiential Education in Law took place in Greensboro, North Carolina. The Alliance for Experiential Learning in Law and Elon University School of Law hosted the symposium, with the support of Northeastern University School of Law. Presenters included professors and practitioners across multiple disciplines, including business, medicine, and architecture, and they shared their insights about the value of experiential education in their fields. Working groups from the Alliance for Experiential Learning in Law also presented their findings and distributed a set of working papers, which eventually culminated into this report. The report covers research in six areas of experiential learning, including defining a vision and mission for the experiential education movement, tracking the developing rhetoric of experiential education, studying cost and sustainability measures for experiential legal education, integrating experiential learning into the law school curriculum, establishing creative initiatives at law schools, and integrating with the profession. The whole article is posted and reflects the work of a number of authors