Can the EU be a Constitutional System Without Universal Access to Judical Review

This Comment engages with a central dilemma about the legal order of the European Union: is the EU a constitutional system, a treaty system, or a hybrid system for which we must develop a new conceptual vocabulary? Besides intrinsic interest, resolving this categorization problem is important for deciding a number of issues in European Union law. For example, are legal strategies that are normally available to parties in international law viable in the European legal order? Should Community law be supreme over national law? If so, what limits should be placed on that supremacy, and “who should have the ultimate power to decide the boundaries of Community competence[?]” Although some scholars have properly cautioned that the answer to these questions “do not inexorably follow from the choice between the competing visions of Community legal order,” the categorization nonetheless suggests which alternative should more naturally follow. One might compare this European issue to the ongoing debate in the American legal community about whether the Constitution is an agreement between the states or an agreement between the people independent of the states. Although answering the question leaves much room for debate about the boundaries of federalism, it does suggest a great deal about one’s orientation, and in some cases may even determine the ultimate outcome

Linking Datasets on Organizations Using Half A Billion Open Collaborated Records

Scholars studying organizations often work with multiple datasets lacking shared unique identifiers or covariates. In such situations, researchers may turn to approximate string matching methods to combine datasets. String matching, although useful, faces fundamental challenges. Even when two strings appear similar to humans, fuzzy matching often does not work because it fails to adapt to the informativeness of the character combinations presented. Worse, many entities have multiple names that are dissimilar (e.g., "Fannie Mae" and "Federal National Mortgage Association"), a case where string matching has little hope of succeeding. This paper introduces data from a prominent employment-related networking site (LinkedIn) as a tool to address these problems. We propose interconnected approaches to leveraging the massive amount of information from LinkedIn regarding organizational name-to-name links. The first approach builds a machine learning model for predicting matches from character strings, treating the trillions of user-contributed organizational name pairs as a training corpus: this approach constructs a string matching metric that explicitly maximizes match probabilities. A second approach identifies relationships between organization names using network representations of the LinkedIn data. A third approach combines the first and second. We document substantial improvements over fuzzy matching in applications, making all methods accessible in open-source software ("LinkOrgs")

Can the EU be a Constitutional System Without Universal Access to Judical Review

This Comment engages with a central dilemma about the legal order of the European Union: is the EU a constitutional system, a treaty system, or a hybrid system for which we must develop a new conceptual vocabulary? Besides intrinsic interest, resolving this categorization problem is important for deciding a number of issues in European Union law. For example, are legal strategies that are normally available to parties in international law viable in the European legal order? Should Community law be supreme over national law? If so, what limits should be placed on that supremacy, and “who should have the ultimate power to decide the boundaries of Community competence[?]” Although some scholars have properly cautioned that the answer to these questions “do not inexorably follow from the choice between the competing visions of Community legal order,” the categorization nonetheless suggests which alternative should more naturally follow. One might compare this European issue to the ongoing debate in the American legal community about whether the Constitution is an agreement between the states or an agreement between the people independent of the states. Although answering the question leaves much room for debate about the boundaries of federalism, it does suggest a great deal about one’s orientation, and in some cases may even determine the ultimate outcome

Identifying bureaus with substantial personnel change during the Trump administration: A Bayesian approach

Presidents and executive branch agencies often have adversarial relationships. Early accounts suggest that these antagonisms may have been deeper and broader under President Trump than under any recent President. Yet careful appraisals have sometimes shown that claims about what President Trump has done to government and politics are over-stated, require greater nuance, or are just plain wrong. In this article, we use federal employment records from the Office of Personnel Management to examine rates of entry and exit at agencies across the executive branch during President Trump’s term. A key challenge in this endeavor is that agencies vary in size dramatically, and this variability makes direct comparisons of rates of entry and exit across agencies problematic. Small agencies are overrepresented among agencies with large and small rates. Yet small agencies do important work and cannot simply be ignored. To address such small-area issues, we use a Bayesian hierarchical model to generate size-adjusted rates that better reflect the fundamental uncertainty about what is happening in small agencies as well as the substantial likelihood that these entities are less unusual than raw statistics imply. Our analysis of these adjusted rates leads to three key findings. First, total employment at the end of the Trump administration was largely unchanged from where it began in January of 2017. Second, this aggregate stability masks significant variation across departments, with immigration-focused bureaus and veterans-affairs bureaus growing significantly and certain civil-rights focused bureaus exhibiting signs of stress. Finally, compared to the first terms of Presidents Bush and Obama, separation rates under President Trump were markedly higher for most agencies

Replication Data for: Public Found Not Guilty: The Mismeasurement of Mass Incarceration

ADD ABSTRACT TEX

S1 File -

(PDF)</p