Lower Courts and Constitutional Comparativism

The issue of constitutional comparativism has been a topic of significant commentary in recent years. However, there is one aspect of this subject that has been almost completely ignored by scholars: the reception, or lack thereof, of constitutional comparativism by state and lower federal courts. While the Supreme Court\u27s enthusiasm for constitutional comparativism has waxed and now waned, lower state and federal courts have remained resolutely agnostic about this new movement. This is of tremendous practical significance because over ninety-nine percent of all cases are resolved by lower state and federal courts. Accordingly, if the lower courts eschew constitutional comparativism, then this constitutes the rejection of a comparative interpretive methodology in virtually all cases. This article examines this issue in consideration of the related opinions of two leading constitutional law scholars, David Fontana (who favors the use of comparative material in lower courts) and Vicki Jackson (who opposes it)

Subordination in Children’s Writing

This paper reports an investigation into the use of subordinate clauses in the writing of a class of seven to nine year old children when attempting five different writing tasks. The investigation was undertaken in part-response to an inspection report on the school by the Office for Standards in Education (Ofsted) which recommended that the school should extend the writing skills of pupils in this age-range. The importance of developing subordination in writing is related to previous research and to evidence from reviews of Ofsted inspection evidence. The different patterns of subordination are discussed, between tasks and pupils and in relation to variation in the writing of individual children when tackling the different tasks. The paper ends by suggesting how similar informal investigations can assist schools in promoting writing development. It also outlines how the teaching approaches outlined in the National Literacy Strategy will provide opportunities for this promotion, particularly by exploiting links between reading and writing

The Impact of After-School Programs That Promote Personal and Social Skills

The first of several reports to come from CASEL's major meta-analysisproject. Conducted in collaboration with Joseph Durlak of Loyola Universityand funded by the W.T. Grant Foundation, this first report describes thestrong positive effects after-school programs can have, and the conditionsneeded to realize these benefits

Normal Approximation in Large Network Models

We develop a methodology for proving central limit theorems in network models with strategic interactions and homophilous agents. Since data often consists of observations on a single large network, we consider an asymptotic framework in which the network size tends to infinity. In the presence of strategic interactions, network moments are generally complex functions of components, where a node's component consists of all alters to which it is directly or indirectly connected. We find that a modification of "exponential stabilization" conditions from the stochastic geometry literature provides a useful formulation of weak dependence for moments of this type. We establish a CLT for a network moments satisfying stabilization and provide a methodology for deriving primitive sufficient conditions for stabilization using results in branching process theory. We apply the methodology to static and dynamic models of network formation

Time-resolved optical gating based on dispersive propagation: a new method to characterize optical pulses

We introduce the technique of time-resolved optical gating (TROG) based on dispersive propagation (DP), a new noninterferometric method for characterizing ultrashort optical pulses in amplitude and phase without the need for a short optical gating pulse. TROG is similar to frequency-resolved optical gating except that the role of time and frequency is interchanged. For the DP-TROG geometry, we show that measurements of the autocorrelation trace of the pulse after propagation through a medium with variable dispersion together with a single measurement of its intensity spectrum contain sufficient information to reconstruct the pulse in amplitude and phase. Pulse reconstruction for this DP-TROG geometry works very well even for the case of a nonlinearly chirped double pulse. Compared with other methods, DP-TROG does not introduce an ambiguity in the direction of time for the pulse. Due to its simplicity and improved sensitivity, DP-TROG is expected to be useful in characterizing low-energy pulses