A.A.L.S. Clinical Legal Education Panel: Evaluation and Assessment of Student Performance in a Clinical Setting

This article is adapted from a panel discussion held under the auspices of the Section on Clinical Legal Education of the Association of American Law Schools, presented at the annual meeting in Phoenix, Arizona on January 5, 1980. The participants were H. Russell Cort, Jack L. Sammons, Robert S. Catz, Ralph S. Tyler and Terence J. Anderson

\u3ci\u3eThe Court Years 1939-1975: The Autobiography of William O. Douglas\u3c/i\u3e (1980)

Few Americans would claim objectivity on the subject of William O. Douglas. He inspired powerful reactions. I start by stating my deeply held admiration for Justice Douglas, a respect nurtured at a distance and from his writings. His writings brought Douglas the man and Douglas the Justice close to many who never met him. His words show him to be a man who cared profoundly about the world, its people, his country, and the law. Decades of American law students, particularly those like me who studied law in the 1960\u27s and 1970\u27s, listened to Justice Douglas, whether he was in the majority or, as often was the case, in dissent. As an admirer, I read and now review his account of life as an associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States

What underlies the neuropsychological pattern of irregular>regular past-tense verb production?

The disadvantage in producing the past tense of regular relative to irregular verbs shown by some patients with non-fluent aphasia has been alternatively attributed (a) to the failure of a specific rule-based morphological mechanism, or (b) to a more generalised phonological impairment that penalises regular verbs more than irregular owing to the on-average greater phonological complexity of regular past-tense forms. Guided by the second of these two accounts, the current study was designed to identify more specific aspects of phonological deficit that might be associated with the pattern of irregular > regular past-tense production. Non-fluent aphasic patients (N = 8) were tested on past-tense verb production tasks and assessed with regard to the impact of three main manipulations in other word-production tasks: (i) insertion of a delay between stimulus and response in repetition; (ii) presence/ number of consonant clusters in a target word in repetition; (iii) position of stress within a bi-syllabic word in repetition and picture naming. The performance of all patients deteriorated in delayed repetition; but the patients with the largest discrepancy between regular and irregular past-tense production showed greater sensitivity to the other two manipulations. The phonological nature of the factors that correlated with verb-inflection performance emphasises the role of a phonological deficit in the observed pattern of irregular > regular

Pointed Admissible G-Covers and G-equivariant Cohomological Field Theories

For any finite group G we define the moduli space of pointed admissible G-covers and the concept of a G-equivariant cohomological field theory (G-CohFT), which, when G is the trivial group, reduce to the moduli space of stable curves and a cohomological field theory (CohFT), respectively. We prove that by taking the "quotient" by G, a G-CohFT reduces to a CohFT. We also prove that a G-CohFT contains a G-Frobenius algebra, a G-equivariant generalization of a Frobenius algebra, and that the "quotient" by G agrees with the obvious Frobenius algebra structure on the space of G-invariants, after rescaling the metric. We also introduce the moduli space of G-stable maps into a smooth, projective variety X with G action. Gromov-Witten-like invariants of these spaces provide the primary source of examples of G-CohFTs. Finally, we explain how these constructions generalize (and unify) the Chen-Ruan orbifold Gromov-Witten invariants of the global quotient [X/G] as well as the ring H*(X,G) of Fantechi and Goettsche.Comment: Corrected proof of the trace axiom and made minor typo corrections. 13 figures. Uses Paul Taylor's diagrams packag

The relationship between phonological and morphological deficits in Broca's aphasia: further evidence from errors in verb inflection

A previous study of 10 patients with Broca’s aphasia demonstrated that the advantage for producing the past tense of irregular over regular verbs exhibited by these patients was eliminated when the two sets of past-tense forms were matched for phonological complexity (Bird, Lambon Ralph, Seidenberg, McClelland, & Patterson, 2003). The interpretation given was that a generalised phonological impairment was central to the patients’ language deficits, including their poor performance on regular past tense verbs. The current paper provides further evidence in favour of this hypothesis, on the basis of a detailed analysis of the errors produced by these same 10 patients in reading, repetition, and sentence completion for a large number of regular, irregular, and nonce verbs. The patients’ predominant error types in all tasks and for all verb types were close and distant phonologically related responses. The balance between close and distant errors varied along three continua: the severity of the patient (more distant errors produced by the more severely impaired patients); the difficulty of the task (more distant errors in sentence completion > reading > repetition); the difficulty of the item (more distant errors for novel word forms than real verbs). A position analysis for these phonologically related errors revealed that vowels were most likely to be preserved and that consonant onsets and offsets were equally likely to be incorrect. Critically, the patients’ errors exhibited a strong tendency to simplify the phonological form of the target. These results are consistent with the notion that the patients’ relatively greater difficulty with regular past tenses reflects a phonological impairment that is sensitive to the complexity of spoken forms

Is there a semantic system for abstract words?

Two views on the semantics of concrete words are that their core mental representations are feature-based or are reconstructions of sensory experience. We argue that neither of these approaches is capable of representing the semantics of abstract words, which involve the representation of possibly hypothetical physical and mental states, the binding of entities within a structure, and the possible use of embedding (or recursion) in such structures. Brain based evidence in the form of dissociations between deficits related to concrete and abstract semantics corroborates the hypothesis. Neuroimaging evidence suggests that left lateral inferior frontal cortex supports those processes responsible for the representation of abstract words

Men and Machines: The Psychological Impact of Gunboats on the Fort Henry and Donelson Campaign

During the course of the American Civil War, 1861-1865, ironclad warships developed a fearful reputation as powerful commanders of the Mississippi River. With the ability to pierce deep into the heart of the South, destroy Confederate property, and pull out with amazing speed compared to land assaults, the early Western Flotilla became the symbol of Northern industrial invincibility, boosting Northern morale and seriously damaging Southern psyches. However, an analysis of the Fort Henry/Fort Donelson Campaign of 1862 reveals a different story than the one that went into legend. Using the official records of the Union and Confederate armies and navies, this study traces the psychological impact of the Western Flotilla ironclads and their journey into legend