Catching them young : teaching "history" to the 4-7 age group

If we accept that all normal children, irrespective of their age, are possessed with the desire to find out about the world around them; if it is true that gaining knowledge is a powerful human desire, as basic to life as the need for love, physical safety, trust and security, then it must be the teacher's concern to give a modicum of Social Studies education to children as early in life as one can. Social Studies education teaches children about the nature of people, about the world, and about human relationships and all these are not alien even to young children of the kindergarten and infant classes. How can teachers impart this kind of education? Certainly not by stuffing children with indigestible facts but by accepting the primacy of concepts. Facts, as every educationalist will tell you, are too numerous to learn, date very quickly, and, because they are unrelated to children's experiences, are quickly forgotten. Concepts, on the other hand, while not rejecting the use of facts, always have to do with meaning.peer-reviewe

Private Enforcement in Administrative Courts

Scholars debating the relative merits of public and private enforcement have long trained their attention on the federal courts. For some, laws giving private litigants rights to vindicate important policies generate unaccountable "private attorneys general" who interfere with public enforcement goals. For others, private lawsuits save cash-strapped government lawyers money, time, and resources by encouraging private parties to police misconduct on their own. Yet largely overlooked in the debate is enforcement inside agency adjudication, which often is depicted as just another form of public enforcement, only in a friendlier forum. This Article challenges the prevailing conception of administrative enforcement. Based on a comprehensive examination of over eighty administrative courts, I find that agencies rarely enforce on their own. Among other things, private parties may have procedural rights to file regulatory complaints, trigger agency investigations, demand evidentiary hearings, join public enforcement actions as parties, and even pursue claims without the involvement of the agency's enforcement arm. Although some administrative enforcement is virtually indistinguishable from either public or private enforcement in federal court, more often administrative schemes employ attributes of both

Private Enforcement in Administrative Courts

Scholars debating the relative merits of public and private enforcement have long trained their attention on the federal courts. For some, laws giving private litigants rights to vindicate important policies generate unaccountable private attorneys general who interfere with public enforcement goals. For others, private lawsuits save cash-strapped government lawyers money, time, and resources by encouraging private parties to police misconduct on their own. Yet largely overlooked in the debate is enforcement inside agency adjudication, which often is depicted as just another form of public enforcement, only in a friendlier forum. This Article challenges the prevailing conception of administrative enforcement. Based on a comprehensive examination of over eighty administrative courts, I find that agencies rarely enforce on their own. Among other things, private parties may have procedural rights to file regulatory complaints, trigger agency investigations, demand evidentiary hearings, join public enforcement actions as parties, and even pursue claims without the involvement of the agency\u27s enforcement arm. Although some administrative enforcement is virtually indistinguishable from either public or private enforcement in federal court, more often administrative schemes employ attributes of both. Combining public and private enforcement furthers the goals of agency adjudication while mitigating some of the dangers posed by transferring cases from generalist courts to specialized policymaking bodies with less formal procedures. Public enforcement offers greater political accountability and more coherent implementation of policy. Private enforcement supplements agency expertise with the situated knowledge of regulatory beneficiaries and enhances their access to legal remedies. And diversifying enforcement inputs reduces the risk of political or interest group capture of administrative schemes. These tools are especially valuable today, as presidential administrations increasingly use control over public enforcement to roll back statutory mandates they cannot repeal through the legislative process. Enhanced procedural rights for private parties can reduce capture of statutory mandates, highlight undue influence, and facilitate judicial review of policy changes implemented through agency nonenforcement

Presidential Maladministration

Following her service in the Clinton administration, then-Professor Elena Kagan wrote, "[w]e live today in an era of presidential administration."' Kagan argued that while Congress, the bureaucracy, and interest groups all continued to influence federal regulatory policy, the president had assumed a position of comparative primacy vis-A-vis these other actors.2 Although some were troubled by strong presidential control over the discretion delegated to federal agencies by Congress,3 Kagan maintained that the tools used by President Clinton to influence federal agencies would enhance the political accountability and effectiveness of regulatory policy.4 Clinton's increased use of formal directives to agency heads-which shaped their regulatory agendas, spurred them to action, and nudged them towards his preferred policies-and his public appropriation of regulatory decisions as an extension of his own policymaking goals rendered government policy more transparent and accountable.5 By publicly asserting ownership of agency action, Clinton made clear who to credit or blame for government policy.6 In addition, Kagan argued the president's participation in regulatory agenda setting would improve the effectiveness and dynamism of federal agencies.7 Agencies would be more likely to act expeditiously to solve national problems, and act in a way that was effective and rational.' Finally, a president seeking to grow his base would advance policies supported by the general public rather than parochial private interests, thus promoting democratic norms.9 Although Kagan recognized that presidents would not always highlight their role in policymaking, and would sometimes serve narrow interests, Kagan posited that when presidential control was highly publicized, the resulting government policy would be more representative of the broader electorate than policies shaped by Congress, the Judiciary, the bureaucracy, or interest groups.1

Agency Delays: How a Principal-Agent Approach Can Inform Judicial and Executive Branch Review of Agency Foot-Dragging

Article published in the Geo. Washington Law Review

Democratizing Rule Development

Agencies make many of their most important decisions in rulemaking well before the publication of a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPR), when they set their regulatory agendas and develop proposals for public comment. Agencies' needfor information from outside parties and openness to alternative courses of action are also generally at their greatest during these earlier stages of the rulemaking process. Yet regulatory agenda setting and rule development have received virtually no scholarly attention. The literature generally treats what happens before publication of the NPRM as a "black box" and suggests that agenda setting and rule development are primarily influenced by political considerations and pressure from well-organized groups. Other interested stakeholders, including regulatory beneficiaries, smaller regulated entities, state, local, and tribal governments, unaffiliated experts, individuals with situated knowledge of the regulatory issues, and members of the general public, are routinely absent. While there is undoubtedly much truth to this understanding, a recent study we conducted for the Administrative Conference of the United States unearthed significant efforts by numerous federal agencies to engage the public long before the publication of an NPRM. The existing efforts, however, tend to be relatively unstructured, unsystematic, and ad hoc. Moreover, many opportunities for public engagement are voluntary and self-selecting, which do little to overcome the barriers to participation by traditionally absent stakeholders. Rule development thus warrants more systematic focus and attention to ensure that agencies fully engage all relevant stakeholders in each rulemaking in which they have relevant knowledge, experience, or views thereby promoting the democratic aspirations of regulation

Trading up: Is Section 337 the New ATS?

There is a crisis in international human rights law. In a series of cases, the Supreme Court has drastically reduced the Alien Tort Statute's ("ATS") utility as a vehicle for transnational justice, effectively ending a remarkable four-decade string of human rights litigation under the statute. Since 1980, private plaintiffs have filed hundreds of ATS suits in federal courts seeking to hold a rogue's gallery of international despots, torturers, mass murderers, and their corporate accomplices accountable for violations of international law. But ATS suits proved controversial. The Court's hamstringing of the ATS was driven largely by concerns over assertions of extraterritoriajlu risdiction by private parties that might embroil the United States in sensitive foreign policy disputes. As internationally minded social justice activists and scholars mourn the ATS's demise, they are avidly seeking a replacement. Many increasingly look to state law and state courts as a vehicle for transnational redress. Yet, state law is even more problematic than the ATS as a vehicle for asserting extraterritorial jurisdiction

Inside the Agency Class Action

Article published in the Yale Law Journal

Excavations at Tas-Silg, Malta : a preliminary report on the 1996-1998 campaigns conducted by the Department of Classics and Archaeology of the University of Malta

The area known as Tas-Silg is situated in the south-eastern part of the island of Malta, close to Marsaxlokk harbour. In reality the place name refers to the small church dedicated to Our Lady of the Snows (hence Tas-Silg) situated at the point where the narrow · road from Zejtun forks out in two directions: to Delimara and Xrobb il-Ghagin due south-east and to Marsaxlokk village due south-west. A British-period fort occupying the highest point of the elongated hill further south along· the first road also carries the same place name. The lower and more compact hill on which the excavations have been conducted is called 'Ta' Berikka' , but since it is so close to the above-mentioned church (only 50 m to the north) the tradition of calling it Tas-Silg is now well established and there is no sense in changing it. The site has a commanding view of the Marsaxlokk harbour to the south and overlooks two other bays, Marsascala and St Thomas's bay, to the north-east. On all sides the slope is broken up by man-made terraced fields There is no doubt that the topography of the site must have been a determining factor in its choice for the establishment of a religious centre in the Temple period of Maltese pehistory (3000--2500 BC), though one must keep in mind that close to Tas-Silg there are three other prehistoric temple sites. each one with a completely different topography. The Temple people were quite introverted in their cultural isolation and do not seem to have been much interested in seafaring and in the outside world. The situation changed radically in the following age, the Bronze Age. when the island was occupied by people who set up villages on naturally defensible hilltops, occasionally fortifying them with artificial ramparts. The Tas-Silg hill with its temple ruins was occupied by these people, but it is not as yet clear for what purpose. The scenario changed again in historical times when the central and western Mediterranean started to be parcelled out among the commercial powers originating in the eastern Mediterranean. The Greeks do not seem to have even tried 10 colonize Malta as they did in neighbouring Sicily. The Phoenicians, however, did occupy the island, apparently through a slow process of peaceful penetration and eventual political and cultural assimi lation. It was in this period that the ruins of the megalithic temple were transformed into a Phoenician extraurban shrine dedicated to Astarte, which in time expanded into a full y-fledged sanctuary with an international reputation. The last chapter in the millennia- long history of the site was written when the colonnaded courtyard in front of the old temple was transformed into an early Christian church. Any use made of the site in the following Arab period is, once again, poorly understood.peer-reviewe