The Questions of Authority

In 1992, Professor, Frederick Schauer of Harvard University, delivered the Georgetown Law Center’s twelfth Annual Philip A. Hart Memorial Lecture: Two Cheers for Authority: Should Officials Obey the Law?. Frederick Schauer is a David and Mary Harrison Distinguished Professor of Law at the University of Virginia. Previously he served for 18 years as Frank Stanton Professor of the First Amendment at the John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, where he has served as academic dean and acting dean, and before that was a Professor of Law at the University of Michigan. He is the author of The Law of Obscenity (BNA, 1976), Free Speech: A Philosophical Enquiry (Cambridge, 1982), Playing By the Rules: A Philosophical Examination of Rule-Based Decision-Making in Law and in Life (Clarendon/Oxford, 1991), Profiles, Probabilities, and Stereotypes (Belknap/Harvard, 2003), and Thinking Like a Lawyer: A New Introduction to Legal Reasoning (Harvard, 2009). He is also co-editor of The Philosophy of Law: Classic and Contemporary Readings (1996) and The First Amendment: A Reader (1995), and author of numerous articles on constitutional law and theory, freedom of speech and press, legal reasoning and the philosophy of law. Schauer is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, has held a Guggenheim Fellowship, has been vice-president of the American Society for Political and Legal Philosophy and chair of the Committee on Philosophy and Law of the American Philosophical Association, and was a founding co-editor of the journal Legal Theory. He has also been the Fischel-Neil Distinguished Visiting Professor of Law at the University of Chicago, Ewald Distinguished Visiting Professor of Law at the University of Virginia, Morton Distinguished Visiting Professor of the Humanities at Dartmouth College, Distinguished Visiting Professor of Law at the University of Toronto, and Distinguished Visitor at the New York University School of Law. His work on rules, legal reasoning, constitutional theory and freedom of speech has been the subject of a book Rules and Reasoning: Essays in Honour of Fred Schauer (Hart, 1999) and symposia in Politeia, the Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy, and the Notre Dame, Connecticut, and Quinnipiac law reviews. In 2007-08 Schauer was the George Eastman Visiting Professor at Oxford University and a fellow of Balliol College. A graduate of Dartmouth College, the Amos Tuck School of Business Administration, and Harvard Law School, Schauer was the recipient of a university-wide Distinguished Teacher Award from Harvard University in 2004

The Politics and Incentives of Legal Transplantation

The last ten years have seen an exponential increase in the volume of legal transplantation, the process by which laws and legal institutions developed in one country are then adopted by another. Although there is a small literature on the process of legal transplantation, most of that literature presumes that the expected efficacy of the law is the predominant factor in determining which laws are transplanted, from where, and to where. This exploratory paper ventures a series of quite different hypotheses, all premised on the view that donor countries, recipient countries, and third parties (such as NGOs) have political, economic, and reputational incentives that are likely to be important factors in determining the patterns of legal transplants. The paper offers a number of hypotheses about these possible efficacy-independent factors, gives examples to support the possibility that the hypotheses might be sound, and suggests ways in which the hypotheses might be tested in a more systematic way.legal transplants, legal development, legal change

Bayesian estimation of discretely observed multi-dimensional diffusion processes using guided proposals

Estimation of parameters of a diffusion based on discrete time observations poses a difficult problem due to the lack of a closed form expression for the likelihood. From a Bayesian computational perspective it can be casted as a missing data problem where the diffusion bridges in between discrete-time observations are missing. The computational problem can then be dealt with using a Markov-chain Monte-Carlo method known as data-augmentation. If unknown parameters appear in the diffusion coefficient, direct implementation of data-augmentation results in a Markov chain that is reducible. Furthermore, data-augmentation requires efficient sampling of diffusion bridges, which can be difficult, especially in the multidimensional case. We present a general framework to deal with with these problems that does not rely on discretisation. The construction generalises previous approaches and sheds light on the assumptions necessary to make these approaches work. We define a random-walk type Metropolis-Hastings sampler for updating diffusion bridges. Our methods are illustrated using guided proposals for sampling diffusion bridges. These are Markov processes obtained by adding a guiding term to the drift of the diffusion. We give general guidelines on the construction of these proposals and introduce a time change and scaling of the guided proposal that reduces discretisation error. Numerical examples demonstrate the performance of our methods

Schulische IT- und Medienbildung: Ergebnisse einer empirischen Studie an einem rheinland-pfälzischen Gymnasium

Die Notwendigkeit einer angemessenen IT- und Medienbildung an allgemeinbildenden Schulen wird auf nahezu allen gesellschaftlichen Ebenengefordert: dazu gehören Gremien auf bundespolitischer Ebene (wie die Kultusministerkonferenz und das Bundeskanzleramt), führende Fachverbände (wie Bitcom und Gesellschaft für Informatik) sowie ein Großteil der Elternschaft (vgl. ausführliche Quellen in Schauer und Schauer 2015). Während es einige Studien zur IT- und Mediennutzung an Schulen in Deutschland gibt, so fehlen bislang Studien, die den Stand schulischer IT- und Medienbildung differenziert untersuchen (vgl. Schauer und Schauer 2015). Vor diesem Hintergrund schlägt der vorliegende Forschungsbericht einen begrifflichen Bezugsrahmen für schulische IT- und Medienbildung vor. Er wird angewendet, um fachübergreifend die derzeitige IT- und Medienbildung an einem großen rheinland-pfälzischen Gymnasium zu erheben. Im Ergebnis lassen sich die Stärken und Schwächen hinsichtlich der Umsetzung verschiedener IT- und medienbezogenen Lernbereiche in den rheinland-pfälzischen Lehrplänen sowie im Unterricht der betrachteten Schule identifizieren