Countersupermajoritarianism

How should the Constitution change? In Originalism and the Good Constitution, John McGinnis and Michael Rappaport argue that it ought to change in only one way: through the formal mechanisms set out in the Constitution’s own Article V. This is so, they claim, because provisions adopted by supermajority vote are more likely to be substantively good. The original Constitution was ratified in just that way, they say, and subsequent changes should be implemented similarly. McGinnis and Rappaport also contend that this substantive goodness is preserved best by a mode of originalist interpretation. In this Review, we press two main arguments. First, we contend that McGinnis and Rappaport’s core thesis sidesteps critical problems with elevated voting rules. We also explain how at a crucial point in the book — concerning Reconstruction — the authors trade their commitments to supermajoritarianism and formalism away. Second, we broaden the analysis and suggest that constitutional change can and should occur not just through formal amendment, but also by means of social movements, political mobilizations, media campaigns, legislative agendas, regulatory movement, and much more. Changing the Constitution has always been a variegated process that engages the citizenry through many institutions, by way of many voting thresholds, and using many modes of argument. And that variety helps to make the Constitution good

The Effectiveness of a Learning Strategies Course on College Student-Athletes' Adjustment, Use of Learning Strategies, and Academic Performance

We examined the effectiveness of a learning strategies course in assisting at-risk male and female freshmen student athletes in improving their academic performances. Participants included 129 freshman student-athletes (Female=72 and Male= 57) from a large southern university. Eighty-six participants were enrolled in the student-athlete PSYC 1000 class, either in Fall 2003 or Fall 2004; 43 were student-athletes who entered the university during the same time but were not required to enroll in the course because their test scores and high school grades met or exceeded the university's academic requirements for open admission. The learning strategies course (PSYC 1000) is based on psychological and educational theories and models associated with learning, self-regulation, personal and career development, communication, stress and coping, and health. The overall goals of the course are to (1) assist students in developing effective strategies to be proficient learners, (2) increase their understanding of how people change and develop, and (3) apply this knowledge across academic programs and in all areas of their lives to make positive, self-enhancing changes. The course was based on the same syllabus and lesson plans that are used in other PSYC 1000 sections for students who are not athletes, however, the lesson plans are tailored to encompass the specific demands of the student-athlete experience. The at-risk student athletes reported im­provements across a wide range of study skills, such as comprehension, concentration and use of test-taking strategies, during their first semester of college when they were enrolled in the course. In comparison to regu­larly admitted student-athletes who did not take the course, the at-risk student athletes earned comparable grades during their first two semes­ters. Although neither academic nor noncognitive variables predicted the male student athletes' first and second semester GPA's, female athletes' ability to manage their time as well as their willingness to take responsi­bility for their learning was positively related to their academic perform­ances. Regarding their adjustment to college, the at-risk student athletes showed improvement in the personal/emotional area, but slight decreases with respect to academics and social relationships. Overall, these findings support learning strategies courses as an effectiveness mechanism for improving the academic performance of at-risk student athletes

Debate

In 1890, Louis Brandeis wrote The Right to Privacy. Within a matter of years, the courts began adopting his theory, creating a newly articulated legal right. This article likely represented the high-water mark of legal academia in terms of real world impact. In recent years, the academy has lost much of its relevance. Chief Justice Roberts ridiculed academic work, suggesting that legal scholarship has become esoteric and irrelevant. This should not be the case. The quality of legal scholars is higher than it has ever been—young scholars now often enter the academy with doctoral degrees in related fields. Likewise, technology has placed a world of information at our fingertips. Scholars can write pieces that react to quickly changing events at an unprecedented speed. Yet the speed of publication in flagship print editions has lagged behind the speech of scholarship itself. By the time a piece of writing is published, almost a year has passed since it was submitted. And if the piece elicits a response, it would come out a year after that. At this point, two years have gone by since submission and in the fast paced world of legal scholarship, a final riposte will often not be relevant. The end result is, that aside from the occasional citation, most scholarly debates are obsolete or irrelevant by the time they appear in print. This should be unacceptable given that our profession is, at its core, adversarial. Adversity can help make legal scholarship more relevant. Although a legal practitioner can easily research the case law, she cannot as easily identify the points of interpretive conflict. Now more than ever, it is essential for academic works to present the competing views of a theory in a package that identifies where the real points of reasonable disagreement lie. Yet this is a difficult task for any single scholar. All minds are subject to bias, even more so when the subject has already stoked scholarly passions. And even in the cases where a scholar can fairly present disagreements, there is simply no way for a practitioner to identify an exceptional piece from the volumes of scholarship without significant expertise in the field. Unfortunately, this means that despite the skill and best intentions of legal scholars, the solution to this problem is largely out of their hands. Further, the students that comprise the editorial boards of America’s legal journals do not have the knowledge to consistently ensure that an article includes voices of reasonable opposition. This “debate” is an attempt to remedy the problem. Instead of imposing our opinions on the academy, the editors of the Cornell Law Review have decided to facilitate what is essentially a public peer review process of an article published in a previous volume of our journal. In Volume 101, we published an article by Professors Christopher Serkin and Nelson Tebbe entitled Is the Constitution Special? This article argued that, contrary to common belief, it is difficult to justify lawyers’ distinct interpretive approach to the Constitution, as opposed to statutory or common law. This was a novel and controversial claim that begged to be subjected to heightened scrutiny. After an extensive selection process, the senior editorial board invited Professors Richard Primus and Kevin Stack to act as critics of the Serkin and Tebbe piece, and they graciously accepted. Over the course of the past year, these four scholars have engaged in a written exchange debating Serkin and Tebbe’s argument. It begins with Primus and Stack’s critiques of the article and then carries on for a total of six critiques and responses (two from each critic and two from the authors). While the result of this experiment will be determined by its readership, we believe that it has been a success. As will be seen in the pages that follow, the initial theory has been clarified and elevated while the facets of disagreement have been cleaved for both future scholars and practitioners

Debating Is the Constitution Special?

In 1890, Louis Brandeis wrote The Right to Privacy. Within a matter of years, the courts began adopting his theory, creating a newly articulated legal right. This article likely represented the high-water mark of legal academia in terms of real world impact. In recent years, the academy has lost much of its relevance. Chief Justice Roberts ridiculed academic work, suggesting that legal scholarship has become esoteric and irrelevant. This should not be the case. The quality of legal scholars is higher than it has ever been—young scholars now often enter the academy with doctoral degrees in related fields. Likewise, technology has placed a world of information at our fingertips. Scholars can write pieces that react to quickly changing events at an unprecedented speed

The Effectiveness of a Learning Strategies Course on College Student-Athletes' and Non-Athletes' Adjustment, Academic Performance, and Retention after the First Two Years of College

This study replicated and extended previous research I had performed that suggested that a student success course is an effective intervention to assist student-athletes in the adjustment to college. Participants in the current study included 4 groups of students, including (1) non-athletes and (2) student-athletes who were mandated and enrolled in the student success course, and (3) non-athletes and (4) student-athletes who were not mandated and did not enroll in the student success course. Overall, results from the current study suggested that the student success course was effective in helping non-athletes and student-athletes learn key cognitive strategies that are necessary for college success. In addition, results indicated that after taking the student success course, academically at-risk students earned equivalent grades, percentage of hours passed, and retention rates compared to their peers who were not classified as being academically underprepared. Finally, adjustment patterns of all groups were examined, with particular emphasis on the decrease in adjustment over the course of the semester that was demonstrated by the student-athletes. Intervention implications and future research directions are discussed, specifically in terms of how to address the unique needs of college freshmen student-athletes

Evaluation of a Novel Rapid Test System for the Detection of Allergic Sensitization to Timothy Grass Pollen against Established Laboratory Methods and Skin Prick Test

Type I hypersensitivity is driven by allergen specific immunoglobulin E (sIgE) and thus sIgE represents a marker for modern allergy diagnosis. Recently, a rapid assay for the detection of sIgE, termed as (Allergy Lateral Flow Assay) ALFA, has been developed. The objective of our study is the evaluation of a scanner-based system for the semiquantitative interpretation of ALFA results. Agreement to Skin Prick Test (SPT, Allergopharma), ALLERG-O-LIQ System (Dr. Fooke), and ImmunoCAP (Phadia) was investigated using 50 sera tested for specific IgE to timothy grass pollen (g6). 35/50 sera were positive by SPT, ALLERG-O-LIQ, and ImmunoCAP. Excellent agreement was observed between ALFA results and SPT, ImmunoCAP, and ALLERG-O-LIQ. Area under the curve (AUC) values were found at 1.0, and 100% sensitivity and specificity was found versus all other methods. Visual- and scanner-based interpretation of the ALFA results revealed excellent agreement

PCR-based detection of mobile genetic elements in total community DNA

A

4-Nitro­anilinium triiodide monohydrate

In the title compound, C6H7N2O2 +·I3 −·H2O, the triiodide anions form two-dimensional sheets along the a and c axes. These sheets are separated by the 4-nitro­anilinium cations and water mol­ecules, which form part of an extended hydrogen-bonded chain with the triiodide along the c axis, represented by the graph set C 3 3(14). The second important hydrogen-bonding inter­action is between the nitro group, the water mol­ecule and the anilinium group, which forms an R 2 2(6) ring and may be the reason for the deviation of the torsion angle between the benzene ring and the nitro group from 180 to 163.2 (4)°. These two strong hydrogen-bonding inter­actions also cause the benzene rings to pack off-centre from one another, with an edge-on-edge π–π stacking distance of 3.634 (6) Å and a centroid–centroid separation of 4.843 (2) Å