Pleading as Information-Forcing

This study has been conducted in the context of the master program in Outdoor Environmental Education and Outdoor Life, of Linköping University. It aspires to investigate a specific part of outdoor environments: the schoolyards. Particularly, the aim of the study is to investigate how the use of the school grounds as an educational resource is influenced by their environments -rural or urban. The research compares the school communities’ (principals’, teachers’ and students’) perceptions about the use of their school grounds during the educational process. The research sample consists of 10 Swedish elementary schools, from which the five are in rural and five are in urban environments. The participants are in total 10 principals, 51 teachers and 295 students. Alongside, an observation recorded in a list and photographs enhance the comparison between the rural and urban schools’ infrastructures. From the 1268 photos taken, a selection is included in the study and constitutes the observation part. The study negotiates four controversial issues about school grounds’ capacities: space or place; good or bad; rural or urban; grounds of a school or grounds of a curriculum. The results, after all, reject the contradictions and the sections become respectively: a place for all seasons; neither good nor bad, just unique! ; Ideality stands for ideas; grounds for cooperation. It also becomes visible that even though the analysis of the responses confirms that the urban teachers hold the stereotypical idea that there are differences between rural and urban environments; the infrastructures of both environments do not appear different. However, the teachers’ different opinions and beliefs have a significant impact on the students’ responses. Specifically, significant differences are reported by students which align with the teachers’ differences. The rural and urban principals do not report significant differences, and in the great majority their opinions also align with their teachers’ opinions. Finally, a model which is unfolded through this study has central role, namely the schoolyard circle. This model aims to facilitate a process that I introduce as schoolisization, in which school grounds are used to extend the stereotypical learning environment by adapting the curriculum to a school’s needs. Consequently, the schoolyards’ transformation from a space to our place can be finally proved an outdoor education approach that “bridges contradictions” and promises better educational results

Pleading as Information-Forcing

Academics, judges, and practitioners have devoted much attention to the potential impact of the federal pleading standards announced in Ashcroft v. Iqbal, 556 U.S. 662 (2009), and Bell Atlantic Corp. v. Twombly, 550 U.S. 544 (2007). Many have criticized Iqbal and Twombly on procedural, substantive, and policy grounds. And although most everyone agrees that the cases mark a break with past liberal pleading rules and have changed pleading practice, there is little agreement about precisely how the cases have affected ultimate outcomes. Indeed, there is much confusion about what exactly the new rules require of a pleader. In this Article, I argue that the confusion can be traced in large part to two related errors, unrecognized to date by commentators. The first error is simple but subtle: when the Court announced Iqbal and Twombly, it used old language in new ways and in a new context. The Court rested its decisions on a particular understanding of the words “conclusory” and “plausible,” but did not acknowledge that before Iqbal and Twombly those words each had specific meanings in procedural jurisprudence. The old meanings did not jibe with how the Court used them in its new decisions; overnight the words “conclusory” and “plausible” meant something new in pleading and lower courts were left to sift through the rubble. Second, and relatedly, Iqbal and Twombly implicitly make pleading something of an information-forcing regime. Yet the Court did not rest its shift in emphasis on any of the justifications that the law typically relies upon for information-forcing rules. Here, I provide a taxonomy of some of the classic justifications for information-forcing rules and show that they do not map easily onto pleading. There are dangers inherent to both of these types of errors. When the Court uses legal terms with established meaning in a new way without any acknowledgment, it forces lower courts to attempt to reconcile apparently conflicting Supreme Court precedent with little guidance. It should be no surprise, then, that many judges at the district court and appellate level express frustration at applying the Court’s new decisions. And when the Court blindly imports an information-forcing regime into a context that calls for more nuanced evaluation, it increases the risk that governing doctrine will become even less coherent. I conclude, therefore, with modest suggestions for adhering to Iqbal and Twombly while minimizing this risk of incoherenc

The Influence of Government Defenders on Affirmative Civil Rights Enforcement

The focus of this brief Article will be on a conundrum, particularly in the area of civil rights enforcement: the federal government—in particular the DOJ—can be one of the most efficient and powerful vindicators of civil rights, while at the same time one of the most effective advocates for imposing barriers to affirmative civil rights enforcement. At the same time that the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division (CRD) is entering federal court to “vindicat[e] rights and remedy[] inequities,” attorneys in the Civil Division (either from Main Justice or in any number of U.S. Attorney’s offices) are appearing in court to prevent the same. No doubt the same observation applies to certain state governments that have active affirmative civil rights enforcement bodies while also maintaining well-resourced defensive litigation bureaus. For my purposes, this observation has important consequences. It might bear on the professional obligations of the government attorney who appears in a defensive posture, a topic that Bruce Green and others have addressed in many thoughtful articles. I will address some potential ethical implications toward the end of this Article, but it is not my principal focus because I am not convinced that that is where the solution lies. Instead, I want to concentrate on what the observation means for executive branch law enforcement priorities, how the dynamic impacts broad access-to-justice concerns, and the implications for institutional design. I am going to try to do so in four parts. First, this Article contrasts agenda setting in defensive bureaus with agenda setting in the affirmative posture. Part I compares the defensive positions taken in two extremely similar cases—Ashcroft v. Iqbal and Ziglar v. Abbasi—that were litigated by the DOJ across two different presidential administrations. This is to help illustrate (admittedly by anecdote) that, even while affirmative enforcement priorities can change significantly from one administration to the other, defensive litigating positions can remain remarkably stable. Parts II and III turn to showing what consequences this has in the context of civil rights enforcement. Part II starts with the DOJ’s affirmative bureaus themselves, with a focus on the CRD. The goal is to show that the defensive bureaus impact the work of the CRD in at least two ways: (1) by channeling enforcement priorities into areas that will not conflict with defensive litigating positions and (2) by making affirmative enforcement priorities more difficult to secure through the spread of transsubstantive doctrine that suppresses rights enforcement, even in the areas in which there are no conflicts with defensive positions. Part III moves beyond the direct impact on CRD because defensive litigation positions taken by the DOJ can also suppress affirmative rights enforcement by “private attorneys general,” enforcement that nonetheless is consistent with the affirmative priorities of Main Justice. Finally, Part IV offers some thoughts on what lessons we might draw from these observations. For the most part, I devote my attention to how institutional design might ameliorate the tensions I identify in this Article

Approximating stationary distributions of fast mixing Glauber dynamics, with applications to exponential random graphs

We provide a general bound on the Wasserstein distance between two arbitrary distributions of sequences of Bernoulli random variables. The bound is in terms of a mixing quantity for the Glauber dynamics of one of the sequences, and a simple expectation of the other. The result is applied to estimate, with explicit error, expectations of functions of random vectors for some Ising models and exponential random graphs in "high temperature" regimes.Comment: Ver3: 24 pages, major revision with new results; Ver2: updated reference; Ver1: 19 pages, 1 figur

Joint Vertex Degrees in an Inhomogeneous Random Graph Model

In a random graph, counts for the number of vertices with given degrees will typically be dependent. We show via a multivariate normal and a Poisson process approximation that, for graphs which have independent edges, with a possibly inhomogeneous distribution, only when the degrees are large can we reasonably approximate the joint counts as independent. The proofs are based on Stein's method and the Stein-Chen method with a new size-biased coupling for such inhomogeneous random graphs, and hence bounds on distributional distance are obtained. Finally we illustrate that apparent (pseudo-) power-law type behaviour can arise in such inhomogeneous networks despite not actually following a power-law degree distribution.Comment: 30 pages, 9 figure

Bounds for the normal approximation of the maximum likelihood estimator

While the asymptotic normality of the maximum likelihood estimator under regularity conditions is long established, this paper derives explicit bounds for the bounded Wasserstein distance between the distribution of the maximum likelihood estimator (MLE) and the normal distribution. For this task, we employ Stein's method. We focus on independent and identically distributed random variables, covering both discrete and continuous distributions as well as exponential and non-exponential families. In particular, a closed form expression of the MLE is not required. We also use a perturbation method to treat cases where the MLE has positive probability of being on the boundary of the parameter space.Comment: Published at http://dx.doi.org/10.3150/15-BEJ741 in the Bernoulli (http://isi.cbs.nl/bernoulli/) by the International Statistical Institute/Bernoulli Society (http://isi.cbs.nl/BS/bshome.htm

Darwin and the Body Politic: Schaffle, Veblen, and the Shift of Biological Metaphor in Economics

A long tradition of thought in Western political philosophy compares the body of man to the political body. This traditional cosmological frame of reference was, with the publication of Darwin’s Origin of Species, overcome by the emergence of evolutionary social systems. Albert Schäffle [1831-1903] can fruitfully be considered the last major representative of the old trajectory of thought, and Thorstein Veblen [1853-1929] the first of the new. By comparing and contrasting their uses of biological metaphors and the places these occupied in their larger visions of society and the economy, the author explores some of the tensions generated in late nineteenth century political philosophy by the dramatic change in biological paradigm—in other words by Darwin’s first encounter with the body politic.

Evolutionary Economics, Classical Development Economics, and the History of Economic Policy: A Plea for Theorizing by Inclusion

The author argues that in order to create a qualitative understanding of the factors polarizing the world in growing wealth and growing poverty there is a need to create economics by inclusion, a system where all relevant factors, some of which have been part of the economic discourse for centuries, but also elements (like the different effects of process and product innovations) that are part of evolutionary economics itself, are considered simultaneously. According to the author, this historical/institutional approach to economics would benefit especially the Third World. Moreover, the economics by inclusion should also open the way for policies of inclusion, a system that will put the accent on the wellbeing of the majority and not on the growth of the export sector.