Where Did All of the Fields Go?

The loss of farmland each year due to development in New York State is astounding. Yet, agriculture remains an important part of the local economy and is essential in providing local food to New York residents. Many land-use protective measures that have been put in place such as large minimal lot-size zoning and agricultural districts have failed to slow down the rate of farmland lost each year. Conservation easements are a vital protective tool, but they require lots of private and public funding. This funding is necessary in order to ensure farmland for future generations. Before it is too late, New York needs to follow the lead of states such as Pennsylvania, which has shown an overwhelming commitment to protecting vital farmland.     

Have you signed your electronic contract?

The ease with which business can be transacted over the Internet raises various issues, not least among which are writing and signature requirements. While it has been established that an electronic record is a functional equivalent of writing, the position appears to be less clear with regard to electronic signatures. This paper examines the signature requirement as it applies to electronic contracts, in particular the form of electronic signature that can serve the functional equivalent of a handwritten signature for the purpose of the English Statute of Frauds 1677 and its various re-enactments. Reference will be made to legislation, the relevant UNCITRAL Model Laws and UN Conventions as well as to the substantial body of case law on paper contracts for analytical and comparative purposes.     

Teaching Arts Management: Where Did We Lose the Core Ideas?

In light of the need to start clearing the methodological confusion in the field of arts management, this article provides a critical overview of the teaching curricula in the field. Distinction is made between programs that copy directly from business management; programs that focus on the technological process of producing an artwork (usually run by practitioners); those that interlink cultural management and cultural policy (highlighting the role of public governance as a higher principle); and programs that focus on an entrepreneurial approach to arts management, connecting it to issues of creativity and innovation. The author calls for clear goals to educate administrators and arts or cultural managers. The suggestion is made to follow what I call the Janus syndrome: looking toward managerial and economic realities but primarily focusing on the arts—the aesthetic and the social aspects of the field. A question is raised about the position of art in arts management curricula, as well as the organization of undergraduate and postgraduate studies in the field.     

Did the PNR judgment address the core issues raised by mass surveillance?

This article looks at three main issues raised by the PNR scheme: (i) the base-rate fallacy and its effect on false positives; (ii) built-in biases; and (iii) opacity and unchallengeability of the decisions generated, and at whether the Court has properly addressed them. It concludes that the AG and the Court failed to address the evidentiary issues including the base-rate fallacy—a lethal defect. It also finds that neither the Member States nor the Commission have even tried to assess whether the operation of the PNR Directive has resulted in discriminatory outputs or outcomes; and that the Court should have demanded that they produce serious, verifiable data on this, including on whether the PNR system has led in practice to discrimination. But it also finds that the AG and the Court provided important guidance on the third issue, in that they made clear that the use of unexplainable and hence unreviewable and unchallengeable “black box” machine-learning artificial intelligence (ML/AI) systems violates the very essence of the right to an effective remedy. This means that any EU Member State that still uses such opaque ML/AI systems in its PNR screening will be in violation of the law.     

What Did the Janitor Do? Suggestive Interviewing and the Accuracy of Children's Accounts

Examined the influence of suggestive interviews on 5- to 6-year-old children's reports and recollections of an adult's behavior. Children (29 girls, 27 boys) witnessed a confederate, acting as a janitor, either clean or play with toys. An hour later they were interviewed in succession by the janitor's boss, by an experimenter, and by their own parent. Parents interviewed their child again 1 week later. The boss and experimenter interviewed the child in one of three ways: neutral (nonleading), incriminating (suggesting the janitor was bad and playing on the job), or exculpating (suggesting the janitor was good and doing his job of cleaning). When these interviews were neutral, children consistently gave accurate accounts of the janitor's behavior. When these interviews were suggestive, children's accounts shifted strongly in the direction of suggestion as the interviews progressed. By the end of the suggestive interviews, children's accounts uniformly corresponded to the interviewers' suggestions, even when the suggestions were inconsistent with what actually happened. These effects of suggestion persisted during the two nonleading parent interviews.