HOFSTRA'S FAMILY LAW WITH SKILLS COURSE: IMPLEMENTING FLER (THE FAMILY LAW EDUCATION REFORM PROJECT)

The Family Law Education Reform Project (FLER) Final Report documented that the current doctrinally oriented family law curriculum at most law schools does not adequately prepare students for modern family law practice. FLER recommended that law school courses move from the study of cases to the study of the legal system's effect on families, and integrate the study of alternative dispute resolution and interdisciplinary knowledge. In response, Hofstra Law School has made a comprehensive attempt to implement FLER's curricular recommendations. This article discusses one major innovation – the Family Law with Skills course. Family Law with Skills is the basic course in Hofstra's revised curriculum and is designed to integrate doctrinal teaching with professional skills development. In addition to studying legal doctrine, students are required to engage in structured field observation of family court proceedings; interviewing, counseling, negotiation, and mediation representation exercises in a divorce dispute; direct and cross examination of a social worker in a child protection dispute; and drafting of a surrogacy agreement. The article describes each exercise and discusses its rationale, student reaction to the course, and lessons learned.     

浅议未成年犯社区矫正项目的类型化设置

社区矫正作为与监禁刑相对应的一种行刑方式,在对未成年犯的矫治中发挥着不可替代的作用.社区矫正起源于西方,西方国家对未成年犯的社区矫正项目的设置有很多经验值得我们借鉴.建立和健全我国未成年犯的社区矫正项目,可以在借鉴域外经验的基础上,结合我国国情,针对具有不同人身危险性程度的未成年犯设置不同类型的矫正项目.     

Unilateral CDM—can developing countries finance generation of greenhouse gas emission credits on their own?

The Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) was originally seen as an instrument with a bi- or multilateral character where an entity or fund from an industrialised country invests in a project in a developing country. The sluggish implementation of incentives for industrialised country companies to embark on CDM projects and low carbon prices led to a preference for just buying Certified Emission Reductions (CERs) instead of investing in projects. Thus a third option has gained prominence—the unilateral option where the project development is planned and financed within the developing country. We propose that a project should be called “pure unilateral” if it involves no foreign direct investment (FDI), only has the approval of the Designated National Authority (DNA) of the host country and sells its CERs after certification directly to an industrialised country. Unilateral projects can become attractive if the host country risk premium for foreign investors is high despite a high human, institutional and infrastructural capacity and domestic capital availability. Moreover, transaction costs can be reduced compared to foreign investments that have to overcome bureaucratic hurdles. On the other hand, technology transfer is likely to be lower, capacity building has to be undertaken by the host country and all risks have to be carried by host country entities. The potential to carry out unilateral CDM projects strongly varies among host countries. Whereas several countries from Asia and Latin America can design and implement projects autonomously, most of the Sub-Saharan countries rely on foreign support. International donors of capacity building grants should increasingly address those countries that are not presently focused on by foreign investors and support them in the design of local projects.

Building sustainable free legal advisory systems: Experiences from the history of AI & law

The enthusiasm for artificial intelligence (AI) as a source of solutions to problems is not new. In law, from the early 1980s until at least the early 2000s, considerable work was done on developing ‘legal expert systems.’ As the DataLex project, we participated in those developments, through research and publications, commercial and non-commercial systems, and teaching students application development. This paper commences with a brief account of that work to situate our perspective.The main aim of this paper is an assessment of what might be of value from the experience of the DataLex Project to contemporary use of ‘AI and law’ by free legal advice services, who must necessarily work within funding and other constraints in developing and sustaining such systems. We draw fifteen conclusions from this experience, which we consider are relevant to development of systems for free legal advice services. The desired result, we argue, is the development of integrated legal decision-support systems, not ‘expert systems’ or ‘robot lawyers’. We compare our insights with the approach of the leading recent text in the field, and with a critical review of the field over twenty-five years. We conclude that the approach taken by the DataLex Project, and now applied to free legal advice services, remains consistent with leading work in field of AI and law.The paper concludes with brief suggestions of what are the most desirable improvements to tools and platforms to enable development of free legal advice systems. The objectives of free access to legal information services have much in common with those of free legal advice services. The information resources that free access to law providers (including LIIs) can provide will often be those that free legal advice services will need to use to develop and sustain free legal advisory systems. There is therefore strong potential for valuable collaborations between these two types of services providers.     

From Ahogado to Zorrillo: external causes of mortality in the California missions

The history of grandparents is too often founded on a demographic prejudice, that is, the very low statistical possibility of children having known their grandparents before the rise in life expectancy in the twentieth century. On the basis of a sample of several thousand children bom in the region of Vernon (Normandy) at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century, the article contests this idea and shows that newborns knew about half of their grandparents, with a slight advantage on the grandmothers' side. Inequalities were present between elder and younger siblings, but the latter also profited from the presence of their forbears. Consequently, the study of the different functions served by grandparents in the traditional family should be pursued, and questions should be raised about the contemporary concept of “new grandparents” by separating it from the demographic assumption on which it is based.     

Measuring error for adjacent policy position estimates: Dealing with uncertainty using CMP data

Careful users of CMP party position data should take the uncertainty of position estimates into account. We compare and evaluate two current approaches that provide error estimates for party positions. Researchers of the CMP group identify measurement error in quantitative content analysis as the cause of uncertainty about position estimates, whereas a second approach by Benoit et al. (2009) attributes the uncertainty of position estimates to a stochastic generation of election programs. We illustrate the commonalities and differences of these approaches and provide two empirical applications, the identification of the left–right order of parties and of policy shifts by parties, using CMP data for 25 countries. Despite conceptual differences, results in these applications are surprisingly similar.     

Finding the missing and unknown: Novel educational approaches to warming up cold cases

In recent years, students in police academies and higher education institutions around the world have worked together to analyse cold cases including long-term missing persons cases in collaboration with investigators and prosecutors. In 2020, three European organisations, the Police Expert Network on Missing Persons (PEN-MP), AMBER Alert Europe and Locate International, succeeded in connecting these educational organisations enabling them to work collectively on cases and conduct cold case analyses (CCA) across international borders. The International Cold Case Analysis Project (ICCAP) learning objectives were to 1) collect the necessary information about the victim, 2) reconstruct the crime, and 3) investigate trace control.In a learning objective-based evaluation using Computer-Assisted Web Interviewing, 76 participating students from the German and International ICCAP teams were asked to complete a pre- and post-review questionnaire to self-assess their personal competence development. Participants reported significant increases in competence in all evaluated areas, thus demonstrating that authentic and relevant collaborations can enrich the learning environment, promote the use of professional skills, and provide significant knowledge exchange opportunities between academia and industry.Drawing on case studies of cold case missing persons' investigations and unidentified found remains, this article shares how university academics, students and community volunteers can work together nationally and internationally to find out what has happened to missing people and how we can more effectively identify the previously unidentified. In so doing, we share the expertise required to progress these cold cases and provide recommendations to support other institutions and organisations in adopting this innovative approach.     

“BK21工程”与韩国高等教育改革

韩国政府及民众历来重视教育 ,把教育看作是推动国家发展的重要的可持续动力。正因如此 ,韩国政府及民众对教育事业一直保持着很深的危机感和紧迫感。近几年 ,针对教育中出现的问题 ,韩国政府采取了一系列改革措施 ,通过这些措施 ,韩国教育在今天的亚洲取得了令人称道的成绩。     

电子政务在停车设施行业管理中的试点应用

介绍了公共停车场登记备案系统的结构和功能 ,同时指出 ,该系统的投入使用 ,将为公共停车场的登记备案和管理工作奠定重要的技术基础     

国际项目融资中的环境争端及其解决——以新加坡丰益集团印尼棕榈油项目案为例

如何避免和解决国际项目融资中的环境争端,现已成为各国政府、投资方、项目所在地的当地社群以及国际组织等各方密切关注的问题。2007年新加坡丰益集团印尼棕榈油项目案受到了国际社会的高度关注。审查该案的是世界银行合规顾问/监察专署(CAO)。CAO允许可能受到项目直接影响的个人、社群或非政府组织就项目产生的社会和环境问题提出申诉。国际金融公司(IFC)的履行标准是CAO裁决的重要准据,而非政府组织的一些理念和准则也可能成为争端解决的依据。这使得私方在争端的进程和争端解决中占据着重要地位。投资东道国政府应考虑对相关的国内法规适时进行修改完善,同时关注非政府组织的动向,以免在争端发生时陷入被动。