Animation and multiple-choice questions as a formative feedback tool for legal education

Two-dimensional animation when combined with multiple-choice questions affords an interesting and innovative formative feedback tool for engaging law students in problem-based learning. This article investigates methods for making animation a more accessible medium for legal academics. The article also describes, evaluates and reflects upon the results of a focus group and a survey of online law student perceptions on the combined use of animation and multiple-choice questions as a formative feedback tool. Ethical issues involving delinquent and guilty clients were used as the context in which to describe an animation workflow and explore student attitudes to animation. A website was created within which animations created by academics were included to provide feedback to scaffold student understanding of legal ethics. Students viewed the animations as a very positive learning experience, in the sense of making the lesson more interesting to learn, assisting them to learn and help visualise the ethical problems. Student comments highlighted design features which, when refined, may improve the quality of both the animations and the student experience in studying law using animation.     

Walking the line: Electoral cycles and the shift in legislative priorities among German parliamentarians

This article sheds light on how MPs' priorities change in the course of legislative terms. We purport that members of parliament (MPs) balance a variety of incentives over the electoral cycle. While they emphasize issues that relate to the policy-making agenda of their party right after an election, competition with other parties increasingly gains influence over legislators’ priorities as the next election day approaches. We show supportive evidence for these patterns based on a unique longitudinal dataset combining information on sponsorship of legislative proposals, public opinion, party manifestos, and committee chair positions in Germany between 1990 and 2013. By bringing variation within the electoral cycle to our attention, the results enhance our understanding of the factors that set the incentive structure for MPs and the relationship between party competition and legislative behavior.     

Facebook CEO Charms Chinese Audiences

正ON October 23,a Chinese audience was astonished and delighted to hear Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg answer their questions in Mandarin.A video of the event,posted on Facebook and China’s Wechat,quickly became a hit on social media,     

The impact of candidate selection rules and electoral vulnerability on legislative behaviour in comparative perspective

Legislators are political actors whose main goal is to get re-elected. They use their legislative repertoire to help them cater to the interests of their principals. It is argued in this article that we need to move beyond treating electoral systems as monolithic entities, as if all legislators operating under the same set of macro-rules shared the same set of incentives. Rather, we need to account for within-system variation – namely, candidate selection rules and individual electoral vulnerability. Using a most different systems design, Germany, Ireland and Portugal are leveraged with both cross-system and within-system variation. An original dataset of 345,000 parliamentary questions is used. Findings show that candidate selection rules blur canonical electoral system boundaries. Electoral vulnerability has a similar effect in closed-list and mixed systems, but not in preferential voting settings.     

Parliamentary questions as a control mechanism in coalition governments

This article argues that government parties can use parliamentary questions to monitor coalition partners in order to reduce agency loss through ministerial drift. According to this control logic, government parties have particular incentives to question ministers whose jurisdictions display high policy conflict and high electoral salience and thus hold the prospect of electorally damaging ministerial drift. Multivariate regression analysis of all parliamentary questions in the German Bundestag between 1980 and 2017 supports this hypothesis, showing that cabinet parties address substantially and significantly more questions to ministries held by coalition partners on salient and ideologically divisive issues. This interactive effect does not occur for opposition parties or questions posed to own-party ministers. These findings, as well as the temporal patterns of questioning over the electoral cycle, indicate that control within coalitions is a distinct motivation for questioning ministers that cannot be reduced to existing explanations such as electorally motivated issue competition.     

MPs' Issue Attention in Parliament: Evidence of a Stick–Slip Process of Attention Allocation in the French National Assembly

Until now, political science has focused mainly on institutions or political actors and much less on the content of politics, the issues political actors and institutions deal with. Based on the seminal work of Jones and Baumgartner ((2005), The politics of attention: How government prioritises problems. Chicago: University of Chicago Press), the article will study MPs' issue attention in Parliament and will investigate the source of punctuation in attention allocation. Even if a growing literature is dedicated to this issue, the two main sources of friction – cognition and institution – have not yet been directly tested. Based on an exhaustive database of the parliamentary questions in the French National Assembly between 1988 and 2007, the paper will focus on the dynamics of issue attention in the parliamentary questions at three levels to show that: the general punctuation hypothesis is valid for the parliamentary question agendas; the comparison between the levels of punctuation of the institutionally unconstrained written question agenda and the institutionally constrained question to government agenda is consistent with the idea that higher institutional friction induces higher punctuation in attention allocation; and the dynamics of issue attention in the parliamentary question agendas at the individual level exhibit strong patterns of cognitive friction.     

Guilt and Innocence in the Criminal Justice System: A Comment on R (Mullen) v Secretary of State for the Home Department

The House of Lords upheld the Secretary of State's right to deny compensation under section 133 of the Criminal Justice Act 1988 and the ex gratia scheme to Mullen, whose conviction for conspiracy to cause explosions had been quashed by the Court of Appeal solely by reference to actions by the authorities (securing his illegal deportation to the UK) that constituted an abuse of process, without impugning the fairness of his trial or the accuracy of the verdict The note discusses the different judgments in the House of Lords and the Court of Appeal in terms of their implications for the respective roles of legal and political systems in determining guilt and innocence. In particular, the note explores the nature of the legal principle of the presumption of innocence as it operates in the context of successful appeals.     

谈如何进行试卷分析

正像证券的历史价格信息是证券价格预测的主要依据一样,考试后试题分析对教师指导学生把握学习要点、使考试复习有的放矢,进而帮助学生摸透考试规律,为考试复习提供指引是行之有效的。     

新工伤标准引发的法律问题思考

2006年11月2日颁布、2007年5月1日实施的《劳动能力鉴定职工工伤与职业病致残等级(GB/T16180-2006)》标准,简称《新工伤标准》,是作为《工伤保险条例》配套的医学鉴定标准制订的,重在解决职工因公致残、致病中的医学问题。由于现阶段我国普通伤害案件处理中,人体伤残标准的缺位,使得《新工伤标准》成为了此类案件的补位标准。但是,职工工伤伤残的赔偿与普通伤害案件伤残的赔偿在计算方法上存在根本性的差异,使得《新工伤标准》在普通伤害案件的适用上引发了一系列司法问题:包括(1)《新工伤标准》较前更为宽泛,引发了赔偿数目的显著增加;(2)《新工伤标准》出台了的一些新的鉴定原则,颠覆了既往的司法鉴定理念,将引发司法实务中标准竞合问题、以及司法鉴定理念矛盾的问题;等等。针对目前突出的法律问题,本为作者认为:解决的途径有二:1)统一目前国家赔偿体系,并统一残疾评定标准,做到同种损伤同种赔偿。2)积极制订适用于普通伤害的残疾评定标准,做到每一赔偿体系中,均存在与其相适应的医学鉴定标准,以避免因鉴定标准的不同引发司法不公。两种途径相比较,前者运作更为困难,而后者相对容易。