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In the Shadow of a Myth: Bargaining for Same-Sex Divorce
Get PDFThis Article explores a relatively new phenomenon in family law: same-sex divorce. The Article\u27s central claim is that parties to the first wave of same-sex divorces are not effectively bargaining against the backdrop of legal dissolution rules that would govern in the absence of an agreement. In other words, to use Robert Mnookin and Lewis Kornhauser\u27s terminology, they are not bargaining in the shadow of the law. Instead, the Article argues, many same-sex couples today bargain in the shadow of a myth that same-sex couples are egalitarian—that there are no vulnerable parties or power differentials in same-sex divorce.
The Article shows how a myth of egalitarianism undermines current bargaining for same-sex divorce. First, the myth leads to what the Article calls “divorce exceptionalism,” that is, when a party claims that existing marriage dissolution rules do not apply in same-sex divorce because they were designed to remedy the nonegalitarian conditions of different-sex marriages. Divorce exceptionalism disables effective bargaining because without default legal rules there is nothing to guide the bargaining process. Second, the myth of egalitarianism eliminates key bargaining chips: under a presumption of formal equality neither party really has anything to “give” or “get” in the bargain for divorce. Finally, the myth, combined with the general fog of uncertainty regarding how courts will treat same-sex divorces, may lead to increased strategic behavior. The Article proposes a realistic solution, arguing that the legal actors who participate in same-sex divorce, including lawyers, mediators, courts, and the parties themselves, should reject divorce exceptionalism and apply ordinary divorce rules. It also proposes to protect vulnerable parties by extending to same-sex divorce the current trend toward joint-custody presumptions.
The myth of egalitarianism in same-sex couples, which was quite helpful in achieving marriage equality, is now haunting the first wave of same-sex divorces and harming vulnerable parties. It is time to let it go and address the reality of same-sex relationships
A Heuristic for Improving Legacy Software Quality During Maintenance: An Empirical Case Study
No full textMany organizations depend on the functionality of mission-critical legacy software and the continued maintenance of this software is vital. Legacy software is defined here as software that contains no testing suite, is often foreign to the developer performing the maintenance, lacks meaningful documentation, and over time, has become difficult to maintain. Because of these flaws, developers frequently make modifications without a formal plan. This type of legacy software maintenance is problematic and often results in a reduction of software quality—for example, more defects, code smells and code rot , high levels of brittleness, degradation of conceptual integrity, and bolt-on modifications. General guidelines for legacy software maintenance were developed in prior work, but none of these guidelines were evaluated during actual maintenance tasks. This dissertation contributes to the corpus of legacy software maintenance research by presenting a novel, practical, legacy software maintenance heuristic named Heuristic for Improving Software Quality (HISQ) , and by evaluating the effectiveness of the heuristic on software quality through an action research study. The study showed that an experimental group of developers using HISQ improved software quality for a set of legacy software maintenance tasks when compared to a control group of developers
Transition Support Mechanisms for Communities Facing Full or Partial Coal Power Plant Retirement in New York
Get PDFNew York State is undergoing a rapid and unprecedented energy transformation, particularly in the electricity sector. As new resources and technologies emerge to meet the demands of 21st century life, regulators must balance the need for cost effective and equitable participation in wholesale power markets while maintaining reliability on the grid. Furthermore, it is critical that all New Yorkers participate fully in the promise of a revitalized and equitable energy future. Such a transformation requires that the needs of all communities are factored into the polices and regulations that move New York toward the bold goals set forth under its Reforming the Energy Vision (REV) initiative.
The precipitous drop in natural gas prices, the decreased costs of wind and solar energy, and the rise in the cost of coal, have contributed to the mothballing or retiring of coal-fired and nuclear energy generators across the country, including in New York. Communities that have been home to the electric generation units of the past, particularly struggling coal-fired power plants, are especially vulnerable during this transformation, because these communities often rely on the generators for tax revenues, such as through Payments in Lieu of Tax agreements. New York has the opportunity to ensure a just transition for these communities by adopting new, clean energy resources, technologies, and markets while fostering a trained and skilled workforce to support its ambitious goals. For all New Yorkers to enjoy the new energy future, leadership must address the impact of lost jobs, declining economic activity and lost tax revenue, and must support essential services in impacted communities with the same level of urgency and expansive vision needed to balance the integration of new technologies in the most cost effective manner to maintain grid reliability. At the same time, state and federal funding must be allocated to communities in transition for the remediation and redevelopment of shuttered power plant sites, and to provide the necessary support, training and tools for impacted communities to actively participate in the transition and implementation of clean energy resources.
The first section of this report examines the lessons learned from other jurisdictions in when and how to address the fiscal challenges of retiring electric generation units (EGU’s). The challenges New York faces are not unlike the challenges faced by communities, legislators, and plant owners during periods of deindustrialization of the late 1960’s through 1980’s, described in Section One below, which additionally provides:
1. An evaluation of case studies that address the process of retirement, decommissioning, remediation and preparation for redevelopment for future use, along with the state and federal policies and funding sources that made revitalization possible.
2. An overview of case studies that illustrate local government fiscal and workforce support to communities during periods of plant transformation. These periods encompass three historical phases:
a. Deindustrialization of the 1960’s to1980’s;
b. Federally Mandated Social Programs to Support Enforcement of Federal Regulations 1990’s to 2000; and
c. Coal Plant Closures and Community Transition in the Age of Carbon Emissions Reductions: Federal and State Initiatives between 2000 to 2015; and
Section Two examines four New York coal-fired generators, some of which are currently mothballed, retired, or struggling financially. In addition to providing profiles of each generator, Section Two also describes the Payment in Lieu of Taxes (PILOT) agreements that these generators have entered into with the towns, school boards, and counties in whose jurisdictions they are located. Due to the plants’ finances, several of the generators have made reduced PILOT payments in recent years, creating “budget gaps” for some of the communities.
Finally, Section Three describes state and federal funding and support mechanisms that may be available to the New York communities described in Section Two. Because each community faces unique challenges and opportunities, this report does not attempt to provide specific recommendations for any of the communities. Rather, Section Three lists a number of support mechanisms that each community could consider in developing its own transition plan. New York State leadership can capitalize on the legislative legacy of prior eras and develop comprehensive approaches to reinvest in communities with obsolete industrial facilities that were once the primary source of jobs and economic activity, and revenue to local budgets
A Semantic Approach to Intelligent and Personal Tutoring System
No full textCyberlearning presents numerous challenges such as the lack of personal and assessment-driven learning, how students are often puzzled by the lack of instructor guidance and feedback, the huge volume of diverse learning materials, and the inability to zoom in from the general concepts to the more specific ones, or vice versa. Intelligent tutoring systems are needed to improve the Cyberlearning quality. One of the major difficulties is knowledge representation. The current industry standard is to use Web Ontology Language (OWL) for representing knowledge structure. But OWL only supports one first-class relation, is-a , between the concepts, and different knowledge areas usually need different custom relations to describe the relations among the concepts. For example part-of and time dependency are important relations to represent most engineering knowledge bodies. OWL is limited to object properties to emulate such custom relations, leading to awkward knowledge representation hard for domain experts to code, validate and use such knowledge bases. This research uses Pace University’s extension to OWL, named Knowledge Graph (KG), to support knowledge representation with custom relations. The instructors can use Pace University extended Protégé IDE to declare and apply custom relations in a single document. The instructors teaching experience is also coded in the KG to better support custom learning order by students with different backgrounds. The prototype of a knowledge-driven tutoring system was designed and implemented to illustrate how the KG supports integrated assessments; using assessment results to custom student learning order or material; and let the students freely navigate in the knowledge space from general to specific or the opposite, and following various custom relations. A web technology tutorial is used to validate the design and effectiveness of this approach
Behavioral and Emotional Functioning of Children with Traumatic Brain Injuries: Level of Injury Severity and Cognitive Functioning as it Relates to Parent-Child Report of Psychopathology
No full textThe present study examined the cognitive, behavioral and emotional functioning of children who sustained a traumatic brain injury (TBI), in terms of severity of the injury and parent-child agreement. The study drew upon archival Ara of assessment measures completed during neuropsychological evaluations in a hospital setting. A series of Pearson correlations and t-tests were performed to examine the relationship between child and parent ratings of psychopathology symptoms and cognitive variables. Results indicated significant relationships between the child\u27s cognitive abilities and parent and child reports of psychopathology. Further, parental report of children\u27s psychopathology correlated with General Abilities Index (GAI), while children\u27s self-report of psychopathology was correlated with the GAI and the Cognitive Proficiency Index (CPI). Results of the t tests suggested that the abilities measured by the CPI, remain relatively stable regardless of the severity of the injury, while abilities as measured by the GAI are negatively impacted and show a much greater decrease based on the severity of the injury. Additional t-test analyses compared children\u27s ratings of psychopathology to their parents\u27 ratings on numerous variables. Overall, though the data revealed significant differences in parent and child perception of the child\u27s psychopathology regarding overall internalizing problems, there were no significant differences in parent and child report of child psychopathology based on severity of the injury. Overall, this study contributes to the literature on TBI by highlighting the impact of neurocognitive impairment on severity of psychopathology and demonstrating the discrepancy between parent and child report with regard to diagnostic symptomatology
Law as Trope: Framing and Evaluating Conceptual Metaphors
Get PDFLike others who work with language, many lawyers no doubt appreciate good kennings. However, metaphors also play a much deeper role in thought and law than style, ornament, or verbal virtuosity. As we shall see, metaphors play a necessary role in our categories of thought. As a result, metaphors are a necessary part of thought itself, including legal thought
Preservation: What Is It Good for?
Get PDFThe Article proceeds as follows: in Part A, the preservation doctrine is defined. In Part B, the history of the preservation doctrine is described. In Part C, there is an explanation as to the purpose of preservation. In Part D, there is a description of the appellate process in New York. In Part E, the statutory rules of the New York Court of Appeals are described. In Part F, there is a description of how the rules of preservation have loosened in New York since 2009. In Part G, there is a statistical analysis of the consequences of loosening the rules of preservation in New York. Finally, Part H shows how loosening the rules of preservation impacts the efficiency of appellate courts
Your Mission, Should You Choose to Accept It . . . : Taking Law School Mission Statements Seriously
Get PDFLearning about the process and the results of mission definition in law schools has made palpable the tension between clarity and inflexibility, candor and marketing concerns, and the specificity that fosters accountability as opposed to the generality that embraces a vague multitude of approaches to the law school endeavor. Building on the strong endorsement of the use of mission statements in the original Best Practices for Legal Education, we present some “Best Practices” for both the development and the content of law school mission statements. We hope that this piece hastens further conversation and commentary that will foster a richer and more mindful perspective on this necessary--and potentially transformative--task of legal educators
The Amending Clause in the New York Constitution and Conventionphobia
Get PDFThe amending clause is the nineteenth of the New York State Constitution’s twenty articles. Followed only by the enacting clause, for all intents and purposes this is the document’s final word. Well, maybe not the final word. An alternative is to think of this amending clause as a part of an ongoing several-centuries-long conversation. The clause is a message from one past group of designers and drafters of New York’s governing system, the 1846 Constitutional Convention majority, to all of us who gave them the charge to “secure [for us] the blessings of freedom,” that is to “we the people” of New York