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Black Leadership zine
Get PDFLeadership takes forms in different ways where the art o languages whispers subjectivity.
This zine project takes various definitions of leadership and presents it through a different lens of a political United States.https://digitalcommons.pace.edu/student_zines/1002/thumbnail.jp
Justice Delayed, Justice Denied? The Search for Accountability for Alleged Wartime Atrocities Committed in Sri Lanka
Get PDFDuring the final stages of its nearly three-decades-long civil war in 2009, Sri Lanka attracted considerable international attention due to the allegations of international crimes that were said to have been committed both by the Sri Lankan government Armed Forces, the Guerilla Force, and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE). According to United Nations (UN) experts, an estimated 40,000 civilians were killed during the final offensive, which lasted from January to May 2009. However, the Sri Lankan government has set this figure at 9,000 with no civilian casualties. Several UN bodies found credible allegations that international crimes were committed by both parties taking part in the civil war, some of which amounted to war crimes and crimes against humanity. Further allegations of international crimes being committed by Sri Lankan government forces surfaced in two documentaries by Channel 4 (UK) that claimed to include video footage from the final phases of the civil war.
Against this background, this article discusses: (1) the various national actions that have been initiated in Sri Lanka; (2) the progress made with regard to the various international calls for justice; and (3) the possible international and partially international avenues for pursuing justice. Finally, the article concludes by outlining the present domestic conditions in Sri Lanka and making recommendations on possible avenues to pursue in order to ensure that justice is delivered
The UN at 75: Success Stories From the Trusteeship System
Get PDFThe seventy-fifth anniversary of the United Nations offers an opportunity to review its many contributions to world peace, development, human rights, and the rule of law. Among the purposes stated in its Charter, the United Nations sought “[t]o develop friendly relations among nations based on respect for the principle of equal rights and self-determination of peoples . . . .” The promotion of “self-determination of peoples” fell to the U.N. Trusteeship Council, one of the six organs of the United Nations. The Trusteeship Council suspended its work on November 1, 1994, one month after the Republic of Palau, the last of the original eleven trust territories, became an independent nation
The Illegally Traded Elephant in the Room: Species Terrorism & Combating Illegal Wildlife Trade
Get PDFThe illegal wildlife trade has been a dilemma for decades
and remains prevalent globally – international intervention is
required now. While most countries participate in the Convention
on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild
Fauna and Flora (“CITES”), not all countries have the same approaches
to combating the illegal wildlife trade. Unique approaches
can be beneficial because each illegally traded species
requires a different response, and countries with limited resources
can also participate. However, the lack of a unified response
hinders the global fight against the illegal wildlife trade.
While traditional methods to combat crime, such as passing
laws, are an excellent place to start, they are meaningless without
effective enforcement and prosecution. Due to the complexity
of the illegal wildlife trade, the lack of understanding severely
hinders the ability to effectively combat it. This comment
begins with reasons why the illegal wildlife trade is critical to
confront. This comment continues with illustrating what CITES
is, CITES’s shortcomings, and other international organizations
that aid in the fight against illegal wildlife trade. This comment
then details the potential approaches to decrease the demand for
unsustainable wildlife products that come from endangered species.
This comment will explain the community-based natural
resource management (“CBNRM”) approach and how it can empower
communities and sustain biodiversity. This comment will
then discuss insufficient data collection and submission to
CITES and how both can increase to aid in the global fight
against wildlife crimes. This comment will explore how a lack of
enforcement on a national level affects the country and affects
the world. This comment will conclude with recommendations
on strengthening the fight against illegal wildlife trade using demand
reducing programs, CBNRM where appropriate, increased
shared data, and more vigorous enforcement
Pandemic Theater: An Analysis of Issues that Arose During COVID-19 and the Solutions Applied
Get PDFThe Coronavirus pandemic put a halt to the theater industry for almost eighteen months, and just now is the industry re-emerging with innovative ideas and suggestions for how it wants to distribute productions. A combination of the entertainment business and intellectual property law, the purpose of this review is to investigate the question of “what changes need to be made to CBAs and licensing laws to allow for this type of content to continue?” Through a content and legal analysis of emergency authorizations and agreements, as well as pre-existing copyright and distribution laws, this thesis outlines how the pandemic forced issues within the industry to come to the surface and how they were dealt with in the moment. The recommendations are suggestions based on previous problems and reactions to these changes
Law Faculty Experiences Teaching During the Pandemic
Get PDFWhen colleges and universities abruptly shifted to online teaching in March 2020 all focus (appropriately) was on ensuring continuity of education for students. In adapting courses to the new online environment, professors were encouraged to take into account the incredible stress students were experiencing, their new living conditions and, in some cases, lack of access to technology and educational resources. For the Spring 2020 semester, almost all U.S. law schools shifted to some form of pass/fail grading in recognition of the enormous upheaval to students’ educational plans.
Less discussed during the initial months of the coronavirus pandemic was how faculty members experienced and responded to the pandemic in their personal lives and as professional educators. This essay describes the results of an informal, non-representative survey of law faculty conducted in May 2020. The principal findings are that during the initial months of the pandemic, law professors themselves were under considerable stress during the pandemic, that they altered their modes of delivery and interaction with students, and that they wanted students, colleagues, and school administrators to recognize the complex experiences of law faculty teaching during the pandemic.
The initial survey results here could serve as a basis for law school deans and others to develop school-specific surveys that might elicit more specific feedback about the experiences of faculty members at their schools. That feedback would enable law school leaders develop programs that support their faculty and students. It may also be important to track longer-term effects of the pandemic on law faculty careers, as disruptions to legal education caused by the coronavirus may continue for some time
Sensitivity of Machine Learning Algorithms to Dataset Drift for the Natural Language Processing Application of Spam Filters
No full textThe datum used for many machine learning projects drifts over time. The problem of dataset drift causes the performance of the models to deteriorate. This can have devastating consequences for critical real-world applications that rely on the accuracy and robustness of the model, such as autonomous vehicles, fraud detection, medical diagnosis, etc. The resilience to dataset drift will impact the degree and ways the model suffers in production.The impact of data drift depends on the selected algorithms, as well as the application domains. Application domains involving graphics and pattern recognitions, such as traffic-toll systems and image classification are less likely to suffer from data drift because the data used for training is static and is expected to have the same distribution that will be seen in production. On the other hand, the output of daily business processes that rely on natural language understanding for text classification involving user behavior are subject to change over time.We research the stability of four popular high-performing machine learning algorithms for the text-classification task of email spam classification. In this work, we compare the resilience to dataset drift of the Random Forest (RF) algorithm, Convolutional Neural Network (CNN), Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) Network, as well as the pre-trained transformers architecture of the Bidirectional Encoder Representation from Transformer (BERT) developed by Google. To simulate various amounts of data drift, we create four hybrid datasets using the SpamAssassain benchmark dataset, combined with various percentages of emails from the Enron benchmark dataset.Our study found that for the specific Natural Language Understanding tasks of text classification for use in spam filters, the RF, CNN, and LSTM were less likely to suffer from data drift. These three models suffered only a 1% loss compared to an 11% loss for BERT when using a dataset representing 60% data change. When using a dataset representative of 90% data change, the BERT model suffered a 16% loss compared to the 7% loss of the RF and LSTM, and the 6% loss of the CNN. Overall, we found the RF, CNN, and LSTM algorithms were less likely to be impacted by dataset drift when used for spam filter applications
HIERARCHIES OF ELITISM AND GENDER: THE BLUEBOOK AND THE ALWD GUIDE
Get PDFHierarchies persist in legal academia. Some of these, while in plain view, are not so obvious because they manifest in seemingly small, mundane choices. Synecdoche is a rhetorical device used to show how one detail in a story tells the story of the whole.
This Article examines hierarchies of elitism and gender through a lens of synecdoche. The focus is on the choice of citation guide. Even something as seemingly benign and neutral as choosing a citation guide can reveal hierarchies of elitism and gender bias in legal education and the legal profession. Put another way, the choice of citation guide exists in—is inextricably embedded in—structural hierarchies of the legal profession. This Article examines the ways the choice of a citation guide reinforces elitism and gender bias by examining the use of two common citation guides, The Bluebook and the ALWD Guide. The Bluebook was developed by law students engaged in prestige activities at top-ranked law schools and retains the traits of its birth. This is in contrast to the ALWD Guide, which was written by experienced, professional legal writing professors who have dedicated their careers to teaching lawyers how to practice law. The Article describes the ALWD Guide’s focus on educating students to be practitioners, and the role of elitism and gender bias in keeping the ALWD Guide from displacing The Bluebook, despite The Bluebook’s well-documented deficiencies in training attorneys.
This Article describes how learning citation gives students a kind of social capital through explicit and implicit messages they receive about the relationship of citation to their aptitude for the study of law, the connections between citation and prestige activities like law reviews, and the rhetoric of citation as a proxy for “good lawyering.” It explains how the elevation of The Bluebook elevates and perpetuates elitism as a substitute for quality over the expertise of women—in this case, women working in lower-status, lower-paying positions.
It ultimately uses the example of the choice of a citation guide to examine the distribution of authority, power, and resources along gender lines in society in general and in legal education. The choice of citation guide is a locus of power, and resistance to small choices that shift power accumulates into the perpetuation of the hierarchical status quo. It concludes that by using this example of synecdoche, we can examine and perhaps shift our awareness of who has power, authority, and expertise within the legal profession and move toward rebalancing this power and authority based upon real expertise
