Substantive Class Research Articles

The Propriety and Inevitability of Netting in Antitrust Class Actions

How to define “antitrust injury” is an issue that has been the source of much debate among judges, lawyers, and academics alike. Specifically, a disagreement exists as to whether participation in a single transaction, which a defendant has allegedly tainted via anticompetitive behavior, is sufficient to constitute antitrust injury. Complicating this area of jurisprudential and doctrinal uncertainty are cases in which a plaintiff who has alleged injury as a result of anticompetitive conduct later reaped offsetting gains resulting from that very same conduct. The disagreements regarding the role of these net beneficiaries, and the netting process necessary to identify them, in antitrust suits implicate matters that extend far beyond legal theory. This Note outlines the multitude of ways in which the foregoing consequences manifest. It then highlights the propriety of a contextual approach in which courts are more willing to engage in nuanced and substantive class certification analyses that balance the interests of the litigants and the goals of the antitrust laws. The Note uses financial markets, and variations among the instruments therein, as a specific instantiation of these principles and a context in which a nuanced approach is especially compelling. It concludes by demonstrating that, regardless of whether a court incorporates netting into its definition of antitrust injury, it will have to contend with netting principles during the class–certification process.

Estimating the size of “anti-vax” and vaccine hesitant populations in the US, UK, and Canada: comparative latent class modeling of vaccine attitudes

ABSTRACT Vaccine hesitancy is a significant impediment to global efforts to vaccinate against the SARS-CoV-2 virus at levels that generate herd immunity. In this article, we show the utility of an inductive approach – latent class analysis (LCA) – that allows us to characterize the size and nature of different vaccine attitude groups; and to compare how these groups differ across countries as well as across demographic subgroups within countries. We perform this analysis using original survey data collected in the US, UK, and Canada. We also show that these classes are strongly associated with SARS-CoV-2 vaccination intent and perceptions of the efficacy and safety of the COVID-19 vaccines, suggesting that attitudes about vaccines to fight the novel coronavirus pandemic are well explained by latent vaccine attitudes that precede the pandemic. More specifically, we find four substantive classes of vaccine attitudes: strong supporters, supporters with concerns, vaccine hesitant, and “anti-vax” as well as a fifth measurement error class. The strong “anti-vax” sentiment class is small in all three countries, while the strong supporter class is the largest across all three countries. We observe different distributions of class assignments in different demographic groups – most notably education and political leaning (partisanship and ideology).

Teaching Legal English with “Modified Clil”

Abstract This paper will describe the methodology for teaching legal English used at the Fordham University School of Law’s Legal English Institute (LEI), a one-semester program for law students and attorneys. Reasonable minds may disagree about the most effective methodology for teaching legal English, or for that matter any other form of academic English, but we have developed an approach that is informed by both theory and practice. At LEI, we use a “modified CLIL” format, with four substantive classes on topics in U.S. law that run in parallel with a core class on legal English. All four substantive classes use authentic reading materials that are similar to those used in an LL.M. program, and these materials are recycled in the legal English class and form the basis of discussions about language issues. Our use of content classes (as opposed to explicit language classes) to elicit language issues has proven to be effective and it also helps keep students motivated, as students tend to have more intrinsic interest in legal topics than in language study per se.

Using the Social Cognitive Theory Framework to Chart Gender Differences in the Developmental Trajectory of STEM Self-Efficacy in Science and Engineering Students

According to Bandura’s social cognitive theory, a student’s self-efficacy influences his or her academic and career decisions, and his or her performance outcomes; as such, a student’s self-efficacy changes with time in response to the student’s experiences. Self-efficacy may also vary by academic domain. Differences in STEM self-efficacy have often been reported between men and women. The purpose of this study is to explore the evolution of domain-specific STEM self-efficacy in students in gateway physics and mathematics courses and how academic feedback influences the evolution of these differences with time. Further, this study explored whether gender differences in self-efficacy are consistent across STEM domains and how these differences change in response to academic feedback. Self-efficacy in multiple academic domains (current mathematics/science class, other STEM classes, and intended profession) was assessed at multiple time points with subscales adapted from the Motivated Strategies for Learning Questionnaire. Linear mixed effects modeling was used to understand how academic feedback provided by test scores influenced changes in self-efficacy. Students in all classes expressed different levels of self-efficacy toward different domains with the lowest self-efficacy toward their current class and the highest toward their intended profession. Only the current math/science class self-efficacy of men and women differed significantly, with women expressing lower self-efficacy. The differences in current class self-efficacy were evident very early in the class before substantive class feedback was received. The evolution of self-efficacy within the class and between classes was the same for men and women.

UNMASQUE

Given a database instance and a populated result, query reverse-engineering attempts to identify candidate SQL queries that produce this result on the instance. A variant of this problem arises when a ground-truth is additionally available, but hidden within an opaque database application. In this demo, we present UN-MASQUE, an extraction algorithm that is capable of precisely identifying a substantive class of such hidden queries. A hallmark of its design is that the extraction is completely non-invasive to the application. Specifically, it only examines the results obtained from application executions on databases derived with a combination of data mutation and data generation techniques, thereby achieving platform-independence. Further, potent optimizations, such as database size reduction to a few rows, are incorporated to minimize the extraction overheads. The demo showcases these features on both declarative and imperative applications.

Cosmopolitan Politesse

In an earlier work (Anyone: The Cosmopolitan Subject of Anthropology, 2012), I considered a solution to the ‘problem’ of society as identified by Georg Simmel. The fact that we only come to know the interactional ‘Other’ by way of distortion, by virtue of the imposition of alien and alienating labels, categories and taxonomies, Simmel (1971) described as ‘tragic’ (cf. Rapport 2017). We distort the Other’s identity when we ‘know’ them in the conventional and collectivising terms of a symbolic classification of cultural reality. In response, I argued for a linguistic and behavioural style of public address and exchange, and an ethos of good manners, that I termed ‘cosmopolitan politesse’. This was an interactional code by which we presumed the common humanity and the distinct individuality of whomsoever we engaged with, but classified the Other in no more substantive fashion than this. We accepted that in our social interactions we were engaging with an individual human other – ‘Anyone’ – and not with a representative of some more substantive class: ‘a woman’, ‘a Swede’, ‘a Jew’, someone ‘working class’, ‘primitive’ or ‘pious’, and so on.

How Interspersion Affects Class Relations

AbstractScholars have identified a new configuration of spatial inequality in several of the largest cities in the developing world. This configuration, which I label interspersion, is characterized by the general proximity of classed spaces, particularly ‘slums’ and ‘enclaves’. There is disagreement about how interspersion affects class relations. One side argues that it worsens class relations by foreclosing substantive class interaction; the other side maintains that it improves class relations by enabling greater class interaction. I argue that it is not the extent but the form of class interaction that matters. Interspersion worsens class relations by promoting categorically unequal interaction. It provides regular opportunities for the imposition of spatial boundaries on slum residents. Regular experiences of boundary imposition deepen their sense of discrimination. This argument is based on an ethnographic study of the relations between slum and enclave residents in Metro Manila.

Hopes and Expectations: The Origins of the Black Middle Class in Hartford by Barbara J. Beeching

Reviewed by: Hopes and Expectations: The Origins of the Black Middle Class in Hartford by Barbara J. Beeching Clifton Watson Hopes and Expectations: The Origins of the Black Middle Class in Hartford. Barbara J. Beeching. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2017. ISBN 978-1-4384-6165-6. 296 pp., cloth, $90.00. Hopes and Expectations is a compelling microhistory of the black experience in America explored through the travails and triumphs of the Primus Family—descendants of Gad Asher, who was sold into slavery before reclaiming his freedom after serving in the American Revolutionary War. Barbara Beeching's monograph narrates the experiences of an emergent black middle class and the immediate family of Holdridge Primus—the grandson of Asher—who migrated from North Branford to Hartford, Connecticut, around 1830. Though just thirty miles separated the town and city, they were marked by significant differences in demographic composition and economic opportunity. The Primus family members were among few African Americans in the small developing town of North Branford, where economic fortunes were still largely contingent upon a family's farming success. "Soil exhaustion and the coming of industrialization," Beeching writes, were key factors in the exodus from towns like North Branford to cities across New England (12). The [End Page 226] city of Hartford, with its free black population of significant size and visibility and relative economic diversity, embodied the promise of better opportunities during the early to mid-nineteenth century. Holdridge Primus left for Hartford inspired by its possibilities and emboldened by his family's narrative of progress and investment in the development of the young republic. Scholars across disciplines—and across time—have explored the intersection of African American class aspirations and questions of identity. "The forced geographical displacement" of Africans, historian Michael Gomez argues, "result[ed] in an all-out search for a return to equilibrium . . . [where] wrongs are righted, wounds are healed, and dignity is restored" ("Of Dubois and Diaspora: The Challenge of African American Studies," Journal of Black Studies 35, no. 2 [Nov. 2004]: 178). Beeching's research is illustrative of the endurance of this pursuit. Beeching acknowledges the problematic notion of being black and middle-class in the historical context she offers—citing the arguments of historians Glenda Gilmore and Douglass Daniels to highlight its inherit contradictions (xvii). In lieu of fixed access to the resources that would facilitate upward mobility, the black middle class of Hartford, Beeching argues, embraced respectability, reform, and refinement. Although these values were ultimately imposed on African Americans, they were endorsed under the pretense that doing so would help debunk the mythology of black inferiority. Poignantly, the author notes the centrality of yet another value in this community: "active interest in community welfare" (xviii). Necessitated by sociopolitical and economic dynamics shaped by racism, this core principle of black life served to remind community members that "class" distinctions did not trump America's racial hierarchy. The Primus Papers—a collection of "more than two hundred personal letters" and ephemera from the 1860s—form the foundational source material for Hope and Expectations. This gem of a repository comprises the keepsakes and letters of "three interrelated individuals pursuing three different ambitions in three different locations," nonetheless bound by their roots in Hartford's black middle-class community (xv). Rebecca and Nelson Primus—offspring of Holdridge—contribute mightily to the collection. At the onset of the Civil War, the community within which the Primus family lived enjoyed an uptick in property ownership and literacy, along with a reinvigorated optimism. "However faint, however modest" was the progress of this community, the author reminds us, it stoked the hope of acceptance and substantive class mobility (xvii). Nelson and Rebecca Primus—two generations removed from slavery—are testaments of such. [End Page 227] Nelson, who left Hartford for Boston before moving to California, sought to make his living as an artist. Though a successful career never materialized, his correspondences reveal a steadfast belief in the virtue of respectability. Through economic depravity Nelson rarely contemplated abandoning his vocation and swore to honor his father's advice to "keep out of bad company" (95). Rebecca, in contrast, motivated by an "interest in community welfare," leveraged her middle...

Learning Critical Legal Theory Across the Curriculum: An Innovative Course in Applied Feminism

In law schools, we are so accustomed to a single professor teaching each substantive class that we rarely question this method of teaching. Imagine instead a class taught by fourteen professors, each of whom teaches for one week to share their substantive expertise through the lens of critical legal theory. At the University of Baltimore School of Law, we offer such a course, entitled Special Topics in Applied Feminism. Throughout the semester, students are exposed to feminist legal perspectives on a wide range of substantive topics, including tax law, international law, immigration law, employment law, and many others.The course is sponsored and organized by our Center on Applied Feminism, which seeks to apply feminist legal theory to real-world problems in order to promote gender equality. The Center's activities range from sponsoring an annual conference to advocating for law reform to advising students on career choices. We sought to add an academic component for students that harnessed the talent of our colleagues outside their usual substantive course silos. We have offered the course every other year since 2010. Based on this experience and the responses of students, we recommend that more law schools offer collaborative courses.

Beyond the number of classes: separating substantive from non-substantive dependence in latent class analysis

Latent class analysis (LCA) for categorical data is a model-based clustering and classification technique applied in a wide range of fields including the social sciences, machine learning, psychiatry, public health, and epidemiology. Its central assumption is conditional independence of the indicators given the latent class, i.e. independence; violations can appear as model misfit, often leading LCA practitioners to increase the number of classes. However, when not all of the local dependence is of substantive scientific interest this leads to two options, that are both problematic: modeling uninterpretable classes, or retaining a lower number of substantive classes but incurring bias in the final results and classifications of interest due to remaining assumption violations. This paper suggests an alternative procedure, applicable in cases when the number of substantive classes is known in advance, or when substantive interest is otherwise well-defined. I suggest, in such cases, to model substantive local dependencies as additional discrete latent variables, while absorbing nuisance dependencies in additional parameters. An example application to the estimation of misclassification and turnover rates of the decision to vote in elections of 9510 Dutch residents demonstrates the advantages of this procedure relative to increasing the number of classes.

Class Politics and Social Protection: The Implementation of India's MGNREGA

In this paper, I direct attention to the role of class politics in shaping the outcomes of social protection interventions. I highlight the ways in which class politics is constituted by the interaction of class relations and the balance of substantive class power in a polity. I demonstrate the ways in which variations in class politics influence outcomes of a large social protection programme in India, the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA). In localities where either of the elite classes has successfully co-opted or eliminated the other, their stark contradictions against the interests of agricultural labourers result in them sabotaging the labour-friendly MGNREGA or implementing it half-heartedly. On the other hand, in localities characterised by an overarching framework of contest between the precarious classes and the entrenched classes, dominant class hostility to agricultural labourers is dissipated and labour-friendly programmes such as the MGNREGA have a chance of being implemented. However, the transformative aspect of the programme’s intent, in terms of dissolving the relations of power that bolster poverty, appears to be more in evidence in localities where emergent classes with precarious surpluses, together with agricultural labourers, challenge the influence of the entrenched classes. In these localities, the implementation of the programme, even where fraught with difficulties, contributes to dissolving hierarchical relations and establishing egalitarian ones.

Profiles of language development in pre‐school children: a longitudinal latent class analysis of data from the Early Language in Victoria Study

Pre-school language impairment is common and greatly reduces educational performance. Population attempts to identify children who would benefit from appropriately timed intervention might be improved by greater knowledge about the typical profiles of language development. Specifically, this could be used to help with the early identification of children who will be impaired on school entry. This study applied longitudinal latent class analysis to assessments at 8, 12, 24, 36 and 48 months on 1113 children from a population-based study, in order to identify classes exhibiting distinct communicative developmental profiles. Five substantive classes were identified: Typical, i.e. development in the typical range at each age; Precocious (late), i.e. typical development in infancy followed by high probabilities of precocity from 24 months onwards; Impaired (early), i.e. high probabilities of impairment up to 12 months followed by typical language development thereafter; Impaired (late), i.e. typical development in infancy but impairment from 24 months onwards; Precocious (early), i.e. high probabilities of precocity in early life followed by typical language by 48 months. The entropy statistic (0.84) suggested classes were fairly well defined, although there was a non-trivial degree of uncertainty in classification of children. That half of the Impaired (late) class was expected to have typical language at 4 years and 6% of the numerically large Typical class was expected to be impaired at 4 years illustrates this. Characteristics indicative of social advantage were more commonly found in the classes with improving profiles. Developmental profiles show that some pre-schoolers' language is characterized by periods of accelerated development, slow development and catch-up growth. Given the uncertainty in classifying children into these profiles, use of this knowledge for identifying children who will be impaired on school entry is not straightforward. The findings do, however, indicate greater need for language enrichment programmes among disadvantaged children.

Submission of Law Student Articles for Publication

Each year law students collectively write a large number of papers that could become law review articles but that are never published. Most law schools require students at some point during their time in law school to research and write an academic paper of publishable quality or seminar paper. Some of these are law review notes and comments that are not selected for publication. Others of these are papers written for specific substantive classes or to fulfill research and writing requirements.Most of these student papers - even very worthy ones - will never be published or posted online. The publishing route for law students who want to publish in a venue other than their home law journal is not clearly marked. And many law reviews simply will not accept submissions from students outside their own school. Often, the publishing opportunities for non-law review members in their home school’s law review are also not well known.The purposes of this essay are twofold. First, it offers a number of suggestions for law students (and implicitly for students in other graduate programs) who want to publish their research papers. Second, this essay presents a chart of the policies of 194 law reviews with respect to whether they will publish comments submitted by non-law review members who are students at their home school or notes, comments or articles submitted by law students from other schools.

Teaching Beginning Undergraduates How to Do an In-depth Interview

In-depth interviewing is now a common method in sociology. Although there are many potential benefits of in-depth interviewing assignments for both majors and nonmajors, few have developed tools one can use to teach this method at the first and second year, especially in substantive classes where instruction in interviewing is constrained by time and practical circumstances. In this note, the authors present an in-class exercise and tip sheet they developed to teach beginning undergraduates how to conduct quality in-depth interviews. Comparative analysis of students’ preliminary and final interview guides, as well as the results of a student survey, support the teaching effectiveness of the workshop and tip sheet.

Reducing the dimensionality of linear quadratic control problems

In linear-quadratic control (LQC) problems with singularities in the control cost and/or the transition matrices, we derive a reduction of the dimension of the Riccati matrix, simplifying iteration and solution. Employing a novel transformation, we show that, under a certain rank condition, the matrix of optimal feedback coefficients is linear in the reduced Riccati matrix. For a substantive class of problems, our technique permits scalar iteration, leading to simple analytical solution.

An online tutorial for helping nonscience majors read primary research literature in biology.

Using primary literature is an effective tool for promoting active learning and critical thinking in science classes. However, it can be challenging to use primary literature in large classes and in classes for nonscience majors. We describe the development and implementation of an online tutorial for helping nonscience majors learn to read primary literature in biology. The tutorial includes content about the scientific process and the structure of scientific papers and provides opportunities for students to practice reading primary literature. We describe the use of the tutorial in Biology of Exercise, a course for nonscience majors. Students used the tutorial outside of class to learn the basic principles involved in reading scientific papers, enabling class sessions to focus on active-learning activities and substantive class discussions.

Modeling International Diffusion: Inferential Benefits and Methodological Challenges, with an Application to International Tax Competition

Although scholars recognize that time-series-cross-section data typically correlate across both time and space, they tend to model temporal dependence directly, often by lags of dependent variables, but to address spatial interdependence solely as a nuisance to be corrected by FGLS or to which to be robust in standard-error estimation (by PCSE). We explore the inferential benefits and methodological challenges of directly modeling international diffusion, one form of spatial dependence. To this end, we first identify two substantive classes of modern comparative-and-international-political-economy (C&IPE) theoretical models - (context-conditional) open-economy comparative political-economy (CPE) models and international political-economy (IPE) models, which imply diffusion (along with predecessors, closed-economy CPE and orthogonal open-economy CPE) - and then we evaluate the relative performance of three estimators - non-spatial OLS, spatial OLS, and spatial 2SLS - for analyzing empirical models corresponding to these two modern alternative theoretical visions from spatially interdependent data. Finally, we offer a substantive application of the spatial 2SLS approach in what we call a spatial error-correction model of international tax competition.

Creative disorder: A response to Chafetz

For several years I have read and used the work of Janet Saltzman Chafetz on gender and society in my own work. Her brief piece on theory in Perspectives is also stimulating, but several of its points deserve a response, in particular, the issue of teaching about "long dead scholars" requires comment. Chafetz is raising an important point here, especially since courses on "the classics" can easily be white males speaking about the thought of earlier European white males. Such power-based, rational, economic, structure-functional thought may miss another important perspective and may be encapsulated by its own concepts and worldview. We are being reminded today that this process needs to be "deconstructed," so as to question many of the assumptions on which it is based. A course in which white males speak of other white males may simply be ignoring (or not understanding) much of social reality. A course of the classics does not have to be like that. In my course on classical theory we deal with thinkers such as Charlotte Perkins Gilman, who spoke of consumption before Veblen, who applied Durkheim's division of labor to the home, and who raised many of today's feminist issues sixty years ago. But the male scholarly world saw to it that she was vilified and then ignored. Aside from Judith Nies's book on Seven Women, it is still hard to find references to her today?even by feminist writers. The point is that classical theory does not need to be either anachronistic or captured by a single perspective. This leads to a second point. Discussion of dead scholars at its best is not merely intellectual history. The questions they asked and the answers they gave are being lived by and died for today. Here we are not talking about "minor revisions" to make them applicable. Rather, we are saying that, rightly or wrongly, they are being applied by whole ethnic groups and societies. A theory about "is ness" easily becomes an ideology of "ought-ness." of good/best, right/wrong, better/worse. And this has happened with many "classics." A third point concerns Chafetz's statement that relevant theoretical ideas should be incorporated into substantive classes. This is do-able except for certain major theoretical questions, such as the nature of society (consensual, coercive, etc.) or the nature of societal change (evolution, revolution, reform, etc.). The fact is