Day archives: December 9th, 2018

Paper – An Unappreciated Constraint on the President’s Pardon Power

Rappaport, Aaron J., An Unappreciated Constraint on the President’s Pardon Power (November 30, 2018). UC Hastings Research Paper. Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3293411 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3293411. [h/t Joe Hodnicki] “Most commentators assume that, except for the few textual limitations mentioned in the U.S. Constitution, the President’s pardon power is effectively unlimited. This paper suggests that this common …

Subjects: Government Documents, Legal Research

Disappearing Acts – the mass extinction of species accelerates

“We are living in an age of loss: the sixth mass extinction. Following this year’s shocking report that the planet has lost half its wildlife in the past 40 years, and the 2018 Remembrance Day for Lost Species, we bring you ‘The Vanishing’. In this new section, we seek responses not only to extinction – the deaths of …

Subjects: Climate Change, Environmental Law

Impact of expansive natural gas fields on the people and animals of Arctic Tundra

Lens culture: There Is Gas Under the Tundra – In the far reaches of the Arctic tundra, fire and ice coexist in expansive natural gas fields. “We typically think of ice and fire as elemental opposites – two of nature’s most primal forces that cannot exist in the same place at once. But the Russian …

Subjects: Climate Change, Energy, Environmental Law

Congressional Oversight of Intelligence: Background and Selected Options for Further Reform

EveryCRSReport.com – Congressional Oversight of Intelligence: Background and Selected Options for Further Reform, December 4, 2018: “Prior to the establishment of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI) and the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI) in 1976 and 1977, respectively, Congress did not take much interest in conducting oversight of the Intelligence Community …

Subjects: Civil Liberties, Congress, Defense, Government Documents, Legal Research, Legislation

Robert Crown Law Library preserves stories of women legal pioneers

Sharon Driscoll – Stanford News: “In the last half-century, women in law have made huge strides. But women who came before them faced huge hurdles—and many of them overcame those hurdles, making history by attending law school and succeeding in the profession against the odds. BROOKSLEY BORN, JD ’64, BA ’61, and Linda Ferren, executive …

Subjects: Knowledge Management, Legal Research, Libraries

Study Shows Reading Remediation Improves Children’s Reading Skills and Positively Alters Brain Tissue

“Carnegie Mellon University scientists Timothy Keller and Marcel Just have uncovered the first evidence that intensive instruction to improve reading skills in young children causes the brain to physically rewire itself, creating new white matter that improves communication within the brain. As the researchers report today in the journal Neuron, [Timothy A. Keller, Marcel Adam …

Subjects: Education, Knowledge Management, Libraries

Lists of Best Books and Holiday Tech Gifts – 2018

Curated List – The Best Books of 2018 – Jason Kottke: “2018 was the year that tsundoku entered our cultural vocabulary. It’s a Japanese word that doesn’t translate cleanly into English but it basically means you buy books and let them pile up unread. The end-of-the-year book lists coming out right now won’t help any …

Subjects: Internet, Knowledge Management, Libraries

CDC data – Large cities still segregated even as nation becoming more diverse

Washington Post: “…Even as the United States becomes increasingly diverse, neighborhood segregation patterns persist in large urban areas, including in the Washington metro region, according to five-year trend data from the Census Bureau. Segregation has remained most entrenched between black and white residents, while segregation between whites and Hispanics and whites and Asians is more …

Subjects: Economy, Government Documents, Housing

The long, tortured quest to make Google unbiased

The Verge – Can a search engine ever be meaningfully neutral: “[December 11, 2018], Sundar Pichai will try to reassure Congress that Google’s search engine isn’t rigged. The Google CEO is testifying before the House Judiciary Committee on Tuesday [The Hearing is titled – Transparency & Accountability: Examining Google and its Data Collection, Use and …

Subjects: Civil Liberties, Congress, Internet, Knowledge Management, Search Engines

Thank you!