October 2011

This article was written by guest author Kathryn A. Sampson, Assistant Professor of Law at the University of Arkansas School of Law. In January of 2010, the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) released a study conducted by Thomas Dee and Brian Jacobs that reported success in anti-plagiarism instruction.[i]   Dee and Jacobs examined the effectiveness of an anti-plagiarism tutorial among 1,200 papers and concluded that pre-assignment completion of the tutorial “reduced instances of plagiarism by roughly 2 percentage points overall (i.e., a two-thirds reduction) and that this treatment effect was concentrated among students with lower [standardized test] scores.”[ii]  From this data, Dee & Jacob concluded “intervention reduced plagiarism by increasing student knowledge rather than by increasing the perceived probabilities of detection and punishment.”[iii] In addition to the on-line tutorial suggested…

This article was written by guest author Nick Walter. Mr. Walter is a 2012 J.D. candidate at Yale Law School, and Executive Editor of the Yale Law Journal. This blog post is based on his article, The Status of Religious Arbitration in the United States and Canada, which will appear in 52 Santa Clara L. Rev. (forthcoming Jan. 2012). Arbitration is a popular form of dispute resolution. It is effective, too: in the United States and Canada, arbitral agreements and awards can be enforced in court.[i] This includes religious arbitration agreements—arbitration proceedings that are conducted before religious tribunals, or in accordance with religious principles. Religious arbitration from time to time appears in the news, often in relation to some kind of controversy. In Ontario in 2006, the premier, Dalton McGuinty,…