Institutional background. 1. Each Party shall establish or maintain an appropriate institutional framework and mechanisms necessary for the proper functioning of the public procurement system and the implementation of the provisions of this Chapter.
Institutional background. The federal judicial system is comprised of three court tiers. The first is the district or trial court. Federal defendants who contest their guilt are tried in one of 94 US district courts. Next, appeals are handled by one of 11 circuit or appellate courts. Lastly, the Supreme Court of the United States sits atop the system as the highest court in the land. Federal judges are appointed by the President for life, and cases are randomly allocated to judges within each district. As part of the Comprehensive Crime Control Act of 1984 (Pub.L. 98–473, S. 1762, 98 Stat. 1976, October 12, 1984), Congress founded the United States Sen- tencing Commission (USSC). Prior to the Act, judges were free to sentence within a wide range allowed by law. The USSC was created in response to the perceived sentencing inequity that similarly culpable offenders would face when going before different judges; its principle job is to develop guidelines for sentencing convicted fed- eral offenders. Those guidelines take the form of a grid or table. One axis contains the severity of the offense, while the other contains the criminal history of the offender (see Figure A1). Upon a conviction, a judge calculates the offender’s position in the table and chooses a sentence within the given range. The ranges are fairly narrow, with the lower bound typically being about 75% of the upper bound. The guidelines became binding in 1987, at which point federal parole was abol- ished. Judges were able to depart from the guidelines, but any departure could be reversed on appeal. Over time, Congress grew concerned about the frequency of downward departures and took steps to reduce them in part of an omnibus crime xxxx, the PROTECT Act (Pub.L. 108–21, 000 Xxxx. 000, X. 151, April 30, 2003).2 In the years preceding the Act, departures were reviewed under an abuse-of-discretion standard. The PROTECT Act instated a stricter de novo standard of review. It also strengthened reporting requirements and put extra limits on the grounds for departure. Furthermore, then Attorney General Xxxx Xxxxxxxx urged prosecutors to oppose downward departures (Xxxxxxxx and Xxxxxxxx 2010). Roughly a year and a half later, in a watershed case, the US Supreme Court excised the portion of law making the guidelines mandatory upon judges (United States x. Xxxxxx , 543 U.S. 220 [2005]). As courts grappled with how much weight to afford the guide- lines, now formally advisory, the Court clarified that a sentence within the guide...
Institutional background. Purdue University is a public university located in northwest Indiana with about 45,000 students of which 33,500 are undergraduates. Slightly more than 50 percent of the under- graduate students are Indiana residents and about 14 percent are international students. In-state student annual tuition is $10,000 and the total cost of attendance is $23,000. Out- of-state domestic student tuition is $29,000 and the total cost of attendance is $42,000. International student tuition is $31,000 and the total cost of attendance is $46,000. The average SAT score for undergraduate students is 1260 (28 ACT) but varies con- siderably by major. Potential students apply to and are accepted by colleges within the university and the admissions cutoff differs significantly by college. More than 40 percent of undergraduate students begin in engineering or science, but many switch to a major in an- other college after the first year. While not impossible, administrative hurdles make it very difficult for students to switch into engineering or science majors if they were not initially accepted into those colleges as a first-year student. Similar, but less insurmountable, hurdles exist for many other majors including those in the business school. Purdue’s ISA program is called “Back a Boiler.” The first year of the ISA program was the 2016-2017 academic year and the university offered the program to students in the final few months of the prior school year and over the summer. Interested students submit an application which includes permission to run a credit check. If the student has a bankruptcy or is currently in debt collection, they are disqualified. This is the only information the university requests as part of the credit check. To be eligible for the ISA, students must have remaining financial need after exhausting merit-based scholarships, grants, and opportunities for direct subsidized federal loans, direct unsubsidized federal loans, and Xxxxxxx loans. Purdue presents its ISA program as an alternative to a direct PLUS loan or a private student loan.4 Direct PLUS loans have higher interest rates than the other federal student loan options and while the money goes to the student’s education, it is the parent who is the borrower and responsible for payments. Private student loans have the highest interest rates of all student loan options. While ISAs are similar to income-based student loan repayment, the fundamental differ- ence is that ISAs have no loan balance that the...
Institutional background. This part will describe and have an overview of the actual situation of gender diversity among European board of directors. It exposes the measures that the European Union and several of their member states have recently taken namely with regards to the introduction of gender quotas to strive for gender equality on boards of directors of large listed companies. Moreover, the positive and negative effects of the implementation of this law will be considered taken into account different views.
Institutional background. Describes the applicant institution in terms of its location, demographics, mission, relationship to the service area and past successes in the project area.
