“Human beings have their weaknesses, and our institutions have their weaknesses, but a jury trial is as good as we can do,” Nancy Marder, a Chicago-Kent College of Law professor who studies jury trials, said in an interview.
“Judges use what has been done before and what has been accepted in the past, so they’re not doing this from scratch,” said Nancy Marder, a professor at Illinois Tech Chicago Kent College of Law and director of the Justice John Paul Stevens Jury Center. “So I do think it provides an important roadmap for the jurists once they get into the jury room and start deliberating.”
The first comprehensive history of the world-famous Edith Farnsworth House will be published to coincide with the site’s 20th anniversary as a public space. “The Edith Farnsworth House: Architecture, Preservation, Culture” (Monacelli, June 2024) by Michelangelo Sabatino tells the story of the property’s development from an experimental farm owned by a newspaper magnate to a nature retreat anchored by a masterpiece of modernist architecture.
For the Pritzker Architecture Prize, the latest ceremony honoring 2024 laureate Riken Yamamoto, marked a homecoming. Yamamoto gave a lecture at Crown Hall on the campus of the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT), talking about how his work has been influenced by settlements and houses in ancient Greece and Mesopotamia, as well as modern-day India and Spain, places he visited in his early travels.
“People are desperate,” said Richard Kling, a clinical professor of law at Chicago-Kent College of Law. “They want things. They see things on TV that you and I may be able to afford to buy and they're not able to afford to buy it. So they decide they want to take it. I think part of it is the educational system. I think part of it is parental control.”
Imagine that you’re sent to a pristine rainforest to carry out a wildlife census. Every time you see an animal, you snap a photo. Your digital camera will track the total number of shots, but you’re only interested in the number of unique animals — all the ones that you haven’t counted already. What’s the best way to get that number? “The obvious solution requires remembering every animal you’ve seen so far and comparing each new animal to the list,” said Lance Fortnow, a computer scientist at the Illinois Institute of Technology. But there are cleverer ways to proceed, he added, because if you have thousands of entries, the obvious approach is far from easy.
“That’s why this opinion is very important, it’s recognizing that torture comes in many forms, not just the classic knife to throat, or threat to kill your mother,” explains Harold Krent, a professor at Chicago-Kent College of Law. “It also comes in the form of sleep deprivation, of depriving someone of medicine, not allowing him to speak to an attorney. The sort of events that go on and on and build upon each other that coerce someone’s will, and then force them to sign a confession falsely.”
A timber city mimicking the appearance and natural functions of fungi and a supertall skyscraper containing a vertical cement plant and high capacity thermal battery, are among the first student projects to emerge from a pioneering high-rise masters programme at Illinois Institute of Technology. The Master of Tall Buildings and Vertical Urbanism (M.TBVU) is the world’s first multi-disciplinary post-graduate degree focused specifically on skyscrapers and the role of urban density in future cities.
“In some cases it could be that some prospective jurors do not want to sit on a six-week jury trial that will be in the public eye,” said Nancy S. Marder, jury expert professor at Chicago-Kent College of Law. “They might have such strong feelings because the defendant is in the public eye. Or, it might be that New Yorkers are not afraid to express their strongly held views. But in either case, this is exactly what should happen.”
“This is not about getting biological vision back,” says Philip Troyk, a professor of biomedical engineering at Illinois Tech. “This is about exploring what artificial vision could be.”
