Digital Commons Network^™

Kamala Harris And The Complexity Of Racial Identity Politics, Vinay Harpalani

Faculty Scholarship

Vinay Harpalani reviews Kamala Harris' run as Democratic nominee for President, contrasting her challenges with Barak Obama's campaign to show how racial identity politics are complicated and constantly evolving as well as the intersectional, or multifaceted, issues Kamala faced during her candidacy.

Michael Vick, Robert Byrd, And The Case For Redemption, Vinay Harpalani

Faculty Scholarship

At the 2020 Pro Bowl, former NFL quarterback Michael Vick will be honored as one of the legends captains. Vick’s selection has sparked controversy, because in 2007, he was convicted of operating a dog fighting ring. Vick has served his prison sentence, and beyond that, he has sought redemption. We should extend forgiveness and let the NFL honor Michael Vick.

The Harvard Crimson Interviews Vinay Harpalani (Justice Department Continues Investigation Into Harvard Admissions), Vinay Harpalani, Camille G. Caldera

Faculty Scholarship

A Department of Justice investigation into alleged discrimination in Harvard’s race-conscious admissions policies remains ongoing. Harpalani believes the existence of this investigation supports Students for Fair Admissions (SFFA), which knows that the Trump Administration is sternly behind eliminating race-conscious admissions policies. He believes the real purpose of the investigation is to pressure other universities with race-conscious admissions policies to reduce or eliminate the use of race as an admissions factor.

Boilerplate: What Consumers Actually Think About It, Franklin G. Snyder, Ann M. Mirabito

Faculty Scholarship

One of the most difficult problems in modem contract law is the status of standard terms-often called "boilerplate"-in consumer transactions. On the one hand, standard terms are good because they reduce costs and increase efficiency and predictability. On the other hand, they can be used to impose unfair terms on consumers and even to evade important public policies. There is thus a vast and growing literature on the topic.

We know for a fact that most consumers do not read standard terms. They will not read them before they sign the writing or click "I agree" or "Buy now" on …

In-Situ Observation Of Aln Formation From Ni-Al Solution Using An Electromagnetic Levitation Technique, Andrew J. Loach, Justin S. Fada, Laura G. Wilson, Roger H. French, Jennifer L. W. Carter

Faculty Scholarship

Aluminum nitride is a promising substrate material for AlGaN-based UV-LED. In order to develop a robust growth processing route for AlN single crystals, fundamental studies of solution growth experiments using Ni-Al alloy melts as a new solution system were performed. Al can be stably kept in solution the Ni-Al liquid even at high temperature; in addition, the driving force of the AlN formation reaction from solution can be controlled by solution composition and temperature. To investigate AlN crystal growth behavior we developed an in situ observation system using an electromagnetic levitation technique. AlN formation behavior, including nucleation and growth, was …

Brief Of Professors Of Law, Us V. Bergdahl, Joshua E. Kastenberg, Rachel E. Vanlandingham, Geoffrey S. Corn

Faculty Scholarship

When scrutinizing executive actions for unlawful command influence, this Court must account for a president’s immense power over the military. The extant judicial test for unlawful command influence – a violation of due process in the military setting – is a contextual one, and hence must consider the unique and unparalleled authority of the Commander-In-Chief over the military and individual service-members when the president’s actions are at issue. This executive power should also be evaluated in light of its myriad, and historically important, constitutional and statutory constraints – some predating the birth of the United States – that appropriately continue …

The Relationship Between Work During College And Post College Earnings, Daniel Douglas, Paul Attewell

Faculty Scholarship

© Copyright © 2019 Douglas and Attewell. Prior research suggests that undergraduates employed during term time are less likely to graduate. Using transcript data from a large multi-campus university in the United States, combined with student earnings data from state administrative records, the authors find that traditional-age students who worked for pay during college on average earned more after leaving college than similar students who did not work. This post-college earnings premium is on par with the benefit from completing a degree, even after controlling for demographic and academic achievement characteristics, across various student sub-groups, and including models that account …

The Role Of Social, Economic, And Physical Environmental Factors In Care Planning For Home Health Care Recipients, Elliane Irani

Faculty Scholarship

Social, economic, and environmental factors contribute to patients’ recovery following hospitalization. However, little is known about how home health nurses make decisions based on their assessment of these factors. The purpose of the current study was to explore the nonclinical factors that home health nurses evaluate and describe how these factors influence care planning decisions. Semi-structured inter-views conducted with 20 visiting nurses from three home health agencies were analyzed using conven-tional content analysis. Three nonclinical factor themes emerged: Social Support, Home Environment and Neighborhood, and Finances and Insurance Barriers. Nurses’ assessments guided them to include family caregivers in the plan …

The Proposed Secure Act’S Ten-Year Mandatory Distribution Period For Non-Spousal Traditional §401(K)/Ira Beneficiaries May Not Increase Government Revenue, William Ks Wang

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Negative Liberty Meets Positive Social Change, Anita Bernstein

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Seer: An Explainable Deep Learning Midi-Based Hybrid Song Recommender System, Khalil Damak, Olfa Nasraoui

Faculty Scholarship

State of the art music recommender systems mainly rely on either matrix factorization-based collaborative filtering approaches or deep learning architectures. Deep learning models usually use metadata for content-based filtering or predict the next user interaction by learning from temporal sequences of user actions. Despite advances in deep learning for song recommendation, none has taken advantage of the sequential nature of songs by learning sequence models that are based on content. Aside from the importance of prediction accuracy, other significant aspects are important, such as explainability and solving the cold start problem. In this work, we propose a hybrid deep learning …

Researching The Legal History Of Santa Claus, Kurt Metzmeier

Faculty Scholarship

For most lawyers, the figure of Santa Claus in the law is an unpleasant memory of an establishment clause essay question on a Constitutional Law exam where they had to decide what combination of Christmas trees, electric menorahs and inflatable Santas a city-owned mall could display without being reprimanded by the U.S. Supreme Court. Alas, Lynch v. Donnelly (1984) and Allegheny County v. Greater Pittsburgh ACLU (1989) have been a lump of coal in the fall semester grades stocking of many a law student.But the white-bearded one made his first appearance in the law reports a hundred years before Justice …

A Natural Right To Copy, Glynn Lunney

Faculty Scholarship

In this symposium, we gather to celebrate the work of Wendy Gordon. In this essay, I revisit her article, A Property Right in Self-Expression: Equality and Individualism in the Natural Law of Intellectual Property. In the article, Professor Gordon first used the "no-harm" principle of John Locke to justify copyright as natural right and then used his “enough-and-as-good” proviso to limit that right. Her second step turned natural rights approaches to copyright on its head. Through it, she showed that even if we accept copyright as natural right, that acceptance does not necessarily lead to a copyright of undue breadth …

The Case Against Expanding Defamation Law, Yonathan A. Arbel, Murat C. Mungan

Faculty Scholarship

It is considered axiomatic that defamation law protects reputation. This proposition—commonsensical, pervasive, and influential—is faulty. Underlying this fallacy is the failure to appreciate audience effects: the interaction between defamation law and members of the audience.

Defamation law seeks to affect the behavior of speakers by making them bear a cost for spreading untruthful information. Invariably, however, the law will also affect members of the audience, as statements made in a highly regulated environment tend to appear more reliable than statements made without accountability. Strict defamation law would tend to increase the perceived reliability of statements, which in some cases can …

Lawful Searches Incident To Unlawful Arrests: A Reform Proposal, Mark A. Summers

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Deep Fakes: A Looming Challenge For Privacy, Democracy, And National Security, Danielle K. Citron, Robert Chesney

Faculty Scholarship

Harmful lies are nothing new. But the ability to distort reality has taken an exponential leap forward with “deep fake” technology. This capability makes it possible to create audio and video of real people saying and doing things they never said or did. Machine learning techniques are escalating the technology’s sophistication, making deep fakes ever more realistic and increasingly resistant to detection. Deep-fake technology has characteristics that enable rapid and widespread diffusion, putting it into the hands of both sophisticated and unsophisticated actors. While deep-fake technology will bring with it certain benefits, it also will introduce many harms. The marketplace …

Index Funds And The Future Of Corporate Governance: Theory, Evidence, And Policy, Scott Hirst, Lucian Bebchuk

Faculty Scholarship

Index funds own an increasingly large proportion of American public companies. The stewardship decisions of index fund managers—how they monitor, vote, and engage with their portfolio companies—can be expected to have a profound impact on the governance and performance of public companies and the economy. Understanding index fund stewardship, and how policymaking can improve it, is thus critical for corporate law scholarship. In this Article we contribute to such understanding by providing a comprehensive theoretical, empirical, and policy analysis of index fund stewardship.

We begin by putting forward an agency-costs theory of index fund incentives. Stewardship decisions by index funds …

A Hardy Case Makes Bad Law, Victoria Sahani

Faculty Scholarship

This Article is the first ever to analyze a direct clash between the inherent power of US courts regarding the enforcement ofjudgments and the obligations of the United States as one of the 163 member countries of the 1965 Convention on the Settlement of Investment Disputes between States and Nationals of Other States, commonly known as the "ICSID Convention. " The ICSID Convention includes a self-enforcement mechanism whereby the courts of the member countries are obligated to enforce the pecuniary obligations in multimillion (and sometimes over one billion) dollar ICSID arbitration awards as though they were court judgments of the …

Common Ownership And Executive Incentives: The Implausibility Of Compensation As An Anticompetitive Mechanism, David I. Walker

Faculty Scholarship

Mutual funds, pension funds and other institutional investors are a growing presence in U.S. equity markets, and these investors frequently hold large stakes in shares of competing companies. Because these common owners might prefer to maximize the values of their portfolios of companies, rather than the value of individual companies in isolation, this new reality has lead to a concern that companies in concentrated industries with high degrees of common ownership might compete less vigorously with each other than they otherwise would. But what mechanism would link common ownership with reduced competition? Some commentators argue that one of the most …

Shakespeare And Experimental American Poetry, Alan Golding

Faculty Scholarship

Why the particular emphasis proposed in my title on Shakespeare’s importance for experimental or avant-garde American poetry? We can take Shakespeare’s significance for American poetry generally, as for most writers in the English language, as a given. One can certainly trace Shakespeare’s presence in a wide range of more mainstream twentieth-century poetry, from John Berryman to Anthony Hecht to Sylvia Plath, and anthologies of poetic responses to Shakespeare abound. But the use of the ultimate canonical Anglophone writer by experimental poets dedicated to changing the context of writing and reception in their own time raises some interesting questions not just …

Washington’S 'Cutting-Edge' Technology Solution To Combating Sales Tax Fraud: Real-Time Data (Now), Real-Time Remittance In The Future, Richard Thompson Ainsworth, Robert Chicoine, Andrew Leahey, Sunder Gee

Faculty Scholarship

Globally, consumption tax compliance (value added tax and retail sales tax) has gone digital – digital invoices are becoming mandatory, centralized monitoring of transactions and tax payments are increasingly common, and artificial intelligence is assessing fraud risks in real-time. When tax is collected, it is increasingly being remitted in near-real-time. This is the trajectory for the modern retail sales tax (RST) imposed by most states in the US. While this may appear to be revolutionary to the average American, it is a well-worn path among global nations using the value added tax (VAT). The RST will eventually be following suit. …

Follow The Money? A Proposed Approach For Disclosure Of Litigation Finance Agreements, Maya Steinitz

Faculty Scholarship

Litigation finance is the new and fast-growing practice by which a non-party funds a plaintiff’s litigation either for-profit or for some other motivation. Some estimates placed the size of the litigation finance market at 50–100 billion dollars. Both proponents and opponents of this newly -emergent phenomenon are in agreement that the it is the most important development in civil justice of this era. Litigation finance is already transforming civil litigation at the level of the single case as well as, incrementally, at the level of the civil justice system as a whole. It is also beginning to transform the way …

Cops And Cars: How The Automobile Drove Fourth Amendment Law, Tracey Maclin

Faculty Scholarship

This is an essay on Professor Sarah A. Seo’s new book, Policing the Open Road: How Cars Transformed American Freedom (Harvard Univ. Press 2019). I focus on Professor Seo’s analysis of Carroll v. United States, 267 U.S. 132 (1925) and Brinegar v. United States, 338 U.S. 160 (1949). Carroll is important not only because it was the Court’s first car case. Understanding Carroll (and Brinegar, which solidified and expanded Carroll’s holding) is essential because, nearly one hundred years later, its logic continues to direct how the modern Court resolves Fourth Amendment claims of motorists. Put simply, a majority of today’s …

Death Of Copyright, Paul Gugliuzza

Faculty Scholarship

The four primary bodies of intellectual property law—patent law, copyright law, trademark law, and the law of trade secrets—address the question of duration in different ways. Trade secrets have no fixed duration; the law protects against misappropriation as long as the relevant information remains secret. Trademark protection lasts as long as the mark retains its capacity to distinguish the goods or services it is attached to. In patent law—my primary area of scholarship—duration is fixed, finite, and generally straightforward to determine: you get twenty years from the date you file your patent application. Copyright duration, by contrast, varies depending on …

Response To Commentaries On Who’S The Bigot?, Linda C. Mcclain

Faculty Scholarship

One of the joys of writing a book is the chance to have its arguments and observations evaluated by creative and engaged readers. I am very grateful that the scholars included in this book symposium provided such constructive commentary on the manuscript of my book, Who’s the Bigot? Learning from Conflicts over Marriage and Civil Rights Law. One of those commentators, Professor Imer Flores, also generously hosted a wonderful live conference at which I had the chance to hear and engage with early versions of several of these commentaries. The final book, I hope, reflects improvements that grew out of …

The Unnecessary And Unfortunate Focus On “Animus,” “Bare Desire To Harm,” And “Bigotry” In Analyzing Opposition To Gay And Lesbian Rights, James E. Fleming

Faculty Scholarship

I am delighted to participate in this symposium on Professor Linda C. McClain’s wonderful new book, Who’s the Bigot? Learning from Conflicts over Marriage and Civil Rights Law. All of the other papers in this symposium focus on Masterpiece Cakeshop, Ltd. v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission (and thus connect with Chapter Eight of her book, on claims of religious exemptions from protections of gay and lesbian rights), while my piece will join issue with the related Chapter Seven, on bigotry, motives, and morality in the Supreme Court’s gay and lesbian rights cases. In this brief Essay, I cannot do justice …

A Longitudinal Examination Of African American Adolescent Females Detained For Status Offense, Dexter R. Voisin

Faculty Scholarship

Introduction: Behaviors like truancy, running away, curfew violation, and alcohol possession fall under the status offense category and can have serious consequences for adolescents. The Juvenile Justice and Delinquency and Prevention Act prohibited detaining status offenders. We explored the degree to which African American adolescent girls were being detained for status offenses and the connections to their behavioral health risks and re-confinement. Methods: 188 African American girls (aged 13–17), recruited from detention facilities, were surveyed at baseline and 3-month follow-ups. Logistic regression models estimated the likelihood of longitudinal re-confinement, controlling for sexual and behavioral health risk factors. Results: One third …

Learned Hand And The Objective Theory Of Contract Interpretation, Daniel P. O'Gorman

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

New Insights Into Anhydrobiosis Using Cellular Dielectrophoresis-Based Characterization, Mohamed Z. Rashed, Clinton J. Belott, Brett R. Janis, Michael Menze, Stuart J. Williams

Faculty Scholarship

Late embryogenesis abundant (LEA) proteins are found in desiccation-tolerant species from all domains of life. Despite several decades of investigation, the molecular mechanisms by which LEA proteins confer desiccation tolerance are still unclear. In this study, dielectrophoresis (DEP) was used to determine the electrical properties of Drosophila melanogaster (Kc167) cells ectopically expressing LEA proteins from the anhydrobiotic brine shrimp, Artemia franciscana. Dielectrophoresis-based characterization data demonstrate that the expression of two different LEA proteins, AfrLEA3m and AfrLEA6, increases cytoplasmic conductivity of Kc167 cells to a similar extent above control values. The impact on cytoplasmic conductivity was surprising, given …

Tensions And Exclusions: The Knotty Policy Encounter Between Sexual And Reproductive Health And Rights And Hiv, Susana T. Fried, Aziza Ahmed, Luisa Cabal

Faculty Scholarship

The International Conference on Population and Development or ICPD (Cairo, 1994) provided a global policy framework centred on reproductive rights instead of population control. Global standards on sexual and reproductive health and rights (SRHR) and on HIV rapidly expanded throughout the 1990s.1 Considerable activist mobilisation in both arenas advanced health issues as politically salient decision-making venues where human rights and health advocacy were urgently needed, rather than scientific and technical showcases.

The ICPD, quickly followed by the Fourth World Conference on Women (1995), stressed that reproductive rights are anchored in governments’ human rights obligations and development commitments, including to …