Law Commons^™

The Unfortunate Role Of Farm Subsidies As A Stimulus For Inequality And Obesity, Neil M. Browne, Facundo Bouzat, Justin Rex, Joseph Seipel

Economics Faculty Publications

Governmental expenditures are directed at a particular objective, but their effects have consequences far beyond the named target of the expenditures. Specific farm subsidies, for example, encourage consumption of particular foods by reducing the costs of producing these foods. To what extent do these subsidies affect the American obesity epidemic? How do the subsidies create disparate negative effects on those in poverty? Exploring these questions stimulates us to take greater care when designing legislation to take a broader look at the stakeholders affected by any particular governmental expenditure.

Online Training For Judicial Officers And Court Personnel, Morgan Patten

Master of Education in Instructional Design and Technology Plan II Graduate Projects

The purpose of this project was to create two online, asynchronous courses: one on domestic violence for judicial officers and one on community supervision of sex offenders for probation and parole officers. These courses will be offered to the court community through the Supreme Court of Ohio Judicial College, which is responsible for providing education to judicial officers, court personnel, and others who serve the judiciary.

These courses were developed in consultation with Supreme Court of Ohio staff, judicial officers, and other subject matter experts. These experts evaluated the courses on at least three occasions and provided substantive feedback. Once …

Dominican And Haitian Relations: Changing Constitutions And Migrant Rights, Tiffany Busch

Honors Projects

The Dominican Republic and Haiti share the island of Hispaniola. The two nations’ shared history can best be described as tumultuous. The French and Spanish long fought for control over the small island before ultimately becoming two independent nations. Tensions still exist between the nations. The Dominican Republic, operating under antihaitianismo, fears that the influx of Haitian people will be detrimental to the country’s economic and cultural well-being. As a result, deportations have increased. Human Rights Watch has condemned the Dominican Republic for its unethical deportation methods. Moreover, the Dominican Republic enacted a new constitution in 2010 with more …

Violence-Related Police Crime Arrests In The United States, 2005-2011, Philip M. Stinson, Steven L. Brewer Jr, Joelle K. Bridges

Criminal Justice Faculty Publications

This study is a quantitative content analysis of news reports and court records on 3,328 violence-related arrest cases of 2,586 individual sworn law enforcement officers during the years 2005-2011. The arrested officers were employed by 1,445 nonfederal state, local, special, constable, tribal, and regional law enforcement agencies located in 805 counties and independent cities in 49 states and the District of Columbia. Binary logistic regression and classification and regression tree (CART) analyses were conducted to predict criminal conviction in violence-related police crime arrest cases. Finding indicate that conviction of police officers on one or more offenses charged are driven by …

‘Please Be A Lady… You Are Not Going To Be Heard’: The Debate Over The Ratification Of The Convention On The Elimination Of All Forms Of Discrimination Against Women, Kasie Durkit

International ResearchScape Journal

Why did the United States fail to ratify the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women? This overarching question forms the basis of this paper and will be answered using an array of primary and secondary sources. This paper gleans most of its evidence from the Senate Foreign Relations Committee Hearings of 1994 and 2002, letters from both President Jimmy Carter and former Secretary of State Colin Powell, Congressional Research Service reports on CEDAW from 2013 and 2007, several Senators’ statements in the Congressional Record, Congressional testimony, and the text of the CEDAW treaty. This …

Federal Civil Rights Litigation Pursuant To 42 U.S.C. §1983 As A Correlate Of Police Misconduct, Philip M. Stinson, Steven L. Brewer Jr, Theresa M. Lanese, Mallorie A. Wilson

Criminal Justice Faculty Publications

Police officers acting in their official capacity are subject to being sued in federal court pursuant to 42 U.S.C. §1983 for violating constitutional rights under the color of law. Using data obtained in a larger study on police crime in the United States, names of more than 5,500 nonfederal sworn law enforcement officers who were arrested during the years 2005-2011 were checked against the civil case party master name index of the federal courts’ Public Access to Courts Electronic Records (PACER) system. Findings indicate that more than 20% of the police officers who were arrested for committing one or more …

The Effects That Liquid And Solid Cattle Manure Have On The Water Quality Of Drainage Ditches In Putnam County, Ohio, Janelle Horstman

Honors Projects

Lake Erie has experienced harmful algal blooms with increased frequency since the mid-1990s due to excess nutrients from Rivers, such as the Maumee River, and largely agricultural watersheds. Nonpoint source pollution from agriculture contributes to eutrophication, algal blooms, and the degradation of water quality. This creates stress on aquatic fauna, reduced aesthetic quality, odor, and limits of the water for usage of drinking, recreation, and industry. This research paper asks what the contributions of having access to manure application records, soil records, and information about antibiotics have on what is known about manure management and antibiotic resistance, which has been …

Dynamics Of The Courtroom Workgroup, Paige Chretien

Honors Projects

The roles and responsibilities of the various members included in the courtroom workgroup were evaluated in determining the prevalence of ordinary injustices. The dynamics among such members were found to be the basis under which lax adversarialism, and ultimately injustice within the criminal justice system, dominates. Prosecutorial discretion and inadequate public defense systems were observed to compromise justice on several occasions.

Unconscionability And The Contingent Assumptions Of Contract Theory, M. Neil Browne, Lauren Biksacky

Economics Faculty Publications

In 1971, W. David Slawson estimated that 99% of all contracts do not resemble the Platonic ideal of a document of jointly negotiated terms, but rather are lists of terms presented by one party to the other on a pre-printed form.2 Although this estimate is forty years old, it underestimates our cur-rent market exchange situation; the pervasiveness of form contracts stipulat-ed by one party has increased.3 Contract law generally provides for the enforcement of such contracts, allowing the powerful party to essentially govern over consumers and weaker parties.4 Classical contract theory allows for this enforcement of contracts based upon a …

Legal Tolerance Toward The Business Lie And The Puffery Defense: The Questionable Assumptions Of Contract Law, M. Neil Browne, Kathleen M.S. Hale, Maureen Cosgrove

Economics Faculty Publications

American contract law is supposed to facilitate the efficiency and fairness of market transactions between parties. Does the increasing success of the puffery defense in false advertising and securities cases further the fairness of transactions between companies with major advertising budgets and consumers? This Article contends that it does not.

Potential Tension Between A "Free Marketplace Of Ideas" And The Fundamental Purpose Of Free Speech, M. Neil Browne, Justin Rex, David L. Herrera

Economics Faculty Publications

The authors argue that the marketplace of ideas is not competitive in the economic sense. Yet the Court often rules as if it is. What are the implications?

By assuming often that the idea market is competitive, Justices are committing the reification fallacy. They are treating an abstract belief or hypothetical construct as if it represented a concrete event or physical entity. In this instance, the Justices assume that existing markets are structured the same way idealized competitive markets are. In doing so, they treat the marketplace of ideas as inherently good, when in fact one must first determine what …

Are Introductory Courses A Proper Venue For Deep Thought About The Discipline?, John H. Hoag, M. Neil Browne

Economics Faculty Publications

An introductory course is the discipline's handshake; it is the greeting that either seals the deal or in varying degrees convinces the learner that this discipline has little usefulness. Given the huge stakes in forming a strategy for the introductory course, how should we structure the course? The argument in this paper is that we should encourage students to think deeply about the discipline. In other words, we should encourage an appreciation for the complexity of the vocabulary, the underlying assumptions, and the kinds of evidence relied on in the discipline in question.

Rare, But Promising, Involvement Of Faculty In Residence Hall Programming, M. Neil Browne, Spencer Headworth, Kandice Saum

Economics Faculty Publications

Students regularly encounter faculty in classrooms. Student affairs personnel interact with students in the main when students are beyond the classroom. Both groups are pledged to encourage student development, but they rarely collaborate. What are the reasons for this divided effort? How can the separate spheres of faculty and student affairs work together such that learners can benefit from the partnership? This article reports on the insights gained from the five-year experience of two senior faculty who lived in a residence hall and endeavored to encourage greater academic presence in residence hall programming. In the interest of encouraging additional collaboration …

Advertising To Children And The Commercial Speech Doctrine: Political And Constitutional Limitations, M. Neil Browne, Lauren Frances Biksacky, Alex Frondorf

Economics Faculty Publications

For the past forty years, efforts to limit or prohibit advertising to children have faced a powerful combination of political and constitutional limitations. The political will and pressure have not been exerted to enact and enforce meaningful regulations that curtail, in all media, the proliferation of advertising directed at children. Such advertising exploits the very market failures that governments around the world, including our own, seek to minimize. Yet even when restrictions on advertising are enacted, they are inevitably met with constitutional challenges. These two limitations - political and constitutional - rest, however, on faulty assumptions about human behavior in …

Mobbing In The Workplace And Individualism: Antibullying Legislation In The United States, Europe And Canada, M. Neil Browne, Mary Allison Smith

Economics Faculty Publications

“Mobbing” refers to systematic behavior directed toward an employee over a long period of time that results in serious harm to the victim. Legislative responses to mobbing behavior in Sweden, France, Canada, and Belgium have responded in various ways to alleviate the conditions that create the psychological harm caused by this workplace phenomenon. The more muted response in the United States is linked to the individualistic assumptions prevalent in American culture that place responsibility for harmful conditions frequently on the choices of the person experiencing the harm.

Putting Expert Testimony In Its Epistemological Place: What Predictions Of Dangerousness In Court Can Teach Us, M. Neil Browne, Ronda R. Harrison-Spoerl

Economics Faculty Publications

Judges and juries must make momentous and intricate decisions. The temptation is overwhelming for the court to request assistance from those who claim to know facts, interpretations, and explanatory models that promise to make those decisions more accurate.1 As long as some of us know more than others about specific probative matters, courts will certainly seek to know what those experts know or, to anticipate, what they claim to know. But how can courts optimize their consumption of this expertise?

Impact Of Market Ideology On Transnational Contract Law, M. Neil Browne, Jennifer Coon

Economics Faculty Publications

As world trade expands to the remotest of venues, commercial laws that encompass transnational jurisdictions become increasingly important. The appropriateness of these laws rely, inter alia, on the strength of the assumptive base supporting such transnational laws of commerce. As this article explains, transnational contract law'is not the product of the Immaculate Conception; it is the anachronistic progeny of certain European laws that emerged during the Industrial Revolution. As such, transnational contract law inherits many of the characteristics of its progenitors. Those characteristics, however, become awkward when viewed through a contemporary institutional context that diverges from the prevailing social arrangements …

Concealment Of Information In Consumer Transactions In The U.S., Sweden, And China: A Window To The Relationship Between Individualism And Regulation, M. Neil Browne, Justin Rex, Curtis Bunner

Economics Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.