Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

From The Streets To The Chamber: Social Movements And The Mining Ban In El Salvador, Rose J. Spalding

Faculty Publications – College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences

Following an extended anti-mining campaign, El Salvador became the first country to adopt a legal ban on all forms of metallic mining. This article uses process tracing to map direct, indirect and mediated linkages between the anti-mining mobilization and the formal adoption of a mining prohibition by the national legislature in 2017. It draws on 78 interviews with campaign activists, legislators, government officials, business leaders and legal teams, and combines this information with legislative documents and reports, public opinion data, legal documents from an investment dispute filed against the Salvadoran government, and blogs and website of the Mesa Nacional Frente …

Thoughts And Prayers, Chloe Kardasopoulos

Student Scholar Symposium Abstracts and Posters

Examining the symbolic Gun against its tangible counterpart illuminates abstract attachments of power and superiority this nation associates with the weapon. These elements loaded in the Gun transform the weapon into an object representative of American identity. Analyzing ideological commitments within the Gun guides a critical response to examine disproportionately increasing national gun violence against stagnant federal gun control. The ongoing gun debate must be analyzed in its entirety, beginning at its source - the Second Amendment. Scholars such as Gary Wills dissect the Second Amendment to extract its contextualized intent from modern writers’ manipulated interpretations. It is not the …

Lobbying Legislation And Cumulative Abnormal Returns, Brenan Stewart

All Graduate Plan B and other Reports, Spring 1920 to Spring 2023

The Honest Leadership and Open Government Act of 2007 (Pub.L. 110-81, 121 Stat. 735, enacted September 14, 2007) was passed by the U.S. Congress in order “to strengthen public disclosure requirements concerning lobbying activity and funding. It placed more restrictions on gifts for members of Congress and their staff, and provides for mandatory disclosure of earmarks in expenditure bills.” Treating this event as a natural experiment, we examine how this legislation affected the Cumulative Abnormal Returns (CARs) of firms that lobbied in the year(s) leading up to the passing of the legislation. We find that companies that lobbied in the …

The Legislative Recycling Bin: A Reevaluation Of The Policy Process, Angelina L. González-Aller

Political Science ETDs

Congressional scholarship has long sought to understand the conditions under which a member of Congress is successful in converting a policy idea into a law. Two areas of this research, the bill sponsorship literature and the legislative effectiveness literature, have developed scholarly understanding on both the motivations and outcomes of bill sponsorship, as well as illuminating the conditions under which a bill is more likely to become law. The empirical approaches of these areas of study however, do not adequately capture the complexities of Congress. Most studies of the legislative process treat bill sponsorship and the policy process as a …

Peacebuilding Through Food Recovery, Angela Hackstadt

University Libraries Faculty Scholarship

The United States wastes approximately 133 billion pounds of food annually while 15 million American households are food insecure. Current and proposed U.S. legislation attempts to encourage food recovery efforts to address both of these problems by incentivizing donation of surplus foods by businesses to charitable organizations, yet legislation has failed to deliver. Food insecure individuals who use food banks or other safety net programs are often required to provide personal information and are subject to scrutiny in the process of acquiring food. Information can be leveraged in different ways to stigmatize or marginalize those in need. This presentation discusses …

Law Library Blog (November 2018): Legal Beagle's Blog Archive, Roger Williams University School Of Law

Law Library Newsletters/Blog

No abstract provided.

Whole-Of-Society Approach Needed Against Truth Decay, Eugene K. B. Tan

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

In an age of pervasive informationflows, governments do not defeat fake news. It's the people as a society whodo.The threatof deliberate falsehoods, or more popularly "fake news", posesserious threats to the democratic wellbeing of societies. The marketplace ofideas increasingly suffers from truth decay, propagated online or offline,imperilling an already vulnerable information ecosystem. In turn,this compromises the functioning of a democracy, which is premised on citizenshaving a shared reality rather than multiple distorted realities.

Smart Voting Resources, Natalie Loewengruber

Knowledge Market

Americans have a civic duty and responsibility to participate in democracy through voting. Voters can feel overwhelmed and unsure where to go to find the information necessary to cast an informed vote. This document is a product of the workshop "Vote Smart! The Basics of becoming Informed" offering tools, resources, and helpful tips to become better educated on candidates, ballot proposals, and the voting process.

1911 Triangle Factory Fire — Building Safety Codes, Paul H. Robinson, Sarah M. Robinson

All Faculty Scholarship

Can a crime make our world better? Crimes are the worst of humanity’s wrongs but, oddly, they sometimes do more than anything else to improve our lives. As it turns out, it is often the outrageousness itself that does the work. Ordinary crimes are accepted as the background noise of our everyday existence but some crimes make people stop and take notice – because they are so outrageous, or so curious, or so heart-wrenching. These “trigger crimes” are the cases that this book is about.

They offer some incredible stories about how people, good and bad, change the world around …

We’Ve Come A Long Way (Baby)! Or Have We? Evolving Intellectual Freedom Issues In The Us And Florida, L. Bryan Cooper, A.D. Beman-Cavallaro

Works of the FIU Libraries

This paper analyzes a shifting landscape of intellectual freedom (IF) in and outside Florida for children, adolescents, teens and adults. National ideals stand in tension with local and state developments, as new threats are visible in historical, legal, and technological context. Examples include doctrinal shifts, legislative bills, electronic surveillance and recent attempts to censor books, classroom texts, and reading lists.

Privacy rights for minors in Florida are increasingly unstable. New assertions of parental rights are part of a larger conservative animus. Proponents of IF can identify a lessening of ideals and standards that began after doctrinal fruition in the 1960s …

State Immigration Policies: The Role Of State Compacts And Interest Groups On Immigration Legislation, Erin Trouth Hofmann, Paul D. Jacobs, Peggy Petrzelka

Sociology, Social Work and Anthropology Faculty Publications

US states are active in enacting immigration policies, which vary widely and have substantial impact on the lives of immigrants. Our understanding of what produces these divergent state laws remains limited. Qualitative research demonstrates the importance of a 2010 immigration compact, supported by a powerful religious organization, in shaping immigration policies in Utah, and the Utah Compact was held up as a model for other states. But is the experience of Utah applicable across other states? We test the effects of compacts and interest groups on immigration policy adoption across all 50 states between 2005 and 2013. Our findings suggest …

A Study Of Electronic Logging Devices And Mandatory Entry Level Training In Ontario And Their Effects On The Shortage Of Truck Drivers In Windsor-Essex, Corey Isaac Shenken

Major Papers

North America, and more specifically, Windsor-Essex are currently in the midst of a truck driver shortage. This is happening in a time when more drivers are needed for today’s increased capacity and necessity of trucks on the road. Both the federal government of Canada and the provincial government of Ontario have introduced recent legislation that will have negative effects on the current shortage of truck drivers.

The federal government of Canada is introducing a mandatory Electronic Logging Device mandate to take place in December 2019, that will require all commercial transport truck drivers to install an electronic log that will …

Using Anthropocentrism To The Benefit Of Other Species, Vanessa Wilson

Animal Sentience

Chapman & Huffman (2018) argue that we should not consider humans as unique or superior to other animals when we have the chance to explore the diversity of the traits of other species. This is a valid and progressive point in our approach to research, but I suggest that an anthropocentric approach can have animal welfare benefits when it helps us perceive other species – especially distantly related ones such as crustaceans – in a human light.

Statutory Rape, Paul H. Robinson, Tyler Scot Williams

All Faculty Scholarship

It is common for criminal law scholars from outside the United States to discuss the “American rule” and compare it to the rule of other countries. As this volume makes clear, however, there is no such thing as an “American rule.” Because each of the states, plus the District of Columbia and the federal system, have their own criminal law, there are fifty-two American criminal codes.

American criminal law scholars know this, of course, but they too commonly speak of the “general rule” as if it reflects some consensus or near consensus position among the states. But the truth is …

The Ecology Of Transparency Reloaded, Seth F. Kreimer

All Faculty Scholarship

As Justice Stewart famously observed, "[t]he Constitution itself is neither a Freedom of Information Act nor an Official Secrets Act." What the Constitution's text omits, the last two generations have embedded in "small c" constitutional law and practice in the form of the Freedom of Information Act and a series of overlapping governance reforms including Inspectors General, disclosure of political contributions, the State Department’s “Dissent Channel,” the National Archives Information Security Oversight Office, and the publication rights guaranteed by New York Times v. United States. These institutions constitute an ecology of transparency.

The late Justice Scalia argued that the …

Distributive Principles Of Criminal Law, Paul H. Robinson, Tyler Scot Williams

All Faculty Scholarship

This first chapter from the recently published book Mapping American Criminal Law: Variations across the 50 States documents the alternative distributive principles for criminal liability and punishment — desert, deterrence, incapacitation of the dangerous — that are officially recognized by law in each of the American states. The chapter contains two maps visually coded to display important differences: the first map shows which states have adopted desert, deterrence, or incapacitation as a distributive principle, while the second map shows which form of desert is adopted in those jurisdictions that recognize desert. Like all 38 chapters in the book, which covers …

Felony Murder, Paul H. Robinson, Tyler Scot Williams

All Faculty Scholarship

It is common for criminal law scholars from outside the United States to discuss the “American rule” and compare it to the rule of other countries. As this volume makes clear, however, there is no such thing as an “American rule.” Because each of the states, plus the District of Columbia and the federal system, have their own criminal law, there are fifty-two American criminal codes.

American criminal law scholars know this, of course, but they too commonly speak of the “general rule” as if it reflects some consensus or near consensus position among the states. But the truth is …

Crimes That Changed Our World: Tragedy, Outrage, And Reform: Chapter One: 1911 Triangle Factory Fire: Building Safety Codes, Paul H. Robinson, Sarah M. Robinson

All Faculty Scholarship

This first chapter of the recently published book Crimes That Changed Our World: Tragedy, Outrage, and Reform, examines the process by which the tragic 1911 Triangle Factory Fire provoked enormous outrage that in turn created a local then national movement for workplace and building safety that ultimately became the foundation for today’s building safety codes. What is particularly interesting, however, is that the Triangle Fire was not the worst such tragedy in its day. Why should it be the one that ultimately triggers social progress?

The book has 21 chapters, each of which traces the tragedy-outrage-reform dynamic in a …

Insanity Defense, Paul H. Robinson, Tyler Scot Williams

All Faculty Scholarship

It is common for criminal law scholars from outside the United States to discuss the “American rule” and compare it to the rule of other countries. As this volume makes clear, however, there is no such thing as an “American rule.” Because each of the states, plus the District of Columbia and the federal system, have their own criminal law, there are fifty-two American criminal codes.

American criminal law scholars know this, of course, but they too commonly speak of the “general rule” as if it reflects some consensus or near consensus position among the states. But the truth is …