Digital Commons Network^™

The Role Of Data Sharing In Transboundary Waterways: The Case Of The Helmand River Basin, Najibullah Loodin, Gabriel Eckstein, Vijay P. Singh, Rosario Sanchez

Faculty Scholarship

While data and information exchanges theoretically play an effective role in the decision-making process of a shared watercourse, in practice, there are several challenges that prevent riparians from sharing data in an effective and cooperative manner. This chapter seeks to assess why the riparian nations of the Helmand River have failed to adopt an effective data exchange mechanism although both nations signed an internationally recognized bilateral water treaty in 1973. Applying a mixed study approach, the study draws on the theory of planned behavior (TPB) to interpret the main obstacles of data sharing between Afghanistan, the upstream state, and Iran, …

English Company Law: Legal Architecture For A Global Law Market, Andrew P. Morriss, Charlotte Ku

Faculty Scholarship

English-architecture company law describes the distinct and diverse group of company or corporate law used in more than 60 jurisdictions worldwide. English-architecture company law provides a robust platform for innovation and development due to its permissive structure, opportunity for choice of law in an entity’s internal governance, and scalability permitting variation for small and large entities. It is the dominant form among International Financial Centers (IFCs), many of which have legal systems with a British connection. This body of law responds to competition and maintains dynamism by engaging its practice community through “learning by doing” and “frictioneering.” An architecture approach …

Exploring The Factors That Influence Female Offending In The U.S. And Mexico, Dana Villasenor

CMC Senior Theses

Hollywood has painted a picture of the criminal woman as a sexy, sneaky, and often psychotic female fatale. This is because men run Hollywood. Much like movies, research on why women offend had historically focused on men as their stellar. However, towards the turn of the century and with the disproportionate rise in female incarceration, literature caught up to the fact that women and men do not experience the same socialization, standards, or reality and, therefore, have different reasons for and ways of offending. This research explores those reasons for women in the U.S. and Mexico and paints the picture …

China’S Strategic Calculus: A Comparative Analysis Of China’S Approaches Towards The Philippines And Vietnam In The South China Sea Dispute, Letian Wang

CMC Senior Theses

The South China Sea (SCS) dispute is a longstanding territorial conflict involving several surrounding states. In this paper, I analyze the differences in China’s policies towards the Philippines and Vietnam as China exerts its expansion into the SCS using relevant International Relations theories. The Philippines’ democratic values, alliance with the U.S., small-scale volume of trade with China, and active strategies against China all contradict China’s interests to be the regional hegemonic power. In contrast, Vietnam’s socialist regime, alliance with China, substantial trade with China, and passive strategies do not contradict China’s interests as much and even comply with them. Hence, …

Speaking To Maryland’S Eastern Shore: Lessons For Candidates Looking To Earn The Watermen Vote, Maryum Khwaja

CMC Senior Theses

One of the thirteen original states, Maryland is located on the East Coast. It consists of two main sections that are separated by the Chesapeake Bay: the Eastern Shore, which is east of the Chesapeake, and mainland Maryland, west of the Chesapeake. As a whole, Maryland is a blue state. The East Shore is different: it has Republican House member, Andy Harris, and holds different values from the rest of the state, and it votes differently, too. In the 2020 election, Biden won the statewide vote 65-32 percent – but Trump carried Harris’s district 56-42 percent.

The people of the …

Learning Law In Elementary And High School: Innovating Civics Education For A More Empowered Citizenry, Ariel J. Liberman, Michael J. Broyde

Faculty Articles

A principal objective of the public school system in a democracy is to promote societal cohesion by way of preparing students for civic engagement. There exists a founding belief that a democratic nation ought to be composed of educated activists, run by innovators, and kept in check by involved citizens. For, indisputably, the democratic experiment—our values, our institutions—can only be upheld anew with each generation on the backs of critique, reinvention, and reinvigoration. But, as so many have mentioned when discussing the civics education paradigm, the increase in educational opportunities and the marked expansion of our school system has not …

Exoneration Finance, Kay L. Levine, Russell M. Gold

Faculty Articles

The path to financial compensation for the wrongfully convicted can be complex and time-consuming. Exonerees often struggle to make ends meet and function in free society, let alone navigate serpentine processes while waiting years for the recovery they deserve. Securing the assistance of an attorney is often a critical step, but too few lawyers are willing to risk accepting these complicated cases on a contingency-fee basis—the only way that exoneree-clients can likely pay their lawyers without outside help.

Litigation finance—an important tool for increasing access to justice in tort cases—could help close this access to justice gap for exonerees. In …

Law In Inaction: The Origins And Implications Of Chronic Drug Law Underenforcement In One Southern County, Kay L. Levine, Elizabeth Griffiths, Joshua M. Hinkle, Volkan Topalli

Faculty Articles

Common accounts of police and prosecutorial nonenforcement discretion tend to valorize individual declination choices as demonstrations of mercy and resource constraint. Simultaneously, these accounts critique blanket nonenforcement policies as being outside the bounds of executive authority. Both accounts fail to consider the origins and implications of nonenforcement decisions made by police officers and prosecutors in individual cases that, when taken together, amount to significant underenforcement of an otherwise valid law.

This Article fills the gap between these differing perspectives by empirically examining the hidden and habitual underenforcement of technically valid drug-free-zone (DFZ) laws in one Southern county. Data matching the …

Rethinking Health Law Architecture, Ani B. Satz

Faculty Articles

Neither the individualistic regulatory health paradigm nor the vulnerable populations approach of public health can provide the legal structure necessary to address the most pressing problems in health care today. These approaches fail to address conflicts between individuals and populations as well as challenges to qualifying for care and are in inherent conflict with each other, sometimes within the same statute. As health concerns become more global, it is necessary to move past a vulnerable populations approach to a broader population approach that respects individual choice but does not sacrifice community health for liberty interests.

Climatizing National Security, Mark P. Nevitt

Faculty Articles

Is climate change a national security issue? Human security? Ecological security? This Article addresses the growing nexus between climate change and various conceptions of security with a particular emphasis on climate change's national security impacts. This Article argues that there is a growing connection between national security and climate change and a corresponding need to address the normative implications of "climatizing national security." This connection can be observed through three lenses: mitigation (reducing greenhouse gas emissions from military and national security sources); adaptation (investing in climate resilient infrastructure in an effort to prepare for climate impacts), and response (addressing climate-exacerbated …

Cultivating Attentiveness To Law In India Through Legal Anthropology, Deepa Das Acevedo, Jahnavi Chamarthi

Faculty Articles

This Article reviews and analyses scholarship at the intersection of anthropology and law. The first half of the Article provides context for understanding the boundaries, animating concerns, and tensions that have characterised the anthropology of law as an area of interdisciplinary inquiry. We focus especially on the subdiscipline’s Anglo-American history and show how a promising early period of engagement dissipated as both anthropologists and legal scholars lost enthusiasm for each others’ insights and methods. Then, we expand our analysis outward. Because legal anthropology belongs within, and is increasingly attentive to, the broader field of law and society scholarship, we explore …

Hydrogen Law And Policy Initiatives In The United States, Joel B. Eisen

Law Faculty Publications

The article discusses key US federal developments in hydrogen policy, including tax credits and significant funding for hydrogen hubs. Despite hydrogen's potential for decarbonization, establishing a hydrogen economy in the US requires overcoming production challenges and addressing legal, technological, and economic hurdles. Concerns persist regarding public acceptance and effectiveness in reducing greenhouse gas emissions in line with energy justice goals.

Infrastructural (Dis)Entitlement: Tactics Of Dispossession On The Critical Minerals Frontier, Dayna Nadine Scott

Articles & Book Chapters

In Ontario’s far north, settler state authorities and extractive firms are engaged in coordinated tactics to gain ground amid a polarization in the positions of Indigenous leadership. Alongside a surging resistance, we also witness a resigned acceptance of critical minerals mining by some First Nations. Drawing on years of community engaged research, I detail here the contemporary tactics of “infrastructural (dis)entitlement:” in this dynamic, infrastructural needs are both denied and fulfilled to differential effect. Infrastructural disentitlement is passive; it is not necessarily deliberate, nor is it politically or institutionally organized. But infrastructural entitlement is strategic and aggressive: Indigenous prosperity and …

Bruen's Enforcement Puzzle: Unearthing And Adjudicating The Historical Enforcement Record In Second Amendment Cases, Andrew Willinger

Faculty Scholarship

The Supreme Court’s 2022 decision in New York State Rifle & Pistol Ass’n v. Bruen brings historical complexity to the fore by instituting a history-focused test for the Second Amendment that demands analogues from the Founding or Reconstruction eras to support modern gun regulations. The majority opinion in Bruen considers, in multiple places, how certain historical gun regulations may have been enforced. In each instance, the Court suggests that evidence of racially disparate enforcement of a historical law is relevant to whether that law is part of the American historical tradition and an appropriate analogue. Historical enforcement data appear to …

U.S. Public Perceptions Of The Sensitivity Of Brain Data, Shenyang Huang, Umika Paul, Shikhar Gupta, Karan Desai, Melinda Guo, Jennifer Jung, Beatrice Capestany, William D. Krenzer, Dylan Stonecipher, Nita A. Farahany

Faculty Scholarship

As we approach an era of potentially widespread consumer neurotechnology, scholars and organizations worldwide have started to raise concerns about the data privacy issues these devices will present. Notably absent in these discussions is empirical evidence about how the public perceives that same information. This article presents the results of a nationwide survey on public perceptions of brain data, to inform discussions of law and policy regarding brain data governance. The survey reveals that the public may perceive certain brain data as less sensitive than other ‘private’ information, like social security numbers, but more sensitive than some ‘public’ information, like …

Beyond Medical Tourism: Pressured Exits And Global Health Justice, Medha D. Makhlouf

Faculty Scholarly Works

Too often, people living in the United States are compelled to take extreme measures to get the medical care they need. Most often, due to the cost, they delay or go without care. They also decline to fill prescriptions or take less medication than prescribed. Many rack up enormous debts to health care providers and other lenders. Others stand in long lines for free clinics, or they spend hours filling out applications for hospital financial assistance programs and gathering copious documentation to support them. Some people seek care from alternative providers or traditional healers because of cost concerns, while others …

Forbidden Purposes: A New Path For Limiting Criminalization, Raff Donelson

Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology

Activists and scholars have often complained that the American criminal justice system makes choices about criminalization and sentences based on nefarious reasons. For instance, critics have claimed that criminalization and sentencing decisions are made to provide cheap prison labor to the government or private industry, to boost the private prison industry, to offer employment in rural communities in the form of jobs managing correctional facilities, or to empower police to harass undesirables and remove them from public spaces. These accusations are very alarming, and the evidence may not confirm activists’ worst suspicions. But, supposing the extraordinary evidence could be adduced, …

Applying The Model Rules Of Professional Conduct To Attorneys Who Draft Unenforceable Noncompete Agreements, Nicole A. Faria

Emory Law Journal

Noncompete agreements in the employment context have become increasingly controversial. For almost a decade, there has been an ongoing national debate about their enforceability and legality. This debate initially culminated in a proposed, and ultimately final, rule by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to completely ban noncompete agreements. Despite increased state and federal regulation of noncompete agreements, workers still incur detrimental consequences due to restraints imposed by the agreements. One reason workers continue to endure negative effects from noncompetes is that some employers disregard state statutes governing noncompete agreements and include unenforceable provisions in their employment contracts. As a result, …

Law In Inaction: The Origins And Implications Of Chronic Drug Law Underenforcement In One Southern County, Kay L. Levine, Elizabeth Griffiths, Joshua M. Hinkle, Volkan Topalli

Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology

Common accounts of police and prosecutorial nonenforcement discretion tend to valorize individual declination choices as demonstrations of mercy and resource constraint. Simultaneously, these accounts critique blanket nonenforcement policies as being outside the bounds of executive authority. Both accounts fail to consider the origins and implications of nonenforcement decisions made by police officers and prosecutors in individual cases that, when taken together, amount to significant underenforcement of an otherwise valid law.

This Article fills the gap between these differing perspectives by empirically examining the hidden and habitual underenforcement of technically valid drug-free-zone (DFZ) laws in one Southern county. Data matching the …

County Prosecution And State Preemption: The Confusing Politics Of Criminal Legal Reform And Backlash, John Pfaff

Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology

Urban reform prosecutors, who are generally elected at the county level, find themselves in a tricky political spot. On the one hand. most urban counties are in many ways “too big” for reformers: they include large numbers of suburban voters who generally dislike reform, in no small part because they are relatively unaffected by the decisions prosecutors make. On the other hand, these counties are also often “too small”: they lack the political power to resist efforts by conservative state legislatures and governors to rein in, if not outright remove, reformers. This Article examines both vulnerabilities. It first maps out …

Intellectual Property Law And International Arbitration, Siqi Li

Student Works

No abstract provided.

Racial Capitalism, Climate Change, And Ecocide, Carmen G. Gonzalez

Faculty Publications & Other Works

Lawyers, scholars, and activists have long sought to incorporate ecocide into the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court to address corporate and governmental impunity for massive and severe ecological damage, including the harms caused by climate change. This Article uses the framework of racial capitalism to examine and critique the proposed criminalization of ecocide. Coined by South African scholars and activists and refined by political theorist Cedric Robinson, the theory of racial capitalism offers valuable insights on the root causes of the climate crisis and the manifold injustices it inflicts on marginalized states and peoples. While most discussions of …

Financing Climate Change Through A Racial Capitalism Lens, James T. Gathii

Faculty Publications & Other Works

In this Essay, I argue that the climate crisis has provided the global finance industry an opportunity to make exorbitant profits from majority Black and Brown countries in the Global South. I show how the global finance industry is leveraging its muscle over climate-vulnerable and heavily indebted countries in the Global South through complex financial transactions. These transactions commodify nature and the biodiversity resources of these Global South countries. In return, these Global South countries borrow capital to address the climate crisis and to pay off their debts. This borrowing that invariably comes at high interest rates, especially through bond …

The New Eu-Us Data Protection Framework's Implications For Healthcare, Charlotte A. Tschider, Marcelo Corrales Compagnucci, Timo Minssen

Faculty Publications & Other Works

In July 2023, the United States and the European Union introduced the Data Privacy Framework (DPF), introducing the third generation of cross-border data transfer agreements constituting adequacy with respect to personal data transfers under the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) between the European Union (EU) and the US. This framework may be used in cross-border healthcare and research relationships, which are highly desirable and increasingly essential to innovative health technology development and health services deployment. A reliable model meeting EU adequacy requirements could enhance the transfer of patient and research participant data. While the DPF might present a familiar terrain …

Death And Discretion: Some Thoughts On Living, Barry Sullivan

Faculty Publications & Other Works

Fifty years ago, James Boyd White inspired a quiet revolution in the world of legal studies. He encouraged lawyers to think more deeply about questions of law and justice by drawing upon the humanities, which provided sources and methods well beyond those that the legal academy then recognized as legitimate ways of thinking and talking about law. Among other things, Professor White insisted that there was a morality to authentic legal argument and decision making that required a close and engaged reading of texts, an understanding of community, and an openness to being persuaded by others. It was a courageous …

From Streets To Stats: A Statistical Analysis Of The Quantity Of Illegal Narcotics Seized In The United States, Zachary T. Strickland

Tenor of Our Times

This study aims to determine how seven different variables affect the total quantity of illegal narcotics seized. These seven variables include four dichotomous and three continuous variables, each striving to teach readers how they relate to the quantity of narcotics seized across specific states. My goal for this project is to figure out if there is any relationship to help law enforcement fight the war on drugs. With the continuing apparent rise of this war, this study is crucial in determining potential relationships between a state's characteristics and the quantity of illegal narcotics they forcibly take possession of. I further …

Changing College Conferences To Benefit Football And The Effects On Basketball Programs, Liam Douglas Maher

Student Works

No abstract provided.

Balancing The Scales: Harnessing The Power Of Artificial Intelligence (Ai) In Healthcare Fraud Detection While Navigating Ai’S Perils, Ally Winter

Student Works

No abstract provided.

Beyond Discrimination: Market Humiliation And Private Law, Hila Keren

University of Colorado Law Review

Market humiliation is a corrosive relational process to which the law repeatedly fails to respond due to the law’s heavy reliance on the discrimination paradigm. In this process, providers of market resources, from housing and work to goods and services, use their powers to reject or mistreat other market users due to their identities. They thus cause users severe harm and deprive them of dignified participation in the marketplace. The problem has recently reached a peak. The discussion in 303 Creative v. Elenis indicates that the Supreme Court might legitimize market humiliation by granting private providers broad free speech exemptions …

Data Controllers As Data Fiduciaries: Theory, Definitions & Burdens Of Proof, Noelle Wilson, Amanda Reid

University of Colorado Law Review

As more U.S. states have begun to pass consumer privacy laws, there are growing calls for federal data privacy regulation to ease the burden of compliance with various, sometimes conflicting, state laws. However, scholars and lawmakers are divided on how best to balance robust privacy protections with privacy laws to which businesses can realistically comply. Two prominent regulatory models have emerged from scholarly debate. The Rights/Obligations Model grants consumers various rights and imposes obligations on businesses. This model has been trending in U.S. states, which have mirrored language from the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) by imposing different …