Digital Commons Network^™

Final 2021 Residential Metals Abatement Program (Rmap) School Soil Sampling Field Sampling Plan (Fsp) Submittal #2 (Covering Highland View Christian School, Hillcrest Elementary, Kennedy Elementary, Silver Bow Montessori, & West Elementary), Pioneer Technical Services, Inc.

Silver Bow Creek/Butte Area Superfund Site

No abstract provided.

Narrowing The Universe: A Machine Learning Approach To Patent Clearance, Rebecca Weires, Joshua Rosefelt, Katelyn Meylor, Stephanie Shim, Lindsay Chong

Chicago-Kent Journal of Intellectual Property

Companies cannot reliably predict which patents are likely to be asserted against them. If they could, they would be better able to quantify and mitigate their own patent infringement risk. We used machine learning methods, informed by legal scholars’ understanding of relevant patent traits, to improve on prior attempts to predict litigation. We built primarily on Colleen Chien’s Predicting Patent Litigation. Chien used traits from a patent’s legal history and developed a method of prediction based on the traits acquired before litigation, but not after. She demonstrated that the traits acquired before litigation are useful predictors. Evaluating Chien’s approach, we …

Ai Output: A Human Condition That Should Not Be Protected Now, Or Maybe Ever, Xiao Wang

Chicago-Kent Journal of Intellectual Property

AI is usually considered to be a form of automatic and autonomous work, but when applied to the creation of literary and artistic works, challenges arise in deciding whether the AI is the de facto author of its output and whether AI outputs or AI-generated products should be protected under the copyright system. This article argues that these outputs should be human creations because the working principles of AI determine that AI functions merely as a mathematical tool applied by humans to not only conceive of but also to execute the creation of AI outputs. The creativity reflected in these …

Quantitative Literacy And Guns, William Briggs

Numeracy

Briggs, William. 2017. How America Got Its Guns: A History of the Gun Violence Crisis; (Albuquerque, University of New Mexico Press). 352 pp. Paperback: ISBN 978-0-8263-5813-4. E-book ISBN 978-0-8263-5814-1.

Quantitative literacy and statistics are just two of many disciplines required to understand the problem of gun violence in America. However, it’s also useful to appreciate their limitations in an issue that is so complex.

Final 2021 Residential Metals Abatement Program (Rmap) School Soil Sampling Field Sampling Plan (Fsp) Submittal #1 (Covering Ramsay Elementary School), Pioneer Technical Services, Inc.

Silver Bow Creek/Butte Area Superfund Site

No abstract provided.

Many Minds, Many Mdl Judges, Brian T. Fitzpatrick

Law and Contemporary Problems

No abstract provided.

Tennessee's National Impact On Teacher Evaluation Law & Policy: An Assessment Of Value-Added Model Litigation, Mark Paige, Audrey Amrein Beardsley, Kevin Close

Tennessee Journal of Law and Policy

Over the last decade or so, federal and state education policymakers embraced the use of value-added models (VAMs) to evaluate teachers' performance and make high-stakes employment decisions (e.g. tenure, merit pay, termination of employment). VAMs are complicated statistical models that attempt to estimate a teacher's contribution to student test scores, particularly those in mathematics and reading. Educational researchers, as well as many teachers and unions, however, have objected to the use of VAMs noting that these models fail to adequately account for variables outside of teachers' control that contribute to a student's education performance. Subsequently, many teachers challenged the use …

Development And Application Of Business Valuation Methods By The Delaware Courts, Edmund H. Mantell, Edward Shea

UC Law Business Journal

No abstract provided.

Antiracist Remedial Approaches In Judge Gregory’S Jurisprudence, Leah M. Litman

Articles

This piece uses the idea of antiracism to highlight parallels between school desegregation cases and cases concerning errors in the criminal justice system. There remain stark, pervasive disparities in both school composition and the criminal justice system. Yet even though judicial remedies are an integral part of rooting out systemic inequality and the vestiges of discrimination, courts have been reticent to use the tools at their disposal to adopt proactive remedial approaches to address these disparities. This piece uses two examples from Judge Roger Gregory’s jurisprudence to illustrate how an antiracist approach to judicial remedies might work.

Antiracist Remedial Approaches In Judge Gregory’S Jurisprudence, Leah M. Litman

Washington and Lee Law Review

This piece uses the idea of antiracism to highlight parallels between school desegregation cases and cases concerning errors in the criminal justice system. There remain stark, pervasive disparities in both school composition and the criminal justice system. Yet even though judicial remedies are an integral part of rooting out systemic inequality and the vestiges of discrimination, courts have been reticent to use the tools at their disposal to adopt proactive remedial approaches to address these disparities. This piece uses two examples from Judge Roger Gregory’s jurisprudence to illustrate how an antiracist approach to judicial remedies might work.

Federal Income Taxation, Nikolai Karetnyi, Ruoxi Zhang

Mercer Law Review

In the year 2020, the federal courts within the United States Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit handed down several notable opinions on federal tax issues.1 This Article surveys two of those opinions involving the taxation of conservation easements and the receipt of settlement payments.

Financial Benchmark Control As Monopoly Power, Sharon E. Foster

UC Law Business Journal

No abstract provided.

Teacher Biases And Expectations: Impact On Self-Esteem, Self-Efficacy, Delinquent Behavior Among Black Grade School Students, Rhonda Lloyd

Dissertations

Black children and adolescents in today’s society face so many challenges that come about from the hands of authority figures in their life, their environment, the education system, and society as a whole. Through a critical review of literature, the author sought to answer three research questions: (1) What are the indications that teachers may be more biased toward Black students? (2) How do perceived teacher biases and discrimination impact the self-esteem and self-efficacy of Black students? (3) How are teacher bias and the school-to-prison pipeline connected? The literature review exposed a need for a teacher training model, which was …

Trust In And Ethical Design Of Carebots: The Case For Ethics Of Care, Gary Kok Yew Chan

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

The paper has two main objectives: to examine the challenges arising from the use of carebots as well as to discuss how the design of carebots can deal with these challenges. First, it notes that the use of carebots to take care of the physical and mental health of the elderly, children and the disabled as well as to serve as assistive tools and social companions encounter a few main challenges. They relate to the extent of the care robots’ ability to care for humans, potential deception by robot morphology and communications, (over)reliance on or attachment to robots, and the …

Simulating Subject Communities In Case Law Citation Networks, Jerrold Tsin Howe Soh

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

We propose and evaluate generative models for case law citation networks that account for legal authority, subject relevance, and time decay. Since Common Law systems rely heavily on citations to precedent, case law citation networks present a special type of citation graph which existing models do not adequately reproduce. We describe a general framework for simulating node and edge generation processes in such networks, including a procedure for simulating case subjects, and experiment with four methods of modelling subject relevance: using subject similarity as linear features, as fitness coefficients, constraining the citable graph by subject, and computing subject-sensitive PageRank scores. …

Entrenched Racial Hierarchy: Educational Inequality From The Cradle To The Lsat, Kevin Woodson

Minnesota Law Review Headnotes, Vols. 94-106 (2009-2022)

For my contribution to this special issue of the Minnesota Law Review, I will attempt to situate the problem of black underrepresentation at America’s law schools within the broader context of racial hierarchy in American society. The former has generated an extensive body of legal scholarship and commentary, centering primarily on the racial impact of law schools’ admissions criteria and procedures, particularly the substantial weight placed upon the Law School Admissions Test (“LSAT”). This focus is understandable: given the substantial racial disparities in LSAT performance and the test’s relatively limited value in predicting academic and professional outcomes, it makes sense …

Climate-Induced Stressors To Peace: A Review Of Recent Literature, Ayyoob Sharifi, Dahlia Simangan, Chui Ying Lee, Rose Reyes, Tarek Katramiz, Jairus Carmela C. Josol, Leticia Dos Muchangos, Hassan Virji, Shinji Kaneko, Thea Kersti Tandog, Leorence Tandog, Moinul Islam

Environmental Science Faculty Publications

Climate change is increasingly recognized as a threat to global peace and security. This paper intends to provide a better understanding of the nature of interactions between climate change and events that undermine peace through a systematic review of recent literature. It highlights major methodological approaches adopted in the literature, elaborates on the geographic focus of the research at the nexus of climate change and peace, and provides further information on how various climatic stressors, such as extreme temperature, floods, sea-level rise, storms, and water stress may be linked to different events that undermine peace (e.g. civil conflict, crime, intercommunal …

Our Imperial Federal Courts, Matthew J. Steilen

Journal Articles

This essay is a response to Christian R. Burset, Advisory Opinions and the Problem of Legal Authority, 74VAND.L.REV.621(2021).

“The article is significant for the archival work alone. It is useful, as well, for the impressive synthesis of the existing secondary literature, collected in the footnotes, which makes a convenient reading list for us mere mortals. The argument of the article is ambitious. As the Table of Contents suggests, its structure is complex: the author asks us to visit three different jurisdictions (two British and one American, each thousands of miles apart), in three different decades, in three different political and …

Consumer Protection In Ecommerce: A Case Study Of Egypt, Heba Habib

Theses and Dissertations

This paper examines electronic contract regulation in the context of business-to-consumer transactions. The technological advancement and cross-border nature of e-commerce have posed significant challenges to the Egyptian legal framework highlighting the limitations of general commercial contract rules with regards to electronic contracts. This thesis argues that access to the courts is hindered by restrictive terms in the electronic contracts over which the Egyptian law has no jurisdictional power. Accordingly, private institutions set the rules in the e-contracts and enforce them through private methods leaving no room for state intervention to ensure the protection of consumers. Hence, the application of national …

Ranked Choice Voting: How Voters Have Responded To A Failing Political System, Audrey Brittingham

Indiana Journal of Law and Social Equality

No abstract provided.

Not Approved For Human Consumption: A Study Of The Denmark Water Crisis, A Call For Reforming The Swda, And A Demand For Community Lawyering In Rural America, Matthew Woodward

William & Mary Environmental Law and Policy Review

Over the past four decades, nine million Americans have ingested dangerous drinking water from a trusted source: their own taps. Each year, “an estimated 16.4 million cases of acute gastroenteritis” are linked to public drinking water. For many Americans, drinking water—perhaps the most important cornerstone of human health—has become cause for concern.

In Flint, Michigan, this concern turned to panic. In 2014, after toddlers began developing painful skin conditions, children fell seriously ill, and tap water emerged in the form of thick, orange-brown sludge, the people of Flint began to wonder: is there something in the water? What soon became …

Session 3: Access To Financial Services - The Promise (And Challenges) Of Fintech, Joseph M. Vincent, Chris Adams, Lucinda Fazio, Roberta Hollinshead, Sumit Mallick, Sands Mckinley, Jonice Gray Tucker, Tonita Webb

SITIE Symposiums

For many Americans, the American Dream is a dream deferred. Recently, there has been an explosion in demand for diversity, equity, and inclusion in financial services. This has coincided with an explosion of a different kind related to delivering financial services through innovations in technology, otherwise known as FinTech. We have seen a plethora of FinTech applications on our smartphones, ranging from online lending to remote deposit making. While these applications provide potential opportunities to level the playing field for those whose dream has been deferred, there remain challenges.

Session 2: Access To Health And Health Services Panel - The Covid-19 Experience, Annette Clark, Wendy Chalres, Dan Laster, Anna Santos Rutschman, Madhavi Sunder, Margret Chon

SITIE Symposiums

COVID-19 has had a massive impact on the U.S. and the world regarding health care and health care access. Improving access has been the topic of scholarship for many years. It took the COVID- 19 pandemic to bring these issues to the forefront of public discussion. Inequities in public health access, not only domestically but globally, have become apparent in the light of COVID-19. This expert panel addresses the inequities of vaccines worldwide and the concept of vaccine sharing programs. It also explores the role that intellectual property plays in these equity issues and some of the risks inherent in …

Session 1: Access To Legal Services - The Role Of Innovation And Technology, Steven Bender, Stacy Butler, Anna Carpenter, Michael Cherry, Sands Mckinley, Kimball Dean Parker, Miguel Willis

SITIE Symposiums

This expert panel is addressing access to justice problems. People without access to lawyers and legal services suffer in many ways not limited to divorce, domestic violence, and educational roadblocks. This panel will ask what lawyers can do to help, in what ways can technology help or replace lawyers in the delivery of legal and non-legal services. It will also explore different legal services being offered by individuals who do not have a JD, online firms, and developing technology in a law firm owed subsidiary. There are six panelists who are broken into two categories: (1) the innovation and delivery …

Opening Session, Annette Clark, Steven Bender

SITIE Symposiums

This year's conference focuses on the social good, highlighting three access barriers fundamental in law and society - access to legal services (and more generally, justice), access to health and health care during the COVID-19 pandemic, and access to financial services for the unbanked or underbanked.

The Problem With Assumptions: Revisiting The Dark Figure Of Sexual Recidivism, Tamara Rice Lave, Jj Prescott, Grady Bridges

Law & Economics Working Papers

What is the actual rate of sexual recidivism given the well-known fact that many crimes go unreported? This is a difficult and important problem, and in The Dark Figure of Sexual Recidivism, Nicholas Scurich and Richard S. John (2019) attempt to make progress on it by “estimate[ing] actual recidivism rates given observed rates of reoffending” (p.172). In this article, we show that the math in their probabilistic model is flawed, but more important, we demonstrate that their conclusions follow ineluctably from their empirical assumptions and the unrepresentative empirical research they cite to benchmark their calculations. Scurich and John contend that …

What The Great Recession Revealed About Taxation By Citation And What Can Be Done About It, Dick M. Carpenter Ii, Chelsea Lawson, Courtney Deuser

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

In recent years, the issue of “taxation by citation” has grown in national prominence. It is generally defined as municipal revenue generation through fines and fees that transcends a clear relationship to public health and safety and serves more as a revenue generating device. According to critics, taxation by citation creates conflicts of interest, violates the rights of those with low income, and distorts law enforcement priorities. Municipal leaders reject such criticisms by denying taxation by citation even exists. To date, research findings have been mixed on whether cities practice taxation by citation. This Article examines whether there is a …

The Federal Circuit Continues To Grapple With The Question Of Patent Eligibility For Diagnostic Methods, Christopher M. Holman

Faculty Works

This article considers the current state of affairs at the Federal Circuit with regard to the patent eligibility of diagnostic methods. Diagnostics v. Mayo Collaborative Servs. I then look at all of the decision decisions I could find in which the court strikes down diagnostic method claims as patent ineligible under Mayo v. Prometheus, of which there are quite a few. Finally, I turn to the handful of cases, all decided in 2018 or later, in which the Federal Circuit has upheld the patent eligibility of diagnostic claims, the most significant of which I believe to be Vanda Pharmaceuticals v. …

The Impact Of Climate Change On Virginia's Coastal Areas, Jonathan L. Goodall, Antonio Elias, Elizabeth Andrews, Christopher "Kit" Chope, John Cosgrove, Jason El Koubi, Jennifer Irish, Lewis L. Lawrence Iii, Robert W. Lazaro Jr., William H. Leighty, Mark W. Luckenbach, Elise Miller-Hooks, Ann C. Phillips, Henry Pollard V, Emily Steinhilber, Charles Feigenoff, Jennifer Sayegh

Faculty Publications

As part of HJ47/SJ47 (2020), the Virginia General Assembly directed the Joint Commission on Technology and Science (JCOTS) to study the “safety, quality of life, and economic consequences of weather and climate-related events on coastal areas in Virginia.” In pursuit of this goal, the commission was to “accept any scientific and technical assistance provided by the nonpartisan, volunteer Virginia Academy of Science, Engineering, and Medicine (VASEM). VASEM convened an expert study board with representation from the Office of the Governor, planning district commissions in coastal Virginia, The Port of Virginia, the Virginia Economic Development Partnership, state universities, private industry, and …

Grand-Vision: An Intelligent System For Optimized Deployment Scheduling Of Law Enforcement Agents, Jonathan Chase, Tran Phong, Kang Long, Tony Le, Hoong Chuin Lau

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Law enforcement agencies in dense urban environments, faced with a wide range of incidents to handle and limited manpower, are turning to data-driven AI to inform their policing strategy. In this paper we present a patrol scheduling system called GRAND-VISION: Ground Response Allocation and Deployment - Visualization, Simulation, and Optimization. The system employs deep learning to generate incident sets that are used to train a patrol schedule that can accommodate varying manpower, break times, manual pre-allocations, and a variety of spatio-temporal demand features. The complexity of the scenario results in a system with real world applicability, which we demonstrate through …