Digital Commons Network^™

Beyond The Legal Black Hole: Hyper-Legality, Deferral, And Detention In Northeast Syria, Grace T. Harmon

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines the detention of suspected ISIS affiliates and their family members held in facilities administered by the Kurdish-led authorities in North-East Syria. Thousands of foreign nationals remain detained without trial, without repatriation, and in conditions widely criticized as inhumane. Existing scholarship and political discourse often describe these facilities as legal voids, limbo, or black holes where law has broken down or ceased to apply. This thesis challenges that characterization. Rather than existing outside the law, the facilities are governed through overlapping frameworks of international humanitarian law, international human rights law, counterterrorism security resolutions, and domestic laws. I argue …

Adjudicating Technology Facilitated Violence Against Women In Egypt: Between The Text And The Application, Eman E. Zidan

Theses and Dissertations

Technology-facilitated violence against women (TFVAW) has surged on digital platforms, leading to a sharp rise in victimization rates among girls and women globally. Egypt’s pioneering cybercrime legislation, though comprehensive, remains gender-neutral and inadequate in judicial application. Community perceptions reveal systemic gaps that erode public trust and fuel demands for specialized protections. This study analyzes Egyptian judicial responses to TFVAW cases through comparative jurisprudence with jurisdictions that feature gender-specific norms. Findings demonstrate that textual provisions alone fail to arrest this escalating phenomenon, underscoring the need for integrated reforms: tailored legislation, heightened awareness campaigns, and collaborative education on rights, duties, and societal …

The Contractual Womb: U.S. Surrogacy Reform Through A Federal Bioethical Framework, Yasmine A. Quinones

Student Works

No abstract provided.

Hearsay In High Definition: Body-Worn Cameras And The Future Of Intimate Partner Violence Prosecutions, Kenechukwu Okocha

Working Papers

Technological advances in documenting police encounters with the public have outpaced evidentiary hearsay rules. Specifically, the rapid adoption of body-worn cameras (BWCs), fueled by racial justice and police reform advocates, has produced previously unavailable, vivid, and timely recordings of IPV victims’ accounts of abuse. Unfortunately, state and federal rules governing hearsay often prevent juries from considering these out-of-court statements. Such restrictions carry particular force in IPV cases, where victims frequently recant or decline to testify at trial due to abuser manipulation or distrust of the criminal justice system.

Courts and legislatures have eased some evidentiary restrictions in IPV cases in …

Ai: Governance Patchwork To A Unified Regulatory Regime, Vamsi K. Revuru

Student Works

No abstract provided.

Cyberbullying And Free Speech Considerations Under The New Jersey Anti-Bullying Bill Of Rights Act, Jesse R. Place

Student Works

No abstract provided.

Revising The Role Of Minors And Their Participation In Their End-Of-Life Care: An Argument For A Shared Decision-Making Model Rooted In Pediatric Patients’ Decision-Making Capacity, Taylor Talcott

Student Works

No abstract provided.

From Schoolhouse To Enforcement Zone: The Legal Limits Of Ice Access In Public Schools, Yinet De Leon

Student Works

No abstract provided.

Multidisciplinary Practices (Mdps) In Elder Law, Bryan Koslow

Student Works

No abstract provided.

How Traditional And Social Media Shapes Public Perception Of United States Surpeme Court Decisions On Civil Liberties, Leila P. Martin

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

This study examines how traditional and social medai shape public perception of U.S. Supreme Court decisions on Civil liberties, focusing on four landmark cases: Dobbs v. Jackson, District of Columbia v. Heller, Materpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission, and Obergfell v. Hodges. Using Entmans framing theory, the research analyzes how tone, language, emphasis, and ideological slant differ across media platofrms and how these frames infleunce public attitudes, insitutional trust, and civic understanding. A mixed-methods design combines archival media analysis, national polling data from Pew Rsearch Center and gallup, and an independent survery to asses how media narratives, rather than …

Goalkeeping, Not Goaltending: Young Athletes’ Welfare And The Necessity Of Minimum Age Limits In Professional Sports, Melissa A. Tan

Student Works

No abstract provided.

Artificial Intelligence Ratings Of Facial Feature Similarity As Predictors Of Eyewitness Performance, Agata K. Bugajczyk

Student Theses

Eyewitness identification plays an important role in the criminal justice system, yet it is often prone to error. Diagnostic Feature Theory (DFD) suggests that lineup fillers should match the eyewitness’s description of the suspect but be different in other ways (Wixted & Mickes, 2014). According to this theory, people remember faces using multiple features (e.g., age, race, face shape), some of which are useful for recognition and some that are not. This approach has been shown to improve the ability to tell the difference between guilty and innocent suspects (e.g., Colloff et al., 2021), but it also increases identification rates …

Legislation Is Hot: Reforming The Troubled Teen Industry In California, Jaclyn Ragusa

Hofstra Law Review

No abstract provided.

Correctional Officer Suicide: A Theory-Driven Investigation Of Acquired Capability And Suicide Behavior, Abigail R. Andersen

All-Inclusive List of Electronic Theses and Dissertations

A growing body of research suggests that correctional officers (COs) die by suicide at a significantly higher rate compared to the general population and some other public safety personnel. Despite what is known about this phenomenon, an understanding of the risk factors driving the high rate of suicide among this population remains unclear. Specifically, little attention has been paid to specific risk factors for suicide among this population and there is an overall absence of theory-driven research investigating CO suicide. The present study sought to address the gap in this area of research by investigating potential risk factors for suicide …

Did College Football Betting Markets Correctly Assess Game-Shortening Rule Changes?, Kevin Krieger, Justin Davis

UNLV Gaming Research & Review Journal

Established rules and norms are standard within competitive sports. However, changes are often made to create better functioning contests or improved viewer experiences. We examine the impact of one such change on sports wagering markets. To shorten college football games, starting in 2023, the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) adopted rule changes that would, in part, enable the game clock to run more frequently. This decision might create games with fewer plays, and scoring in such games might also be lower. We document the impact of these changes and question whether the sports betting markets quickly ascertained the impacts of …

Stigma-Based Credentials: Reentry, Record-Based Exclusion, And The Rights Of Permatemps, Sarah Sallen

San Diego Law Review

Employers’ use of background checks to exclude long-term temporary workers (“permatemps”) with criminal records from permanent employment —despite proven performance—creates a hidden barrier to advancement in the labor market.  Permatemping, where workers remain in the same role for months or years through a staffing agency, has grown alongside the rapid expansion of temporary work, which has nearly tripled since the 1990s. U.S. staffing agencies now hire nearly 13 million temporary and contract workers each year, and a significant portion of this workforce has criminal records.  For many, staffing agencies are not just a last resort, but a deliberate pathway to …

Zero-Sum Empathy: The Supreme Court's 2025 Term Decisions On Gender Identity, Susan Etta Keller

ConLawNOW

This past term, the Supreme Court majority continued to follow a pattern of rendering transgender individuals essentially invisible in the cases that concern their rights. In last year’s United States v. Skrmetti, the transgender youth affected by the ban on transgender care were largely absent from the majority opinion holding that such bans discriminated on the basis of neither sex nor transgender status. This term, the majority continued a similar trend, deciding two cases on the emergency docket that ignored the lived experience of transgender individuals while significantly affecting them, and one case on the merits, West Virginia v. …

Fines, Fees, And The Carceral Economic Conditions Of Public Education, Thalia González

Washington and Lee Law Review Online

In this Article, I apply an expanded concept of education carcerality to identify and analyze a largely unexamined modality of punitive economic governance—intra-system educational fines and fees. Distinguished from other forms of childhood financial sanctions, including the criminalization of ordinary child and adolescent behavior in schools through the use of municipal fines and fees, these carceral-penal practices are exclusively defined, imposed, and collected within school systems themselves. Drawing on original data from 101 publicly available policies governing the two largest school districts by student population in each state and the District of Columbia, this Article contributes to the literature with …

Deportation By Deception: Coerced Administrative Voluntary Departures And The Illusion Of Choice, Fonda Pham

Washington and Lee Law Review Online

Administrative voluntary departure allows noncitizens facing removal to leave the United States by waiving their right to a hearing before an immigration judge. Although this process provides noncitizens with a quicker alternative to a lengthy removal hearing, the process is not always as “voluntary” as its name suggests. Over the past four decades, noncitizens have alleged that immigration officers threatened and intimidated them in order to obtain waivers of consent, including threats against family members, prolonged detention, and physical abuse. Although the Fifth Amendment of the Constitution states that all persons physically present in the U.S. must receive due process …

Law Enforcement Perceptions Of An Integrated Co-Responder Model: A Qualitative Case Study At The Jefferson County Sheriff’S Office, Austin D. Schwent

Doctoral Dissertations and Projects

Law enforcement personnel often serve as first responders to behavioral health crises, yet limited research has examined agency-based co-responder models staffed by embedded mental health professionals. This descriptive, non-evaluative, site-specific generic qualitative case study examined commissioned personnel’s descriptions of the benefits and challenges of the Jefferson County Sheriff’s Office Crisis Response and Mitigation Unit (CRMU) and perceived operational differences from external partnership models. The anonymous PowerDMS questionnaire served as the primary participant-derived source and produced 91 routing-item responses and 528 nonblank narrative response units; three organizational artifacts supplied procedural, historical, and structural evidence concerning the bounded case. The researcher manually …

The End Of Unmeasured Exploitation: How A.S.M., C.A.S., And S.I.A. Challenge Digital Attention Capitalism, Delante Clark

Graduate Scholarship and Creative Works

Digital attention capitalism generates value through the capture and monetization of human attention, yet it has historically lacked standardized mechanisms for measuring attention-related harm. This paper argues that the Attention Safeguard Models (A.S.M.), Cognitive Attentional Standards (C.A.S.), and Sociological Impact Assessment (S.I.A.) collectively challenge this system by introducing an integrated framework for classifying, measuring, and evaluating digital attention harm and its societal consequences. C.A.S. provides standardized measurement of digital attention harm, A.S.M. identifies and classifies patterns of attentional disruption and manipulation, and S.I.A. evaluates broader impacts on institutions, communities, civic engagement, education, social cohesion, and inequality. Together, these systems transform …

Buffeted By Change, Researchers Seek Continuity And Investment: Results From The Ithaka S+R Us Researcher Survey, Chelsea Mccracken, Dylan Ruediger, Ruby Macdougall

Copyright, Fair Use, Scholarly Communication, etc.

Executive summary

The research enterprise in the United States, established after the second world war, is experiencing massive disruption. US colleges and universities are grappling with federal and state disinvestment and intervention at a time when AI and other technologies are reshaping how research is conducted and its findings are communicated. As a result, researchers at US higher education institutions are operating in an unstable environment. Against this backdrop, the findings from our survey of 4,003 researchers, fielded in late 2025, demonstrate that they remain committed to carrying out essential work and that they are doing so in innovative ways—through …

How Legal Systems Reflect Societal Views Of Nature, Devorah Corvo

Latin American & Caribbean Law Review

Pre-Columbine Indigenous communities differed from European settlers in many ways. One of the most striking differences was the way each group viewed itself in relation to nature and wildlife. Indigenous communities generally did not see themselves as separate from the natural world, while European settlers often viewed themselves as distinct from it. In the United States today, many people care about the environment but are unsure how to protect it. By contrast, pre-Columbian Indigenous communities were so deeply connected to their surroundings that harm to wildlife would have been seen as harm to the community itself. By examining three pre-Columbian …

On The Need To Recognize The Erga Omnes Effect In Fundamental Rights In Chilean Law, José Luis Guerrero Becar

Latin American & Caribbean Law Review

This article refers to the Chilean legal tradition of the relative effect of judgments, that is, their effects apply only to the parties involved in the litigation. This principle has an express exception in the Consumer Rights Protection Act, which mentions the erga omnes effect. Since 2010, this principle has come under scrutiny due to constitutional injunctions in social security matters administered by private companies known as ISAPRES (National Health Insurance Companies). These companies have increased the prices of health plans, using tables that apply factors based on age and sex. This has led to the filing of thousands of …

Victim Behaviour And Phone Snatching In Kano Metropolis: A Literature Review Based On Victim Precipitation Theory, Mu'azu Ya'u Abdullahi

African Journal of Criminology and Justice Studies

This paper reviews studies on the problem of phone snatching in Kano Metropolis, with focus on the behaviour of victims. Many studies have explained the crime by linking it to poverty, unemployment, and weak policing among others. However, less attention has been given to how people’s everyday actions may increase their risk. Using Victim Precipitation Theory, this review shows that behaviours such as openly displaying phones, walking alone in unsafe places, or using phones while distracted create easy chances for offenders. The review also notes that wider issues, such as poor street lighting and active black markets, combine with victim …

Law School Announcements 2026-2027, Law School Announcements Editors

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Legal Scapegoating Of Transgender People, Democratic Vulnerability, And The Problem Of Judicial Blinders, Suzanne B. Goldberg

Faculty Scholarship

Over the past decade, lawmakers have proposed an extraordinary number of restrictions on transgender people across nearly every area of public and private life — bathrooms, health care, athletics, education, identity documents, military service, prisons, and more. This Article argues that these measures are best understood as legal scapegoating, meaning the use of law to galvanize public discomfort and hostility toward a targeted group. While demagogic rhetoric can also galvanize those reactions, the concrete restrictions of a legal scapegoating effort raise two further risks, one for democratic governance and the other for judicial review. First, legal scapegoating normalizes government’s use …

Dishonorable Machines: Why And How To Resist Trial By Ai Judges, Kyle Singhal

SMU Law Review Forum

Just as humans trust human doctors to treat human ills, we trust human judges to resolve human disputes. A doctor may employ artificial intelligence (AI) tools to aid in diagnosis, but the doctor ultimately decides what to prescribe, and the doctor bears accountability for that choice. This Article argues that judging demands the same boundary: AI may assist as a tool, but it must not replace human decision-making.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, in light of AI’s recent gains in its ability to process large quantities of seemingly complex material, some scholars and practitioners have contended otherwise, urging that at least some judging …

The Alien Enemies Act Of 1798, Andrew Kent

Fordham Law Review

For the first time since World War II—and for the first time ever outside a formally declared war—an American president has invoked the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to detain and deport noncitizens. Enacted during the Quasi-War with France, the Act’s operative language remains largely unchanged today. In March 2025, President Donald J. Trump proclaimed that members of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua present in the United States are “alien enemies,” asserting that their activities, allegedly coordinated with President Nicolás Maduro’s government, constitute an “invasion” or “predatory incursion” within the meaning of the statute. Litigation challenging the invocation of …

The Role Of Reliance In Stare Decisis Doctrine, Rochelle Hestnas

Fordham Law Review

The U.S. Supreme Court’s recent treatment of reliance interests in stare decisis doctrine is in flux. The Court has overruled long-standing precedent such as Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey with scant analysis as to how reliance interests factor into stare decisis doctrine, despite continuing to name reliance as a factor that should be considered. Arguments for whether and how reliance interests deserve protection are inherently challenging because it cannot be the case that every precedent should stand. Using Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization as a case study, this Note analyzes the Court’s claim …