Digital Commons Network^™

Sopra? So What?: Chevron Reform Misses The Target Entirely, Kristin Hickman

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No abstract provided.

Surrogacy Professionalism, June Carbone, Christina O. Miller

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No abstract provided.

Patent Damages Heuristics, Tom Cotter

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No abstract provided.

How Is Competition Policy Coping With Atlantic Area Airline Markets?, Daniel Gifford, Robert T. Kudrle

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No abstract provided.

Cheap Sentiment, Claire Hill

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Public Employee Speech And Magarian’S Dynamic Diversity, Heidi Kitrosser

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No abstract provided.

Punishing Kids In Juvenile And Criminal Court, Barry Feld

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Punishment And Human Dignity: Sentencing Principles For Twenty-First-Century America, Michael Tonry

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From Duty And Disclosure To Power And Participation In Social Enterprise, Brett Mcdonnell

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No abstract provided.

Is U.S. Insurance Regulation Unconstitutional?, Daniel Schwarcz

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No abstract provided.

The Promise And Failure Of Silence As A Shield Against Immigration Enforcement, Linus Chan

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Why Limits On Contributions To Super Pacs Should Survive Citizens United, Richard W. Painter, Norman L. Eisen, Albert W. Alschuler, Laurence H. Tribe

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No abstract provided.

Remedial Reading: Evaluating Federal Courts’ Application Of The Prejudice Standard In Capital Sentences From “Weighing” And “Non-Weighing” States, Sarah Gerwig-Moore

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On March 31, 2016, the State of Georgia executed my client, Joshua Bishop. Until the time of his execution, several successive legal teams challenged his conviction and sentence through the usual channels: direct appeal, state habeas corpus proceedings, and federal habeas corpus proceedings. The last hearing on the merits of his case was before a panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit, which accepts appeals from death penalty cases out of Georgia, Florida, and Alabama. In a lengthy opinion describing the many mitigating circumstances present in Mr. Bishop’s case, the Eleventh Circuit denied relief. This …

Disruptive Lending For Innovations: Signaling Model And Banks Selection Of Startups Innovations, Xuan-Thao Nguyen, Erik Hille

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Startups desperately need funding. But lending to startups is too risky for banks. How can banks lend to startups whose cash flow is negative, tangible assets are nonexistent, and most valuable assets are patents? In light of the uncertainties, what can banks do in lending for innovations? In this Article, we turn to economic theory to demonstrate how banks can make their selections of startups, ensuring their returns and encouraging innovations. Specifically, we create a signaling model with partial separating equilibria to demonstrate how banks can address the information asymmetry problem by relying on a truth-telling signal in assessing the …

The Puzzle In Financing With Trademark Collateral, Xuan-Thao Nguyen, Erik Hille

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If trademarks are important corporate assets, do banks and nonbanks lend against trademarks? Or do lenders accept trademark collateral merely as part of a blanket lien? Do banks and nonbanks treat trademarks differently than patents in lending, including venture lending? This first empirical study will attempt to answer these questions. We extract and analyze security interest filings in trademarks and patents against the backdrop of secured transactions law and banking regulations. Based on the data, it seems banks and nonbanks have an aversion for trademark collateral and, by practice, treat most trademarks as idle assets. We also argue that the …

Sovereign Patent Funds, Xuan-Thao Nguyen

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No abstract provided.

Is The License Still The Product?, Robert W. Gomulkiewicz

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The Supreme Court rejected the use of patent law to enforce conditional sales contracts in Impression Products v. Lexmark. The case appears to be just another step in the Supreme Court’s ongoing campaign to reset the Federal Circuit’s patent law jurisprudence. However, the decision casts a shadow on cases from all federal circuits that have enforced software licenses for more than 20 years and potentially imperils the business models on which software developers rely to create innovative products and to bring those products to market in a variety of useful ways.

For over two decades, we could say that …

Freedom In Structure: Helping Foreign-Trained And International Graduate Students Develop Thesis Statements By Component, Elizabeth R. Baldwin

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This article explains how foreign-trained and international graduate students can use a thesis development template to find and articulate narrow, novel, non-obvious, and useful claims for their final, academic papers in law. These students, in particular, are in need of clear direction and methods for crafting well-developed claims (or thesis statements), given that many are non-native speakers of English who trained in different legal and educational systems with different expectations about what constitutes good academic writing—in any genre, let alone law. Through the use of a thesis development template (adapted from writing advice by Joseph M. Williams and Eugene Volokh), …

Letter From Jeffery M. Kadet And David L. Koontz To The Internal Revenue Serv. (June 5, 2018) On Notice 2018-43, 2018-2019 Priority Guidance Plan Regulatory And Ruling Guidance Concerning Various International Tax Issues, Jeffery M. Kadet, David L. Koontz

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A principal focus of our suggestions is the modernization and updating of regulations as well as providing guidance that will affect the many multinational corporations (MNCs) whose operations take place partially or wholly within the U.S. Many of these MNCs have embarked on complicated and legalistic schemes whose primary purpose is to shift profits without any real operational changes and to record those profits within zero- and low-taxed foreign members. Importantly, this includes not only U.S.-based MNCs, but also the many inverted MNCs that structured their inversions to remain untouched by the §7874 anti-inversion rules.

Indeconstructible: The Triumph Of The Environmental “Administrative State”, Stephen M. Johnson

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Shortly after the 2017 Presidential inauguration, a senior advisor to the President proclaimed that a top priority of the Administration would be the “deconstruction of the administrative state.” A primary target of the Administration’s deconstruction efforts was the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (“EPA”) and federal environmental regulations.

While the President can use a variety of tools, including the appointment power, budget power, treaty power, and executive orders, to influence the manner in which the EPA and other agencies interpret and enforce laws, the President has very little power to unilaterally “deconstruct the administrative state.” The “administrative state” is a creation …

Fintech: Antidote To Rent-Seeking?, Jeremy Kidd

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Fintech is a reality of our modern society, and will likely become even more so in the future. Peer-to-peer lending, cybercurrencies, smart contracts, algorithmic lending, and more, have required adaptation by consumers and producers of financial services. Our modes of doing business will continue to be challenged and changed by these and other Fintech innovations, almost certainly expanding beyond merely “promot[ing] financial inclusion, expand[ing] access to capital for individuals and small businesses, and more broadly reshap[ing] how society interacts with financial services.” By reducing transaction costs, advancing technology opens the doors to innovations the likes of which we might not …

Stranger Than Fiction: How Lawyers Can Accurately And Realistically Tell A True Story By Using Fiction Writers’ Techniques That Make Fiction Seem More Realistic Than Reality, Cathren Page

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This Article differs from other articles on related topics in that it focuses broadly on including specific details to establish an overall sense of reality. In contrast, in his article, This is Not the Whole Truth, Professor Steve Johansen discusses those details that can ethically be omitted; this Article, however, is about which select details to include rather than to omit. Although some articles have focused on details regarding specific objects, such as an obtuse object or an endowed object, this Article covers a wider category of details that applies throughout the narrative as opposed to details that surface only …

Telling Tales The Transactional Lawyer As Storyteller, Karen J. Sneddon

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Transactional lawyers are storytellers, although they may not think of themselves as such. They work with provisions and clauses to build trans-actional documents that encapsulate the wishes, hopes, and fears of the transacting parties to promote, guide, and control the relationship of those parties. Narratology, the theory of narrative, can provide a resource to transactional lawyers that facilitates the construction of a wide range of transactional documents, which can themselves be considered narratives.

The form documents that transactional lawyers use as starting points in the drafting process are already rife with narrative characteristics; they are embedded with characters and plots, …

Problem-Based Learning: Student Perceptions Of Its Value In Developing Professional Skills For Engineering Practice, Una Beagon, Dervilla Niall, Eabhnat Ni Fhloinn

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This study explores students’ perceptions of the effectiveness of a Problem-Based Learning (PBL) design project, taken as part of a first-year engineering module, in developing professional skills needed for engineering practice. Students completed surveys before and after the PBL group project, and produced personal reflections on the process. The closed survey questions were analysed quantitatively and the main themes from the reflections outlined using General Inductive Analysis. Students rated themselves as having improved across a range of professional skills as a result of the project, with particular emphasis on teamwork, communication skills, understanding of the design process and self-directed learning. …

High Sensitivity Optical Fiber Sensors For Simultaneous Measurement Of Methanol And Ethanol, Dejun Liu, Rahul Kumarb, Fangfang Wei, Wei Han, Arun Kumar Mallik, Jinhui Yuanc, Shengpeng Wan, Xingdao He, Zhe Kange, Feng Li, Chongxiu Yu, Gerald Farrell, Yuliya Semenova, Qiang Wu

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High sensitivity volatile organic compounds (VOCs) sensors based on a tapered small core single mode fiber (TSCSMF) and a microfiber coupler (MFC) are reported. The TSCSMF had a waist diameter of ~5.1 μm and the MFC had a waist diameter of ~1.9 μm each and both were fabricated using a customized microheater brushing technique. Silica based materials containing immobilized Nile red prepared by sol-gel method with two different recipes (recipe I and recipe II) are investigated. Initially recipe I based coating materials were applied to the surfaces of the TSCSMF and MFC. The experimental results show that the sensor based …

Investigation Of Temperature Dependence Of Microfibre Coil Resonators, Yu Yin, Jibo Yu, Yuxuan Jiang, Shi Li, Jing Ren, Gerald Farrell, Elfed Lewis, Pengfei Wang

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The temperature-sensitive performance of a microfiber coil resonator (MCR) is thoroughly investigated. The MCR is fabricated by wrapping a microfiber on a PMMA rod coated with a UV-curable low refractive index epoxy. The temperature sensitivity is measured by investigating the correlation between the shift of the resonant wavelength and the surrounding temperature. It is determined that a range of parameters of the MCRs, including the gap between two adjacent rings, the diameter of the supporting rod, the number of rings, and the diameter of the microfiber, have a great influence on the temperature sensitivity of the MCRs. By optimizing the …

A Simple All-Fiber Comb Filter Based On The Combined Effect Of Multimode Interference And Mach- Zehnder Interferometer, Guorui Zhou, Rahul Kumar, Qiang Wu, W. P. Ng, Richard Binns, Lalam Nageswara, Xinxiang Miao, Longfei Niu, Xiaodong Yuan, Yuliya Semenova, Gerald Farrell, Jinhui Yuan, Chongxiu Yu, Xinzhu Sang, Xiangjun Xin, Bo Liu, Haibing Lv, Yong Qing Fu

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A polarization-dependent all-fiber comb filter based on a combination effect of multimode interference and Mach-Zehnder interferometer was proposed and demonstrated. The comb filter was composed with a short section of multimode fiber (MMF) fusion spliced with a conventional single mode fiber on the one side and a short section of a different type of optical fiber on the other side. The second type of optical fiber is spliced to the MMF with a properly designed misalignment. Different types and lengths of fibers were used to investigate the influence of fiber types and lengths on the performance of the comb filter. …

Whispering Gallery Mode Micro Resonators For Multi-Parameter Applications, Arun Mallik, Gerald Farrell, Manjusha Ramakrishnan, Vishnu Kavungal, Dejun Liu, Qiang Wu Prof.

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A novel fiber optic sensing configuration for simultaneously measuring ammonia vapor (NH3) concentration and relative humidity (RH) in air is proposed and experimentally demonstrated. The system comprised two silica whispering gallery mode (WGM) microsphere resonators coated with different polymer layers. One of the microspheres was dip-coated with sol gel silica polymer and another with a 0.5 % wt./vol. agarose hydrogel. WGMs in both microspheres were excited simultaneously by evanescent coupling using a single adiabatic fiber taper. The optical properties of both coating layers change due to their exposure to ammonia and water molecules in the surrounding atmosphere, resulting in the …

Design Of Scalable Hardware-Efficient Compressive Sensing Image Sensors, Stefan Leitner, Haibo Wang, Spyros Tragoudsa

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This work presents a new compressive sensing (CS) measurement method for image sensors, which limits pixel summation within neighbor pixels and follows regular summation patterns. Simulations with a large set of benchmark images show that the proposed method leads to improved image quality. Circuit implementation for the proposed CS measurement method is presented with the use of current mode pixel cells; and the resultant CS image sensor circuit is significantly simpler than existing designs. With compression rates of 4 and 8, the developed CS image sensors can achieve 34.2 dB and 29.6 dB PSNR values with energy consumption of 1.4 …

Effect Of High- And Low-Molecular-Weight Hyaluronic-Acid-Functionalized-Az31 Mg And Ti Alloys On Proliferation And Differentiation Of Osteoblast Cells, Sankalp Agarwal, Brendan Duffy, James Curtin, Swarna Jaiswal

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The quality of patient care has increased dramatically in recent years because of the development of lightweight orthopedic metal implants. The success of these orthopedic implants may be compromised by impaired cytocompatibility and osteointegration. Biomimetic surface engineering of metal implants using biomacromolecules including hyaluronic acid (HA) has been used an effective approach to provide conditions favorable for the growth of bone forming cells. To date, there have been limited studies on osteoblasts functions in response to metal substrates modified with the hyaluronic acid of different molecular weight for orthopedic applications. In this study, we evaluated the osteoblasts functions such as …