Digital Commons Network^™

What We Don't See When We See Copyright As Property, Jessica Litman

Articles

For all of the rhetoric about the central place of authors in the copyright scheme, our copyright laws in fact give them little power and less money. Intermediaries own the copyrights, and are able to structure licenses so as to maximise their own revenue while shrinking their pay-outs to authors. Copyright scholars have tended to treat this point superficially, because – as lawyers – we take for granted that copyrights are property; property rights are freely alienable; and the grantee of a property right stands in the shoes of the original holder. I compare the 1710 Statute of Anne, which …

Universal Representation, Lindsay Nash

Articles

In an era in which there is little good news for immigrant communities and even holding the line has become an ambitious goal, one progressive project has continued to gain steam: the movement to provide universal representation for noncitizens in removal proceedings. This effort, initially born out of a pilot project in New York City, has generated a host of replication projects throughout the nation and holds the promise of even broader expansion. But as it grows, this effort must confront challenges from within: the sort-of supporters who want to limit this representation system's coverage in a number of ways, …

Law & Laundry: White Laundresses, Chinese Laundrymen, And The Origins Of Muller V. Oregon, Emily Prifogle

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This article uses the historian’s method of micro-history to rethink the significance of the Supreme Court decision Muller v. Oregon (1908). Typically considered a labor law decision permitting the regulation of women’s work hours, the article argues that through particular attention to the specific context in which the labor dispute took place — the laundry industry in Portland, Oregon — the Muller decision and underlying conflict should be understood as not only about sex-based labor rights but also about how the labor of laundry specifically involved race-based discrimination. The article investigates the most important conflicts behind the Muller decision, namely …

Texas Gulf Sulphur And The Genesis Of Corporate Liability Under Rule 10b-5, Adam C. Pritchard, Robert B. Thompson

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This Essay explores the seminal role played by SEC v. Texas Gulf Sulphur Co. in establishing Rule 10b-5’s use to create a remedy against corporations for misstatements made by their officers. The question of the corporation’s liability for private damages loomed large for the Second Circuit judges in Texas Gulf Sulphur, even though that question was not directly at issue in an SEC action for injunctive relief. The judges considered both, construing narrowly “in connection with the purchase or sale of any security,” and the requisite state of mind required for violating Rule 10b-5. We explore the choices of the …

Combining Ontologies And Open Standards To Derive A Middle Layer Information Model For Interoperability Of Personal And Electronic Health Records, Dympna O'Sullivan, Panagiotis Plastiras

Articles

Objectives: To enable better interoperability between Personal Health Record (PHR) and Electronic Health Record (EHR) systems to allow exchange of data from patients to providers and vice versa in order to encourage PHR use and patient self-management. Methods: A non-binding middleware based on open technologies and standards that resides between a PHR and EHR system has been developed. Specifically, the middleware consists of an ontology-driven information model based on the HL7 Reference Information Model (RIM) and a set of transformation rules that work in conjunction with the information model to process data exported from a PHR or EHR system and …

Physical Models Can Provide Superior Learning Opportunities Beyond The Benefits Of Active Engagements, Dina L. Newman, Megan Stefkovich, Catherine Clasen, Margaret A. Franzen, Leslie Kate Wright

Articles

The essence of molecular biology education lies in understanding of gene expression, with subtopics including the central dogma processes, such as transcription and translation. While these concepts are core to the discipline, they are also notoriously difficult for students to learn, probably because they cannot be directly observed. While nearly all active learning strategies have been shown to improve learning compared with passive lectures, little has been done to compare different types of active learning. We hypothesized that physical models of central dogma processes would be especially helpful for learning, because they provide a resource that students can see, touch, …

Intelligent Design, Christopher Buccafusco, Mark Lemley, Jonathan Masur

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No abstract provided.

Sexual Harassment And Corporate Law, Daniel Hemel, Dorothy Shapiro Lund

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No abstract provided.

An Interactive And Dynamic Search-Based Approach To Software Refactoring Recommendations, Vahid Alizadeh, Marouane Kessentini, Mohamed Wiem Mkaouer, Mel Ocinneide, Ali Ouni, Yuanfang Cai

Articles

Successful software products evolve through a process of continual change. However, this process may weaken the design of the software and make it unnecessarily complex, leading to significantly reduced productivity and increased fault-proneness. Refactoring improves the software design while preserving overall functionality and behavior, and is an important technique in managing the growing complexity of software systems. Most of the existing work on software refactoring uses either an entirely manual or a fully automated approach. Manual refactoring is time-consuming, error-prone and unsuitable for large-scale, radical refactoring. On the other hand, fully automated refactoring yields a static list of refactorings which, …

The Beat And Treaty Overrides: A Brief Response To Rosenbloom And Shaheen, Reuven S. Avi-Yonah, Bret Wells

Articles

In a recent article in Tax Notes International, H. David Rosenbloom and Fadi Shaheen argue that the base erosion and antiabuse tax (IRC section 59A, as enacted in 2017) is a potential violation of articles 23 and 24 of U.S. tax treaties. They say the BEAT does not override those treaties, so those agreements can be relied on to overcome the effects of the BEAT. In our opinion, that conclusion is wrong for two reasons: The BEAT is not a treaty violation, and even if were, it is a treaty override.

Using A Socioeconomic Segregation Burn-In Model To Initialise An Agent-Based Model For Infectious Diseases, Elizabeth Hunter, Brian Mac Namee, John D. Kelleher

Articles

Socioeconomic status can have an important effect on health. In this paper we: (i) propose using house price data as a publicly available proxy for socioeconomic status to examine neighbourhood socioeconomic status at a more fine grained resolution than is available in Irish Central Statistics Office data; (ii) use a dissimilarity index to demonstrate and measure the existence of socioeconomic clustering at a neighbourhood level; (iii) demonstrate that using a standard ABM initialisation process based on CSO small area data results in ABMs systematically underestimating the socioeconomic clustering in Irish neighbourhoods; (iv) demonstrate that ABM models are better calibrated towards …

Bankruptcy Fiduciary Duties In The World Of Claims Trading, John A.E. Pottow

Articles

In earlier work, I explored the role of fiduciary duties in the bankruptcy trustee's administration of a debtor's estate, noting the absence of any explicit demarcation of those duties in the Bankruptcy Code. In this piece, I report the highlights of that analysis and see to what extent (if any) fiduciary duties can inform policy prescriptions for the issue of bankruptcy claims trading, colorfully referred to by some as the world of "bankruptcy M&A." My initial take is pessimistic. Fiduciary duties, at least as traditionally conceived in bankruptcy, are unlikely to provide much help. But there is still a source …

When Law Calls, Does Science Answer? A Survey Of Distinguished Scientists & Engineers, Shari Seidman Diamond, Richard O. Lempert

Articles

Sound legal decision-making frequently requires the assistance of scientists and engineers. The survey we conducted with the cooperation of the American Academy examines the views of the legal system held by some of the nation’s most distinguished scientists and engineers, what motivates them to participate or to refuse to assist in lawsuits when asked, and their assessment of their experiences when they do participate. The survey reveals that a majority of the responding scientists and engineers will agree to participate when asked, and when they turn down requests, the most common reasons are lack of time and absence of relevant …

Divine Justice And The Library Of Babel: Or, Was Al Capone Really Punished For Tax Evasion?, Gabriel Mendlow

Articles

A criminal defendant enjoys an array of legal rights. These include the right not to be punished for an offense unless charged, tried, and proved guilty beyond a reasonable doubt; the right not to be punished disproportionately; and the right not to be punished for the same offense more than once. I contend that the design of our criminal legal system imperils these rights in ways few observers appreciate. Because criminal codes describe misconduct imprecisely and prohibit more misconduct than any legislature actually aspires to punish, prosecutors decide which violations of the code merit punishment, and judges decide how much …

Section 4968 And Taxing All Charitable Endowments: A Critique And A Proposal, Edward A. Zelinsky

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No abstract provided.

From Maggie To May: Forty Years Of (De)Industrial Strategy, James Silverwood, Richard Woodward

Articles

Upon becoming Prime Minister, Theresa May installed industrial strategy as one of the principal planks of her economic policy. May's embrace of industrial strategy, with its tacit acceptance of a positive role for the state in steering and coordinating economic activity, initially appears to be a decisive break with an era dating back to Margaret Thatcher, in which government intervention was regarded as heresy. Whilst there are doubtless novel features, this article argues that continuity is the overriding theme of May's industrial strategy. First, despite the reluctance to confess it, like every UK government over the past forty years, May …

Vegetation, Hydrologic, And Erosion Responses Of Sagebrush Steppe 9 Yr Following Mechanical Tree Removal, Christopher Jason Williams, Frederick B. Pierson, Patrick R. Kormos, Osama Z. Al-Hamdan, Sayjro K. Nouwakpo, Mark A. Weltz

Articles

Land managers across the western United States are faced with selecting and applying tree-removal treatments on pinyon (Pinus spp.) and juniper (Juniperus spp.) woodland-encroached sagebrush (Artemisia spp.) rangelands, but current understanding of long-term vegetation and hydrological responses of sagebrush sites to tree removal is inadequate for guiding management. This study applied a suite of vegetation and soil measures (0.5 − 990 m²), small-plot rainfall simulations (0.5 m²), and overland flow experiments (9 m²) to quantify the effects of mechanical tree removal (tree cutting and mastication) on vegetation, runoff, and erosion at …

Innovation In Rangeland Monitoring: Annual, 30 M, Plant Functional Type Percent Cover Maps For U.S. Rangelands, 1984-2017, Matthew O. Jones, Brady W. Allred, David E. Naugle, Jeremy D. Maestas, Patrick Donnelly, Loretta J. Metz, Jason Karl, Rob Smith, Brandon Bestelmeyer, Chad Boyd, Jay D. Kerby, James D. Mciver

Articles

Innovations in machine learning and cloud‐based computing were merged with historical remote sensing and field data to provide the first moderate resolution, annual, percent cover maps of plant functional types across rangeland ecosystems to effectively and efficiently respond to pressing challenges facing conservation of biodiversity and ecosystem services. We utilized the historical Landsat satellite record, gridded meteorology, abiotic land surface data, and over 30,000 field plots within a Random Forests model to predict per‐pixel percent cover of annual forbs and grasses, perennial forbs and grasses, shrubs, and bare ground over the western United States from 1984 to 2017. Results were …

Regulatory Enforcement Under New York's Martin Act: From Financial Fraud To Global Warming, Richard A. Epstein

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No abstract provided.

Discordant Alternans Mechanism For Initiation Of Ventricular Fibrillation In Vitro, Laura M. Muñoz, Anna R.M. Gelzer, Flavio H. Fenton, Wei Qian, Weiye Lin, Robert F. Gilmour Jr, Niels F. Otani

Articles

Background: Ventricular tachyarrhythmias are often preceded by short sequences of premature ventricular complexes. In a previous study, a restitution-based computational model predicted which sequences of stimulated premature complexes were most likely to induce ventricular fibrillation in canines in vivo. However, the underlying mechanism, based on discordant-alternans dynamics, could not be verified in that study. The current study seeks to elucidate the mechanism by determining whether the spatiotemporal evolution of action potentials and initiation of ventricular fibrillation in in vitro experiments are consistent with model predictions. Methods and Results: Optical mapping voltage signals from canine right-ventricular tissue (n=9) were obtained simultaneously …

Evaluating The Effectiveness Of A Focused Debate On The Development Of Ethical Reasoning Skills In Pharmacy Technician Students., Seana Hogan, Julie Dunne

Articles

Objective. To evaluate the effectiveness of debating an ethical dilemma on the development of ethical reasoning skills in pharmacy technician students.

Methods. A mixture of qualitative and quantitative methods was used. This included analysis of before and after 5-minute papers, a sentiment survey, thematic analysis of student reflective writing and a qualitative questionnaire by an independent observer.

Results. Twenty-five students participated in the study. The 5-minute papers showed improvement in student learning. In the sentiment survey, 83% of students agreed or strongly agreed that they had a better understanding of ethical dilemmas following the debate. The main theme identified from …

The Persistence Of The Probabilistic Perspective, Richard D. Friedman

Articles

The publication now of an essay written by Craig Callen nearly a decade ago is cause for wistful celebration. Even while we are reminded how suddenly and prematurely Craig’s life ended, it is good to have one more academic contribution from him, especially because it is marked by the erudition, thoroughness, gentleness, and humor that characterized him.

Show And Tell, Patrick Barry

Articles

“Show don’t tell.” Teachers preach these words. Style guides endorse them. And you’d be hard pressed to find any editor or law firm partner who hasn’t offered them as feedback in the last year, month, week, maybe even day. There’s only one problem: “Show don’t tell” is bad advice. Or at least, it is incomplete advice.

Paragraphing, Patrick Barry

Articles

Consider treating the word paragraph as a verb. Think of it as something you can do well or poorly, with major consequences for your readers. Good paragraphers, for example, help readers. They make it easy to navigate and absorb information. They don’t flit around, hastily moving on to the next point before fully supporting their first. Nor do they get stuck for too long in one place. Instead, they give a lot of thought not just to the ideas but also to their arrangement—their shape, their balance, their pace.

Drug Approval In A Learning Health System, W. Nicholson Price

Articles

The current system of FDA approval seems to make few happy. Some argue FDA approves drugs too slowly; others too quickly. Many agree that FDA—and the health system generally—should gather information after drugs are approved to learn how well they work and how safe they are. This is hard to do. FDA has its own surveillance systems, but those systems face substantial limitations in practical use. Drug companies can also conduct their own studies, but have little incentive to do so, and often fail to fulfil study commitments made to FDA. Proposals to improve this dynamic often suggest gathering more …

Fourth Amendment Constraints On The Technological Monitoring Of Convicted Sex Offenders, Ben A. Mcjunkin, J. J. Prescott

Articles

More than forty U.S. states currently track at least some of their convicted sex offenders using GPS devices. Many offenders will be monitored for life. The burdens and expense of living indefinitely under constant technological monitoring have been well documented, but most commentators have assumed that these burdens were of no constitutional moment because states have characterized such surveillance as ‘‘civil’’ in character—and courts have seemed to agree. In 2015, however, the Supreme Court decided in Grady v. North Carolina that attaching a GPS monitoring device to a person was a Fourth Amendment search, notwithstanding the ostensibly civil character of …

Safety Implications Of Plasma-Induced Effects In Living Cells – A Review Of In Vitro And In Vivo Findings, Daniela Boehm, Paula Bourke

Articles

Cold atmospheric plasma is a versatile new tool in the biomedical field with applications ranging from disinfection, wound healing and tissue regeneration to blood coagulation, and cancer treatment. Along with improved insights into the underlying physical, chemical and biological principles, plasma medicine has also made important advances in the introduction into the clinic. However, in the absence of a standard plasma ‘dose’ definition, the diversity of the field poses certain difficulties in terms of comparability of plasma devices, treatment parameters and resulting biological effects, particularly with regards to the question of what constitutes a safe plasma application. Data from various …

Check Clearing And Voidable Preference Law Under The Bankruptcy Code, David G. Carlson

Articles

Every business practice must withstand the critique of federal voidable preference law. This article surveys how well check clearing system fares under this adjunct to the principle that unsecured creditors should share equally in a bankruptcy proceeding. Check clearing involves extending short-term credit by depositary banks to their customers. Banks routinely extend unsecured and secured credit. The fate of a bank in its customer's bankruptcy differs, depending on what kind of credit is extended. In the case of an overdraft, banks have preference risk, but they also have powerful defenses to muster against liability. In the case credit is advanced …

The Institutions Of Innocence Review: A Comparative Sociological Perspective, Jessica A. Roth

Articles

The last three decades have seen the rise of an international innocence movement that has forced participants in diverse criminal justice systems to confront their systems’ fallibility, previously thought more theoretical than real. The public acknowledgment of that fallibility has led to the creation of new institutional mechanisms to re-examine old convictions. This short essay prepared for a symposium issue of the Rutgers University Law Review on the theory of criminal law reform compares the error correction institutions created in the United Kingdom, Canada, and the United States, three English-speaking countries with common law roots and an adversarial structure, through …

Performance Comparison Of Support Vector Machine, Random Forest, And Extreme Learning Machine For Intrusion Detection, Iftikhar Ahmad, Muhammad Javed Iqbal, Mohammad Basheri, Aneel Rahim

Articles

Intrusion detection is a fundamental part of security tools, such as adaptive security appliances, intrusion detection systems, intrusion prevention systems, and firewalls. Various intrusion detection techniques are used, but their performance is an issue. Intrusion detection performance depends on accuracy, which needs to improve to decrease false alarms and to increase the detection rate. To resolve concerns on performance, multilayer perceptron, support vector machine (SVM), and other techniques have been used in recent work. Such techniques indicate limitations and are not efficient for use in large data sets, such as system and network data. The intrusion detection system is used …