Digital Commons Network^™

The Perverse Effects Of Subsidized Weather Insurance, Omri Ben-Shahar, Kyle D. Logue

Articles

This Article explores the role of insurance as a substitute for direct regulation of risks posed by severe weather. In pricing the risk of human activity along the predicted path of storms, insurance can provide incentives for efficient location decisions as well as for cost-justified mitigation efforts in building construction and infrastructure. Currently, however, much insurance for severe-weather risks is provided and heavily subsidized by the government. This Article demonstrates two primary distortions arising from the government’s dominance in these insurance markets. First, existing government subsidies are allocated differentially across households, resulting in a significant regressive redistribution favoring affluent homeowners …

In Praise Of (Some) Ex Post Regulation: A Response To Professor Galle, Kyle D. Logue

Articles

According to modern law-and-economics (“L&E”) orthodoxy, the primary—maybe even the only—legitimate justification for government regulation is to correct a market failure. This conclusion is based on two key assumptions. First, when markets are functioning reasonably well, they are better at achieving efficiency than the government is. Second, most markets function reasonably well most of the time. Although there is probably evidence to support these assumptions (for example, the relative prosperity of market-based economies in comparison with the relative poverty of centrally planned economies), both assumptions are usually taken as articles of faith by mainstream L&E scholars. This is why scholarly …

The Pendulum Swings: Reconsidering Corporate Criminal Prosecution, David M. Uhlmann

Articles

Corporate crime continues to occur at an alarming rate, yet disagreement persists among scholars and practitioners about the role of corporate criminal prosecution. Some argue that corporations should face criminal prosecution for their misconduct, while others would reserve criminal prosecution for individual corporate officials. Perhaps as a result of this conflict, there has been a dramatic increase over the last decade in the use of deferred prosecution and non-prosecution agreements for some corporate crimes, even as the government continues to bring criminal charges for other corporate crimes. To move beyond our erratic approach to corporate crime, we need a better …

What Notice Did, Jessica D. Litman

Articles

In the twenty-first century, copyright protection is automatic. It vests in eligible works the instant that those works are first embodied in a tangible format. Many Americans are unaware of that, believing instead that registration and copyright notice are required to secure a copyright. That impression is understandable. For its first 199 years, United States copyright law required authors to take affirmative steps to obtain copyright protection. The first U.S. copyright statute, enacted by Congress in 1790, required the eligible author of an eligible work to record the title of the work with the clerk of the court in the …

Confronting Power In Public Law, Kate Andrias

Articles

In his important and provocative Foreword, Professor Daryl Levinson criticizes American constitutional law for failing to attend sufficiently to questions of power, which he defines as “the ability to effect substantive policy outcomes by influencing what the government will or will not do.” As Levinson details, structural constitutional law has focused on how power is distributed among governmental institutions. It has not consistently or adequately considered how power is — or should be — distributed among social groups. Ultimately, Levinson suggests that the narrow focus of separation of powers law and theory on “equalizing the power of government institutions” lacks …

Portmanteau Ascendant: Post-Release Regulations And Sex Offender Recidivism, J. J. Prescott

Articles

The purported purpose of sex offender post-release regulations (e.g., community notification and residency restrictions) is the reduction of sex offender recidivism. On their face, these laws seem well-designed and likely to be effective. A simple economic framework of offender behavior can be used to formalize these basic intuitions: in essence, post-release regulations either increase the probability of detection or increase the immediate cost of engaging in the prohibited activity (or both), and so should reduce the likelihood of criminal behavior. These laws aim to incapacitate people outside of prison. Yet, empirical researchers to date have found essentially no reliable evidence …

Easy Come, Easy Go: The Plight Of Children Who Spend Less Than 30 Days In Foster Care, Vivek Sankaran, Christopher Church

Articles

This article explores the plight of “short stayers” and argues that juvenile courts are failing to use two tools—the federal reasonable efforts requirement and the early appointment of parents’ counsel—to prevent the unnecessary entry of children into foster care. The article also argues that states should give parents and children the right to an expedited appeal of removal decisions to ensure removal standards are properly applied. Finally, this article argues that the federal government must acknowledge the problem of short stayers by utilizing data related to children who may unnecessarily enter foster care in the Child and Family Services Review, …

On Some Zarankiewicz Numbers And Bipartite Ramsey Numbers For Quadrilateral, Janusz Dybizbanski, Tomasz Dzido, Stanislaw Radziszowski

Articles

No abstract provided.

Separations Of Wealth: Inequality And The Erosion Of Checks And Balances, Kate Andrias

Articles

American government is dysfunctional: Gridlock, filibusters, and expanding presidential power, everyone seems to agree, threaten our basic system of constitutional governance. Who, or what, is to blame? In the standard account, the fault lies with the increasing polarization of our political parties. That standard story, however, ignores an important culprit: Concentrated wealth and its organization to achieve political ends. The only way to understand our current constitutional predicament—and to rectify it—is to pay more attention to the role that organized wealth plays in our system of checks and balances. This Article shows that the increasing concentration of wealth and political …

Assignments With Intrinsic Lessons On Professionalism (Or, Teaching Students To Act Like Adults Without Sounding Like A Parent), Beth H. Wilensky

Articles

There is little question that law schools ought to teach their students professionalism – indeed, they are required to do so to maintain accreditation. And there is little question that the required legal writing and research course is one of the places it ought to be taught. But teaching students to adopt the norms of professional behavior — both in law school and after graduation — is a challenge to law faculties, and particularly to the experiential learning faculty who frequently are on the front lines of teaching professionalism. While there are many ways to teach students what professional and …

Gradual Marriage, Jessica Feinberg

Articles

The time has come to reform the law governing marriage. In determining the rights and obligations between spouses arising from marriage, current law does not adequately account for the way in which spousal behaviors and expectations change over the course of a marriage. With regard to intact marriages, under the existing legal framework, the spousal rights and obligations enjoyed by couples in intact marriages arise all at once—at the moment a couple is granted a marriage license—and do not change as the years of marriage pass or as children are born to the marriage. In terms of dissolving marriages, with …

Improved High Temperature Stability Of Anatase Tio2 Photocatalysts By N, F, P Co-Doping, Rachel Fagan, Declan Mccormack, Steven Hinder, Suresh Pillai

Articles

Among the three commonly occurring phases (anatase, rutile, and brookite) of TiO2, the anatase form is reported to be the best photocatalyst due to the improved charge-carrier mobility and the greater number of surface hydroxyl groups. The anatase to rutile transition in titania photocatalysts usually occurs at a temperature between 500 °C to 700 °C. Development of a high temperature stable (above 1000 °C) anatase phase is important for various environmental applications (e.g. self-cleaning ceramic tiles, anti-microbial sanitary wares, etc.). In this study, the use of ammonium hexafluorophosphate as a single source dopant (method A) and urea, trifluoroacetic acid and …

Piperlongumine (Piplartine) And Analogues: Antiproliferative Microtubule-Destabilising Agents, Mary J. Meegan, Seema M. Nathwani, Brendan Twamley, Daniela M. Zisterer, Niamh O'Boyle

Articles

Piperlongumine (piplartine, 1) is a small molecule alkaloid that is receiving intense interest due to its antiproliferative and anticancer activities. We investigated the effects of 1 on tubulin and microtubules. Using both an isolated tubulin assay, and a combination of sedimentation and Western blotting, we demonstrated that 1 is a tubulin-destabilising agent. This result was confirmed by immunofluorescence and confocal microscopy, which showed that microtubules in MCF-7 breast cancer cells were depolymerised when treated with 1. We synthesised a number of analogues of 1 to explore structure-activity relationships. Compound 13 had the best cytotoxic profile of this series, …

Optimisation Of Anodic Oxidation Of Aluminium For Enhanced Adhesion And Corrosion Properties Of Sol-Gel Coatings., Michael Whelan, Tobin Edmond, John Cassidy, John Colreavy, Brendan Duffy

Articles

The anodising process for clad and bare AA2024-T3 has been optimised as a surface preparation technique prior to sol-gel coating deposition. The combination of anodised aluminium surfaces and organically functionalised sol-gel chemistry have been investigated to impart elevated corrosion resistance and increased mechanical properties to the aluminium metal. A duplex anodising process has been developed to utilise the natural corrosion resistance properties of sulphuric acid anodising with the adhesion and hosting properties of phosphoric acid anodising. The novel anodising process and sol-gel sealed surfaces have been characterised using field emission scanning electron microscopy, energy dispersive x-ray spectroscopy. Performance of the …

Delayed Valuation: A Reanalysis Of Goal Features, “Upwards” Complementizer Agreement, And The Mechanics Of Case, Vicki Carstens

Articles

There are at least four opposing views on the directionality and configuration of Agree relations. In mainstream Minimalism, Agree is strictly downward “probing” (Chomsky 2000, 2001, Boskovic 2007, Epstein & Seely 2006), but some recent works argue instead that Agree always looks upwards (Zeijlstra 2012; Wurmbrand 2012). A third perspective takes agreement to follow from the Spec, head configuration (Koopman 2006; and see Chomsky’s 2013 labeling through shared prominent features), and under a fourth proposal, the directionality of Agree varies parametrically (Baker 2008). While each of these approaches has some empirical support, none achieves the strict conceptual necessity that is …

Atpg For Delay Defects In Current Mode Threshold Logic Circuits, Ashok Kumar Palaniswamy, Spyros Tragoudas, Themistoklis Haniotakis

Articles

An automatic test pattern generation approach to
detect delay defects in a circuit consisting of current mode
threshold logic gates is introduced. Each generated pattern
should excite the maximum propagation delay at the fault site.
Manufactured weights may vary, and maximum delay is ensured
by applying an appropriately generated set of patterns per fault.
Experimental results show the efficiency of the proposed methods.

Adaptive Sensor Node Sleep Scheduling For Quality-Of-Experience Enhancement, Mini Mathew, Ning Weng

Articles

Focusing on a user’s quality-of-experience (QoE) has become important, because of the growing space of sensor-dependent applications and low-cost sensor design. QoE is typically affected by two quantities: the quality-of-information (QoI) received and the lifetime-of-service. Therefore, QoE is defined as a sensor network’s ability to consistently offer assured QoI for an expected lifetime when operating on a limited energy resource, such as a battery. However, dynamic factors, such as varying user requirements, unpredictable sensor environment, unreliable network conditions, and limited energy resource, affecting both QoI and lifetime-of-service, make it challenging to achieve a good QoE. In our previous work, we …

The Rise And Fall Of Plausibility Pleading, Adam N. Steinman

Articles

No abstract provided.

The Concept Of Property, Meredith M. Render

Articles

This Article confronts the conceptualistnonconceptualist divide in property theory Specifically the Article addresses the primary normative objection to the conceptualist account of property In the course of addressing this criticism the Article bridges an important gap in the literature and provides a new way of understanding the legal concept of property as distinguished from other types of legal arrangementsThe conceptualistnonconceptualist divide centers on whether the legal concept of "˜property' can be said to have criterial features "“ that is features that make "˜property' both unique and distinguishable from other legal concepts such as contract Conceptualists understand the concept of "˜property' …

Formalism And Functionalism In Antitrust Treatment Of Loyalty Rebates: A Comparative Perspective, Daniel A. Crane

Articles

It is a widely held belief that U.S. antitrust law has long been characterized by economic functionalism and that European antitrust law has long been characterized by legal formalism.' The received wisdom began to change in Europe a decade ago when the Directorate General Competition of the European Commission (DG Comp) began to advocate a more "effects-based" analysis of abuse of dominance. Two factors arguably contributed to this change. First, the DG Comp became increasingly influenced by economists who had little use for the old formalism. Second, as Europe trie to spread antitrust to developing antitrust regimes across the world-and, …

Testing Racial Profiling: Empirical Assessment Of Disparate Treatment By Police, Sonja B. Starr

Articles

In this Article, I explore why measuring disparate-treatment discrimination by police is so difficult, and consider the ways that researchers' existing tools can make headway on these challenges and the ways they fall short. Lab experiments have provided useful information about implicit racial bias, but they cannot directly tell us how these biases actually affect real-world behavior. Meanwhile, for observational researchers, there are various hurdles, but the hardest one to overcome is generally the absence of data on the citizen conduct that at least partially shapes policing decisions. Most crime, and certainly most noncriminal "suspicious" or probable-cause-generating behavior, goes unreported …

Is Theocracy Our Politics? Thoughts On William Baude's 'Is Originalism Our Law?', Richard A. Primus

Articles

In Is Originalism Our Law?, William Baude has made a good kind of argument in favor of originalism. Rather than contending that originalism is the only coherent theory for interpreting a constitution, he makes the more modest claim that it happens to be the way that American judges interpret our Constitution. If he is right—if originalism is our law—then judges deciding constitutional cases ought to be originalists. But what exactly would the content of that obligation be? Calling some interpretive method “our law” might suggest that judges have an obligation to decide cases by reference to that method. But the …

The Just-Barely-Sustainable California Prisoners' Rights Ecosystem, Margo Schlanger

Articles

Over the past two decades, the United States has seen a marked decline in the frequency and depth of court interventions in prisons and jails. Prisoners’ rights litigation has not disappeared—but it has been drastically curtailed by the 1996 Prison Litigation Reform Act (PLRA), along with myriad other forces, doctrinal and political. The PLRA, enacted as part of the Newt Gingrich “Contract with America,” undermined prisoners’ ability to bring, settle, and win lawsuits. (Schlanger 2003; Schlanger 2006)

The resulting impact on jail and prison litigation has been extremely substantial. Significant prisoners’ rights cases certainly remain on court dockets, and new …

Framing Effects On Bidding Behavior In Experimental First-Price Sealed-Bid Money Auctions, Michael J. Vernarelli, Justin S. Skillman

Articles

Consumers often face prices that are the sum of two components, for example, an online purchase that includes a stated price and shipping costs. In such cases consumer behavior may be influenced by framing, i.e., how the components are bifurcated. Previous studies have demonstrated the effects of framing and anchoring in auctions. This study examines bidding patterns in a series of first-price sealed-bid experimental money auctions (where the commodity being auctioned is money itself). We hypothesize that bidders’ behavior is affected by the framing of the potential monetary payoff into “monetary prize” and “winner’s bonus” components. We find strong evidence …

Applying Kouzes & Posner's Leadership Concepts To Poverty Alleviation Work In The Developing World, John Oliphant

Articles

Many people in the developing world struggle with significant poverty. People who feel trapped in a cycle of poverty often describe feeling inferior and powerless. Those who are relatively wealthy and in leadership roles may suffer from a different pathology that some have described as a “god- complex” in which a sense of superiority may develop, leading to the belief that they have been chosen to decide what is best for the poor. As the leaders of organizations that do poverty alleviation work in the developing world contemplate what approach to take when formulating their leadership style, they would do …

Hybrid Life Cycle Assessment Of Low, Mid And High-Rise Multi-Family Dwellings, Kimberly Bawden, Eric Williams

Articles

We undertake Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) of the cumulative energy demand (CED) and global warming potential (GWP) for a portfolio of 10 multi-family residences in the U.S. We argue that prior LCA studies of buildings use an inconsistent boundary for processes to be included in the supply chain: The operational phase includes all energy use in a building, but supply chains for the production of appliances, equipment and consumables associated with activities done in the building are neglected. We correct this by starting the analysis with an explicit definition of a functional unit, providing climate controlled space, and including processes …

Opinion 2/13 Of The Court (C.J.E.U.), Daniel Halberstam

Articles

Opinion 2/13 of the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) declared the draft agreement on European Union accession to the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) incompatible with the Treaty on European Union. The Opinion comes toward the end of a long and gradual process of incorporating human and fundamental rights principles into the legal system of the European Community and its successor, the European Union. Opinion 2/13 sends the Commission back to the drawing board on what has long been seen as the capstone of that process—EU accession to the Strasbourg human rights regime as an external …

When Should We Teach Our Students To Pay Attention To The Costs Of Legal Research?, Beth H. Wilensky

Articles

It is axiomatic in legal research pedagogy that law schools should teach students how to conduct cost-effective legal research. To do that, we need to teach students to consider the amount of time and money their research requires, how paid legal research platforms like Westlaw and Lexis charge for their services, and how to research in an efficient and cost-sensitive way. But we shouldn’t do those things. Or at least, we shouldn’t do them at first. Instead, we should tell students not to worry about the costs of legal research during their first year of law school—with the possible exception …

Contemporary Practice Of The United States Relating To International Law, July 2016, Kristina Daugirdas, Julian Davis Mortenson

Articles

In this section: • U.S. Supreme Court Upholds Law Facilitating Compensation for Victims of Iranian Terrorism • Russia Argues Enhanced Military Presence in Europe Violates NATO-Russia Agreement; United States Criticizes Russian Military Maneuvers over the Baltic Sea as Inconsistent with Bilateral Treaty Governing Incidents at Sea • U.S. Secretary of State Determines ISIL Is Responsible for Genocide • United States Blocks Reappointment of WTO Appellate Body Member • U.S. Department of Defense Releases Report of Investigation Finding That October 2015 Air Strike on Doctors Without Borders Hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan, Was Not a War Crime • United States Expands Air …

Legal Limits And The Implementation Of The Affordable Care Act, Nicholas Bagley

Articles

Accusations of illegality have dogged the Obama Administration's efforts to implement the Affordable Care Act (ACA), the most ambitious piece of social legislation since the advent of Medicare and Medicaid. Some of the accusations have merit; indeed, it would be surprising if they did not. Even as the ACA's rollout has exposed unanticipated difficulties in the statutory design, congressional antipathy to health reform has precluded looking to the legislature to iron out those difficulties. To secure his principal achievement, President Obama has repeatedly tested the limits of executive authority in implementing the ACA. Six years after its enactment and two …