Digital Commons Network^™

Renegotiation Design By Contract, Anup Malani, Richard T. Holden

Articles

No abstract provided.

Audits As Signals, David A. Weisbach

Articles

No abstract provided.

Attributes Of Ownership, Reid Thompson, David A. Weisbach

Articles

No abstract provided.

From Helmets To Savings And Inheritance Taxes: Regulatory Intensity, Information Revelation, And Internalities, Saul Levmore

Articles

Introduction It seems obvious that regulation requires the revelation of private information, because legal interventions can do harm when they are designed with insufficient information about individuals' preferences and other variables. Nevertheless, ac

Quadratic Voting As Efficient Corporate Governance, Eric A. Posner, E. Glen Weyl

Articles

No abstract provided.

The Structure Of Sovereignty, Diane P. Wood

Articles

No abstract provided.

The Margin Of Appreciation In International Investment Law, Julian Arato

Articles

Investment treaties tend to say nothing, or only very little, about the appropriate standard of review for arbitrating disputes between sovereign states and foreign investors. Most treaties do not address whether states should be afforded any deference in their own assessment of their treaty obligations. Neither do they specify the converse, that state action must be strictly reviewed. They are simply silent – and their silence has been interpreted in innumerable ways by different tribunals. This interpretive chaos has generated calls for a unified approach – one that would resolve the uncertain and fragmented status quo, while being sufficiently flexible …

Performance Of Meshed Tree Protocols For Loop Avoidance In Switched Networks, Kuhu Sharma, Bill Stackpole, Daryl Johnson, Nirmala Shenoy, Bruce Hartpence

Articles

Loop free frame forwarding in layer 2 switched networks that use meshed topologies to provision for link and path redundancy is a continuing challenge. The challenge is addressed through special protocols at layer 2 that build logical trees over the physically meshed topologies, along which frames can be forwarded. The first such protocol was based on the spanning tree. The spanning tree protocol (STP) had high convergence times subsequent to topology changes. Rapid STP and IETF RFC 5556 Transparent Interconnection of Lots of Links (TRILL) on Router Bridges (RBridges) were then developed to reduce the convergence times. RSTP cntinued to …

Self-Regulated Learning And The Role Of Eportfolios In Business Studies, Amparo Soler-Dominguez, Lucia Morales, Valentina Tarkovska

Articles

Through a case study supported by observation techniques, and questionnaires to gather data, we explored the use of ePortfolios as an efficient assessment tool to assist business degree students. Our main focus was a postgraduate course in which finance modules were a major component. We analysed the role of ePortfolios in Higher Education Institutions over a period of four academic years. Our findings suggest that ePortfolios could be used to facilitate and enhance students’ selfregulated learning. The role of the instructor was found to be fundamental in the early stages of the learning process. This role diminished as students became …

Downsides Of Social Capital, Alejandro Portes

Articles

No abstract provided.

A Method To Assess Adherence In Inhaler Use Through Analysis Of Acoustic Recordings Of Inhaler Events, Shona D’Arcy, Elaine Machale, Jansen Seheult, Martin S. Holmes, Cian Hughes, Imran Sulaiman, Deirdre Hyland, Conor O’Reilly, Senan Glynn, Thekra Al-Zaabi, John Mccourt, Terence Taylor, Frank Keane, Isabelle Killane, Richard B. Reilly, Richard W. Costello

Articles

Rationale: Poor adherence to inhaler use can be due to poor temporal and/or technique adherence. Up until now there has been no way of reliably tracking both these factors in everyday inhaler use. Objectives: This paper introduces a device developed to create time stamped acoustic recordings of an individual’s inhaler use, in which empirical evidence of temporal and technique adherence in inhaler use can be monitored over time. The correlation between clinical outcomes and adherence, as determined by this device, was compared for temporal adherence alone and combined temporal and technique adherence. Findings: The technology was validated by showing that …

Federalism, Treaty Implementation, And Political Process: Bond V United States, Curtis A. Bradley

Articles

In Bond v. United States,¹ the U.S. Supreme Court disallowed the prosecution of a domestic poisoning case under legislation that implements the Convention on the Prohibition of the Development, Production, Stockpiling and Use of Chemical Weapons and on Their Destruction.² In doing so, a majority of the Court declined to address constitutional issues concerning the relationship between the national government's treaty power and the U.S. federal system of government. Instead, the majority resolved the case by applying a presumption that federal statutes do not intrude on traditional areas of state authority, such as the prosecution of local crimes, …

Guest Editor's Observations: Recurring Policy Issues Of Guidelines (And Non-Guidelines) Sentencing: Risk Assessments, Criminal History Enhancements, And The Enforcement Of Release Conditions, Richard Frase

Articles

No abstract provided.

Statutory Reading Of Opaque Constructions - Errors And Purposes, Brian H. Bix

Articles

In her excellent article, Misreading Like a Lawyer: Cognitive Bias in Statutory Interpretation,1 Professor Jill Anderson explains an intri- cacy of sentence meaning that is well known by linguists, generally handled adequately by most of us in normal conversation, but appar- ently misunderstood and badly handled by lawyers and judges. The misreading in question is based on what linguists call “opaque con- structions”: texts whose structural ambiguity creates alternative read- ings. These alternative readings are generally known (as Anderson points out) as “de re” and “de dicto” interpretations. As the article clearly explains, opaque constructions differ from other sentences by …

Human Rights Standards Concerning Transnational Corporations And Other Business Entities, David Weissbrodt

Articles

The rapid expansion of transnational economic activity and corresponding growth in power of transnational corporations and other business entities have prompted renewed international discourse and action over the past decade to address the human rights abuses committed by businesses. 2 The responsibility of businesses to respect human rights has been at the heart of the discussion. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), adopted in 1948, states that "every individual and every organ of society ... shall strive by teaching and education to promote respect for these rights and freedoms and ... to secure their universal and effective recognition and …

Make No Little Plans: Response To Ted Sichelman, Purging Patent Law Of Private Law Remedies, Tom Cotter

Articles

No abstract provided.

People Who Are Not Legal And Who Are Not Alive In The Eyes Of The Law, Richard W. Painter

Articles

No abstract provided.

Testing, Diversity, And Merit: A Reply To Dan Subotnik And Others, Andrea A. Curcio, Carol L. Chomsky, Eileen Kaufman

Articles

The false dichotomy between achieving diversity and rewarding merit frequently surfaces in discussions about decisions on university and law school admissions, scholarships, law licenses, jobs, and promotions. “Merit” judgments are often based on the results of standardized tests meant to predict who has the best chance to succeed if given the opportunity to do so. This Article criticizes over-reliance on standardized tests and responds to suggestions that challenging the use of such tests reflects a race-comes-first approach that chooses diversity over merit. Discussing the firefighter exam that led to the Supreme Court decision in Ricci v. DiStefano, as well as …

Who's Afraid Of Good Governance? State Fiscal Crises, Public Pension Underfunding, And The Resistance To Governance Reform, Thomas Fitzpatrick, Amy B. Monahan

Articles

Much attention has been paid to the significant underfunding of many state and local employee pension plans, as well as efforts by states and cities to alleviate that underfunding by modifying the benefits provided to workers. Yet relatively little attention has been paid to the systemic causes of such financial distress — such as chronic underfunding that shifts financial burdens to future taxpayers, and governance rules that may reduce the likelihood that a plan’s trustees will make optimal investment decisions. This article presents the results of a qualitative study of the funding and governance provisions of twelve public pension plans …

Gastro-Topogrophy: Exploring Food-Related Placenames In Ireland, Máirtín Mac Con Iomaire

Articles

Most Irish people likely have little or no knowledge of the richness and variety of their ancestor’s diet before the arrival of the potato. For generations, food was considered far too common to be considered a field of study. Considering the primacy of food in people’s lives generally throughout history, it is logical that food be reflected in toponymic references to environment and landscape. This article taps into a wide range of material including poetry, prose, travellers’ reports, mythology, folklore, letters, shipping records, and archaeological evidence, both to contextualize the food-related placenames of Ireland, and to explore what Irish placenames …

Hands Off Our Fingerprints: State, Local, Andindividual Defiance Of Federal Immigrationenforcement, Christine N. Cimini

Articles

Secure Communities, though little-known outside law-enforcement circles, is one of the most powerful of the federal government’s immigration enforcement programs. Under Secure Communities, fingerprints collected by state and local law enforcement and provided to the Federal Bureau of Investigation for criminal background checks are automatically shared with the Department of Homeland Security, which checks the fingerprints against its immigration database. In the event of a match, an immigration detainer can be issued and an individual held after they would otherwise be entitled to release. Originally designed as a voluntary program in which local governments could choose to participate, the Department …

Sentencing In Tax Cases After Booker: Striking The Right Balance Between Uniformity And Discretion, Scott A. Schumacher

Articles

It has been nearly ten years since the Supreme Court’s seminal decision in United States v. Booker, in which the Court invalidated the mandatory application of the United States Sentencing Guidelines. In the cases that followed, the Court addressed subsidiary issues regarding the application of the Guidelines and the scope of appellate review. However, despite — or perhaps because of — these opinions, there is little consensus regarding the status and extent of appellate review, as well as the discretion afforded sentencing courts. More troubling, what consensus there is seems to permit judges to impose any sentence they wish, as …

Mind The Gap: Basic Health Along The Aca’S Coverage Continuum, Sallie Thieme Sanford [email protected]

Articles

As ACA implementation proceeds, expansion states should mind the gap — the gap between Medicaid and Marketplace. In this transition between insurance platforms, people can stumble. As a bridge between expanded Medicaid and the insurance Marketplaces, the ACA allows states to enact a Basic Health Program (BHP) supported by federal funds. The BHP option, which has been delayed until 2015, aims to reduce insurance costs and increase care continuity for low-income individuals and families. Interested states face a complicated calculus, one with significant unknowns and moving parts. In this article, I first place this new insurance affordability program in the …

Straddling The Columbia: A Constitutional Law Professor's Musings On Circumventing Washington State's Criminal Prohibition On Compensated Surrogacy, Peter Nicolas

Articles

In this Article, I recount—through both the prisms of an intended parent and a constitutional law scholar—my successful efforts to become a parent via compensated surrogacy and egg donation. Part I of this Article provides a narrative of my experience in becoming a parent via compensated surrogacy, and the various state and federal legal roadblocks and deterrents that I encountered along the way, including Washington State's criminal prohibition on compensated surrogacy as well as federal guidelines issued by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration regarding the use of sperm by gay donors in the process of in vitro fertilization.

Part …

Committee Opinions And Treasury Regulation: Tax Lawyer Ethics, 1965-1985, Michael Hatfield

Articles

This first section of the Article highlights the themes and tones of the 1945-1965 tax ethics literature, and then provides the political context and an overview of the legal changes in 1965-1985 that frame the tax ethics literature of that period. Section II begins in 1965, documenting the history of the first Formal Opinion (Opinion) on tax lawyer ethics issued by the American Bar Association's (ABA) Committee on Ethics and Professional Responsibility (PR Committee), which after considerable criticism in the ensuing years was substantially revised by a second Opinion in 1985. Section III is focused on 1980-1985, investigating the first …

The Future Of Compensated Surrogacy In Washington State: Anytime Soon?, Terry J. Price

Articles

Americans in the mid-1980s were shocked by the facts of the Baby M case. That case, a compensated surrogacy arrangement that publicly went very wrong, raised complicated issues that the country had not considered: whether a woman could contract to carry a pregnancy for another person without becoming the legal mother; whether she could be separated from the child at birth, even though it was her genetic offspring; and whether the contract could take precedence over a mother’s regret over giving up the child. As a result of that case, a number of states, including Washington, prohibited compensated surrogacy arrangements. …

The Long-Term Tort: In Search Of A New Causation Framework For Natural Resources Damages, Sanne H. Knudsen

Articles

Recent scientific evidence is proving that toxic releases have long-term, unintended, and harmful consequences for the marine environment. Though a new paradigm is emerging in the scientific literature--one demonstrating that long-term impacts from oil spills are more significant than previously thought--legal scholars, regulators, and courts have yet to consider the law's ability to remedy long-term ecological harms.

While scholars have exhaustively debated causation questions related to latent injuries for toxic torts, they have overlooked the equally important and conceptually similar causation problems of long-term damages in the natural resource context. Likewise, only a few courts have considered the standards of …

Code, Nudge, Or Notice?, Ryan Calo

Articles

Regulators are increasingly turning to means other than law to influence citizen behavior. This Essay compares three methods that have particularly captured the imagination of scholars and officials in recent years. Much has been written about each method in isolation. This Essay considers them together for the first time in order to generate a novel normative insight about the nature of regulatory choice.

The first alternative method, known colloquially as architecture or “code,” occurs when regulators change a physical or digital environment to make undesirable conduct difficult. Speed bumps provide a classic example. The second method, libertarian paternalism or “nudging,” …

Digital Market Manipulation, Ryan Calo

Articles

In 1999, Jon Hanson and Douglas Kysar coined the term “market manipulation” to describe how companies exploit the cognitive limitations of consumers. For example, everything costs $9.99 because consumers see the price as closer to $9 than $10. Although widely cited by academics, the concept of market manipulation has had only a modest impact on consumer protection law.

This Article demonstrates that the concept of market manipulation is descriptively and theoretically incomplete, and updates the framework of the theory to account for the realities of a marketplace that is mediated by technology. Today’s companies fastidiously study consumers and, increasingly, personalize …

Racial Profiling As Collective Definition, Trevor G. Gardner

Articles

Economists and other interested academics have committed significant time and effort to developing a set of circumstances under which an intelligent and circumspect form of racial profiling can serve as an effective tool in crime finding–the specific objective of finding criminal activity afoot. In turn, anti-profiling advocates tend to focus on the immediate efficacy of the practice, the morality of the practice, and/or the legality of the practice.

However, the tenor of this opposition invites racial profiling proponents to develop more surgical profiling techniques to employ in crime finding. In this article, I review the literature on group distinction to …