Digital Commons Network^™

Mitochondrial Dna Replacement: Moral And Halakhic Concerns, J. David Bleich

Articles

Mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA), transmitted from mother to child, have their own genetic code that may cause debilitating genetic diseases. To prevent such unfortunate occurrences, researchers have developed a process enabling them to completely replace an ovum’s mitochondria with mitochondria contributed by a donor. Children born by use of this method have genetic material from both the mitochondrial donor and the birth mother; they are “three-parent babies.” Resultant medical, ethical, legal and theological problems are obvious.

Moreover, this technology may pose significant risks to neonates born of such procedures. Certainly no person has the right to cause harm to a fellow …

A Wikipedia Powered State-Based Approach To Automatic Search Query Enhancement, Kyle Goslin, Markus Hofmann

Articles

This paper describes the development and testing of a novel Automatic Search Query Enhancement (ASQE) algorithm, the Wikipedia N Sub-state Algorithm (WNSSA), which utilises Wikipedia as the sole data source for prior knowledge. This algorithm is built upon the concept of iterative states and sub-states, harnessing the power of Wikipedia's data set and link information to identify and utilise reoccurring terms to aid term selection and weighting during enhancement. This algorithm is designed to prevent query drift by making callbacks to the user's original search intent by persisting the original query between internal states with additional selected enhancement terms. The …

Quantitative Fine-Grained Human Evaluation Of Machine Translation Systems: A Case Study On English To Croatian, Filip Klubicka, Antonio Toral, Victor Manuel Sanchez-Cartagena

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This paper presents a quantitative fine-grained manual evaluation approach to comparing the performance of different machine translation (MT) systems. We build upon the well-established Multidimensional Quality Metrics (MQM) error taxonomy and implement a novel method that assesses whether the differences in performance for MQM error types between different MT systems are statistically significant. We conduct a case study for English-to- Croatian, a language direction that involves translating into a morphologically rich language, for which we compare three MT systems belonging to different paradigms: pure phrase-based, factored phrase-based and neural. First, we design an MQM-compliant error taxonomy tailored to the relevant …

Experienced Mental Workload, Perception Of Usability, Their Interaction And Impact On Task Performance, Luca Longo

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No abstract provided.

Graffiti, Speech, And Crime, Jenny E. Carroll

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Graffiti resides at the uncomfortable intersection of criminal law and free speech rhetoric It is not the shout of revolution to the gathered protesting masses or the political pamphlet flung from a 1920s window Graffiti is not the obscenerenderedpoliticaljacketed protest of war or a flag set aflame in the name of reclaiming patriotism It is an illicit scrawl It is damage and defiance rolled into one from the moment of its creation Graffiti is a crimebrbrUnlike more celebrated examples of free speech graffiti earns no safe harbor from the First Amendment When asked to choose between the tag that appears …

Data Deficits In Municipal Rideshare Collaborations Symposium: Law, Technology, And The Organization Of Work, Deepa Das Acevedo

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No abstract provided.

Law, Religion, And Racial Justice: A Comment On Derrick Bell's Last Article, Jean Stefancic

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This essay examines Derrick Bells reflections on religion and law and his exploration of how blind faith in either can incorporate racism I offer two examples from Alabamas legal history to show how this can happen I then posit that his rejection of a fundamentalist approach to both religion and law led to his adoption of racial realism as a way to live a life of meaning and worth

The Origins (And Fragility) Of Judicial Independence, Tara Leigh Grove

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The federal judiciary today takes certain things for granted Political actors will not attempt to remove Article III judges outside the impeachment process they will not obstruct federal court orders and they will not tinker with the Supreme Court's size in order to pack it with likeminded Justices And yet a closer look reveals that these "selfevident truths" of judicial independence are neither selfevident nor necessary implications of our constitutional text structure and history This Article demonstrates that many government officials once viewed these courtcurbing measures as not only constitutionally permissible but also desirable and politically viable methods of "checking" …

A U.S.-Mexican Law School For Deportees: A Response To Amy Kimpel, Richard Delgado

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No abstract provided.

Retheorizing Actions For Targeted Hate Speech: A Comment On Professor Brown Comments, Richard Delgado, Jean Stefancic

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No abstract provided.

The Half-Life And Death Of The Irish Catholic Novel : In A Country Renowned For Its Catholicism, It Is Unusual The ‘Catholic Novel’ Never Took Root, Eamon Maher

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In Underground Cathedrals (2010), the Glenstal monk and author Mark Patrick Hederman described artists as the “secret agents” of the Holy Spirit: “Art has the imagination to sketch out the possible. When this happens something entirely new comes into the world. Often it is not recognised for what it is and is rejected or vilified by those who are comfortable with what is already there and afraid of whatever might unsettle the status quo”. Reflecting on this position, one wonders to what extent Irish novelists have fulfilled the important role outlined by Hederman. In the past, they definitely did offer …

The Right To Work And The Right To Strike, Laura Weinrib

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No abstract provided.

Pari Passu Clauses And The Skeuomorph Problem In Contract Law, Douglas G. Baird

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No abstract provided.

A Country Writer Exiled In The City: The Case Of John Mcgahern, Eamon Maher

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No abstract provided.

Disability, Universalism, Social Rights, And Citizenship, Samuel R. Bagenstos

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The 2016 election has had significant consequences for American social welfare policy. Some of these consequences are direct. By giving unified control of the federal government to the Republican Party for the first time in a decade, the election has potentially empowered conservatives to ram through a bill to repeal the Affordable Care Act—the landmark “Obamacare” law that marked the most significant expansion of the social welfare state since the 1960s. Other consequences are more indirect. Both the election result itself, and Republicans’ actions since, have spurred a renewed debate within the left-liberal coalition regarding the politics of social welfare …

Guilty As Charged: Reflections On Tra 17, Reuven S. Avi-Yonah

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The international provisions of TRA 17S are in some ways an improvement over TRA 17H, but they are nevertheless deeply flawed. U.S.-based MNEs have accumulated $ 2.6 trillion of low taxed income offshore. This "guilty" income derives not just from IP developed in the United States, but in many cases (for example, Google, Facebook, and Big Pharma) also from exploiting the U.S. consumer market. This is a classic "round tripping" situation in which both the supply side (production) and the demand side (consumption) are in the United States, and yet both TRA 17H and TRA 17S let the guilty parties …

Organizational Decline And Fiscal Distress In Municipal Police Agencies, Matthew Giblin, Jeffrey Nowacki

Articles

In late 2007, the United States entered one of the most significant recessions in recent memory. While the consequences to individuals have been well-documented, less attention has been paid to the effects on state-sponsored organizations such as police agencies. The current study examines fiscal distress (e.g., layoffs, hiring freezes) in a sample of large municipal law enforcement agencies. According to a framework proposed by Levine (1978), departments should be most vulnerable to fiscal distress when the jurisdiction experiences economic shocks (environmental entropy), the demand for police services declines (problem depletion), the political system becomes less supportive of police agencies (political …

Improving Access To Justice In State Courts With Platform Technology, J. J. Prescott

Articles

Access to justice often equates to access to state courts, and for millions of Americans, using state courts to resolve their disputes—often with the government—is a real challenge. Reforms are regularly proposed in the hopes of improving the situation (e.g., better legal aid), but until recently a significant part of the problem has been structural. Using state courts today for all but the simplest of legal transactions entails at the very least traveling to a courthouse and meeting with a decision maker in person and in a one-on-one setting. Even minimally effective access, therefore, requires time, transportation, and very often …

Ip Enforcement Under The Tpp: Civil And Administrative Procedures And Remedies, Provisional Measures In Tpp (Articles, 18.71-18.76), J. Janewa Osei-Tutu

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No abstract provided.

China's 'Corporatization Without Privatization' And The Late 19th Century Roots Of A Stubborn Path Dependency, Nicholas Howson

Articles

This Article analyzes the contemporary program of “corporatization without privatization” in the People's Republic of China (PRC) directed at China's traditional state-owned enterprises (SOEs) through a consideration of long ago precursor enterprise establishments--starting from the last Chinese imperial dynasty's creation of “government-promoted/-supervised, merchant-financed/-operated” (guandu shangban) firms in the latter part of the nineteenth century. While analysts are tempted to see the PRC corporations with listings on international exchanges that dominate the global economy and capital markets as expressions of “convergence,” this Article argues that such firms in fact show deeply embedded aspects of path dependency unique to the Chinese context …

Design And Planned Obsolescence. Theories And Approaches For Designing Enabling Technologies, Matteo Zallio, Damon Berry

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We are currently living in a decade where smart objects and Internet of Things (IoT)-based devices are becoming part of daily life in different contexts. This research seeks to investigate and verify, by using a formal literature review methodology, the most visible aspects of technological development, within the Industry 4.0 and IoT scenario, in relation to the theories of the so called “Planned Obsolescence”.

This study covers a defined number of works on Design theories and practices on how to face the issue of built-in obsolescence of devices in the era of the Connected Devices. The majority of the works …

The Cost Of The Text, Richard A. Primus

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Christopher Serkin and Nelson Tebbe's Is the Constitution Special?explores many facets of constitutional interpretation. I will focus here on their observation that constitutional interpretation is "less textual" than statutory interpretation. I place the expression "less textual" in quotation marks because "textual" could mean many things, such that it would often be problematic to characterize one interpretive exercise as more or less textual than another. In Serkin and Tebbe's view, as I understand it, mainstream constitutional interpretation is "less textual " than statutory decisionmaking in that it is less constrained by the words of particular enacted clauses. As a convenient …

Reflections On A Language Planning Project In Context, Maire Mhic Mhathuna, Cathy Kelleher

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The aim of this paper is to reflect in broad terms on issues which arose in the context of an early years language planning project in Irish-medium preschools (naíonraí) in the Irish-speaking (Gaeltacht) areas of the west of Ireland. Borradh Language Planning Project was commissioned in 2009 to provide guidance and planning templates for early years educators to develop the Irish language competency of children in their early years groups. Due to the changing language ecology of the Gaeltacht areas, many families now raise their children through both Irish and English and children enter the early years services with differing …

Debating Is The Constitution Special?, Richard Primus, Kevin M. Stack, Christopher Serkin, Nelson Tebbe

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In 1890, Louis Brandeis wrote The Right to Privacy. Within a matter of years, the courts began adopting his theory, creating a newly articulated legal right. This article likely represented the high-water mark of legal academia in terms of real world impact. In recent years, the academy has lost much of its relevance. Chief Justice Roberts ridiculed academic work, suggesting that legal scholarship has become esoteric and irrelevant. This should not be the case. The quality of legal scholars is higher than it has ever been—young scholars now often enter the academy with doctoral degrees in related fields. Likewise, technology …

The Radical Majoritarianism Of Rule 23(B)(2), Myriam E. Gilles, Gary Friedman

Articles

One often reads that, “because of the group nature of the harm alleged and the broad character of the relief sought,” Rule 23(b)(2) classes are necessarily “homogenous and cohesive group[s] with few conflicting interests.” But that truism is debatable; at minimum, it begs the question of what counts as a “conflicting interest.” After all, class members often have conflicting positions with respect to the outcome of litigation — especially in significant injunctive-relief complex, structural reform cases of the type that Rule 23(b)(2) addresses. For example, it may be the case that a minority within an injunctive class would prefer to …

In Re Akhbar Beirut & Al Amin, Monica Hakimi

Articles

On August 29, 2016, the Special Tribunal for Lebanon (Tribunal) sentenced a corporate media enterprise and one of its employees for contemptuously interfering with the Tribunal's proceedings in Ayyash, a prosecution concerning the February 2005 terrorist attack that killed former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri. The contempt decision is significant for two reasons: (1) it adopts an expansive definition of the crime of contempt to restrict a journalist's freedom of expression; and (2) it is the first international judicial decision to hold a corporate entity criminally responsible.

Festival Heterotopias: Spatial And Temporal Transformations In Two Small-Scale Settlements, Bernadette Quinn, Linda Wilks

Articles

This paper reports the findings of research undertaken at two festivals which take place in small-scale settlements: one in a village set in rural western Ireland, the other in a small coastal town set within a largely rural Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty in southern England. It uses Foucault’s concept of heterotopia as an analytical tool to further understandings of how the spatial and temporal interruptions caused by festivals temporarily transform the prevailing social order. The findings attest to the manner in which festivals juxtapose several incompatible spaces, creating a diverse array of social alterations in consequence, and highlight the …

Regime Change In 1950s Ireland: The New Export-Oriented Foreign Investment Strategy, Frank Barry, Clare O'Mahony

Articles

The new export-oriented foreign direct investment (FDI) regime of the 1950s was an interparty government initiative that facilitated the later Whitaker and Lemass-led dismantling of protectionist trade barriers. The potential opposition of protectionist-era industry to the new regime was defused by confining the new tax relief to profits derived solely from exports, by allocating new industrial grants only to firms that ‘would not compete in the home market with existing firms’, and by retaining the Control of Manufactures Acts of the 1930s that imposed restrictions on foreign ownership. The fact that the US had overtaken the UK as the major …

Regime Change In 1950s Ireland: The New Export-Oriented Foreign Investment Strategy, Frank Barry, Clare O'Mahony

Articles

The new export-oriented foreign direct investment (FDI) regime of the 1950s was an interparty government initiative that facilitated the later Whitaker and Lemass-led dismantling of protectionist trade barriers. The potential opposition of protectionist-era industry to the new regime was defused by confining the new tax relief to profits derived solely from exports, by allocating new industrial grants only to firms that ‘would not compete in the home market with existing firms’, and by retaining the Control of Manufactures Acts of the 1930s that imposed restrictions on foreign ownership. The fact that the US had overtaken the UK as the major …

Property Is Only Another Name For Monopoly, Eric A. Posner, E. Glen Weyl

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No abstract provided.