Digital Commons Network^™

Solving The Moro Problem: Legalizing The Bangsamoro Peace Process, Gene Carolan

Articles

The purpose of this paper is to highlight the structural features that are proving central to the stability of the 2014 Comprehensive Agreement on the Bangsamoro between the Government of the Philippines and the Moro Islamic Liberation Front, and those features that were detrimental to its predecessors.

This paper finds that a more highly legalized approach to peace-making has resulted in greater agreement stability in the Philippines. More precise in detail and inclusive in scope, the legal nature of the 2014 Comprehensive Agreement has made it more responsive to the root causes of the conflict, and resilient to incidents that …

Women On State Boards And Commissions: Is Idaho Where It Wants To Be?, Brenda Bauges

Articles

No abstract provided.

Case Studies Of Cavity And External Wall Insulation Retrofitted Under The Irish Home Energy Saving Scheme: Technical Analysis And Occupant Perspectives, Aimee Byrne, Gerard Byrne, Garrett O'Donnell, Anthony Robinson

Articles

The residential sector represents 27% of primary energy consumption in Ireland. This paper examines the case study of the Irish government’s national grant scheme to encourage energy efficiency retrofit in private housing. That is the Home Energy Saving (HES) Scheme, later rebranded the Better Energy: Homes (BEH) Scheme. The methodology involved monitoring several homes immediately before and after retrofit alongside discussions with occupants. The examination focused on specific measures commonly introduced through the HES/BEH programme − cavity and external wall insulation. It has been found that a significant decrease in heat loss through the walls was measured in all cases. …

Eighth Amendment's Lost Jurors: Death Qualification And Evolving Standards Of Decency, Aliza Plener Cover

Articles

The Supreme Court’s inquiry into the constitutionality of the death penalty has overlooked a critical “objective indicator” of society’s “evolving standards of decency”: the rate at which citizens are excluded from capital jury service under Witherspoon v. Illinois due to their conscientious objections to the death penalty. While the Supreme Court considers the prevalence of death verdicts as a gauge of the nation’s moral climate, it has ignored how the process of death qualification shapes those verdicts. This blind spot biases the Court’s estimation of community norms and distorts its Eighth Amendment analysis.

This Article presents a quantitative study of …

Adaptive Governance Of Water Resources Shared With Indigenous Peoples: The Role Of Law, Barbara Cosens

Articles

Adaptive governance is an emergent phenomenon resulting from the interaction of locally driven collaborative efforts with a hierarchy of governmental regulation and management and is thought to be capable of navigating social-ecological change as society responds to the effects of climate change. The assertion of Native American water rights on highly developed water systems in North America has triggered governance innovations that resemble certain aspects of adaptive governance, and have emerged to accommodate the need for Indigenous water development and restoration of cultural and ecological resources. Similar innovations are observed in the assertion of Indigenous voices in Australia. This presents …

The Grass Is Not Always Greener: Congressional Dysfunction, Executive Action, And Climate Change In Comparative Perspective, Hari Osofsky, Jacqueline Peel

Articles

Partisan climate change politics, paired with a legislative branch that is often deeply divided between two parties, has led to congressional gridlock in the United States. Numerous efforts at passing comprehensive climate change legislation have failed, and little prospect exists for such legislation in the foreseeable future. As a result, executive action under existing federal environmental statutes--often in interaction with litigation--has become the primary mechanism for national-level regulation of greenhouse gas emissions from motor vehicles and power plants. Although many observers critique this state of affairs and wish for a legislature more able to act. this essay argues that more …

Arctic Energy Cooperation, Hari M. Osofsky, Jessica Shadian, Sara L. Fechtelkotter

Articles

The Arctic – with almost a third of the world’s remaining natural gas and thirteen percent of its oil – is one of the globe’s last frontiers for competition over unexplored natural resources. The rapid pace of Arctic melting due to climate change has created opportunities to extract the region’s previously inaccessible offshore oil and gas. The 2015 controversy over the Obama Administration’s approval of Shell Oil’s drilling in the Chukchi Sea followed by the company’s decision to pull out highlighted the need for clear and effective regulation of Arctic drilling. Offshore oil spills are difficult to prevent and clean …

Energy Partisanship, Hari M. Osofsky, Jacqueline Peel

Articles

Whether the topic is the Paris Agreement on climate change, greenhouse gas emissions from power plants, the Keystone XL pipeline, hydraulic fracturing, offshore drilling, or renewable energy, much of the U.S. policy dialogue about energy and climate change is deeply partisan. Republicans and Democrats debate individual issues in vitriolic sound bites that indicate minimal common ground. For example, officials favoring robust action on climate change are charged with engaging in a “War on Coal.” Those opposed are labeled “members of the Flat Earth Society.” Set against these dysfunctional climate and energy politics, how can progress be made? For people who …

Regional Energy Governance And U.S. Carbon Emissions, Hari Osofsky, Hannah Jacobs Wiseman

Articles

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s final rule that limits carbon dioxide emissions from existing power plants — the Clean Power Plan — is an environmental regulation that powerfully influences energy law and forms a key part of the U.S. plan to meet its voluntary international commitments under the December 2015 Paris Agreement on climate change. Even if portions of the Plan are ultimately struck down, almost any viable pathway to lower carbon emissions will require greater integration of these two areas of law to address the large percentage of U.S. emissions from the energy sector. This integration produces both challenges …

A Tale Of Three Markets: Comparing The Renewable Energy Experiences Of California, Texas, And Germany, Felix Mormann, Dan Reicher, Victor Hanna

Articles

The Obama administration has repeatedly identified the large-scale build-out of clean, renewable energy infrastructure as a key priority of the United States. The President's calls for a cleaner energy economy are often accompanied by references to other industrialized countries such as Germany, hailed by many as a leader in renewable energy deployment. Indeed, the share of renewables in Germany's electricity generation mix is twice that of the United States, and the ambitious "Energiewende" commits the country to meeting 80% of its electricity needs with renewables by 2050. While some praise the German renewables experience as successful proof of concept, others …

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 …

Abortion, Informed Consent, And Regulatory Spillover, Katherine Shaw, Alex Stein

Articles

The constitutional law of abortion stands on the untenable assumption that any state’s abortion regulations impact citizens of that state alone. On this understand-ing, the state’s boundaries demarcate the terrain on which women’s right to abortion clashes with state power to regulate that right.

This Article uncovers a previously unnoticed horizontal dimension of abortion regulation: the medical-malpractice penalties imposed upon doctors for failing to inform patients about abortion risks; the states’ power to define those risks, along with doctors’ informed-consent obligations and penalties; and, critically, the possi-bility that such standards might cross state lines. Planned Parenthood v. Casey and other …

Class Warfare: The Disappearance Of Low-Income Litigants From The Civil Docket, Myriam Gilles

Articles

In recent years, much attention has been paid to the startling disparities in income and wealth in contemporary U.S. society. The enormous concentration of economic power in the top 1% is the culmination of decades of significant income and wealth gains for the top, combined with stagnant or decreasing growth for the majority - a trend that continues apace. But nowhere is the gap more glaring than in the civil docket, where class actions brought by or on behalf of low-income consumers and employees are on the verge of disappearing.

To be sure, the decline in class actions is only …

Temples, Courts, And Dynamic Equilibrium In The Indian Constitution, Deepa Das Acevedo

Articles

Must all states have fixed constitutional identities Does democracy necessarily entail citizensovereignty This paper uses ethnographic data from India to argue that the answer to both questions is "no" In the aftermath of a massive stampede in 2011 the Kerala High Court initiated an overhaul of the complex executive legislative and judicial network that governs the famous Hindu temple at Sabarimala The court's conflicting goals were to avoid further consolidating government authority over the temple and to further empower officials so that they could undertake needed reforms Ultimately the court did both "” and neither "” in an instance of …

Ingress Well-Played: City As Mmo, Elizabeth L. Lawley

Articles

This paper describes player experience for Ingress, a geo-local, mobile augmented reality game created by Google’s Niantic Labs. Ingress incorporates aspects of both pervasive, alternate reality (ARG) and massively multiplayer online (MMO) games. However, unlike many ARGs, Ingress is not focused on a specific time-limited period, or linked to a single real-world event or location. And unlike a typical MMO, play in Ingress is geo-spatially limited; players must be physically proximate to game elements in order to interact with them. Using game mechanics similar to those of many MMOs, Ingress provides for a range of gameplay, based both on …

Branding Taxation, Xuan-Thao Nguyen, Jeffrey A. Maine

Articles

Branding is important not only to businesses,but also to the economy. The intellectual property laws and tax laws should thus further the legitimate goals of encouraging and protecting brand investments while maintaining a sound tax base. Intellectual property protections for branding depend on advertisement and enforcement, both of which demand significant amounts of private investment by firms. Although one would expect similar tax treatments of both categories of investment, the categories are actually treated as vastly different for federal income tax purposes. Additionally, tax distinctions also exist within each category. The result is that some branding investments are expensed and …

Creative Capitalism And Human Trafficking: A Business Approach To Eliminate Forced Labor And Human Trafficking From Global Supply Chains, Dana Raigrodski

Articles

A great amount of revenue generated by businesses in the global economy can be linked to the trafficking and enslavement of human beings. Yet, the current discourse on human trafficking fails to recognize the magnitude of benefit consumers, businesses, and economies gain from the work of forced and trafficked labor. Moreover, the limited efforts that seek to address this situation have focused on ways to encourage businesses to voluntarily adopt more socially responsible practices. These measures have had only limited success, and are generally believed to be in tension with the for-profit purposes of businesses.

Hence, the task of convincing …

Sovereignty And Subsistence: Native Self-Government And Rights To Hunt, Fish, And Gather After Ansca, Robert T. Anderson

Articles

The Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act (ANCSA) was passed in 1971 to extinguish aboriginal rights of Alaska Natives and provide compensation for those rights extinguished. Instead of vesting assets (land and money) in tribal governments, Congress required the formation of Alaska Native corporations to receive and hold these assets. A major flaw in the settlement was the failure to provide statutory protections for the aboriginal hunting, fishing, and gathering rights extinguished by ANCSA. Moreover, while ANCSA did not directly address Alaska Native tribal status or jurisdiction, the Supreme Court interpreted the Act to terminate the Indian country status of ANCSA …

The Entrepreneurial Commons: Reframing The Relationship Between Intellectual Property And Entrepreneurship, Michael J. Burstein

Articles

Reconceptualizing entrepreneurial activity as a knowledge commons leads us to ask a different set of questions than previous studies have, and to utilize a different set of methodological tools. As Part II described, existing approaches to understanding the relationship between IP and entrepreneurship focus on the firm and its reactions to various IP laws. By contrast, to the extent that the exemplar entrepreneurial activities described in Part III can be described as instances of commons governance, the analysis must necessarily be broader. The knowledge commons framework forces us to acknowledge that much of information production and dissemination depends on relationships …

Integration Of New Biological And Physical Retrospective Dosimetry Methods Into Eu Emergency Response Plans – Joint Reneb And Eurados Inter-Laboratory Comparisons, Elizabeth Ainsbury, Christophe Badie, Stephen Barnard, Aidan Meade

Articles

RENEB, 'Realising the European Network of Biodosimetry and Physical Retrospective Dosimetry,' is a network for research and emergency response mutual assistance in biodosimetry within the EU. Within this extremely active network, a number of new dosimetry methods have recently been proposed or developed. There is a requirement to test and/or validate these candidate techniques and inter-comparison exercises are a well-established method for such validation.

Interpreting Megalithic Tomb Orientations And Siting Within Broader Cultural Contexts, Frank Prendergast

Articles

This paper assesses the measured axial orientations and siting of Irish passage tombs. The distribution of monuments with passages/entrances directed at related tombs/cairns is shown. Where this phenomenon occurs, the targeted structure is invariably located at a higher elevation on the skyline and this could suggest a symbolic and hierarchical relationship in their relative siting in the landscape. Additional analysis of astronomical declinations at a national scale has identified tombs with an axial alignment towards the rising and setting positions of the Sun at the winter and summer solstices. A criteria-based framework is developed which potentially allows for these types …

Long-Term Drainage Reduces Co2 Uptake And Increases Co2 Emission On A Siberian Floodplain Due To Shifts In Vegetation Community And Soil Thermal Characteristics, Min Jung Kwon, Martin Heimann, Olaf Kolle, Kristina Luus, Edward A. G. Schuur, Nikita Zimov, Sergey A. Zimov, Mathias Göckede

Articles

Abstract. With increasing air temperatures and changing precipitation patterns forecast for the Arctic over the coming decades, the thawing of ice-rich permafrost is expected to increasingly alter hydrological conditions by creating mosaics of wetter and drier areas. The objective of this study is to investigate how 10 years of lowered water table depths of wet floodplain ecosystems would affect CO2 fluxes measured using a closed chamber system, focusing on the role of long-term changes in soil thermal characteristics and vegetation community structure. Drainage diminishes the heat capacity and thermal conductivity of organic soil, leading to warmer soil temperatures in shallow …

Geographies Of Inequality: Urban Renewal And The Race, Gender, And Class Of Post-Katrina New Orleans, Shiloh L. Deitz, Kristen M. Barber

Articles

In this paper, we address pressing questions on the perpetuation of race, gender, and class inequalities in ongoing restoration practices shaping the "New" New Orleans. We unpack federal and local efforts to rebuild and revitalize the city over the last ten years and map the geography of New Orleans at the neighborhood level both before and after the storm. We discuss how mismanaged resources, corrupt profit-taking, conflicts of interest for the stakeholders, and socially unconscious design conditioned a fiscally irresponsible and non-inclusive recovery. These efforts have pushed out already marginalized populations, resulted in the gentrification of historically African American neighborhoods, …

An Entrepreneurial Context For The Theory Of The Firm: Exploring Assumptions And Consequences, Arturo E. Osorio, Paul Donnelly, Banu Ozkazanc-Pan

Articles

While entrepreneurship may be driven by personal interests and lifestyle choices, entrepreneurial actions are not only economically driven opportunity-searching processes but also enactments of social transformation that may or may not lead to socioeconomic benefits. We advance that exploring these entrepreneurial processes can inform a theory of the firm that may explain how socioeconomic processes shape the socioeconomic environment of communities while serving individuals. This article discusses several understandings of the firm, as theorized in extant literature. Guided by these different conceptualizations, we present a case study of an artist and artisan cluster in Western Massachusetts to demonstrate various understandings …

Using Sequential Mixed Methods In Enterprise Policy Evaluation: A Pragmatic Design Choice?, Anthony Paul Buckley

Articles

How might policy instruments contribute to indigenous firm growth and how can the effects of these instruments be evaluated at both firm and policy level? This paper illustrates how a mixed methods research design and data analysis strategy can pragmatically address the research questions outlined above. The advantages and challenges of employing quantitative research methods (what happened?) followed by confirmatory qualitative research methods (how and why did it happen?) in a multiphase sequential explanatory design is explored. The data analysis strategy is firstly to analyse the data generated from a ‘before and after’ quasi-experiment (with statistical controls), then data from …

Improving Operator Situational Awareness With Wide Area Geographic Data View Displays Of The Electric Power Grid, Esa M. Rantanen, Limor Hochberg, Diego Klabjan, Mingyang Di

Articles

To reduce clutter on wide-area geographic data view displays of electric power systems, substations in geographically compact areas should be spread out and line overlaps and intersections minimized. Such pat- terns optimized with respect to given constraints can be modeled as a multicommodity flow problem. Due to the size of the developed model, we developed two clustering-based iterative algorithms to decompose the global network into smaller regions and then iteratively solve the subproblem in each region by readjusting some values. Three solutions were selected for experimental evaluation. The experimental results were somewhat inconclusive, due to naïve participants, simple task, and …

Partisan Gerrymandering And The Efficiency Gap, Nicholas Stephanopoulos, Eric Mcghee

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No abstract provided.

The Realities Of Electoral Reform, Nicholas Stephanopoulos, Eric Mcghee, Steven Rogers

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No abstract provided.

Tour Guides And The Mediation Of Difficult Memories: The Case Of Dublin Castle, Ireland, Bernadette Quinn, Theresa Ryan

Articles

This research seeks to furthering understandings of how Tour Guides interpret memories at heritage sites when the memories at issue are difficult yet subtle and not always apparent to tourists. Specifically, it explores how Dublin Castle, formerly the seat of British rule in Ireland, is captured in narratives presented to tourists that often include Britons. Representing the site is made challenging because some visitors have little knowledge of the site's history, while others are well informed and hold strong political views. The findings show that Guides select largely depoliticized narratives, strongly influenced by their personal interests and experiences. Some hint …

Critical Design And The Critical Social Sciences, Damian White

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No abstract provided.