Digital Commons Network^™

Asking Gpt For The Ordinary Meaning Of Statutory Terms, Richard Mcadams, Christoph Engel

Articles

No abstract provided.

Untangling Unreliable Citations, Margie Alsbrook

Articles

Citations are the vernacular that the legal profession uses to communicate the precedents that underline our arguments and analysis. They are the building blocks of legal communications and legal arguments, and lawyers and judges need to be able to rely upon the accuracy of each other’s citations to work in a stabilized democracy. Democratic stability is in jeopardy due to an erosion of norms from a variety of well-documented sources, most of which are well beyond the control of the average lawyer. But lawyers and judges can control the reliability of the authority we use in our own work product, …

Solving A Sixth Amendment Crisis: The Case For Resource Parity In Georgia's Indigent Defense System, Meagan R. Hurley

Articles

The United States criminal legal system employs what is said to be an “adversary” system—one in which opposing parties—the prosecution and the defense—present their evidence and arguments (usually in conflict with one another) to a neutral third party (a judge or jury) for adjudication. The idea behind the adversarial process is that a judge or jury is best positioned to make determinations of guilt or innocence once provided with reliable information from competent, zealous, and prepared advocates on both sides of the podium. At its core, the adversarial system is meant to function as the mechanism by which constitutional principles …

Assemblages And Actor Networks In The Borderlands - The Apposition Of Reproductive Rights Along The Mexican-American Border, Madeleine M. Plasencia

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In 1971, Sarah Weddington argued Roe v. Wade as a class action on behalf of pregnant women living in Texas, many of whom, including herself had to flee the State to obtain an abortion in Mexico. In 2021, Texas enacted S. B. 8, otherwise known as the Texas Heartbeat Act, which created a private cause of action for injunctive relief and statutory damages awards against any person assisting in and any physician accused of performing an abortion, thus reigniting the cross-border flows that historically have made Mexico a haven for runaway enslaved people and pregnant persons heading south to freedom. …

The Radical Challenge To The Antitrust Order, Daniel A. Crane

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The U.S. antitrust order is undergoing a radical challenge along three key dimensions. First, the challengers seek to denaturalize markets and replace a commitment to competition with an anti-domination norm. Second, the challengers seek to dramatically alter institutional arrangements, with Congressional legislation and agency rulemaking replacing antitrust's longstanding commitment to judicial common law incrementalism. Finally, the challengers would replace the antitrust order's preferred juridical approach-open-ended rule of reason analysiswith a return to bright-line prohibitory rules and a related demotion of economists as decision-makers. Each of these challenges entails significant consequences, many of them unintended, counter-productive, or perverse. Contrary to the …

Framing A Feminist Phenomenological Inquiry Into The Lived Experiences Of Women Entrepreneurs, Edicleia Oliveira, Serge Basini, Thomas M. Cooney

Articles

Purpose – This article aims to explore the potential of feminist phenomenology as a conceptual framework for advancing women’s entrepreneurship research and the suitability of interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA) to the proposed framework.

Design/methodology/approach – The article critically examines the current state of women’s entrepreneurship research regarding the institutional context and highlights the benefits of a shift towards feminist phenomenology.

Findings – The prevailing disembodied and gender-neutral portrayal of entrepreneurship has resulted in an equivocal understanding of women’s entrepreneurship and perpetuated a male-biased discourse within research and practice. By adopting a feminist phenomenological approach, this article argues for the importance …

Ideological Presuppositions In Media Coverage Of Corporation Tax Policy In The Uk And Ireland: A Critical Discourse Analysis, Ciara Graham, Brendan K. O'Rourke

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This paper argues that the state's capacity to tax corporations in order to fund itself is reaching crisis proportions. Following decades of trade liberalization, deregulation, and globalization, large multinational companies have been able to take advantage of tax competition between states in order to avoid taxation and offset their obligations. This crisis, arguably, has been facilitated by state actors and exacerbated by non-state actors: we explore the ways in which multi-national corporations (MNCs) manipulate their capital, assets, and supply chains to minimize their tax burdens; and we further consider the ways in which media narratives construct this issue and whether …

Consent Searches As Police Violence, David B. Owens

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Henderson and Krishnamurthi’s new paper—A Wolf in Sheep’s Attire: How Consent Enfeebles Our Fourth Amendment (hereinafter Sheep’s Attire)— powerfully advocates for reform to the consent doctrine. The paper is thoughtful, well-intentioned, and useful for challenging core assumptions about the law to help us evaluate how it should work. The piece is also fun to read as the authors breathe real-world insight into old doctrine. In the end, though the article flirts with a categorical rule about consent searches, and while the authors “think it categorically unreasonable for police to ask individuals to forgo their rights” in the context …

Research Access To Social Media Data: Lessons From Clinical Trial Data Sharing, Christopher J. Morten, Gabriel Nicholas, Salomé Vilgoen

Articles

For years, social media companies have sparred with lawmakers over how much independent access to platform data they should provide researchers. Sharing data with researchers allows the public to better understand the risks and harms associated with social media, including areas such as misinformation, child safety, and political polarization. Yet researcher access is controversial. Privacy advocates and companies raise the potential privacy threats of researchers using such data irresponsibly. In addition, social media companies raise concerns over trade secrecy: the data these companies hold and the algorithms powered by that data are secretive sources of competitive advantage. This Article shows …

Sails Symposium Launch On International Law Scholarship: What We Write, Where We Publish, And Why It Matters, Kathleen Claussen, Melissa J. Durkee, Rebecca Ingber, Steven Arrigg Koh

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No abstract provided.

Navigating Gendered Spaces: A Feminist Phenomenological Exploration Of Women Entrepreneurs Lived Experiences Within Government Support Agencies, Edicleia Oliveira, Serge Basini, Thomas M. Cooney

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Purpose: This article explores women entrepreneurs' lived experiences in their interactions with government enterprise support agencies. It investigates the relationship between gendering and Entrepreneurial Orientation (EO), as a normative orientation adopted at the institutional level and justified by an economic rationale. It also explores how women entrepreneurs articulate their experiences through embodied metaphors and image schemas, shedding light on how they navigate the institutional entrepreneurial space. Design/methodology/approach: This study is framed within the concept of Phenomenological Orientation as conceptualised in feminist phenomenology. It applies Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis, a qualitative methodology focused on interpreting accounts of first-person lived experiences of a …

Framing A Feminist Phenomenological Inquiry Into The Lived Experiences Of Women Entrepreneurs, Edicleia Oliveira, Serge Basini, Thomas M. Cooney

Articles

Purpose: This article aims to explore the potential of feminist phenomenology as a conceptual framework for advancing women's entrepreneurship research and the suitability of interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA) to the proposed framework. Design/methodology/approach: The article critically examines the current state of women's entrepreneurship research regarding the institutional context and highlights the benefits of a shift towards feminist phenomenology. Findings: The prevailing disembodied and gender-neutral portrayal of entrepreneurship has resulted in an equivocal understanding of women's entrepreneurship and perpetuated a male-biased discourse within research and practice. By adopting a feminist phenomenological approach, this article argues for the importance of considering the …

A Novel Integration Of Data-Driven Rule Generation And Computational Argumentation For Enhanced Explainable Ai, Lucas Rizzo, Damiano Verda, Serena Berretta, Luca Longo

Articles

Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) is a research area that clarifies AI decision-making processes to build user trust and promote responsible AI. Hence, a key scientific challenge in XAI is the development of methods that generate transparent and interpretable explanations while maintaining scalability and effectiveness in complex scenarios. Rule-based methods in XAI generate rules that can potentially explain AI inferences, yet they can also become convoluted in large scenarios, hindering their readability and scalability. Moreover, they often lack contrastive explanations, leaving users uncertain why specific predictions are preferred. To address this scientific problem, we explore the integration of computational argumentation—a sub-field …

The Right To Access Information On Land Recovery, Compensation, Assistance, And Resettlement: Case Study, City Of Can Tho, Vietnam, Hien Trung Phan, Hugh D. Spitzer

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Land recovery in Vietnam is the process of compulsory transfer of land use rights from the hands of land users to the hands of the State by way of local government agencies. Land recovery frequently raises issues of compensation, assistance, and resettlement. It is vital for affected land users and the general public to have access to reports on land recovery, compensation, and resettlement. The article describes a limited survey of Vietnamese people whose land was subject to government recovery and evaluates their access to and understanding of information at each stage of the land recovery process. The study revealed …

Covid-19 Pandemic’S Impact On Online Sex Advertising And Sex Trafficking, Coxen O. Julia, Vanessa Castro, Bridgette Carr, Glen Redin

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Disruptive social events such as the COVID-19 pandemic can have a significant impact on sex trafficking and the working conditions of victims, yet these effects have been little understood. This paper examines the effect of the COVID-19 pandemic on sex trafficking in the United States, based on analysis of over one million sexual service advertisements from the online platform Rubratings.com, using indicators of third-party management as potential proxies for trafficking. Our results show that there have been measurable changes in online commercial sexual service advertising, both with and without third-party management indicators, in the United States, with a significant decrease …

Inéire: An Interpretable Nlp Pipeline Summarizing Inclusive Policy Making Concerning Migrants In Ireland, Arefeh Kazem, Arjumand Younus, Mingyeong Jeon, Muhammad Atif Qureshi, Simon Caton

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Reaching marginal and other migrant communities to elicit their political views and opinions is a well-known challenge. Social media has enabled a certain amount of online activism and participation, especially in societies with abundant multicultural identities. However, it can be quite challenging to isolate the voice of the migrant in English-speaking countries, especially with an abundance of content in English on social media. In this paper, we pursue a case study of Ireland’s Twitter landscape, specifically migrant and native activists. We present a methodology that can accurately ( >80% ) isolate the Irish migrant voice with as little as 25 …

Technical Report: A Framework For Confusion Mitigation In Task-Oriented Interactions, Na Li, Robert J. Ross

Articles

Confusion is a mental state that can be triggered in task-oriented interactions and which can if left unattended lead to boredom, frustration, or disengagement from the task at hand. Since previous work has demonstrated that confusion can be detected in embodied situated interactions from visual and auditory cues, in this technique report, we propose appropriate interaction structures which should be used to mitigate confusion. We motivate and describe this dialogue mechanism through an information state-style policy with examples, and also outline the approach we are taking to integrate such a meta-conversational goal alongside core task-oriented considerations in modern data driven …

A Method For Generating A Non-Manual Feature Model For Sign Language Processing, Robert G. Smith Dr, Markus Hofmann Dr

Articles

While recent approaches to sign language processing have shifted to the domain of Machine Learning (ML), the treatment of Non-Manual Features (NMFs) remains an open question. The principal challenge facing this method is the comparatively small sign language corpora available for training machine learning models. This study produces a statistical model which may be used in future ML, rules-based, and hybrid-learning approaches for sign language processing tasks. In doing so, this research explores the emerging patterns of non-manual articulation concerning grammatical classes in Irish Sign Language (ISL). The experimental method applied here is a novel implementation of an association rules …

Definition And Characteristic Features Of A ‘Cultural Flashpoint’: A Case Study Of Exploring Masculinities, A Controversial Gender And Education Programme In Ireland, Joan Hanafin, Paul Conway, Cormac O Beaglaoich, Jack Hanafin

Articles

The concept ‘cultural flashpoint’ (CF) has not been fully defined or described. The authors test this concept through the prism of a controversial gender-focused Irish school programme, Exploring Masculinities (EM). Adopting an instrumental case study methodology, they use media content analysis to develop a temporal trajectory of the CF, describe its shape, explicit and implied contentious themes, and its process. They identify characteristic features of a cultural flashpoint: (i) a focal issue, event and/or object; (ii) conflict; (iii) bounded time period; (iv) the involvement of exo- and multi-sectoral individuals and groups; (v) randomness, opaqueness and conflation among its expressions; and …

Human Frailty, Unbreakable Victims And Asylum, Rebecca Sharpless, Kristi E. Wintermeyer

Articles

This article analyzes the asylum decisions of immigration agencies and federal appellate courts and demonstrates that the case law driven standard for persecution is out of step with the original meaning of the term, international law standards, and contemporary understanding of how human beings experience physical and mental harm. Medical and psychological evidence establishes that even trauma at the lower end of the spectrum of severity can inflict lasting and debilitating effects on people's health. Yet over the last three decades, virtually no court decisions have decreased the showing of harm needed to establish persecution. To the contrary, courts have …

The Replication Crisis And Ip Law: A Novel Policy Tool For Open Science, Or Cohen Sasson, Ofer Tur‐Sinai

Articles

In recent years, the scientific community has faced a considerable problem the replication crisis. Replication is the process of verifying scientific findings by repeating a published study. It is considered a cornerstone of the scientific enterprise, contributing to the credibility of research findings. Over the past two decades, however, replication has become increasingly difficult; in fact, in some disciplines the non-replicability rate is over 50%. A major factor accounting for this is diminished access to research materials required for replication (replication materials). This problem is particularly acute in computational studies, where the code, software documentation, datasets, and other information are …

Jury-Related Errors In Copyright, Zahr K. Said

Articles

Copyright law is surprisingly hard. Copyright does not do what laypeople think it does, nor do its terms mean what laypeople expect. Copyright also possesses systemic indeterminacy about what it protects and the extent of that protection. For laypeople, copyright law is decidedly “user-unfriendly.” Nonetheless, copyright law reserves for lay jurors its most-litigated, most difficult, and most consequential question at trial: whether works are “substantially similar” and thus infringing.

Many have criticized this allocation because in the context of copyright law, juries effectively have the power to expand or contract owners’ rights with little oversight or correction. But blaming the …

Guest Column: Paraquat And The Deliberate Production Of Ignorance, Amit Ray, Earl Ray Dorsey

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The article examines how paraquat's manufacturer used "agnotology" - the deliberate production of ignorance for commercial gain - to hide evidence linking the herbicide to Parkinson's disease. Despite decades of toxic effects documented in company studies, the company expanded sales while allegedly suppressing research and discrediting scientists investigating paraquat dangers.

Paraquat, Parkinson's Disease, And Agnotology, Amit Ray, E. Ray Dorsey

Articles

This commentary examines the controversial relationship between paraquat, a widely used herbicide, and Parkinson's disease through the lens of agnotology—the deliberate production of ignorance for commercial gain. Despite numerous animal and epidemiological studies linking paraquat to Parkinson's disease, its use in the United States doubled from 2013 to 2018. The authors reveal how the manufacturer allegedly employed tactics similar to the tobacco industry, including attempts to discredit scientific researchers and suppress unfavorable findings. While over 30 countries have banned paraquat due to health risks, the EPA reauthorized its use in 2021. The paper argues that internal company documents and emerging …

Engaging Bhakti As/In Translation: An Outline Of A Methodological Approach To Analyse Ranade's Views About The "Saints And Prophets Of Maharashtra", Rinku Lamba

Articles

The analysis in this article suggests that M G Ranade’s reflections in his essay about the ‘Saints and Prophets of Maharashtra’ are significant because they offer a site to unravel shifts from a premodern to a modern conception of moral order on the Indian subcontinent, in the context of the encounter with colonialism. For its role in allowing such unravelling, and for the way it permits attention to hitherto neglected dimensions of Ranade’s comparison between bhakti and the Protestant Reformation, this article argues for the value of investigating Ranade’s reflections through the framework of translation. While doing the above, the …

Current Topics In Technology-Enabled Stroke Rehabilitation And Reintegration: A Scoping Review And Content Analysis, Katryna Cisek

Articles

Background. There is a worldwide health crisis stemming from the rising incidence of various debilitating chronic diseases, with stroke as a leading contributor. Chronic stroke management encompasses rehabilitation and reintegration, and can require decades of personalized medicine and care. Information technology (IT) tools have the potential to support individuals managing chronic stroke symptoms. Objectives. This scoping review identifies prevalent topics and concepts in research literature on IT technology for stroke rehabilitation and reintegration, utilizing content analysis, based on topic modelling techniques from natural language processing to identify gaps in this literature. Eligibility Criteria. Our methodological search initially identified over 14,000 …

Know An Emotion By The Company It Keeps: Word Embeddings From Reddit/Coronavirus, Alejandro García-Rudolph, David Sanchez-Pinsach, Dietmar Frey, Eloy Opisso, Katryna Cisek, John Kelleher

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Social media is a crucial communication tool (e.g., with 430 million monthly active users in online forums such as Reddit), being an objective of Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques. One of them (word embeddings) is based on the quotation, “You shall know a word by the company it keeps,” highlighting the importance of context in NLP. Meanwhile, “Context is everything in Emotion Research.” Therefore, we aimed to train a model (W2V) for generating word associations (also known as embeddings) using a popular Coronavirus Reddit forum, validate them using public evidence and apply them to the discovery of context for specific …

Ar/Vr Teaching-Learning Experiences In Higher Education Institutions (Hei): A Systematic Literature Review, Belen Bermejo, Carlos Juiz, David Cortes, Jeroen Oskam, Teemu Moilanen, Jouko Loijas, Praneschen Govender, Jenniifer Hussey, Alexander Lennart Schmidt, Ralf Burbach, Daniel King, Colin O'Connor, David Dunlea

Articles

During the last few years, learning techniques have changed, both in basic education and in higher education. This change has been accompanied by new technologies such as Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (AR). The combination of these technologies in education has allowed a greater immersion, positively affecting the learning and teaching processes. In addition, since the COVID-19 pandemic, this trend has been growing due to the diversity of the different fields of application of these technologies, such as heterogeneity in their combination and their different experiences. It is necessary to review the state of the art to determine the …

The 2023 Scalia Lecture: Beyond Textualism?, William Baude

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No abstract provided.

Common Good Gun Rights, Darrell Miller

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No abstract provided.