Digital Commons Network^™

Truth And Its Rivals In The Law Of Hearsay And Confrontation (Symposium: Truth And Its Rivals: Evidence Reform And The Goals Of Evidence Law)." , Richard D. Friedman

Articles

In this paper, I will look at the problem of hearsay and confrontation through the lens offered by this symposium's theme of "truth and its rivals." I will ask: To what extent does the law of hearsay and confrontation aspire to achieve the goal of truth in litigation? To what extent does it, or should it, seek to achieve other goals, or to satisfy other constraints on the litigation system? And, given the ends that it seeks to achieve, what should the shape of the law in this area be? My principal conclusions are as follows: In most settings, the …

Open Systems, Free Markets, And Regulation Of Internet Commerce, Jane Kaufman Winn

Articles

Can commercial transactions conducted over the Internet be regulated by existing commercial law doctrines? Many promoters of Internet commerce argue that business done over open computer networks such as the Internet will require a new regulatory framework In fact, many issues raised by Internet commerce have already been considered at length in the context of electronic commerce conducted over closed computer networks, such as those used in financial markets.

One of the most hotly debated issues regarding the regulation of Internet commerce is the question of what would be the online equivalent of a signature. Some have argued that, because …

Yearning For Lake Wobegon: The Quest For The Best Test At The Expense Of The Best Education, Lisa Kelly

Articles

This article first will outline the various tests or assessments. Next, recent federal and state mandates for standardized testing of elementary school children will be examined. Then, the educational literature will be reviewed to expose the dangers of testing, particularly in the early grades. Finally, I will urge that the Clinton administration, Congress, and the states step back from this manner of securing educational adequacy. These governmental policies are rooted in the stated intention of guaranteeing that all schools are doing right by all of the children. However, early testing fosters the opposite result-educational inequity through tracking, retention, and the …

Transitive And Fully Transitive Groups, Steve Files, Brendan Goldsmith

Articles

The notions of transitivity and full transitivity for abelian p-groups were introduced by Kaplansky in the 1950s. Important classes of transitive and fully transitive p-groups were discovered by Hill, among others. Since a 1976 paper by Corner, it has been known that the two properties are independent of one another. We examine how the formation of direct sums of p-groups affects transitivity and full transitivity. In so doing, we uncover a far-reaching class of p-groups for which transitivity and full transitivity are equivalent. This result sheds light on the relationship between the two properties for all p-groups.

After The Dna Wars: Skirmishing With Nrc Ii, Richard O. Lempert

Articles

This article traces some of the controversies surrounding DNA evidence and argues that although many have been laid to rest by scientific developments confirmed in the National Research Council's second DNA report, there remain several problems which are likely to lead to continued questioning of standard ways prosecutors present DNA evidence. Although much about the report is to be commended, it falls short in several ways, the most important of which is in its support for presenting random match probabilities independent of plausible error rates. The article argues that although one can sympathize with the NRC committee's decision as an …

On The Stark Broadening Parameters Of The Two Nii Spectral Lines Of The 3d-4f Transition, Vladimir Milosavljevic, Stevan Djenize

Articles

Stark parameters (width and shift) of two singly ionized nitrogen spectral lines, that belong to 3d-4f transition have been measured in a linear pulsed, low pressure, arc discharge in the nitrogen-oxygen plasma at a 54000 K electron temperature and at a 2.8×10 23 m−3 electron density. The measured values have been compared to the existing experimental and calculated data

A New Distributed Constant False Alarm Rate Detector, Hamid Amirmehrabi, R. Viswanathan

Articles

A new constant false alarm rate (CFAR) test termed signal-plus-order statistic CFAR (S+OS) using distributed sensors is developed. The sensor modeling assumes that the returns of the test cells of different sensors are all independent and identically distributed. In the S+OS scheme, each sensor transmits its test sample and a designated order statistic of its surrounding observations to the fusion center. At the fusion center, the sum of the samples of the test cells is compared with a constant multiplied by a function of the order statistics. For a two-sensor network, the functions considered are the minimum of the order …

Why Quine Is Not A Postmodernist, Brian Leiter

Articles

No abstract provided.

Modern Discovery Practice: Search For Truth Or Means Of Abuse?, Frank H. Easterbrook

Articles

No abstract provided.

The Problematics Of Moral And Legal Theory, Richard A. Posner

Articles

In these Holmes Lectures, delivered a century after the publication of Oliver Wendell Holmes's great essay The Path of the Law, Judge Posner argues for an essentially Holmesian conception of the proper relations among modern normative moral philosophy ("academic moralism"), morality, and law. Academic moralism, he argues, lacks either the intellectual cogency or the emotional power to change people's beliefs or behavior; the power to do so resides in "moral entrepreneurs," which academic moralists emphatically are not. Academic moralism's lack of cogency disqualifies it to guide judicial decisionmaking even - in fact, especially - in cases involving controversial moral issues, …

Rethinking Legal Realism: Toward A Naturalized Jurisprudence, Brian Leiter

Articles

No abstract provided.

Causation And The Discretionary Function Exception To The Federal Tort Claims Act, Richard Henry Seamon

Articles

No abstract provided.

Behavioral Analysis Of Law, Cass R. Sunstein

Articles

No abstract provided.

Incommensurability, Welfare, Economics, And The Law, Richard Craswell

Articles

No abstract provided.

Distributed Detection With Multiple Sensors: Part I—Fundamentals, Ramanarayanan Viswanathan, Pramod K. Varshney

Articles

In this paper, basic results on distributed detection are reviewed. In particular, we consider the parallel and the serial architectures in some detail and discuss the decision rules obtained from their optimization based on the Neyman–Pearson (NP) criterion and the Bayes formulation. For conditionally independent sensor observations, the optimality of the likelihood ratio test (LRT) at the sensors is established. General comments on several important issues are made including the computational complexity of obtaining the optimal solutions, the design of detection networks with more general topologies, and applications to different areas.

Family Businesses And The Business Of Families: A Consideration Of The Role Of The Lawyer Symposium - The Intersecting Institutions Of Marriage: Conflicts And Consequences, Steven H. Hobbs, Fay Wilson Hobbs

Articles

No abstract provided.

Answering The Bayesioskeptical Challenge, Richard D. Friedman

Articles

In recent years, some scholars of evidence, myself among them, have made active use of subjective probability theory - what is sometimes referred to as Bayesianism - in thinking about issues and problems related to the law of evidence. But, at the same time, this use has been challenged to various degrees and in various ways by scholars to whom I shall apply the collective, if somewhat misleading, label of Bayesioskeptics. I present this brief paper to defend this use of probability theory, and to discuss what I believe is its proper role in discourse about evidentiary issues.

Describing Ideals Of Endomorphism Rings, Brendan Goldsmith, Simone Pabst

Articles

No abstract available.

The Unsolved Problem Of The Unfunded Mandate, Edward A. Zelinsky

Articles

No abstract provided.

Game Theory And Nonrefundable Retainers: A Response To Professors Croson And Mnookin, Lester Brickman, Lawrence A. Cunningham

Articles

In the inaugural issue of the Harvard Negotiation Law Review, Professors David Croson and Robert Mnookin attempt a game-theoretic defense of the nonrefundable retainer. A nonrefundable retainer is an attorney fee arrangement that requires a client to pay her lawyer a specified dollar amount in advance and entitles the lawyer to keep the fee even if he does no work. For nearly a decade, we have argued that nonrefundable retainers are unethical as a matter of professional responsibility and unenforceable as a matter of law. In the last few years, numerous courts have evaluated the enforceability of these agreements, choosing …

Irrelevance, Minimal Relevance, And Meta-Relevance (Response To David Crump), Richard D. Friedman

Articles

Professor Crump's analysis runs the full traverse from academic theorizing to practical observation. I will attempt to follow him over the same course, addressing three questions among the congeries that he raises. First, is it true that all evidence satisfies the minimalist definition of relevance? Second, should evidentiary codes include a tighter definition of relevance? Third, how should we assess lawyers' use of evidence that, loosely speaking, is irrelevant?

Dealing With Evidentiary Deficiency, Richard D. Friedman

Articles

Lack of information distorts litigation. Claims or defenses that a party might prove easily, or that might even be undisputed, in a world of perfect information can be difficult or impossible to prove in the real world of imperfect information. Some information deficiencies are inevitable, at least in the sense that we could not eliminate them without incurring undue social costs. In some cases, however, a person's conduct may have caused the deficiency. More generally, the person may have had available a reasonable alternative course of conduct that would have eliminated, or at least mitigated, the deficiency. Ariel Porat and …

The Cathedral' At Twenty-Five: Citations And Impressions, James E. Krier, Stewart J. Schwab

Articles

It was twenty-five years ago that Guido Calabresi and Douglas Melamed published their article on property rules, liability rules, and inalienability' Calabresi, then a law professor, later a dean, is now a federal judge. Melamed, formerly a student of Calabresi's, is now a seasoned Washington attorney. Their article-which, thanks to its subtitle, we shall call The Cathedral-has had a remarkable influence on our own thinking, as we tried to show in a recent paper2 This is not the place to rehash what we said then, but a summary might be in order. First, we demonstrated that the conventional wisdom about …

The Life And Times Of Legal Education In Alabama, 1819-1897: Bar Admissions, Law Schools, And The Profession Alabama Section, Paul M. Pruitt Jr.

Articles

No abstract provided.

Computer Science Concepts In Copyright Cases: The Path To A Coherent Law, Marci A. Hamilton, Ted Sabety

Articles

No abstract provided.

Diffraction From Polarization Holographic Gratings With Surface Relief In Side-Chain Azobenzene Polyesters, Izabela Naydenova, Ludmila Nikolova, Todor Todorov, N.C.R. Holme, P.S. Ramanujam, S. Hvilsted

Articles

We investigate the polarization properties of holographic gratings in side-chain azobenzene polyesters in which an anisotropic grating that is due to photoinduced linear and circular birefringence is recorded in the volume of the material and a relief grating appears on the surface. A theoretical model is proposed to explain the experimental results, making it possible to understand the influence of the different photoinduced effects. It is shown that at low intensity the polarization properties of the diffraction at these gratings are determined by the interaction of the linear and circular photobirefringences, and at larger intensity the influence of the surface …

Godtalk: Should Religion Inform Public Debate?, J. David Bleich

Articles

No abstract provided.

A Mathematical Model Of Growth Factor Induced Capillary Growth In The Retina, Sophia Maggelakis, Andreas Savakis

Articles

Abnormal capillary growth in the retina has been recently associated with the presence of the Vascular Endothelial Growth Factor (VEGF). The production of VEGF is a result of oxygen starvation in the retina, which can take place as a consequence of inadequate capillary growth in premature babies or clogged capillaries in diabetics. When VEGF levels rise, they trigger abnormal blood vessel growth across the retina, and may cause damage, and sometimes permanent loss of vision. In this paper, a mathematical model that examines the effects of VEGF on the growth of retinal capillaries is presented. The model directly relates the …

Hypertext Theory And Narrative, Eoin Kilfeather

Articles

No abstract provided.

Contract And Trust In Corporate Law: The Case Of Corporate Opportunity, Richard A. Epstein

Articles

No abstract provided.