Digital Commons Network^™

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 …

Taking Images Seriously, Elizabeth G. Porter

Articles

Law has been trapped in a stylistic straitjacket. The Internet has revolutionized media and communications, replacing text with a dizzying array of multimedia graphics and images. Facebook hosts 150 billion photos. Courts spend millions on trial technology. But those innovations have barely trickled into the black-and-white world of written law. Legal treatises continue to evoke Blackstone and Kent; most legal casebooks are facsimiles of Langdell’s; and legal journals resemble the Harvard Law Review circa 1887. None of these influential forms of disseminating the law has embraced — or even nodded to — modern, image-saturated communication norms. Litigants, scholars and courts …

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 …

China’S Apologetic Justice: Lessons For The United States?, Xuan-Thao Nguyen

Articles

Many scholars have criticized Congressional apology resolutions for slavery as inadequate and ineffective. Ironically, Congress may look to China’s apologetic justice in intentional intellectual property infringements to learn valuable lessons about apologies and how to incorporate them into righting wrongs. China requires that the wrongdoer who intentionally harms or infringes the intellectual property rights of another make a public apology in a newspaper or trade journal, in addition to stopping the harm and paying for compensatory damages and costs. If the wrongdoer does not timely make the public apology, the infringed party will draft and publish the public apology in …

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 …

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 …

Transparently Opaque: Understanding The Lack Of Transparency In Insurance Consumer Protection, Daniel Schwarcz

Articles

Consumer protection in most domains of financial regulation centers on transparency. Broadly construed, transparency involves making relevant information available to consumers as well as others who might act on their behalf, such as academics, journalists, newspapers, consumer organizations or other market watchdogs. By contrast, command and control regulation that affirmatively limits financial firms’ products or pricing is relatively uncommon. This Article describes a remarkable inversion of this pattern: while state insurance regulation frequently employs aggressive command and control consumer protection regulation, it typically does little or nothing to promote transparent markets. Rather, state lawmakers routinely either completely ignore transparency-oriented reforms …

Hybrid Energy Governance, Hari M. Osofsky, Hannah J. Wiseman

Articles

This Article develops a novel theory of energy governance and uses it to assess how institutional innovation can help meet critical challenges. Energy law is substantively complex and deeply fragmented. Each energy sector - including fuel extraction and pipelines, electricity generation and transmission, and transportation - has its own legal regime and federalism approach; confusion often exists at moments of crisis about how much authority federal, state, and local regulators have in these areas. The complexity and fragmentation of energy law are particularly problematic because the energy system faces major transitions due to emerging technology, more unpredictable and extreme weather …

Bringing A World Of Light To Technology And Judicial Ethics, David Hricik

Articles

The Luddites thought that by smashing machines in early 19th Century England, they could eliminate the threat that those machines presented to them. Of course, they were wrong. As was the case during the Luddites’ time, technology continues to march inexorably onward in today’s society. As a result, those within the legal community—judges in particular—have no choice but to begin using technology. Although judges are currently using technology, they sometimes do so without understanding what they are doing.

Already, today’s “new-fangled” contraptions have ensnared judges. Perhaps the most widely known example is Judge Kozinski of the United States Court of …

A Strange Kind Of Identity Theft: How Competing Definitions Of "Indian" May Deny Individual Identity, Suzianne D. Painter-Thorne

Articles

To the extent we think about it all, most of us believe what our parents tell us about where we came from-about who our grandparents are, who our ancestors were, our ethnic background, our family histories. My own family story includes claims to Scottish, Irish, French, and English ancestry. It also includes the Cherokee great-grandmother so popular in American genealogical stories. I have not undertaken an extensive genealogical search to more accurately pinpoint the threads of my ancestral quilt; I have simply accepted the family lore without much thought to whether it was verifiable.

My family's claimed link to the …

Post-Polymerization Modifications Of Polymeric Monolithic Columns: A Review, Sinead Currivan, Pavel Jandera

Articles

The vast cache of methods used in polymeric monolithic column modification is presented herein, with specific attention to post-polymerization modification reactions. The modification of polymeric monolithic columns is defined and can include the modification of pre-existing surface groups, the addition of polymeric chains or indeed the addition of structures such as nano-particles and nano-structures. The use of these modifications can result in the specific patterning of monoliths, useful in microfluidic device design or in the investigation of modification optimization.

H-Index For Quantifying The Fractal Or Scaling Structure Of Geographic Features, Bin Jiang, Junjun Yin

Articles

Although geographic features, such as mountains and coastlines, are fractal, some studies have claimed that the fractal property is not universal. This claim, which is dubious, is mainly attributed to the strict definition of fractal dimension as a measure or index for characterizing the complexity of fractals. In this article, we propose an alternative, ht-index, to quantify the fractal or scaling structure of geographic features. A geographic feature has ht-index (h) if the pattern of far more small things than large ones recurs (h – 1) times at different scales. The higher the ht-index, the more complex …

Mitigating The Impacts Of The Renewable Energy Gold Rush, Amy Wilson Morris, Jessica Owley

Articles

No abstract provided.

Cultivating Professional Identity & Creating Community: A Tale Of Two Innovations, Jan L. Jacobowitz

Articles

No abstract provided.

Quantitative Trait Loci Underlying Partial Resistance To Cercospora Sojina Race 2 Detected In Soybean Seedlings In Greenhouse Assays, Hemlata Sharma, David A. Lightfoot

Articles

Cercospora sojina (Hara), an air-borne pathogen, infects soybean [Glycine max (L.) Merr.] leaves causing frog-eye leaf spot (FLS). Three major genes (Rcs1-3) underlie resistance to the major races of FLS but two were not yet mapped. In addition quantitative trait loci provide partial resistance to many strains. FLS race 2 was an isolate first collected in the 1950’s when damaging FLS first arose. ‘Essex’ was partially resistant while ‘Forrest’ was partially susceptible to mixed races of FLS. The objective here was to identify quantitative trait loci underlying resistance to FLS race 2 in the greenhouse using recombinant inbred lines (RILs) …

Hate Speech In Cyberspace, Richard Delgado, Jean Stefancic

Articles

Coauthored with Jean Stefancic Hate Speech in Cyberspace analyzes why hate speech and other expressions of contempt are so ubiquitous on the Internet Building on our previous work on hate speech we identify features of cyberspace that predispose users to communicate in this fashion and suggest a number of remedies

Frequent Approximation Of The Bayesian Posterior Inclusion Probability By Stochastic Subsampling, Ernest Fokoue, Vi Ly

Articles

No abstract provided.

When Bank Examiners Get It Wrong: Financial Institution Appeals Of Material Supervisory Determinations, Julie Andersen Hill

Articles

Banks and credit unions sometimes complain that the examination process regulators use to police banking practices is oppressive. These financial institutions complain that regulators reach unduly negative examination conclusions known as "material supervisory determinations." Institutions are wary because negative determinations can subject an institution to further regulatory scrutiny or enforcement actions. To guard against erroneous determinations, Congress, in 1994, enacted a statute requiring federal financial institution regulators to provide an appeals process. Each of the four regulators (the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, the Federal Reserve, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, and the National Credit Union Administration) adopted …

Banks, Marijuana, And Federalism Symposium: Marijuana, Federal Power, And The States, Julie Andersen Hill

Articles

Although marijuana is illegal under federal law, twenty-three states have legalized some marijuana use. The state-legal marijuana industry is flourishing, but marijuana-related businesses report diffi- culty accessing banking services. Because financial institutions will not allow marijuana-related businesses to open accounts, the mari- juana industry largely operates on a cash-only basis-a situation that attracts thieves and tax cheats. This Article explores the root of the marijuana banking problem as well as possible solutions. It explains that although the United States' dual banking system comprises both federal- and state- chartered institutions, when it comes to marijuana banking, federal regulation is pervasive and …

Introduction: Still Learning From New York Times V. Sullivan, Paul Horwitz

Articles

No abstract provided.

Zombies Among Us: Injunctions In Defamation Cases Come Back From The Dead, Jim Stewart, Leonard M. Niehoff

Articles

Here's a scary thought: an individual, unhappy with negative statements that have been made about him, sues for defamation and persuades the trial court to issue an injunction prohibiting the speaker from engaging in that speech again. An appellate court reviews the injunction and, in large measure, upholds it. This creepy scenario brings shudders to free speech and media advocates, who have long viewed such injunctions as prior restraints that the First Amendment forbids in all but the most extreme and extraordinary cases. As a recent decision from the Michigan Court of Appeals demonstrates, however, decades of United States Supreme …

Hobby Lobby And The Pathology Of Citizens United, Ellen D. Katz

Articles

Four years ago, Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission held that for-profit corporations possess a First Amendment right to make independent campaign expenditures. In so doing, the United States Supreme Court invited speculation that such corporations might possess other First Amendment rights as well. The petitioners in Conestoga Wood Specialties Corp. v. Sebelius are now arguing that for-profit corporations are among the intended beneficiaries of the Free Exercise Clause and, along with the respondents in Sebelius v. Hobby Lobby Stores, that they also qualify as “persons” under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA). Neither suggestion follows inexorably from Citizens United, …

Contemporary Practice Of The United States Relating To International Law, October 2014, Kristina Daugirdas, Julian Davis Mortenson

Articles

In this section: • United States Condemns Russia’s Use of Force in Ukraine and Attempted Annexation of Crimea • In Wake of Espionage Revelations, United States Declines to Reach Comprehensive Intelligence Agreement with Germany • United States Defends United Nations’ Immunity in Haitian Cholera Case • French Bank Pleads Guilty to Criminal Violations of U.S. Sanctions Laws • D.C. Circuit Strikes down Administrative Order Requiring Divestment by Foreign-Owned Corporation • United States Adopts New Land Mine Policy • United States Claims That Russia Has Violated the INF Treaty

Contemporary Practice Of The United States Relating To International Law, July 2014, Kristina Daugirdas, Julian Davis Mortenson

Articles

United States Negotiates Prisoner Exchange to Secure Release of U.S. Soldier Held in Afghanistan • United States Refuses to Grant Visa to Iranian UN Envoy • Multilateral Naval Code of Conduct Aims to Prevent Unintended Conflict in Contested Areas of East and South China Seas • Senate Approves Treaties to Regulate Fishing • United States Indicts Chinese Military Officials for Economic Espionage • U.S. Supreme Court Declines to Terminate Long-Running Efforts to Force Argentina to Pay Defaulted Sovereign Debt • United States Condemns Uganda’s Antigay Law as Violating Human Rights • President Barack Obama Certifies That U.S. Peacekeepers in Mali …

Access To Optometric Education: Challenges In Sub-Saharan Africa, James Loughman, V.R. Moodley, Brien Holden, K. Naidoo

Articles

Access to education was identified as a key international priority by UNESCO as far back as 1998 when it called for “equality of access”. The profession of optometry has been challenged to educate practitioners in increasing numbers in order to meet the eye care needs. The World Health Organization reported that globally, an estimated 285 million people are visually impaired and in Sub Saharan Africa (SSA) uncorrected refractive error is the main cause of visual impairment. The number of optometrists trained on the continent is currently insufficient to meet these eye care needs with limited access to education remaining a …

Egypt, Lila Meadows, Nadia Adib Bamieh, Janet E. Lord

Articles

No abstract provided.

Hamiltonian Approach To The Modeling Of Internal Geophysical Waves With Vorticity, Alan Compelli

Articles

We examine a simplified model of internal geophysical waves in a rotational 2-dimensional water-wave system, under the influence of Coriolis forces and with gravitationally induced waves. The system consists of a lower medium, bound underneath by an impermeable flat bed, and an upper lid. The 2 media have a free common interface. Both media have constant density and constant (non-zero) vorticity. By examining the governing equations of the system we calculate the Hamiltonian of the system in terms of its conjugate variables and perform a variable transformation to show that it has canonical Hamiltonian structure. We then linearize the system, …

Hamiltonian Formulation Of 2 Bounded Immiscible Media With Constant Non-Zero Vorticities And A Common Interface, Alan Compelli

Articles

We examine a 2-dimensional water-wave system, with gravitationally induced waves, consisting of a lower medium bound underneath by an impermeable flat bed and an upper medium bound above by an impermeable lid such that the 2 media have a free common interface. Both media have constant density and constant (non-zero) vorticity. By examining the governing equations of the system we calculate the Hamiltonian of the system in terms of it's conjugate variables and per- form a variable transformation to show that it has canonical Hamiltonian structure.