Digital Commons Network^™

Availability Cascades And Risk Regulation, Cass R. Sunstein, Timur Kuran

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An availability cascade is a self-reinforcing process of collective belief formation by which an expressed perception triggers a chain reaction that gives the perception increasing plausibility through its rising availability in public discourse. The driving mechanism involves a combination of informational and reputational motives: Individuals endorse the perception partly by learning from the apparent beliefs of others and partly by distorting their public responses in the interest of maintaining social acceptance. Availability entrepreneurs- activists who manipulate the content of public discourse-strive to trigger availability cascades likely to advance their agendas. Their availability campaigns may yield social benefits, but sometimes they …

Controlling The Costs Of Alternative Medicine, Lior Strahilevitz

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No abstract provided.

Two Cheers For Cheerleading: The Noisy Integration Of Vmi And The Quiet Success Of Virginia Women In Leadership The Law Of Sex Discrimination, Mary Anne Case

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No abstract provided.

Regulating Network Industries: A Look At Intel, Randal C. Picker

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No abstract provided.

Dworkin, Polemics, And The Clinton Impeachment Controversy, Richard A. Posner

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No abstract provided.

Status Signaling And The Law, With Particular Application To Sexual Harassment, Richard A. Posner, Gertrud M. Fremling

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No abstract provided.

Sex Discrimination In Life And Law, Diane P. Wood

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No abstract provided.

Mine Disaster Threatens Spain's Donana National Park, Jerrold A. Long

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No abstract provided.

The Politics Of Race On The Electronic Highway: An Analysis Of The Video Dialtone Redlining Cases And The Nynex Consent Decree In Roxbury, Madeleine M. Plasencia

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No abstract provided.

Professors And Politics, Cass R. Sunstein

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No abstract provided.

More Light Thoughts And Night Thoughts On The American Family, Judith T. Younger

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No abstract provided.

Search Tools: Skills And Strategies, Robin Schard

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No abstract provided.

Prosecuting Race, Anthony V. Alfieri

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Theoreticians and practitioners in the American criminal justice system increasingly debate the role of racial identity, racialized narratives, and race-neutral representation in law, lawyering, and ethics.

This debate holds special bearing on the growing prosecution and defense of acts of racially motivated violence. In this continuing investigation of the prosecution and defense of such violence, Professor Alfieri examines the recent federal prosecution of five white New York City police officers charged with assaulting Abner Louima, a young male Haitian immigrant, in 1997. Professor Alfieri presents a race conscious, community-oriented model of prosecutorial discretion guided by constitutional precepts, citizenship ideals, professionalism …

Mirrored Silence: Reflections On Judicial Complicity In Private Violence, Zanita E. Fenton

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Tracy and John had been married for seven years. They were so in love when they met at college. He brought her flowers and wanted to spend all of his free time with her. Everything was perfect. But it seemed to become increasingly tumultuous as soon as they got married, two years later. He didn't just want to spend all of his time with her; he had to know what she was doing every waking moment of the day. He had to approve of her activities and her friends. He called her at work every day. If she wasn't at …

Finding The Constitution: An Economic Analysis Of Tradition's Role In Constitutional Interpretation, Adam C. Pritchard, Todd J. Zywicki

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In this Article, Professor Pritchard and Professor Zywicki examine the role of tradition in constitutional interpretation, a topic that has received significant attention in recent years. After outlining the current debate over the use of tradition, the authors discuss the efficiency purposes of constitutionalism--precommitment and the reduction of agency costs--and demonstrate how the use of tradition in constitutional interpretation can serve these purposes. Rejecting both Justice Scalia's majoritarian model, which focuses on legislative sources of tradition, and Justice Souter's common-law model, which focuses on Supreme Court precedent as a source of tradition, the authors propose an alternative model--the "finding model"-- …

Sincere And Strategic Voting Norms On Multimember Courts, Evan H. Caminker

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In appellate adjudication, decisions are rendered by a multimember court as a collective entity, not by individual judges. Yet legal scholars have only just begun to explore the formal and informal processes by which individual votes are transformed into a collective judgment.' In particular, they have paid insufficient attention to the ways in which the vote of each individual judge is influenced by the views of her colleagues on a multimember court.

In Memoriam: Lewis F. Powell, Jr., Christina B. Whitman

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At the time of his resignation, Justice Lewis F. Powell, Jr. was justly praised as a moderate, flexible jurist - open-minded, suspicious of ideology, most often found at the center of a divided Supreme Court. Yet Justice Powell was a man of deeply conservative instincts. Suspicious of invitations to expand the scope of individual constitutional rights, he was a participant and even a leader in the Court's reassertion of a federalism that emphasized deference to states and in its reinvigoration of restrictions on access to federal courts. His jurisprudence was all of a piece. Justice Powell's reluctance to expand federal …

Lost Lives: Miscarriages Of Justice In Capital Cases, Samuel R. Gross

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In case after case, erroneous conviction for capital murder has been proven. I contend that these are not disconnected accidents, but systematic consequences of the nature of homicice prosecution in the general and capital prosecution in particular - that in this respect, as in others, death distorts and undermines the course of the law.

Jury Reform At The End Of The Century: Real Agreement, Real Changes, Phoebe C. Ellsworth

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Complaints about the jury system and calls for its reform are nothing new-they have probably existed as long as the jury system itself. Warren Burger called for the reform of the civil jury in 1971'; in 1905 William Howard Taft decried the contemporary tendency "to exalt the jury's power beyond anything which is wise or prudent .... ,2 Judges complain to judges, lawyers complain to lawyers, legal academics write articles about the jury for other legal academics, social scientists report their research on juries to other social scientists, and the jurors themselves go home and express their exasperation to their …

Family Law And Gay And Lesbian Family Issues In The Twentieth Century, David L. Chambers, Nancy D. Polikoff

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Over these thirty years, lesbians and gay men have increasingly challenged conventional definitions of marriage and the family. In this brief article, we tell the story of gay people and family law in the United States across this period. We divide our discussion into two sections: issues regarding the recognition of the same-sex couple relationship and issues regarding gay men and lesbians as parents. These issues overlap, of course, but since family law discussions commonly treat adult-adult issues of all sorts separately from parent-child issues, we believe it convenient and helpful to do so as well.

Enhancing Autonomy For Battered Women: Lessons From Navajo Peacemaking, Donna Coker

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In this Article, Professor Donna Coker employs original empirical research to investigate the use of Navajo Peacemaking in cases involving domestic violence. Her analysis includes an examination of Navajo women's status and the impact of internal colonization. Many advocates for battered women worry that informal adjudication methods such as Peacemaking ignore domestic hierarchies of power and thus facilitate the batterer's ongoing violence against the victim. Those who endorse the use of Navajo Peacemaking and other systems of restorative justice believe that such processes are better equipped to cut through the batterer's denial and victim blaming and are more likely to …

2-(22, 8, 4) Designs Have No Blocks Of Type 3, Brendan Mckay, Stanislaw Radziszowski

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Using computer algorithms we show that in any 2-(22,8,4) design there are no blocks of type 3, thus leaving as possible only types 1 and 2. Blocks of type 3, i.e. those which intersect two others in one point, are eliminated using the algorithms described in our previous paper. It was perhaps the second largest computation ever performed (after the solution to the RSA129 challenge), requiring more than a century of cpu time.

Speckle Observations Of Binary Stars With The Wiyn Telescope. I. Measures During 1997, Elliott P. Horch, Zoran Ninkov, William F. Van Altena, Reed D. Meyer, Terrence M. Girard, J. Gethyn Timothy

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Two hundred seventy-seven position angle and separation measures of 154 double stars are presented. Three of the systems were previously unknown to be double, and 16 other systems were discovered earlier this decade by the Hipparcos satellite. Measures are derived from speckle observations taken with the Wisconsin-Indiana-Yale-NOAO (WIYN) 3.5 m telescope located at Kitt Peak, Arizona. Speckle images were obtained using two different imaging detectors, namely, a multianode microchannel array (MAMA) detector and a fast-readout CCD. A measurement precision study was performed on a sample of binaries with extremely well known orbits by comparing the measures obtained here to the …

The Type Ia Aupernova 1997br In Eso 576-G40, Weidong Li, Yulei Qiu, Q. Y. Qiao, Xiao-Hong Zhu, Michael W. Richmond, A. V. Filippenko, R. R. Treffers, C. Y. Peng, D. C. Leonard

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The peculiar type Ia supernova SN 1997br in ESO576-G40 was extensively observed at Beijing Astronomical Observatory (BAO) and Lick Observatory. In this paper, we present and discuss the BV RI photometry and the spectra collected over three months, starting from 9 days before maximum brightness. The light curves of SN 1997br are similar to those of SN 1991T, with slow decline rates after the B maximum. Well sampled data before the B maximum show unambiguously that SN 1997br rises more slowly and has a wider peak than normal type Ia supernovae. The optical color evolution of SN 1997br is also …

In-Camera Masking With 35mm Cameras, Andrew Davidhazy

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Also published in ABC of Photography online magazine. (March 1999) A variation of the process used by advertising and commercial photographers whereby a desired background scene is combined with a foreground subject using in-camera masking devices but in this article it is explained how this may also be accomplished with 35mm cameras.

The New Wild West: Measuring And Proving Fame And Dilution Under The Federal Trademark Dilution Act, Xuan-Thao Nguyen

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The passage of the Federal Trademark Dilution Act of 1995 (the Dilution Act or Act) has been widely celebrated, as evidenced by the number of related articles, speeches and symposia. Commentators who applauded the adoption of the Dilution Act believed that a dilution claim would now be easier to prove by trademark owners against diluters because trademark owners would not have to establish the troublesome factual issue of consumer confusion. The courts have embraced the Act, and it has already proven to be an effective weapon for trademark owners. One court has even suggested trademark owners asserting claims of dilution …

The Use Of Preclusion Doctrine, Antisuit Injunctions, And Forum Non Conveniens Dismissals In Transnational Intellectual Property Litigation, Peter Nicolas

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Conflicting standards among the federal circuits over the applicability of inherent powers in the transnational intellectual property context and the divided authority regarding the jurisdiction of U.S. federal courts over foreign intellectual property claims severely hamper the ability of federal district courts to use these tools in such a manner so as to prevent parties in transnational intellectual property suits from engaging in strategic behavior. This Comment seeks to reconcile these conflicts where possible and, where irreconcilable, to demonstrate that the text and history of federal statutes conferring subject matter jurisdiction on federal courts and placing limits on their issuance …

West Virginia's Adoption Statute: A History Of A Work In Progress, Lisa Kelly

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More than two years have passed since the Legislature reformed West Virginia's adoption statute. The goal of this article is to provide a kind of legislative history to deepen the reader's understanding of the current statute. This history will include an explanation of the West Virginia Law Institute's Proposal, as well as the Legislature's reaction to it. In Part II, I will detail this history. In Part III, I will explain the operation of the current statute, with mention of the few recent adoption decisions that have construed various provisions. In Part IV, I will look at some of the …

Telemedicine And Integrated Health Care Delivery: Compounding Malpractice Liability, Patricia C. Kuszler

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This Article considers how theories of medical negligence might be applied in the context of telemedicine and integrated delivery health plans. Part Two summarizes the history of telemedicine, its increasing breadth of application and opportunity and promise for the future. Part Three reviews traditional negligence principles and precedents and demonstrates how they might be applied when a telemedicine interaction results in negligence and harm to the patient. Part Four discusses evolving theories of shared liability applicable to health plans and managed care entities. Finally, Part Five demonstrates how shared liability theories will be applied to situations involving telemedicine technologies.

How Copyleft Uses License Rights To Succeed In The Open Source Software Revolution And The Implications For Article 2b, Robert W. Gomulkiewicz

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The computer industry moves from one “next great thing” to the next “next great thing” with amazing speed. Graphical user interface, object-oriented programming, client-server computing, multimedia software, Java applets, the network computer, and the Internet have all been hailed as technological breakthroughs at one time or another. Some of these promising developments fizzle, some evolve and succeed slowly, and some revolutionize the industry overnight.

Led by a group of software developers known as “hackers,” the latest “next great thing” is “open source” software. The word “source” refers to software in source code form. Source code is the collection of instructions …