Digital Commons Network^™

Women And Corporate Governance: Time Horizons And Stakeholder Analysis, June R. Carbone

Articles

This Article will build on my earlier work with Naomi Cahn and Nancy Levit to use the fate of women in individual companies to shine new light on the temporal orientations underlying corporate and labor and employment law and provide a basis for a new foundation for a combined approach. This Article will first explain why the shift to shareholder primacy, and the accompanying emphasis on short-term results tied to high stakes bonus pay, disproportionately short-changes female employees, whether in management or in line positions. The Article will maintain that it is not the shift to shareholder primacy in isolation, …

Presidential Control And Administrative Capacity, Nicholas Bednar

Articles

Presidential control is the power to direct administrative capacity toward the President’s own policy objectives. Accordingly, presidential power vis-à-vis administrative policymaking has two necessary components: control and capacity. First, the President must have the ability to set the agency’s policymaking agenda and direct the day-to-day activities of its leadership and career employees. Second, the agency needs a well-managed team of policymakers with expertise and experience in both the substantive policy area and the policymaking process. Yet scholars have long assumed—without much empirical testing—that the administrative state has sufficient capacity to implement the President’s agenda. Not so.

This Article argues that …

Abuse Of Power In The Workplace: The New Gender Discrimination Claims, June R. Carbone, Nancy Levit, Naomi Cahn

Articles

This article draws on our book, Fair Shake: Women and the Fight to Build a Just Economy, to show how the fight for gender equality has changed. Antidiscrimination laws took hold during an era of relative economic equality; the fight for gender equality was a fight to gain access to the rights of white men. Today’s economy creates much greater inequality and reserves the greatest rewards for a much smaller group, again predominately white and male, who can defy the rules and get away with it. In such contexts, anti-discrimination law premised on a fight for equality can provide only …

Phyllis Schlafly And How Forgetting Women's Struggles For Equality Perpetuates Inequality, Jill Elaine Hasday

Articles

In a nation whose Constitution purports to speak for “We the People,” too many of the stories that powerful Americans tell about law and society include only We the Men. A long line of judges, politicians, and other influential voices have ignored women’s struggles for equality or distorted them beyond recognition by wildly exaggerating American progress. Even as sexism continues to warp constitutional law, political decisionmaking, and everyday life, prominent Americans have spent more than a century proclaiming that the United States has already left sex discrimination behind.

This symposium essay draws on my book, We the Men, to …

Collegiate Nil Collectives: Context, Structure, And Future, Matthew T. Bodie, Esdras D. Camacho

Articles

Since its inception, the NCAA has championed the principle of amateurism in college sports-the idea that collegiate athletes may not receive monetary compensation for their athletic performance. In its 2021 decision in National Collegiate Athletic Association v. Alston, however, the Supreme Court found the NCAA had violated antitrust law with its restrictions on certain benefits provided to athletes. With the possibility of much greater liability to follow, the NCAA soon thereafter enacted a radical departure from past practice, enabling athletes to profit from their names, images, and likenesses ("NIL") while maintaining their amateur status. There were important limitations on this …

The Emerging Framework For The Recognition & Enforcement Of Annulled Arbitral Awards In U.S. Jurisprudence, Sarah Klim

Articles

The recognition and enforcement of foreign awards are governed almost universally by the United Nations Convention on the Recognition and Enforcement of Foreign Arbitral Awards (the "New York Convention"). However, this recognition and enforcement necessarily invokes national judicial power. The New York Convention does not devise a harmonized set of rules for courts to follow when faced with a request to recognize and enforce an annulled award. This has resulted in divergent approaches by national courts, which derive "not from any perversity of judges but from good faith variants in perspectives on how to construe the treaty."  This paper seeks …

Altering Rules: The New Frontier For Corporate Governance, Gabriel Rauterberg, Sarath Sanga

Articles

Corporate law has taken a contractarian turn. Shareholders are increasingly contracting around its foundational rules—statutory rights, the fiduciary duty of loyalty, even the central role of the board—and Delaware courts are increasingly enforcing these contracts. In the one case where they did not, the legislature swiftly overruled the decision and adopted a new statutory provision permitting boards to completely cede their powers to a shareholder by contract. These developments have sparked a polarized debate, with some calling for a return to mandatory rules, while others push for total contractual freedom.

We argue, however, that the best approach lies neither in …

Judicial Economy In The Age Of Ai, Yonathan A. Arbel

Articles

Individuals do not vindicate the majority of their legal claims because of access to justice barriers. This entrenched state of affairs is now facing a disruption. Lawyers and non-lawyers alike are adopting artificial intelligence (AI) tools to perform legal tasks tools that sharply reduce the costs of generating legal materials. There is finally hope that AI might allow many more to access justice.

Paradoxically, what we gain in access to justice we might lose in the delivery of justice. The problem is not that AI tools are ineffective. Indeed, they are even more effective than most realize affecting every stage …

Employment And Identity, Matthew T. Bodie

Articles

Work shapes our identities, and our identities shape our work. The tension between personal identity and work identity drives popular culture, as seen in shows like Severance and The Bear, and it frames our conceptions about who we are and what gives our lives meaning. In many respects the law has assumed a clear separation between work lives and personal lives, divvying up control and responsibility over these realms on that basis. But the divide, never absolute, has blurred considerably through technological change, legal developments, and social expectations, resulting in a more pervasive employer presence in both our workspaces and …

The Law Of Energy Abundance, Alexandra B. Klass, Matthew Appel

Articles

For the first time in decades, electricity demand in the United States is increasing due to the growth of data centers to power artificial intelligence, new manufacturing hubs, and transportation electrification. At the same time, coalfired power plants have been closing in response to competition from lower cost natural gas and renewable energy. Clean energy is being rapidly deployed to replace fossil fuels but not quickly enough to address concerns about demand growth and grid reliability. Accordingly, there is a growing imbalance between electricity supply and demand in many regions of the country that threatens to increase electricity prices and …

Boden Lecture: Taxation Of Autonomous Artificial Intelligence, Reuven S. Avi-Yonah, Lucas Brasil Salama, Herbert Snitz, W. Robert Thomas

Articles

This Article proposes that tax can be a useful supplement to other measures to regulate Autonomous Artificial Intelligence (AAI) and limit its potential harmful effects. This proposal differs from command-and-control regulation of AAI along the lines of European Union legislation that may unduly limit the development of AAI. It also differs from existing proposals to tax AAI to generate revenue to help workers displaced by AAI programs, or to tax the data used by AAI The proposal is based on granting AAI programs like ChatGPT separate legal personhood, like corporate personhood, while incentivizing or requiring their corporate owner to place …

Reckoning With Social Policy In Utility Regulation, Alexandra B. Klass, Gabriel Chan

Articles

State public utility regulation in the energy sector is undergoing a rapid transformation driven by public and private investment in clean energy deployment, the corresponding threat to incumbent fossil fuel interests, and growing demands for energy justice. This transformation will impact many aspects of societal well-being—from energy insecurity in disadvantaged communities to dramatic shifts in energy-sector employment—so it is unsurprising that public utility commissions would engage with social policy concerns. However, for decades, state courts and utility stakeholders have admonished commissions that they are economic regulators and that their jurisdiction does not include social policy. This Article shows that state …

Creditors, Shareholders, And Losers In Between: A Failed Regulatory Experiment, Albert H. Choi, Jeffery Zhang

Articles

In the aftermath of the 2007–08 Global Financial Crisis, regulators encouraged many of the world’s largest banks to hold a new type of regulatory instrument with the goal of improving their safety and soundness. The regulatory instrument was known as a “CoCo,” short for contingent convertible bond. CoCos are neither debt nor equity. They are something in between, designed to give the bank a shot in the arm during times of stress. Many of the largest international banks have issued CoCos worth hundreds of billions of dollars. After more than ten years—a decade that includes the collapse of Credit Suisse …

Sustainable Enzymatic Extraction Of High-Purity Chitin From Button Mushroom (Agaricus Bisporus) Off-Production Waste: Influence Of Alkaline Pre-Treatment On Physicochemical Properties, Buliyaminu A. Alimi, Shivani Pathania, Jude Wilson, Brendan Duffy, Jesus Maria Frias

Articles

This study investigated chitin extraction from the stalks and atypical mushrooms, the often-produced waste in the mushroom production process, using a simultaneous application of protease and glucanase with or without an alkaline pretreatment stage. A commercial chitin, chemically extracted from A. bisporus was used as the control. The purity of extracted chitin (98.92–99.36 %) was slightly lower than commercial chitin (99.80 %), but with comparable physicochemical properties (p < 0.05). All enzymatically extracted chitin in this study exhibited an agglomerated, microfibrillar and irregular structure, while the control showed standalone granules with weathering and cracks on the surfaces. The XRD and FTIR spectra indicated that the extracted chitin and the control belong to the α-allotrope group. The degree of acetylation was higher in the extracted chitin (76.97–78.22 %) than in the control (75.05 %). The highest molecular weight obtained for the extracted chitin was 4.53 × 102 KDa (W0548). The study demonstrated the possibility of producing pure, high molecular weight chitin from the waste produced during the commercial production of button mushrooms, using a potentially more sustainable approach than the traditional one. This enzymatic approach reduces chemical waste, as shown by the excellent results obtained for samples without the pre-treatment stage, and improves environmental safety compared to traditional methods.

Physicists As Environmental Experts, Rachel Rothschild

Articles

The question of which scientists are qualified to provide expert guidance in legal controversies is a perennial debate among scholars, judges, and lawyers. Scientists who participate in legal disputes can achieve enormous power and influence, not only over the case at hand but over long-term developments in legal doctrine. While these issues arise in many areas of the law, environmental litigation has been a particularly active site of contestations over epistemic authority. Courts have frequently relied on scientists to understand whether the government is justified in regulating pollution and who may be liable for environmental and public health harms.

This …

Law, Conflict, And Hybrid Warfare: A Teaching Imperative For A Changing World, Cynthia Alkon, Andrea K. Schneider

Articles

Lawyers increasingly find themselves at the frontlines of the battlefield, just not in the traditional sense. Hybrid warfare is a conflict form that combines traditional military offensive measures with nontraditional methods, including the harnessing of legal systems to achieve strategic goals. Lawyers have always been at the frontline of typical legal risk assessment, thinking about a client's risk of liability or regulation costs generally. Now, lawyers must stand at the ready for a lot more: lawyers must be prepared for cyber-attacks, disinformation campaigns using artificial intelligence, the use of court systems to suppress reporting or shield bad actors, and so …

Coopting Disruption, Mark A. Lemley, Matthew Wansley

Articles

Our economy is dominated by five aging tech giants – Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta, and Microsoft. In the last twenty years, no company has commercialized a new technology in a way that threatens them. Why?

We argue that the tech giants have learned how to coopt disruption. They identify potentially disruptive technologies, use their money to influence the startups developing them, strategically dole out access to the resources the startups need to grow, and seek regulation that makes it harder for the startups to compete. When a threat emerges, they buy it off. And after they acquire a startup, they …

The Big Four [Accounting] Law Firms: It's Past Time For The Practice Of Law To Get In The Game, Edward S. Adams, John H. Matheson

Articles

New legal services models like ABSs and accommodations like UPL waivers provide multiple positive outcomes. These business structures increase access to legal services, particularly for low and middle-income individuals who are currently priced out of them. By allowing these services to be conducted by nonlawyers, the current supply gap could be closed or completely eliminated. Also, the increased pressure on law firms from corporations and ABSs promotes free market competition. Law firms will be forced to either find a way to differentiate their expertise and services or face a serious threat due to the rejection of the traditional billable hour …

A Comprehensive Review Of The Application Of Cold Plasma Technology In Lignocellulosic Biomass Pretreatment, Rasaq S. Abolore, Swarna Jaiswal, Amit K. Jaiswal

Articles

Lignocellulosic biomass (LCB) is a promising feedstock for the sustainable production of biofuels and other biobased products, owing to its abundance, low cost, and minimal competition with food crops for resources. It is mainly composed of cellulose, hemicellulose, and lignin, forming a complex biomass matrix. Its utilization is hindered by its complex structure and pretreatment is required to break down the chemical resistance caused by the strong association between the cellulose, hemicellulose, and lignin structures. Conventional methods such as acid and alkali pretreatment are used frequently but they require the use of high temperatures, high pressure, and corrosive chemicals. This …

Hypnosis And Mindfulness Audio Recordings For Reducing Fatigue In Individuals With Multiple Sclerosis: A Randomized Controlled Study, Mark P. Jensen, Susan Robles, Michael G. Nash, Susanne May, Dwan M. Ehde, Melissa A. Day, Owen Gottlieb, Laurence I. Sugarman, Kevin N. Alschuler

Articles

Background

Fatigue is a common problem in individuals with multiple sclerosis (MS).

Objective

The objective was to evaluate the effects on fatigue of having 4 weeks of

access to audio recordings of therapeutic hypnosis (HYP) and mindfulness meditation

(MM) practices.

Methods

A total of 333 individuals with MS and fatigue were randomly assigned to

one of the three treatment conditions for 28 weeks: (1) access to therapeutic HYP audio

recordings, (2) access to MM audio recordings, or (3) no access to recordings

(treatment as usual or TAU). Fatigue impact (primary outcome) and other outcomes

were assessed at 4, 16, and …

Theoretical And Experimental Investigation Of Slanted Volume Transmission Gratings For Holographic Gas Sensing, Graceson Antony, Dervil Cody, Svetlana Mintova, Izabela Naydenova

Articles

Slanted photopolymer-based diffraction gratings can undergo instant and quantifiable analyte-induced changes in both grating diffraction efficiency and peak reconstruction wavelength. This makes them an attractive option for gas sensing applications. The underlying mechanism for the sensor response is, however, poorly understood due to its complexity; the gaseous analytes produce simultaneous changes in multiple grating parameters (refractive index, thickness, refractive index modulation, and slant angle). Here, a novel and robust approach to the experimental characterization and theoretical analysis of holographic gas sensors based on slanted volume transmission gratings is presented. Slanted transmission gratings were fabricated in both undoped and MFI nanozeolite-doped …

Enhancement Of Intersystem Crossing In Asymmetrically Substituted Bodipy Photosensitizers, Mikhail Filatov, Tatsiana Mikulchyk, Maxine Hodee, Metodej Dvoracek, Venkata N.K. Mamillapalli, Aimee Sheehan, Craig Newman, Sergey M. Borisov, Daniel Escudero, Izabela Naydenova

Articles

We present a novel method to promote intersystem crossing (ISC) and triplet state formation in boron dipyrromethenes (BODIPYs) through the asymmetrical introduction of functional groups within the chromophore. This approach enables the development of new BODIPY photosensitizers without relying on the incorporation of heavy atoms or large electron-donating aromatic groups. Demonstrated on a series of 14 synthesized asymmetrical BODIPY (aBDP) compounds, it significantly enhances photosensitization efficiency compared to the reference symmetrical BODIPYs. In particular, the asymmetrical introduction of ethoxycarbonyl groups into pyrrolic rings of the BODIPY core lead to efficient ISC and singlet oxygen generation, with quantum yields reaching 0.76 …

Modelling The Formation Of Unslanted Holographic Gratings In Hybrid Photopolymer Media, Jack Lyons, Dana Mackey, Izabela Naydenova

Articles

The theoretical modelling of holographic recording in photopolymers has been an important tool in their optimisation. More complex, hybrid organic/inorganic photopolymers have been developed in pursuit of materials with higher sensitivity, low shrinkage, high dynamic range and environmental stability. Recent attempts to augment the existing models for the redistribution of inorganic nanoparticles in holographic recording were successful but there is still a knowledge gap in regards to modelling optical losses, mutual cross-diffusion, the formation of slanted holographic gratings and polymerization induced shrinkage in hybrid photopolymer media. This paper will describe a novel approach to modelling the formation of unslanted holographic …

Power Utilization In Open Ran: Key Findings From A Usa Testbed, Saish Urumkar, Byrav Ramamurthy, Seshu Tirupathi, Sachin Sharma

Articles

Open Radio Access Networks (Open RAN) provide flexible, scalable, and interoperable solutions to address the growing demands of mobile traffic while also aiming to reduce energy consumption. Most prior research on energy-efficient Open RAN has focused on switching techniques such as dynamic cell on/off strategies and adaptive resource allocation, primarily through simulations. This letter investigates Central Processing Unit (CPU) power utilization at the NodeB (base station) level, focusing on User Equipment (UE) connection states by making use of a USA testbed (i.e., POWDER testbed). Two scenarios are considered for the experimental setup: (1) a simulated virtual environment with a single …

A Critical Review Of Consumer Perception And Environmental Impacts Of Bioplastics In Sustainable Food Packaging, Junjie Lin, Amit K. Jaiswal, Swarna Jaiswal

Articles

As awareness of environmental issues deepens and the demand for sustainability grows among societies, businesses, and consumers, minimizing the environmental impact of food packaging has become increasingly important. Bioplastics offer a promising solution due to their use of renewable resources (such as plants), their biodegradability, and their ability to retain the protective properties of traditional plastics. This review discusses recent advancements and trends in sustainable food packaging, emphasizing the role of bioplastics. Several typical types of bioplastics are introduced, along with an analysis of their advantages and limitations. Furthermore, this study investigates consumers' attitudes toward bioplastic food packaging, emphasizing their …

Exploring The Sustainability Of Single Use Plastics In The Biopharmaceuticals Sector: A Scoping Review Of Challenges, Opportunities And Impact, Cormac Mcmahon, Adrienne F. M. Fleming, Philip Owende, Malcolm Goggin

Articles

Single-use plastics (SUPs) are synonymous with the biopharmaceuticals sector, facilitating economies of scale, process efficiency, flexibility and sterility assurance, all with a seemingly negligible environmental footprint. Yet, in ever-tightening regulation, mandated by the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and by concern for large-scale industrial impacts, the sustainability of SUP consumption is increasingly being questioned. Whilst the sector contributes to human welfare, its transition risk is unlikely to remain immune to societal pressure for more sustainable production. This paper aims to present a scoping review of the apparent contradiction between sectoral SUP adoption and the increasing importance of circularity. The approach to …

Human Masters/Robot Servants: Highly Automated Vehicle Design, Intoxicated Drivers & Vicarious Liability, William H. Widen, Marilyn C. Wolf

Articles

A traditional engineering role is to design a safe product. Safety engineering is an exercise in harm avoidance ex ante. In contrast, liability attribution is an exercise to compensate for loss post hoc — traditionally viewed as a legal matter. We observe that, when a natural person incurs liability for a loss that exceeds insurance coverage, economic ruin can follow. Neither engineering nor law focus on the loss suffered by defendants considering law as a "safety risk." The highly automated vehicle (HAV) design space, however, provides an opportunity to prevent this kind of economic harm from occurring ex ante just …

Math And Aftermath: Impacts Of Unbundling A Large Journal Package On Researcher Perceptions And Behavior, Kizer S. Walker, Adam Chandler, Caitlin Finlay, Gabriela Castro Gessner, Tobi Hines, Jesse Koennecke, Susan Kendrick, Leah Mcewen, Jacob Sayward, Henrik W.W. Spoon

Articles

This study seeks to understand the effects on researchers’ work at a large research university in the wake of the university library’s shift from a near-comprehensive journals package with a single, large publisher to a selective list of individual journal subscriptions. Analyzing historical journal usage, along with turnaway and interlibrary loan trends from the years following the changes, the authors made use of structured interviews with local researchers to bring context and meaning to the quantitative data. The interviews highlighted researchers’ strategies for gaining access to literature in their fields to which the library does not subscribe, and revealed assumptions …

Fairness In Contract Law: An Impossibility Theorem?, Francesco Parisi, Brian H. Bix

Articles

Scholars have long debated whether contract law should prioritize maximizing efficiency and social welfare or, instead, prioritize justice, fairness and other deontological values. The debate is partly prescriptive (what should we try to do with contract law rules) and partly conceptual (how should we understand contract law). This article surveys central positions in this debate, distinguishing between the corrective and redistributive functions of contract law and between doing justice between the parties and more systemic effects. It highlights an impossibility theorem that underscores the self-defeating nature of redistributive policies in price-based contractual relationships, using a numerical example and two policy …

Economic History And The Remaking Of Family Law, June R. Carbone, Naomi Cahn

Articles

In looking at the history of family law, we locate family law – and the status of women and children within it – as a function of political economy. That is, family law is shaped by a societal system that allocates access to, and control of, sources of wealth, decision-making power, and responsibility for dependents. As the nature of family assets has changed from land to male wage labor to two incomes and a complex set of complementary employer and state-provided benefits, so too have family dynamics and, ultimately, family law. They have evolved into the contemporary system, with a …