Digital Commons Network^™

Mobility-Restricting Covenants In Business Contracts: The Case Of Franchising, Francine Lafontaine, Lorenzo G. Luisetto, J.J. Prescott

Articles

Several studies show that restrictive covenants in employment contracts, such as non-compete agreements, may affect employees in detrimental ways, including by reducing mobility and suppressing wages. While such concerns are real, these clauses also have the potential to serve legitimate business purposes by helping companies protect valuable information, which can encourage investment and training and enhance social welfare. This paper explores the use of several types of covenants, including non-competes but also confidentiality and post-relationship non-recruitment clauses, in franchise contracts, an important and accessible category of business contracts. Many of these contracts impose restrictive covenants on franchisees but also on …

Is Originalism Orthodoxy?, Neel Sukhatme

Articles

What theory of constitutional interpretation has the Supreme Court followed? We search Supreme Court opinions for a wide range of sources that originalists identify as central to their methodology, over the entire universe of cases beginning in 1791. We find that for much of Supreme Court history, conventional indicators of originalist practice--citations to Founding-era sources--are largely absent, raising questions about originalism's past orthodoxy. Originalist citation practices are absent for much of the 19th century and grow sharply in the late 20th century. The Article elaborates the implications of these findings for debates in constitutional law.

Can Laws Be Flexible? Rethinking Legislation For Innovation, Nicholson W. Price Ii, Nick K. Schneider, Ariel Dora Stem, Jochen K. Lennerz

Articles

Agile legislation adapts principles from agile software development to lawmaking, emphasizing iteration, multi-stakeholder feedback, and embedded revision. We outline this learning-oriented governance model using three case studies: Germany’s stepwise digital health legislation, the EU AI Act, and U.S. FDA user-fee reauthorization. These examples highlight legislative designs that enable structured generation of real-world data and evidence during implementation, informing regulatory interpretation and iterative refinement in rapidly evolving technological domains.

Owning The Al Revolution, George S. Georgiev

Articles

No abstract provided.

Preface To Volume 17, Issue 2, Peter A. Carfagna

Articles

No abstract provided.

Writing – Écriture, Peter Goodrich

Articles

This is the twentieth article in this series (and the fifth in volume 77).

Expert Asymmetry: Evidence From Securities Litigation, Adam Callister, Andrew Granato, Belisa Pang

Articles

Modern litigation often involves two separate, extra-legal features: (1) contingency fee arrangements with the plaintiff-side attorney, and (2) a “battle of the experts” where the outcome of the case rests on conflicting expert witness testimony. We construct a model to illustrate that when these features occur simultaneously, in contexts where plaintiff-side attorneys bear the cost of hiring experts upfront, defendants will spend systematically more than plaintiffs on hiring expert witnesses. Our model is motivated by hand-collected data from a decade of securities class action litigation, where we show that experts polarize into almost entirely plaintiff-side versus defense-side experts, that defense-side …

D-Methionine Improves Spatial Navigation And Attenuates Oxidative Stress And Amyloid Pathology In A Sex-Specific Manner., Mackenzie R Peck, Jenelle E Chapman, Tiarra Hill, Kathleen Quinn, Erol D Ikiz, Angel Lopez, Erin R Hascup, Chilman Bae, Kevin N Hascup

Articles

Background

Oxidative stress and maladaptive neuroimmune activation contribute to cognitive decline in Alzheimer's disease (AD) and represent therapeutic targets beyond amyloid-centered approaches.

Objective

To determine whether oral D-methionine (D-Met), a redox-active amino acid, reduces amyloid pathology and lipid peroxidation and confers disease-modifying benefits in AD models.

Methods

Male and female APP/PS1 and APP^NL−Fmice with advanced AD pathology received oral D-Met or vehicle. Behavioral assessments included locomotor activity and hippocampal-dependent spatial learning and memory. Amyloid burden, lipid peroxidation, peripheral metabolic, and inflammatory markers, and hippocampal microglial phenotypes were evaluated.

Results

D-Met did not alter locomotor or exploratory behavior but …

Emotional Intelligence And Teamwork In A Ship’S Bridge : A Proposed Training Framework For Upskilling, Sofia Kallou, Nikitas Nikitakos, Dimitrios A. Papachristos, Dimitrios Dalaklis, Momoko Kitada

Articles

The notion that computers equipped with software and artificial intelligence (AI) applications can effectively replace human intelligence is under the existing paradigm of operations. This is the leading facilitator of task automation on board a ship to fulfill various jobs and is often supported by numerous scientists/academics who contribute to gaining today’s momentum in public opinion. The discourse of Industry 4.0 in the maritime domain, however, tends to focus heavily on technological contexts and overlooks socio-economic contexts. This gap is evident in the strong emphasis on technical and digital skills for future maritime professionals. This paper, therefore, argues that the …

Technology Before, During, And After Incarceration: Current Product Landscape, Sociotechnical Concerns, And Legal Considerations In The U.S. Context, Yael Eiger, Taylor Hansen, Teanna Barrett, Jevan Hutson, Bryce Clayton Newell, Franziska Roesner

Articles

Emerging technology, including AI, is proliferating throughout the U.S. carceral system. These technologies are marketed to prisons and police departments and then procured using taxpayer money. Previous investigative reporting has exposed troubling kickback schemes, unconstitutional data collection practices, and biased algorithmic outcomes in a handful of prominent technologies (e.g., Flock, Palantir, Clearview AI, COMPAS). In this work, we consider the broader ecosystem of carceral technologies: we catalog 122 products from 53 companies selling technology to carceral institutions. In a collaboration among computer science, law, and surveillance studies scholars, we surface sociotechnical, ethical, and legal concerns related to the use and …

Ai, Medicine, And Social Determinants Of Health Data, Ryan Doyloo, Nicholson Price

Articles

This article examines how medical AI systems are incorporating SDoH data and the governance challenges that follow. The authors show that while SDoH integration can enhance clinical workflows and predictive accuracy — potentially improving outcomes for underserved populations — it also introduces acute risks of proxy discrimination, where facially neutral variables replicate protected characteristics. Surveying U.S., EU, and international frameworks, the authors argue that existing regimes lack clear ex ante guidance to distinguish beneficial from harmful uses of SDoH data. In response, they advance post-market monitoring as a pragmatic and scalable pathway: generating real-world, SDoH-stratified evidence that can support enforcement, …

Feedback Loops: What Am I Missing?, Patrick Barry

Articles

In May, 2024, The Wall Street Journal published an article titled “For Conversations You Dread, Try a Chatbot.” Here are the opening lines: Many people worry about the outsize role that AI may eventually play in our lives. But what if employing an AI program could actually help us with issues that cause fear and anxiety? We’ve found that it can be a surprisingly effective tool for figuring out how to approach emotionally charged conversations.

The Corporate Restructuring Machine: Introducing An Open Platform Approach To Workouts, Horst Eidenmüller, Jared Mayer

Articles

Out-of-court corporate reorganizations, or “corporate workouts,” allow dispersed investors with differing interests to coalesce and strike deals to successfully reorganize distressed companies. Corporate workouts, however, suffer from a host of well-known problems, creating “process fragility.” Current bargaining dynamics limit the instances in which corporate workouts can be used, narrow the kinds of deals that can be made, and invite opportunistic and other socially costly behavior. Yet the Artificial Intelligence (AI) revolution is here; how can it help parties navigate corporate workouts?

In this Article, we argue that AI is well situated to help increase the efficiency of corporate workouts. Based …

An Integrated Framework For Information Security Risk Management: A Mixed-Methods Systematic Literature Review, Biju Varghese, Quang "Neo" Bui

Articles

Driven by escalating threats and regulatory scrutiny, information security risk management (ISRM) is now a strategic imperative for organizations across the industrial spectrum. Although prior literature reviews offer valuable insights into ISRM subdomains, they remain fragmented and overly reliant on manual methods, limiting their scope and scalability. Additionally, only limited reviews have been able to comprehensively synthesize ISRM literature across its three foundational pillars: processes, governance, and strategy. To address this gap, we conduct a large-scale systematic literature review of 623 ISRM-related articles using a mixed-methods approach which combines natural language processing techniques with thematic analysis. We identify 22 thematic …

How Licensing Compromised The Library, Aaron Perzanowski

Articles

Libraries are under attack on multiple fronts. Fueled by right-wing talking points, social-media misinformation, and conspiratorial fantasy, efforts to remove or restrict access to books in public and school libraries have exploded across the United States. At the same time, libraries have confronted a disturbing rise in threats of violence and harassment directed at staff and patrons. State and federal actors have targeted library budgets. And on occasion, local residents have voted to defund their own libraries.

But it gets worse. Libraries face new challenges to their basic operations. Materials are harder than ever to acquire, and many in-demand digital …

Agency Fact-Making, Haiyun Damon-Feng

Articles

Modern administrative-law scholarship, theory, and doctrine generally conceptualize agencies as engaging in three primary functions: rulemaking, enforcement, and adjudication. This understanding of agencies has informed deep debates surrounding the power, independence, and constitutional legitimacy of the administrative state. But the prevailing account is incomplete. It overlooks a fourth core function of the administrative state: its fact-making, or epistemic, function. Across the administrative state, agencies create and disseminate information in ways that are uniquely comprehensive and uniquely powerful. Agencies’ epistemic outputs include the census generated by the Census Bureau, repositories of public-health information maintained by the Centers for Disease Control and …

Living To Die: Life Imprisonment Without Remission Or Parole In India, Preeti Pratishruti Dash, Rushil Batra

Articles

This article critically examines the Supreme Court of India’s use of life imprisonment without the possibility of remission or parole (LWORP) as a sentencing alternative to the death penalty. While the Constitution Bench in V Sriharan vs Union of India (2015) upheld the constitutionality of such sentences, it did not articulate principled standards governing their imposition. This article argues that the absence of such standards has produced a vacuum in LWORP sentencing. To substantiate this claim, we analyse fifty-three Supreme Court judgments delivered between 2016 and 2024 in which death sentences were commuted to LWORP. The analysis reveals widespread inconsistency …

Slurry-As-A-Service: A Modest Proposal On Scalable Pluralistic Alignment For Nutrient Optimization, Rachel Hong, Yael Eiger, Jevan Hutson, Os Keyes, William Agnew

Articles

Pluralistic alignment has emerged as a promising approach for ensuring that large language models (LLMs) faithfully represent the diversity, nuance, and conflict inherent in human values. In this work, we study a high-stakes deployment context—mulching—where automated systems transform selected individuals into nutrientrich slurry for the dual purposes of food security and aesthetic population management. Building on recent pluralistic alignment frameworks, we introduce ValueMulch™, a reproducible training, deployment, and certification pipeline for aligning mulching models (MMs) to a wide range of community norms. Through a real-world testbed spanning 32 communities, we show that ValueMulch™ improves distributional agreement with community mulching preferences …

How Ip Ends, Dave Fagundes, Aaron Perzanowski

Articles

Real and personal property may last forever, but intellectual property (IP) ends. Despite the doctrinal complexity and practical significance of the mechanisms that terminate IP rights, scholarship has scarcely focused on them, and none has analyzed these doctrines as a unified field. As a result, the discourse about the ways IP ends remains impoverished, with courts, legislatures, and commentators offering imprecise and inconsistent formulations that obscure the rationales for these doctrines. This Article offers the first comprehensive taxonomy of IP’s terminal mechanisms, providing much-needed conceptual and definitional coherence. It then reveals the underappreciated policy leverage these mechanisms can deliver and …

Brokering Safety, Chinmayi Sharma, Thomas E. Kadri, Sam Adler

Articles

For victims of abuse, safety means hiding. Not just hiding themselves, but also their contact details, their address, their workplace, their roommates, and any other information that could enable their abuser to target them. Yet today, no number of name changes and relocations can prevent data brokers from sharing a victim's personal information online. Thanks to brokers, abusers can find what they need with a single search, a few clicks, and a few dollars. For many victims, then, the best hope for safety lies in obscurity-that is, making themselves and their information harder to find.

This Article exposes privacy law's …

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 …

An Analysis Of Global And Regional Human Rights Standards On Gender-Based Violence, Tamar Ezer, Denisse R. Cordova Montes

Articles

No abstract provided.

The Shame Of Mass Torts, Anthony J. Sebok

Articles

No abstract provided.

Saturated Hierarchical Atomic Incremental Learning (Shail): A Behavioral Learning Perspective On Staged Mastery And Saturation, Ernest Fokoue

Articles

We introduce Saturated Hierarchical Atomic Incremental Learning (sHAIL), a learning paradigm in which complex tasks are approached through a sequence of simpler atomic subtasks, each mastered to saturation before progression. The central mechanism is a saturation criterion that detects when learning dynamics enter a plateau region, triggering consolidation and subsequent ascent to a higher level of task complexity. We develop a theoretical framework for sHAIL and show that it naturally gives rise to \emph{staircased convergence}: alternating phases of rapid improvement and genuine plateau. Within each level, classical convergence guarantees apply under standard smoothness conditions, while the hierarchical transitions are driven …

A General Weighting Theory For Ensemble Learning: Beyond Variance Reduction Via Spectral And Geometric Structure, Ernest Fokoue

Articles

Ensemble learning is traditionally justified as a variance-reduction strategy, explaining its strong performance for unstable predictors such as decision trees. This explanation, however, does not account for ensembles constructed from intrinsically stable estimators-including smoothing splines, kernel ridge regression, Gaussian process regression, and other regularized reproducing kernel Hilbert space (RKHS) methods whose variance is already tightly controlled by regularization and spectral shrinkage. This paper develops a general weighting theory for ensemble learning that moves beyond classical variance-reduction arguments. We formalize ensembles as linear operators acting on a hypothesis space and endow the space of weighting sequences with geometric and spectral constraints. …

On The Scientific Stature Of Data Science: The Epistemological Unicorn, Ernest Fokoue

Articles

Data Science has ignited unprecedented academic, industrial, and pedagogical fervor, yet its status as a \textit{science} in the classical sense---comparable to physics or biology---remains profoundly unsettled. This article interrogates the epistemological foundations of Data Science by examining its hybrid theoretical lineage, from the Universal Approximation Theorem to the No-Free-Lunch Theorems, with special emphasis on the fundamental Bayesian optimality results for both regression and classification. We argue that Data Science is in a vigorous \textit{gestational period}, characterized not by an absence of principles but by a creative tension between empirical pragmatism and deep mathematical theory. The Cross-Validation score emerges as the …

On Fibonacci Ensembles: An Alternative Approach To Ensemble Learning Inspired By The Timeless Architecture Of The Golden Ratio, Ernest Fokoue

Articles

Nature rarely reveals her secrets bluntly, yet in the Fibonacci sequence she grants us a glimpse of her quiet architecture of growth, harmony, and recursive stability \citep{Koshy2001Fibonacci, Livio2002GoldenRatio}. From spiral galaxies to the unfolding of leaves, this humble sequence reflects a universal grammar of balance. In this work, we introduce \emph{Fibonacci Ensembles}, a mathematically principled yet philosophically inspired framework for ensemble learning that complements and extends classical aggregation schemes such as bagging, boosting, and random forests \citep{Breiman1996Bagging, Breiman2001RandomForests, Friedman2001GBM, Zhou2012Ensemble, HastieTibshiraniFriedman2009ESL}. Two intertwined formulations unfold: (1) the use of normalized Fibonacci weights -- tempered through orthogonalization and Rao--Blackwell optimization -- …

Fibonacci-Driven Recursive Ensembles: Algorithms, Convergence, And Learning Dynamics, Ernest Fokoue

Articles

This paper develops the algorithmic and dynamical foundations of recursive ensemble learning driven by Fibonacci-type update flows. In contrast with classical boosting Freund and Schapire (1997); Friedman (2001), where the ensemble evolves through first-order additive updates, we study second-order recursive architectures in which each predictor depends on its two immediate predecessors. These Fibonacci flows induce a learning dynamic with memory, allowing ensembles to integrate past structure while adapting to new residual information. We introduce a general family of recursive weight-update algorithms encompassing Fibonacci, tribonacci, and higher-order recursions, together with continuous-time limits that yield systems of differential equations governing ensemble evolution. …

Learning Ordinal Geometry: Semantic–Aware Kernels For Ordered Categorical Data, Ernest Fokoue

Articles

Ordinal data arise ubiquitously in survey research, psychology, medicine, economics, and recommender systems, yet kernel methods for such data typically rely on either nominal encodings or arbitrary numeric codings. The former discards order information; the lat- ter imposes a fictitious metric structure. This paper develops a principled framework for kernel design on ordinal scales and introduces a new class of Semantic–Aware Ordinal Ker- nels (SAOK) that simultaneously capture ordinal order and semantic proximity between categories. We begin by formalizing order–preserving embeddings of finite chains and characterizing a broad family of chain distances that are conditionally negative definite. Through Schoen- berg …

Virtual Humans In Virtual Reality: A Scoping Review On Sociability, Fidelity, And Expression, J K Sangeeth Chandran, Marisa Llorens Salvador, Cathy Ennis

Articles

Introduction:

Virtual reality (VR) systems have evolved significantly over the past decade, enabling immersive experiences with enhanced realism and interactivity. This has motivated an interest in socially oriented applications. As user proxies, Virtual Humans (VHs) play essential roles in such applications. However, despite technological advancements, achieving realistic, expressive, and socially responsive VHs continues to present design and implementation challenges. In this scoping review, we present the state-of-the-art of VR VHs, examining the impact of VHs on the user experience.

Methodology:

We reviewed 59 papers retrieved from five databases across three core themes: the implementation and impact of VH facial expressions, …