Digital Commons Network^™

Surgical Removal Of Visceral Adipose Tissue Has Therapeutic Benefit In Male Appnl-F Mice, Samuel A. Mcfadden, Yimin Fang, Kathleen Quinn, Mackenzie R. Peck, Jenelle E. Chapman, Tiarra Hill, Andrzej Bartke, Erin R. Hascup, Kevin Hascup

Articles

Purpose:  Visceral white adipose tissue (vWAT) accumulation causes systemic inflammation, insulin resistance, metabolic syndrome, and senescent cell accumulation that are risk factors for Alzheimer’s disease (AD). Visceral fat removal (VFR) improves metabolism and reduces pro-inflammatory cytokines.  We hypothesized that VFR removal in AD mice would improve metabolism and cognition.

Methods:  Male and female APP^NL-F mice underwent sham or vWAT surgical resection (periovarian or epididymal and perirenal) at 4 (pre-symptomatic) and 16 (symptomatic) months of age to understand interventional and therapeutic effects, respectively.  At 18 months of age, glucose metabolism and novel object recognition (NOR) memory were assayed followed by …

Resurrecting Immigration Releases, Lindsay Nash

Articles

The nation’s “mandatory” immigration-detention laws sustain its largest civil-imprisonment system—and just radically expanded in scope and breadth. These laws consign broad swaths of suspected noncitizens to no-bail pretrial detention, denying tens of thousands of people facing civil regulatory charges any chance to prove they need not be detained. These laws turn split-second arrest decisions into jail sentences. They force people to give up meritorious claims. And they confound the historic presumptions—liberty, innocence, prosecutorial discretion, and bail—that undergird other pretrial-detention regimes. Although mandatory immigration detention conflicts with fundamental constraints on analogous detention regimes, the Supreme Court has treated it as exceptional …

Selecting Without Replacement From A Population Of Bands Of Serially Connected Objects, James E. Marengo, Dominick Banasik, Joseph Voelkel, David L. Farnsworth

Articles

The sampling procedure from a finite population of objects that are serially attached into bands is described and analyzed. One object is randomly selected and removed at a time, which results in that object’s band being broken into two bands or shortened by one object. The main result gives the probability of choosing an object that is part of a band of serially connected objects of any specified size at each stage of the selection process.

Feedback Loops: Half-Life Your Message, Patrick Barry

Articles

I sometimes get asked to design training workshops to help organizations ensure their employees receive the consistent, high-quality feedback needed to develop and improve. A pretty common request is for workshops that give people feedback on their communication styles and push them to become more concise and compelling writers and speakers. Nobody, for example, has ever asked me, “Is there any way you can teach our lawyers to write longer, more rambling emails?” Or “Can you show us how to drone on and on while giving a presentation or running a meeting?”

Flexible Funding Authorities To Support Tribal Climate Adaptation, Monte Mills, Sydney Anderson, Lauren Young

Articles

This project is part of a policy research effort intended to support Tribes, federal agencies, and Tribal and non-Tribal organizations in addressing some of the climate adaptation barriers and needs experienced by Northwest coastal Tribes. Accessing and administering Federal funds is a significant challenge for Tribes. Existing federal funding sources are often accompanied by rigid rules that make it difficult for Tribes to flexibly allocate funds as needed, and include strict qualification criteria that limit Tribal access to funds. Short-term funding cycles can be disruptive to long-term staffing and project needs, and are often misaligned with Tribal priorities.

Interpretive Facts: Textualism, Empiricism, And The Law-Fact Divide, Hannah Walser

Articles

This Article offers the first systematic examination of where empirical linguistic evidence should fit in the federal court system's division of labor based on law and fact. I begin by identifying interpretive facts : generalized empirical evidence about how a particular word or phrase has been used by a population of speakers, understood by a population of listeners, or both. Thanks to technological advances in corpus linguistics permitting the quantitative analysis of large numbers of texts, as well as methodological shifts that frame ordinary meaning as an empirical question, such facts are increasingly prominent in statutory and constitutional interpretation cases. …

Equity In Place, Segregation, And The Phillips Neighborhood, Myron W. Orfield

Articles

This Article describes an existential legal and factual conflict about residential segregation. It is centered in a neighborhood a few blocks north of where George Floyd—and more recently Renee Good—were murdered. Five years before Floyd’s murder, the conflict reached a breaking point, resulting in three lawsuits. One involved federal civil rights and two involved state civil rights claims that housing policy was causing deeper residential and educational segregation. Much of this debate was summarized in a series of articles in the journal Housing Policy Debate before the lawsuits were filed.

On one side were proponents of greater residential and educational …

Can – And Should – The Un Charter Be Saved?, Steven Ratner

Articles

World leaders from Canada’s Mark Carney to Germany’s Friedrich Merz have announced the demise of the international rules that provided some degree of order to international relations since the Second World War.2 The immediate cause is clear to them and others – a seeming abandonment of international law, and the UN Charter in particular, by the United States government, its chief architect and advocate. The U.S. actions and rhetoric over Venezuela and Iran – wars the United States has started – as well as Greenland and Ukraine seem to have confirmed the worst about the future of international law.

Expanding Astrobiology: The Case For A Lunar Biorepository, Mary Hagedorn, Lynne R. Parenti, Robert A. Craddock, Pierre Comizzoli, Paula Mabee, Bonnie Meinke, Susan Wolf, John C. Bischof, Rebecca D. Sandlin, Shannon N. Tessier, Mahmet Toner, Baptiste Journaux, Robert Ambrose, Garret Fitzpatrick

Articles

Earth’s resources are essential to support an expanding presence beyond the planet. Yet global conflicts, environmental change, and natural disasters threaten ecosystems and biodiversity, putting the integrity of Earth’s ecosystems and its resources at risk. These converging challenges underscore the urgency to develop innovative strategies to conserve Earth’s biodiversity. Astrobiology—seeking to understand life’s origins, limits, and potential beyond Earth—plays a central role in this effort, helping to preserve Earth’s species while also providing critical assets to explore and work in space. A Lunar Biorepository was proposed to hold cryopreserved samples from among the most critical species on Earth. Here, we …

Why Boards Should Have Rotating Contrarians, Dana Brakman Reiser, Claire A. Hill

Articles

Too often, for-profit and nonprofit boards are too passive, deferential or both. Their failures to engage their critical faculties have resulted in serious harms as diverse as Boeing planes crashing and the NRA squandering millions of dollars. This article proposes a simple mechanism to stimulate critical thinking by individual directors and improve overall board dynamics: a designated contrarian position that rotates among members of the board. During her term, the contrarian’s job would be to raise objections to the organization’s proposed actions – or inaction. After their terms, each contrarian would resume her duties as a regular board member, replaced …

Follow The Money: A Historical And Bibliometric Reflection On The Rise Of Law And Economics, 1970-2025, Scott H. Dewey

Articles

From roughly 1970 to 2010, law and economics rose from the margins to a dominant position in American legal academia, accompanied by a dramatic increase in citations to law and economics scholarship. Citation analysis is often treated as a proxy for intellectual merit, but that assumption becomes questionable when ideas are advanced through systematic, well-funded, and sustained promotion aimed at serving specific political and economic interests. This study examines the right-wing funding networks that supported the rise of law and economics and analyzes the resulting bibliometric patterns in legal scholarship. By tracing these financial and citation dynamics, the study argues …

Adding Family Complications To Birthright Citizenship, Scott Titshaw

Articles

On the first day of his second administration, President Trump issued an executive order purporting to restrict citizenship of U.S.-born children based on their parents’ citizenship or immigration status. In the process, it discriminates between mothers and fathers and adopts genetic definitions of “mother” and “father” to exclude any parent, who is not the child’s “immediate … biological progenitor.”

Courts and scholars have condemned this attempt to restrict birthplace citizenship as a violation of both the Fourteenth Amendment and the Immigration and Nationality Act. Yet there has been little, if any, discussion of the new family-based conditions in the order. …

Family Law Agreement And The New Gender Bargains, June Carbone, Brian H. Bix

Articles

The great family law divide is said to be marriage, as marriage has emerged as a marker correlated with race and socioeconomic status. This article argues that the real family law divide, inside and outside of marriage, is agreement. Family law, and the family court system that implements it, produce agreement when legal rules, societal norms, and family court procedures operate together to encourage shared understandings expressed through statuses such as marriage or parenthood, and legally enforceable agreements. In an increasingly unequal society, the family understandings of the college-educated middle class have moved apart from those much less privileged in …

In Service Of The State: Foreign Financing, Infrastructure, And Imperialism In Tsarist Russia, Christopher A. Hartwell, Paul Vaaler, Boris Vinogradov

Articles

Russia’s imperialism in the nineteenth century has been far less scrutinized than other episodes of great power colonization, but the Tsar’s expansion into the Caucasus was indeed an ongoing imperial project. The movement of Russian troops and settlers was only feasible with the creation of a large railway network, an undertaking for which the Tsarist regime lacked adequate funding. In response, the regime developed a system of state guarantees and incentives to attract foreign investors looking for higher returns and willing to finance railways serving the imperial project. We illustrate this point with a case study of Paris-based Crédit Lyonnais …

Filling The Network Gap In Research Ethics: Analyzing Ethical Issues At Scale In Big Team Science, Susan Wolf, Gillian H. Roehrig, Timothy L. Pruett, Korkut Uygun, Claire Colby Mcvan, Evelyn Brister, Shawneequa L. Callier, Alexander M. Capron, James F. Childress, Rosario Isasi, Andrew D. Maynard, Kenneth A. Oye, Paul B. Thompson, Terrance R. Tiersch

Articles

Scientific research increasingly involves large, multidisciplinary teams networked across multiple institutions to develop new technologies. Despite the rise of complex research networks and big team science, there has been too little analysis to date of the ethical challenges facing these networks. The extensive literature on the ethical issues confronting individual researchers and small teams (the microlevel) and on the larger societal challenges flowing from research and new technology (the macrolevel) leaves a troubling gap in between, at the mesolevel of the research network involved in big team science. Yet the ability of complex networks to conduct research ethically—which is essential …

Creating A Responsible Authorship Culture In Science: Anchoring Authorship Practices In Principles Of Transparency, Credit, And Accountability, Susan Wolf, Véronique Kiermer, Sofia Adams, Kirsten Bibbins-Domingo, Kathleen Hall Jamieson, Joerg Heber, Mohammad Hosseini, Ana Marušić, Beau Nielsen, Magdalena Skipper, Geeta K. Swamy, Yensi Flores Bueso

Articles

Authorship remains the primary currency of academic credit and a cornerstone of research integrity, yet current practices often fail to reflect the collaborative and interdisciplinary nature of modern science and questionable authorship practices persist. We argue that addressing these shortcomings is a collective responsibility shared by researchers, journals, research funders, scholarly societies, and research institutions. We examined authorship guidelines issued by journals and research institutions and found that their recommendations to researchers are highly variable. We propose that fostering a responsible authorship culture requires a shared, principle-based framework grounded in transparency, credit, and accountability. These three interconnected principles highlight when …

Need For Harmonized Terminology In Cryopreservation To Support Reproducibility, Regulation, And Translation, Susan Wolf, Lakshya Gangwar, Lowell Wolfe, Nikolas Zuchowicz, Irina Filz Von Reiterdank, Srivasupradha Ramesh, Bat-Erdene Namsrai, Joseph Kangas, Joseph Sushil Rao, Matthew Powell-Palm, Timothy L. Pruett, John C. Bischof, Korkut Uygun

Articles

As cryopreservation technologies continue to develop, the need for harmonized terminology across the multitude of disciplines where cryopreservation is applied is becoming increasingly acute. Terminology in cryopreservation remains inconsistent, leading to confusion and barriers to progress. Applications of cryopreservation in medicine, food, agriculture, and conservation remain limited by this lack of consensus. Inconsistent terminology contributes to ethical, legal, and societal issues in translating and integrating new cryopreservation technologies. Here we identify the problem with examples of cryopreservation terminology that demand harmonization. We describe the need for terminological consistency by providing examples of effective terminology harmonization projects in related fields. We …

Ai-Powered Lawyering: Ai Reasoning Models, Retrieval Augmented Generation, And The Future Of Legal Practice, Daniel Benjamin Schwarcz, Sam Manning, J.J. Prescott, Patrick Barry, David R. Cleveland, Beverly Rich

Articles

Generative AI is set to transform the legal profession, though its most promising uses and ultimate effects are still unclear. While AI models like GPT-4 improve efficiency, they can also “hallucinate” and may undermine legal judgment, particularly in complex tasks typically handled by skilled lawyers. This article examines two emerging AI innovations that may mitigate these concerns: Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG), which grounds AI-powered analysis in legal sources, and AI reasoning models, which structure complex reasoning before generating output. We conduct the first randomized controlled trial assessing these technologies, assigning upper-level law students to complete legal tasks using a RAG-powered …

Grading Machines: Can Ai Exam-Grading Replace Law Professors?, Kevin L. Cope, Jens Frankenreiter, Scott Hirst, Eric A. Posner, Daniel Schwarcz, Dane Thorley

Articles

In the past few years, large language models (LLMs) have achieved significant technical advances, enabling legal-advocacy organizations to adopt them as complements to—or substitutes for—lawyers and other human experts. The role of LLMs in legal education, however, is underexplored. While several studies have examined LLMs’ performance in taking law school exams, finding mixed results, there have been no published studies systematically analyzing LLMs’ competence at one of law professors’ chief responsibilities: grading law school exams. This paper presents results of an analysis of how LLMs perform in evaluating student responses to legal analysis questions of the kind typically contained in …

The Durability Of Protections Against Abuse At Interpol Amidst Rising Authoritarian Pressures, Kristina Daugirdas

Articles

Over centuries and across continents, authoritarian governments have demonstrated a large appetite for international cooperation to target political opponents across borders. In 1851, the “first modern police organization”—the Police Union of German States, whose members included Austria and Prussia—was established “with the express purpose of policing the political opposition of established autocratic regimes.” During the 1970s and early 1980s, military regimes in South America participated in a secret scheme known as Operation Condor to coordinate their efforts to suppress subversion. A recent analysis of twenty-nine “hard authoritarian” regional organizations found that twenty-five were engaged in police cooperation. The Shanghai Cooperation …

The End Of Territoriality?, Reuven S. Avi-Yonah

Articles

The One Big Beautiful Big Act (OBBBA) of 2025 is generally consideredto be a continuation of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) of 2017.1Thatis definitely true as far as the individual tax provisions are concerned, be-cause the OBBBA merely made permanent the TCJA provisions with minorchanges, such as increasing the cap on the state and local tax deduction from$10,000 to $40,000. For the corporate tax, the OBBBA continued some of thechanges in the TCJA (such as expensing) while relaxing others (such as amorti-zation of research and experimentation (R&E) expenditures and a stricter limiton interest deductions) without changing the overall …

Liability For Non-Disclosure In Ipos, Albert H. Choi, Kathryn E. Spier

Articles

A privately-informed entrepreneur may withhold material information from prospective investors who may sue the firm ex post for (alleged) non-disclosure. Absent liability, the entrepreneur has an excessive incentive to withhold bad news and pursue socially-wasteful projects. Liability deters inefficient non- disclosure and prevents capital misallocation. Any damage award received by investors is partially offset by a reduction in equity value. Depending on the likelihood of court error and litigation cost, the socially-optimal damage award may be either zero or the minimum necessary for full deterrence. The private incentive to waive liability may be socially excessive or insufficient. Positive and normative …

Ai-Powered Lawyering: Ai Reasoning Models, Retrieval Augmented Generation, And The Future Of Legal Practice, Daniel Schwarcz, Sam Manning, J. J. Prescott, Patrick Barry, David R. Cleveland, Beverly Rich

Articles

Generative AI is set to transform the legal profession, though its most promising uses and ultimate effects are still unclear. While AI models like GPT-4 improve efficiency, they can also “hallucinate” and may undermine legal judgment, particularly in complex tasks typically handled by skilled lawyers. This article examines two emerging AI innovations that may mitigate these concerns: Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG), which grounds AI-powered analysis in legal sources, and AI reasoning models, which structure complex reasoning before generating output. We conduct the first randomized controlled trial assessing these technologies, assigning upper-level law students to complete legal tasks using a RAG-powered …

Authorship Nonsense, Jessica Litman

Articles

Copyright law’s primary device for promoting progress is to bestow rights on the authors of works. Rights vest automatically and last for a very long time. Authors’ choices to retain, license, or transfer those rights fuel opportunities to communicate the works to their audiences. The copyright system’s mechanisms for determining who authored works (and therefore automatically obtained copyright rights) should be both accurate and reliable, since misidentifications will undermine the law’s working as intended.

This article examines authors’ creation of works and copyright law’s handling of authorship disputes. Many works result from creative collaboration. Although the copyright statute incorporates mechanisms …

The Basis Of The Labor Exemption Reconsidered, Sanjukta Paul

Articles

Broadly speaking, this symposium queries the question of expanding some actors’ coordination rights under antitrust law as a way of effectuating legal goals relating to “power relations.” I commend the organizers of the symposium for opening this conversation, for asking about the use of “collective bargaining” beyond the traditional labor domain, and for taking on the question in a creative way. These broader questions are essential, and yet my own article will (paradoxically, perhaps) try to contribute to this effort by going back to the core domain of the labor exemption itself—where, it turns

Rethinking The Fund Termination Sanction, Samuel R. Bagenstos

Articles

Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 is often referred to as the “sleeping giant” of civil rights law. It is a “giant” because it prohibits any form of race discrimination engaged in by any recipient of federal financial assistance, and because the remedy set forth in the statute for a violation is the termination of federal funds. And it is “sleeping” because, except for a brief moment during the desegregation era, the federal government had never seriously attempted to terminate a recipient’s federal grants for a violation of the statute. Nor had the federal government seriously attempted …

Legalistic Noncompliance, Daniel Deacon, Leah Litman

Articles

Will the executive branch comply with court orders? That question has garnered a considerable amount of attention over the first few months of the second Trump administration. But what does it mean to comply? And what if a form of noncompliance is already occurring?

This Article documents an emerging practice that has dominated the second Trump administration's approach to unfavorable court rulings, a practice this Article calls legalistic noncompliance. Legalistic noncompliance occurs when the administration uses the language of the law as cover to claim that it is complying with court orders when in fact it is not. Drawing …

Regulating Robotaxis, Bryant Walker Smith, Matthew T. Wansley

Articles

In several sunbelt cities, commercial robotaxi service has arrived. The leading robotaxi company is providing over 400,000 trips per week. The industry claims that robotaxis will save lives and provide convenient and affordable mobility. Critics counter that they will increase congestion, undermine transit, and subject the public to ubiquitous surveillance. We argue that the social impact of robotaxis depends on how they are regulated. We emphasize two points missing from the debate. First, some of the benefits of robotaxis may be political rather than technological—some longstanding public policy goals may become viable in a robotaxi world. Second, letting one private …

Anti-Zionism, Antisemitism, Antidiscrimination, Zalman Rothschild

Articles

This Article uses recent anti-Zionism cases as a case study in hostile environment causation. It briefly surveys the approaches to the causation element that courts have taken in other contexts and then examines the anti-Zionism decisions in detail. It finds that courts in these cases have consistently converged on the narrowest variant of the motive-based approach, treating proof of animus—subjective hostility toward Jews—as the operative route to causation. That approach has its attractions. It preserves breathing space for political speech and resists the claim that opposition to Zionism is necessarily hostility toward Jews. But it is not the only approach …

Trophy Assets, Aneil Kovvali

Articles

Rich people like to own things that make them look cool. When the thing in question is a car, house, or boat, the implications are limited. But sometimes very rich people own assets that are more important. Within media, Elon Musk acquired Twitter, Jeff Bezos ac-quired the Washington Post, and Patrick Soon-Shiong acquired the Los Angeles Times. There has also been a craze for aerospace: Musk with Space X, Bezos with Blue Origin, Richard Branson with Virgin Galactic, and going back further, Howard Hughes with Hughes Aircraft Company. It is often difficult to understand the behavior in purely finan-cial terms, …