Digital Commons Network^™

Development And Characterisation Of A Whole Hybrid Sol-Gel Optofluidic Platform For Biosensing Applications, Emma Mchugh, Graceson Antony, Arun Kumar Mallik, Alicja Kaworek, Declan Mccormack, Brendan Duffy, Mohamed Oubaha

Articles

This work outlines, for the first time, the fabrication of a whole hybrid sol-gel optofluidic platform by integrating a microfluidic biosensor platform with optical waveguides employing a standard photolithography process. To demonstrate the suitability of this new hybrid sol-gel optofluidic platform, optical and bio-sensing proof-of-concepts are proposed. A photoreactive hybrid sol-gel material composed of a photopolymerisable organically modified silicon alkoxide and a transition metal complex was prepared and used as the fabrication material for the entire optofluidic platform, including the optical waveguides, the sensing areas, and the microfluidic device. The most suitable sol-gel materials chosen for the fabrication of the …

Evaluation Of The Potential Of Nanofluids Containing Different Ag Nanoparticle Size Distributions For Enhanced Solar Energy Conversion In Hybrid Photovoltaic-Thermal (Pvt) Applications, James Walshe, John Doran, George Amarandei

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Hybridising photovoltaic and photothermal technologies into a single system that can simultaneously deliver heat and power represents one of the leading strategies for generating clean energy at more affordable prices. In a hybrid photovoltaic-thermal (PVT) system, the capability to modulate the thermal and electrical power output is significantly influenced by the spectral properties of the heat transfer fluid utilised. In this study, we report on one of the first experimental evaluations of the capability of a multimodal silver nanofluid containing various particle shapes and particle sizes to selectively modulate the solar energy for PVT applications. The diverse set of particle …

Civil Rico Suits Against Harm-Causing Marijuana Operations: Momtazi Family, Llc V. Wagner As A Case Study, Richard Henry Seamon, Kassadie F. Dunham

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Hemp was legalized as a matter of federal law in the 2018 Farm Bill, but the use of cannabis for recreational and medicinal purposes remains a federal crime. This has not stopped an increasing number of states from legalizing recreational and medicinal cannabis as a matter of state law. Unless and until cannabis is legalized on a federal level, coordinated activity to produce and distribute it for recreational and medicinal use can constitute "racketeering activity" under the federal Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act ("RICO') and give rise to "civil RICO" lawsuits by private plaintiffs. This article examines one particular …

Whither The Lofty Goals Of The Environmental Laws?: Can Statutory Directives Restore Purposivism When We Are All Textualists Now?, Stephen M. Johnson

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Congress set ambitious goals to protect public health and the environment when it enacted the federal environmental laws through bipartisan efforts in the 1970s. For many years, the federal courts interpreted the environmental laws to carry out those enacted purposes. Over time, however, courts greatly reduced their focus on the environmental and public health purposes of the environmental laws when interpreting those statutes due to the rise in textualism, the declining influence of the Chevron doctrine, and the increasing willingness of courts to defer to agency underenforcement of statutory responsibilities across all regulatory statutes.

In 2020, the Environmental Protection Network, …

Inclusion And Belonging In Irish Higher Education For Black And Minority Ethnic Students., Fionnuala Darby

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Using Critical Race Theory (CRT) as an analytical prism, this study interrogates the sense of belonging and inclusion experienced by Black and Minority Ethnic (BME) students on one higher education campus in Ireland. The most important story told within the study is as simple as it is complicated. The simple part is that the BME students felt that the campus was inclusive and that they experienced a sense of belonging. The complicated part is that the findings are premised in a normative assumption of whiteness as evidenced by numerous and incremental moments of exclusion in the daily experience of microaggressions, …

Escape Room: Implicit Takings After Cedar Point Nursery, Lee Fennell

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No abstract provided.

Personalized Class Actions, Omri Ben-Shahar

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No abstract provided.

Police Agencies On Facebook Overreport On Black Suspects, Ben Grunwald, Julian Nyarko, John Rappaport

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A large and growing share of the American public turns to Facebook for news. On this platform, reports about crime increasingly come directly from law enforcement agencies, raising questions about content curation. We gathered all posts from almost 14,000 Facebook pages maintained by US law enforcement agencies, focusing on reporting about crime and race. We found that Facebook users are exposed to posts that overrepresent Black suspects by 25 percentage points relative to local arrest rates. This overexposure occurs across crime types and geographic regions and increases with the proportion of both Republican voters and non-Black residents. Widespread exposure to …

Ideation And Innovation In Constitutional Rights, Tom Ginsburg

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This article explores the development of ideas in constitutional design. The point of departure is a perspective of constitutions-as-products, and thus, an examination of the invention, innovation, and an uptake of these products. The article conceptualizes constitutional innovation and distinguishes its manifestations with respect to constitutional products, the process of constitution-making, and in supporting institutions. The last two elements, in line with Schumpeter’s approach to innovation, would seem especially important to constitutional development. The article provides several examples from the area of human rights and argues that innovations tend to be found in situations in which there is strong aversion …

Streaming Property, Lee Anne Fennell

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People acquire property rights in objects and real estate in order to capture the stream of services that these assets can provide over time. The thing or parcel itself is merely a delivery mechanism, a way of packaging and protecting rights to that value stream. And, significantly, these assets cannot stream services to anyone without a set of facilitating conditions and complementary goods, such as public infrastructure, that do not lie within the asset owner’s individual control. This Essay argues that we can gain fresh traction on inequality by recasting property as service streams rather than as owned things. Doing …

Grid Reliability Through Clean Energy, Alexandra Klass, Joshua Macey, Shelley Welton, Hannah Wiseman

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In the wake of recent high-profile power failures, policymakers and politicians have asserted that there is an inherent tension between the aims of clean energy and grid reliability. But continuing to rely on fossil fuels to avoid system outages will only exacerbate reliability challenges by contributing to increasingly extreme climate-related weather events. These extremes will disrupt the power supply, with impacts rippling far beyond the electricity sector.

This Article shows that much of the perceived tension between clean energy and reliability is a failure of law and governance resulting from the United States’ siloed approach to regulating the electric grid. …

Kids Are Not So Different: The Path From Juvenile Exceptionalism To Prison Abolition, Emily Buss

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Inspired by the Supreme Court’s embrace of developmental science in a series of Eighth Amendment cases, “kids are different” has become the rallying cry, leading to dramatic reforms in our response to juvenile crime designed to eliminate the incarceration of children and support their successful transition to adulthood. The success of these reforms represents a promising start, but the “kids are different” approach is built upon two flaws in the Court’s developmental analysis that constrain the reach of its decisions and hide the true implications of a developmental approach. Both the text of the Court’s opinions and the developmental and …

Procedural Losses And The Pyrrhic Victory Of Abolishing Qualified Immunity, Adam A. Davidson

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Who decides? Failing to consider this simple question could turn attempts to abolish qualified immunity into a Pyrrhic victory. That is because removing qualified immunity does not change the answer to this question; the federal courts will always decide. For an outcome-neutral critic of qualified immunity who cares only about its doctrinal failures, this does not matter. But for the vast majority of critics who are outcome- sensitive, meaning they care about qualified immunity because of its role in police accountability, this is a troubling realization. Building on earlier work on the equilibration thesis, as well as on qualitative and …

Open Access, Interoperability, And Dtcc’S Unexpected Path To Monopoly, Dan Awrey, Joshua C. Macey

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For markets characterized by significant economies of scale, scholars and policy- makers o�en advance open-access and interoperability requirements as superior to both regulated monopoly and the breakup of dominant firms. In theory, by compelling firms to coordinate in the development of common infrastructure, these requirements can replicate the advantages of scale without leaving markets vulnerable to monopoly power. Examples of successful coordination include the provision of electricity, intermodal transportation, and credit-card networks.

This Article offers a qualification to this received wisdom. By tracing the Depository Trust and Clearing Corporation’s path to monopoly in the U.S. securities clearing and depository markets, …

Fifty Years Of Patent Remedies Case Law: Two Steps Forward, One Step Back, Thomas F. Cotter

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Over the past fifty years, courts have developed a body of case law on patent remedies that is, in many respects, solidly grounded in economic reasoning. Among the high points are the courts’ embrace, in various contexts, of the simple principle that patent damages should restore patent owners to the position they would have occupied, but for the infringement—and of an important corollary to that principle, namely the importance to damages calculations of the “noninfringing alternatives” concept. By contrast, certain other developments—including the confusing standards for determining when it is appropriate to use the “entire market value” of a product …

January 6, Ambiguously Inciting Speech, And The Overt-Acts Rule, Alan Rozenshtein, Jed Handelsman Shugerman

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A prosecution of Donald Trump for his role in the January 6 attack on the Capitol would have to address whether the First Amendment protects the inflammatory remarks he made at the “Stop the Steal” rally. A prosecution based solely on the content of Trump’s speech—whether for incitement, insurrection, or obstruction—would face serious constitutional difficulties under Brandenburg v. Ohio’s dual requirements of intent and likely imminence. But a prosecution need not rely solely on the content of Trump’s speech. It can also look to Trump’s actions: his order to remove the magnetometers from the entrances to the rally and his …

"You're Fired": Criminal Use Of Presidential Removal Power, Richard Painter

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If Donald Trump wins the 2024 election, his first order of business would be to use his power as president to halt the criminal investigations against him. In the case of federal indictments, he would likely begin by removing the special counsel, and then proceeding to remove anyone else who had control over the investigations or prosecutions. Such removal would likely constitute the crime of obstruction of justice. May a President do this? This Article addresses a narrow but critically important aspect of presidential authority: the intersection between the President’s power to remove executive branch officers and criminal laws that …

Investing In Private Evidence: The Effect Of Adversarial Discovery, Francesco Parisi, Alice Guerra

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Much of the conventional wisdom of evidence law rests on the premise that the amount of evidence available in any given case is exogenously determined. With the advent of evidence technology (e.g. dashcams, black-box technology, digital data storage, surveillance cameras), the availability of evidence is substantially controlled by individuals. In this article, we show that evidence rules play an important role in determining individuals’ decisions to invest in private evidence. We compare the evidence rules adopted in the USA and Europe and analyze their relative impact on the voluntary adoption of evidence technology. We find that by making private evidence …

Preparing Engineering Students For The Challenges Of The Sdgs: What Competences Are Required?, Una Beagon, Klara Kövesi, Brad Tabas, Bente Nørgaard, Riitta Lehtinen, Brian Bowe, Christiane Gillet, Claus Monrad Spliid

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Despite the emerging discussions about the growing role of engineers in achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), there is a lack of agreement on which competences should be prioritised to prepare engineering students to resolve future sustainability challenges. This study examined and compared the views of key stakeholders of engineering education (Academics, Employers and Students) using twelve focus groups in Denmark, Finland, France and Ireland. The findings were mapped against competences identified in previous studies to highlight gaps and opportunities for development. The results confirm the strong emphasis on normative, strategic and systems thinking competences in engineering. However, the outcomes …

Modern Authorities From Brandies To Brnovich: For Jurists Who Have Considered Social Science / When Doctrine Was Not Enough, Jeremiah Chin

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While the Supreme Court is the final authority on the Constitution, its interpretations increasingly turn to outside, non-legal sources to authoritatively support its conclusions of law and fact. Particularly in cases involving racial discrimination, the Court relies on social science data presented by the trial record, amicus curiae, or its own research. However, the Court lacks explicit rules or methods of analysis for these data. To remedy this gap in analysis, this article proposes a critical methodology for analyzing the use of social science data in cases involving race. By outlining a historiography of the Court's invocation of extrinsic data, …

Designing Interdisciplinary, Early Intervention Dispute Resolution Tools To Decrease Evictions And Increase Housing Stability, Christine N. Cimini

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This Article provides a unique glimpse into the development of an early-intervention, pre-court, interdisciplinary dispute resolution project intended to decrease evictions and increase housing stability for recipients of subsidized housing in Seattle. With a grant from the Seattle Housing Authority (SHA), a coalition of non-profit organizations had the rare opportunity to design a dispute resolution system into existence. A dispute system design team was formed and began by examining the interconnected problems of housing instability, eviction, and houselessness. Despite thorough research on dispute system design and extensive meetings with stakeholders, the deign team encountered numerous challenges. This Article identifies the …

Bridges To A New Era Part 2: A Report On The Past, Present, And Potential Future Of Tribal Co-Management On Federal Lands In Alaska, Monte Mills, Martin Nie

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Nowhere else in the United States are tribal connections and reliance on federal public lands as deep and geographically broad-based as in what is now Alaska. The number of Tribes—229 federally recognized tribes—and the scope of the public land resource—nearly 223 million acres—are simply unparalleled. Across that massive landscape, federal public lands and the subsistence uses they provide remain, as they have been since time immemorial, “essential to Native physical, economic, traditional, and cultural existence.”^[1] Alas, the institutions, systems, and processes responsible for managing those lands, protecting those uses, and honoring those connections are failing Alaska Native Tribes.

The …

The Hidden Harms Of Privacy Penalties, Mary D. Fan

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How to frame privacy penalties to protect our personal information is an important question as demands for legislation and proposals proliferate. The predominant assumption in calls for a comprehensive consumer privacy regime is that regulation and penalties arm the consumer David against Goliath businesses. Missing in the focus on powerful companies is attention to the potential harms of expanding privacy penalties for small-fry individuals and entities, especially from disfavored or marginalized groups. This article is the first to illuminate the regressive risks of privacy penalties, showing how broad privacy penalties can become tools for harassment of small businesses and individuals …

Passion Projects In Law Librarianship: A Belated Tribute To Igor Kavass And His Personal Mission To Acquire And Organize U.S. International Agreements, Loren Turner

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In December 2020, Oona Hathaway, Curtis Bradley, and Jack Goldsmith, law professors at Yale, Chicago, and Harvard, respectively, published their article, The Failed Transparency Regime for Executive Agreements: An Empirical and Normative Analysis, in the Harvard Law Review. The article reveals that the U.S. executive branch consistently fails to comply with federal requirements to report and publish the international agreements it makes with foreign countries. As a result, Congress and the American public regularly lack access to legal information to which they are entitled under federal law. Additionally, Hathaway, Bradley, and Goldsmith identify a particular time when our already-inadequate access …

Elephant In The Room, Patrick Barry

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Over the past several decades, the student population at law schools across the country has become more and more racially diverse. In 1987, for example, only about 1 in every 10 law students identified as a person of color; by 2019, that percentage shot up to almost 1 out of 3.

Yet take a look at virtually any collection of recommended manuals on writing. You are unlikely to find even one that is authored by a person of color. The composition of law schools may be dramatically changing, but the materials that students are given to help them figure out …

Race Belongs In Week One Of Lrw, Beth H. Wilensky

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I talk to my 1Ls about race and the law in their first week of law school. In doing so, I have discovered that discussing race helps me introduce foundational concepts about legal writing and law school that we will return to throughout the year. That is partly because race is relevant to nearly every topic law school touches on. But it is also because race is present in—and often conspicuous in its absence from—court opinions in ways that provide rich fodder for discussing how to approach law school. That topic interests all students—even those who might be skeptical about …

Preemption, Commandeering, And The Indian Child Welfare Act, Matthew L.M. Fletcher, Randall F. Khalil

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This year (2022), the Supreme Court agreed to review wide-ranging constitutional challenges to the Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA) brought by the State of Texas and three non-Indian foster families in the October 2022 Term. The Fifth Circuit, sitting en banc, held that certain provisions of ICWA violated the anti-commandeering principle implied in the Tenth Amendment and the equal protection component of the Fifth Amendment’s Due Process Clause.

We argue that the anti-commandeering challenges against ICWA are unfounded because all provisions of ICWA provide a set of legal standards to be applied in states which validly and expressly preempt state …

The Orkney Slew And Central Bank Digital Currencies, Jeffery Y. Zhang, Gary B. Gordon

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This Article on central bank digital currencies is motivated by a parable, The Orkney Slew, which is set in an archipelago. Based on the parable, we point out a significant economic market failure that exists in the cross-border payments realm. The analysis then focuses on real-world examples and the national security concerns, including for Anti-Money Laundering/Combatting the Financing of Terrorism (AML/CFT) and the continued efficacy of U.S. sanctions, associated with the rapidly evolving digital payments landscape.

Many central banks around the world are now cooperatively experimenting with cross-border interoperability of digital currencies. These efforts are driven by the idea of …

Regulating For Energy Justice, Alexandra B. Klass, Gabriel Chan

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In this Article, we explore and critique the foundational norms that shape federal and state energy regulation and suggest pathways for reform that can incorporate principles of “energy justice.” These energy justice principles—developed in academic scholarship and social movements—include the equitable distribution of costs and benefits of the energy system, equitable participation and representation in energy decision making, and restorative justice for structurally marginalized groups.

While new legislation, particularly at the state level, is critical to the effort to advance energy justice, our focus here is on regulators’ ability to implement reforms now using their existing authority to advance the …

Marijuana And Patents: The Complicated Relationship Between Patent Rights And The Federal Criminalization Of Marijuana, Reza Roghani Esfahani, Howard Bromberg

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Difficult questions arise in the context of marijuana-related inventions, patent procurement, and patent enforcement. These questions are a subset of the contradictions in the law of marijuana, where the federal government prohibits marijuana use and yet many of the states legalize, regulate, and tax it. This federal prohibition could discourage research into the health effects of marijuana and makes it difficult for marijuana-related innovations to satisfy statutory patentability requirements. It also renders enforcement of marijuana patents questionable, making marijuana businesses and patent owners vulnerable to nonpracticing patent entities, sometimes called "patent trolls."