Digital Commons Network^™

Doing Injustice: Exchanging One “Arbitrary, Cruel, And Reckless” Sentencing System For Another, Michael Tonry

Articles

Marvin Frankel’s characterization of American sentencing in Criminal Sentences: Law Without Order remarkably successfully distilled ideas that were in the air and emerging. His main proposals—a sentencing commission, sentencing rules, requirements that judges explain their decisions, and meaningful appellate sentence review—would in a better America go a long way toward establishing the kind of rational, humane, and just process he imagined. Despite some early, partial successes, however, Frankel’s proposals remain largely untested. In retrospect, he underestimated, misunderstood, or chose to ignore formidable political impediments to serious sentencing reform in late twentieth century America. He also largely ignored two intractable problems, …

The Blue Family Constitution, June Carbone

Articles

No abstract provided.

Mitigating Citation Errors In The Interlibrary Loan System, Scott Dewey, David Zopfi-Jordan

Articles

Journal articles from most academic disciplines have long shown high rates of citation errors. American law reviews, with their careful cite-checking, are a rare exception to the overall rule. Incorrect citations are especially costly and problematic for interlibrary loan librarians. This article offers practical suggestions to address the problem.

Deepfake 2024: Will Citizens United And Artificial Intelligence Together Destroy Representative Democracy?, Richard Painter

Articles

Deepfakes – computer generated counterfeit videos and audios of people saying and doing things they never said or did – are proliferating on social media and increasingly will be used to target candidates in elections. Citizens United v. FEC, and cases decided in its aftermath, have opened the floodgates of dark money funded electioneering communications, and some of this money will be spent on deepfakes made and disseminated by persons unknown. Some deepfakes may originate outside the United States, as they become a new instrument for foreign interference in U.S. elections.

The Federal Election Commission (FEC) has been asked by …

The Court’S Morality Play: The Punishment Lens, Sex, And Abortion, June Carbone, Naomi Cahn

Articles

This Article uncovers the hidden framework for the Supreme Court’s approach to public values, a framework that has shaped—and will continue to shape—the abortion debate. The Court has historically used a “punishment lens” to allow the evolution of moral expression in the public square, without enmeshing the Court itself in the underlying values debate. The punishment lens allows a court to redirect attention by focusing on the penalty rather than the potentially inflammatory subject for which the penalty is being imposed, regardless of whether the subject is contraception, abortion, Medicaid expansion, or pretrial detention.

This Article is unique in discussing …

From Constructive Ambiguities To Structural Contradictions: The Twilight Of The Good Friday Agreement, Chris O'Ralaigh

Articles

The Good Friday Agreement contained a series of constructive ambiguities which were critical to ensuring that it received broad cross-political support. These ambiguities were reflective of the balance of political power of the time. Once institutionalized, they contained an immanent potential to morph in to structural contradictions as the re-balancing of demographic and political power in Ireland moved from latent to manifest status. As the Agreement reaches its 25th anniversary, three outstanding structural contradictions are manifesting, prompted by Brexit and the re-introduction of the ‘Irish question’ in to Irish-British relations. The constitutional status of the North of Ireland, the raison …

Coming Of Age In The Eyes Of The Law: Theconflict Between Miranda, J.D.B., And Puberty, David M. N. Garavito

Articles

Everyone knows that going through puberty is associated with a multitude of changes: physical, mental, hormonal, etc. Fewer people know that when and how fast one goes through puberty can also be associated with changes to one’s legal rights. The Supreme Court of the United States held, in the landmark case of J.D.B. v. North Carolina, that there were many “commonsense conclusions” that could be drawn from how a child’s age would affect their interactions with law enforcement. In that case, the Court was deciding whether age should affect whether a child was considered “in custody” of the police, granting …

Firearms Law And Scholarship Beyond Bullets And Bodies, Darrell Miller, Joseph Blocher, Jacob Charles

Articles

No abstract provided.

Chefs’ Perspectives Of Failures In Foodservice Kitchens, Part 2: A Phenomenological Exploration Of The Consequences And Handling Of Food Production Failure, Mohamed Fawzi Afifi, J.J. Healy, Mairtin Mac Con Iomaire

Articles

This paper explores the consequences of food production failure (FPF) and its handling in foodservice operations from the perspective of chefs. A phenomenological epistemology and qualitative methodology were followed. Fifteen semi-structured interviews with chefs working in independent restaurants and hotels were carried out using purposive sampling, and employing an emic posture. Interviews were transcribed verbatim, read repetitively, and coded. Thematic analysis yielded themes on the consequences of FPF, on operation and staff, handling failures with kitchen staff, front of the house (FOH), and management. The findings revealed that the major ramification of FPF is financial through food loss. Representing both …

Guest Editorial: Building Performance And Sustainable Infrastructure: Unsustainable Return To Practice, Christopher Gorse, Colin Booth, Lloyd Scott

Articles

The abrupt decline in global carbon emissions experienced during the pandemic was not sustainable. Overwhelmingly, this is evidenced by the advanced economies’ swift return to close to pre-pandemic levels and, of greater concern, the total global use of fossil fuels has rebounded to their highest level in history (IEA, 2021; Jackson et al., 2022). Unfortunately, post-pandemic, the anthropic life threating activities have resumed.

Cinnamon P. Carlarne, Albany Law School's Nineteenth President And Dean, Garry W. Jenkins, Katrina Fischer Kuh, Jonathan Rosenbloom, Marc Roark, Jessica Owley, Robin Kundis Craig, Keith H. Hirokawa

Articles

No abstract provided.

Chatgpt, Esq.: Recasting Unauthorized Practice Of Law In The Era Of Generative Ai, Joseph J. Avery, Patricia S. Abril, Alissa Del Riego

Articles

In March of 2023, OpenAI released GPT-4, an autoregressive language model that uses deep learning to produce text. GPT-4 has unprecedented ability to practice law: drafting briefs and memos, plotting litigation strategy, and providing general legal advice. However, scholars and practitioners have yet to unpack the implications of large language models, such as GPT-4, for long-standing bar association rules on the unauthorized practice of law ("UPL"). The intersection of large language models with UPL raises manifold issues, including those pertaining to important and developing jurisprudence on free speech, antitrust, occupational licensing, and the inherent-powers doctrine. How the intersection is navigated, …

Crying Wolf: Neo-Patriots, Critical Race Theory, And The Constitutional Protection Of "Dangerous" Ideas, Bryan K. Fair

Articles

Most Americans do not realize that, notwithstanding the First Amendment's free speech guarantee, for most of our nation's history, judges sent men and women to prison for expressing ideas considered too "dangerous." It was not until the late 1960s that the Supreme Court rejected the clear and present danger doctrine, insisting that statutes banning speech must draw a distinction between advocacy of ideas and advocacy of imminent lawless action. The Court held that under that constitutional norm, the government could not send a Klansman to prison for expressing racist, anti-Semitic, or otherwise dangerous or offensive ideas. Since then, banning the …

At The Nexus Of Antitrust & Consumer Protection, Luke Herrine

Articles

This Essay uses Section 5 of the Federal Trade Commission Act to examine the theoretical and practical relationship between antitrust and consumer protection law. It argues that, since roughly 1980, there has been a hegemonic "neoliberal"framework, one that has in recent years been challenged by an emerging "moral economy" framework. The neoliberal framework conceptualizes antitrust as preventing firms from conspiring to throttle output, with a focus primarily on consumers' interests in low prices, and consumer protection as making consumers informed, rational, and able to switch between competitors with relatively low cost. The moral economy framework conceptualizes both areas of law …

Constitutional Losses And (Some) Statutory Wins For Criminal Defendants: Select Criminal Law And Procedure Cases From The Supreme Court's 2022-2023 Term., Eve Brensike Primus, Mark Rucci

Articles

The Supreme Court’s 2022–23 Term included a number of important statutory interpretation rulings, as well as significant cases concerning the scope of the Confrontation Clause; the Venue, Vicinage, and Double Jeopardy Clauses; the federal courts’ ability to entertain claims of legal innocence; and the contours of the adequate and independent state ground doctrine. It also was the first term for Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson—the first former public defender and first Black woman to join the centuries-old institution. Although Justice Jackson joined a Court ruptured along ideological lines and confronting serious challenges to its legitimacy and ethical standards, she quickly proved …

Dethroning Langdell, Beth H. Wilensky

Articles

I come not to bury the case method. I come merely to dethrone it. While the case method’s monopolistic hold on the law school classroom has loosened somewhat in recent years, it is still the dominant approach to pedagogy in many law school classrooms—and especially in the first-year law student experience. That is also true of the case method’s traditional pedagogical partners, the Socratic method and the cold call: their dominance has declined somewhat, even while they still have remarkable staying power.

This Essay identifies one fault with our continued acquiescence to these pedagogical mainstays of law school classrooms: it …

Factor Substitution Possibilities, Labor Share Dynamics, And Inequality In An Age Of Intangibles, Adnan Velic

Articles

We examine the economy-wide degree of substitutability between intangible capital and other factor inputs in production using a large sample of advanced countries. In this context, we turn to studying the implications of intangible and tangible capital growth for labor income share dynamics. Compared to tangible capital, we find that intangible capital more strongly complements skilled labor. The analysis further indicates relative fungibility between tangible capital and a composite of intangible capital and skilled labor, in line with the rising prominence of knowledge-intensive tasks and AI-driven online platforms. The intrinsic nature of intangibles and their asymmetric effects across skilled and …

The Gross Injustices Of Capital Punishment: A Torturous Practice And Justice Thurgood Marshall’S Astute Appraisal Of The Death Penalty’S Cruelty, Discriminatory Use, And Unconstitutionality, John D. Bessler

Articles

Through the centuries, capital punishment and torture have been used by monarchs, authoritarian regimes, and judicial systems around the world. Although torture is now expressly outlawed by international law, capital punishment—questioned by Quakers in the seventeenth century and by the Italian philosopher Cesare Beccaria and many others in the following century—has been authorized over time by various legislative bodies, including in the United States. It was Beccaria’s book, Dei delitti e delle pene (1764), translated into French and then into English as An Essay on Crimes and Punishments (1767), that fueled the still-ongoing international movement to outlaw the death penalty. …

Informationalism Beyond Managerialism, Salome Viljoen

Articles

It is now commonplace to observe that digital platforms are both affecting and reshaping markets. The focus of this Article is not the anticompetitive effects of digital platforms upon the markets they enter. It instead focuses on digital platforms themselves as market mechanisms. Information—especially datafied information about people and their behavior—and information technologies have transformed how many markets function in the digital economy. Markets have become market machines: highly engineered and computationally intensive market-like mechanisms that make up a key layer of technological infrastructure within digital platforms.

Discovering Child Sexual Abuse Material Creators’ Behaviors And Preferences On The Dark Web, Vuong Ngo, Rahul Gajula, Christina Thorpe, Susan Mckeever

Articles

Background: Producing, distributing or discussing child sexual abuse materials (CSAM) is often committed through the dark web in order to remain hidden from search engines and regular users. Additionally, on the dark web, the CSAM creators employ various techniques to avoid detection and conceal their activities. The large volume of CSAM on the dark web presents a global social problem and poses a significant challenge for helplines, hotlines and law enforcement agencies.

Objective: Identifying CSAM discussions on the dark web and uncovering associated metadata insights into characteristics, behaviours and motivation of CSAM creators.

Participants and Setting: We have conducted an …

Argframe: A Multi-Layer, Web, Argument-Based Framework For Quantitative Reasoning, Lucas Rizzo

Articles

Multiple systems have been proposed to perform computational argumentation activities, but there is a lack of options for dealing with quantitative inferences. This multi-layer, web, argument-based framework has been proposed as a tool to perform automated reasoning with numerical data. It is able to use boolean logic for the creation of if-then rules and attacking rules. In turn, these rules/arguments can be activated or not by some input data, have their attacks solved (following some Dung or rank-based semantics), and finally aggregated in different fashions in order to produce a prediction (a number). The framework is implemented in PHP for …

Understanding The Interplay Between Immigrant Nascent Entrepreneurship And Cross-Cultural Adaptation, Lucia Walsh, Thomas M. Cooney

Articles

Purpose – All entrepreneurs face challenges during their venture start-up process, but immigrant entrepreneurs face additional and distinctive challenges due to their contextual newness. This paper focuses on understanding the intertwined journeys of nascent entrepreneurship and cross-cultural adaptation of immigrants in a small Western European country where immigrant entrepreneurship is still a relatively new phenomenon.

Design/methodology/approach – The induction-driven, 18-month longitudinal empirical inquiry focused on six early-stage nascent entrepreneurs. Qualitative methods included participant observation during an enterprise program, qualitative interviews and ongoing informal communication.

Findings – The data uncovered the interplay between the nascent immigrant entrepreneurship and crosscultural adaptation. This …

The Virtuous Executive, Alan Rozenshtein

Articles

As currently conceived, executive power law and scholarship detach the identity of the President from the powers and duties of the presidency. Whether an official was properly dismissed without cause, whether a pardon was validly issued, whether a foreign policy debacle rose to the level of an impeachable offense—the answers to all these questions are not supposed to depend on the President’s personal characteristics.

This Article argues that this veil of ignorance is incompatible with a correct understanding of Article II. To properly empower good Presidents and constrain bad ones, constitutional actors must take into account the President’s personal characteristics. …

Adolescent Overweight And Obesity In Ireland—Trends And Sociodemographic Associations Between 1990 And 2020, Aoibhín Moore Heslin, Aisling O'Donnell, Laura Kehoe, Janette Walton, Albert Flynn, John Kearney, Breige Mcnulty

Articles

Background: Overweight and obesity in adolescence is a growing issue and can have a range of both short- and long-term consequences on health.

Objectives: To analyse trends in adolescent weight status in Ireland across a 30-year period and to examine the influence of sociodemographic factors on overweight/obesity in Irish adolescents over time.

Methods: Body composition and body mass index weight status of Irish adolescents were compared using data from three nationally representative, cross-sectional Irish national food consumption surveys from 1990, 2006 and 2020. Adjusted analysis of associations between socio-demographic factors with the risk of adolescent overweight/obesity at each time point …

A Qualitative Analysis Of Women's Postnatal Experiences Of Breastfeeding Supports During The Perinatal Period In Ireland, Niamh Lawlor, Lucia Prihodova, Deborah Byrne, Megan Etherton, Felicienne Rahill, Catie Wilson, Elizabeth J. O'Sullivan

Articles

Ireland has among the lowest rates of breastfeeding worldwide. Despite policies to support breastfeeding, breastfeeding initiation and exclusivity remain low in Ireland. Greater knowledge about support received in the maternity unit may—in part—shed light on why this is so. Our aim was to analyse women's experiences of the breastfeeding supports available in the early postnatal period in Ireland. We conducted an analysis of an open-ended question on a cross-sectional survey about breastfeeding support conducted in the Republic of Ireland in 2022. Participants were asked to provide comments about the breastfeeding support they received in the maternity unit or during your …

Corrigendum: Human Mental Workload: A Survey And A Novel Inclusive Definition, Luca Longo, Christopher D. Wickens, Gabriella Hancock, P. A. Hancock

Articles

In the published article, the name of Gabriella Hancock was incorrectly written as “Gabriela M. Hancock.” The correct name is “Gabriella Hancock.” In the published article, there was also an error in the author list as published. Gabriella Hancock was listed as the last author, but should have been listed as third author. P. A. Hancock was listed as third author but should be listed as the last author. The corrected author list appears below. Luca Longo1, Christopher D.Wickens, Gabriella Hancock and P. A. Hancock. The authors apologize for this error and state that this does not change the scientific …

An Integrated Model For Information Adoption&Trust In Mobile Social Commerce, Fulya Acikgoz, Abdelsalam Busalim, James Gaskin, Shahla Asadi

Articles

ABSTRACT Despite the growing importance of mobile social commerce (ms-commerce), little research has been conducted on the effects of informational and social factors on users’ post-adoption behavior. We, therefore, build on the understanding of mobile social commerce in the UK market and how it affects users’ post-adoption behaviors. Our theoretical model leverages the information adoption model, social support theory, and social influence theory. Data was gathered from 377 ms-commerce users from the UK and analyzed via Partial Least Squares (PLS-SEM). The research findings show that both informational and social factors have a positive impact on information adoption in ms-commerce apps. …

The Potential And Limitations Of Conversational Agents For Chronic Conditions And Well-Being, Ekaterina Uetova, Lucy Hederman, Robert J. Ross, Dympna O'Sullivan

Articles

Conversational agents are becoming more common in the health and wellness domains in part due to assumptions regarding potential improvements in individuals’ outcomes. This paper presents initial findings from a review of conversational agent use in healthcare for chronic conditions and well-being. A search of the literature was performed on electronic databases PubMed, ACM Digital Library, Scopus and IEEE Xplore. Studies were included if they were focused on chronic disorder management, disease prevention or lifestyle change and if systems were tested on target user groups. This paper investigates the health domains, the user profiles and reasons why conversational agents may …

How Has Entrepreneurship Opportunity Formation Amongst Immigrants Been Influenced By The Covid-19 Pandemic?, Osa-Godwin Osaghae, Thomas M. Cooney

Articles

The purpose of this paper is to investigate how entrepreneurship opportunity formation amongst immigrants has been influenced by the COVID-19 pandemic, given that environmental changes and irregularity can contribute to entrepreneurship opportunity formation in the immigrant set-up.

Adolescent Overweight And Obesity In Ireland—Trends And Sociodemographic Associations Between 1990 And 2020, Aoibhín Moore Heslin, Aisling O'Donnell, Laura Kehoe, Janette Walton, Albert Flynn, John Kearney, Breige Mcnulty

Articles

Background: Overweight and obesity in adolescence is a growing issue and can have a range of both short- and long-term consequences on health. Objectives: To analyse trends in adolescent weight status in Ireland across a 30-year period and to examine the influence of sociodemographic factors on overweight/obesity in Irish adolescents over time. Methods: Body composition and body mass index weight status of Irish adolescents were compared using data from three nationally representative, cross-sectional Irish national food consumption surveys from 1990, 2006 and 2020. Adjusted analysis of associations between socio-demographic factors with the risk of adolescent overweight/obesity at each time point …