Digital Commons Network^™

Biglaw's Race Problem, Angela Onwuachi-Willig, Anthony V. Alfieri

Articles

Ever since the 1970s when BigLaw firms began to hire Black lawyers into their associate ranks, these firms have wrestled with problems in both recruiting and retaining Black associates. During the ensuing decades, BigLaw firms have minimally increased the low numbers of Black attorneys who have become partners, particularly equity partners, within their organizations. Numerous scholars have explored how racial bias and discrimination, both within BigLaw firms and greater society, have contributed to such failures in the recruitment, retention, and promotion of Black lawyers. In his new book The Black Ceiling: How Race Still Matters in the Elite Workplace, Professor …

Lessons For The Trump Administration From The Biden U.S. National Strategy To Counter Antisemitism, Lili Levi

Articles

In May 2023, the Biden Administration issued the first-ever U.S. National Strategy to Counter Antisemitism [hereinafter National Strategy] with a goal of hindering further normalization of antisemitism by increasing public awareness of antisemitism and highlighting positive Jewish contributions to America. Recent events, however-particularly the social and political upheaval over protests of the war in Gaza-have led to public contestation over Israel, increased instances of antisemitism, and the partisan politicization of Jewish issues. Now, the Trump Administration explicitly purports to fight antisemitism by widespread attacks on universities over antisemitism on campus. Does this mean that the National Strategy has become anachronistic, …

Environmental Geography And Law: Toward A Synthesis, Michaela Anang-Hadjicostandi, Sophia Borgias, Karrigan Börk, Ann M. Eisenberg, Guadalupe M. Franco, Cinnamon Carlarne Hirokawa, Keith H. Hirokawa, Jonathan London, Melinda Morgan, Jessica Owley, Shannon Roesler, Sonya Ziaja

Articles

This Article introduces the new interdisciplinary field of Environmental Geography and Law, which has deep roots in ecology, social science, and law. Environmental and natural resources laws are situated in specific times and places where the climate, ecosystems, history and political economy influence both the land and the law. These places drive and constrain the way law develops. In turn, the law shapes places, from the dispossession and forced migration of indigenous groups, to land development via railroad land grants, to patterns of resource extraction and infrastructure development. Past efforts to integrate law and geography have focused more on critical …

Saving Agency Adjudication, Aaron L. Nielson, Christopher J. Walker, Melissa F. Wasserman

Articles

When discussing the federal judiciary, commentators typically fixate on the 800 or so “Article III” judges who are nominated by the President, confirmed by the Senate, and enjoy life tenure and salary protection. Yet most federal adjudication does not take place in federal courthouses at all. Instead, it occurs in nondescript hearing rooms in administrative agencies—if not telephonically. Indeed, the more than 12,000 agency adjudicators scattered across the federal government collectively issue millions of decisions per year on subjects ranging from Social Security and veterans benefits to immigration and patent rights. In recent years, however, scholars and agency adjudicators have …

Unspeakable Objections: Recovering From The Tricks And Traps Of Rule 30(C)(2), Leonard Niehoff, Shannon Hickey

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The boundary between a proper “working” objection and an improper “speaking” objection under Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 30(c)(2) turns out to be less discernible and more mysterious than we might like. It’s certainly less plain than some lawyers believe and some judges have suggested. We all need a better understanding of how and why the business of making objections at depositions can get complicated under the terms of this rule.

The Editorial Board's Stories Of War And Recovery, Rachelle Navarro, Edna Epstein, Kristin Bender, Leonard Niehoff, Rahul Agarwal, Dennis Raglin, Margaret Mckeown

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What follows are real-world experiences my fellow editors at Litigation journal shared with me. As much as misery loves company, we litigators love war stories more and, boy, do we have some! They show us that, when faced with unexpected catastrophes, we have only one option: Get to work. Do the math. Solve the problem. And then solve the next one.

Drivers Of Effective Laws For Automated Vehicles, William Hubbard

Articles

Hundreds of thousands of automated vehicles (AVs) are currently driving on America’s roads. The defining feature of AVs is that sophisticated technological systems control some or even all aspects of vehicle movement. Like any motor vehicle, AVs provide many benefits but also raise significant safety concerns. Indeed, people are already dying in collisions with AVs. Effective AV regulation is therefore critical.

This Article addresses an important—perhaps the most important— issue of AV regulation today. Recent empirical research has uncovered a shocking legal crisis: more than 40,000 conventional state laws are unclear or ineffective when applied to AVs. Fortunately, the vast …

U.S. Territories And The Criminal Law Curriculum, Emmanuel H. Arnaud

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No abstract provided.

Springboard To Article V (Or Electoral Democracy And The End Of Constitutional Amendment In The Nation And States), Wilfred U. Codrington Iii

Articles

Drafted in exceedingly sparing terms and notoriously difficult to amend, the U S. Constitution is falling short in one of the most important functions of a government charter: establishing and maintaining a fair and just electoral framework-marked by rules that promote the values of equality, participation, competition, and transparency in elections. That is, the Constitution increasingly fails to preserve electoral democracy even as the nation's systems for voting and elections are plagued by a cascade of problems. State constitutions, though not uniform, are uniformly easier to amend than the national charter and tend to be better stewards of electoral democracy. …

Worldwide Trends In The Quality And Breadth Of Clinical Investigations Of Medical Devices Over The Past Decade: A Scoping Review And Evidence Map, Elaine Harris, David F. Keane, Mathew Cherian, Ryan Longley, Rosie Dunne, Thomas Matthew, Paddy Gillespie, Abhay Pandit, Matthew D. Griffin

Articles

682 studies from 2012 and 1682 studies from 2022 were included. Around a quarter of studies were interventional and the remainder being observational and primary outcomes of effectiveness were more common than efficacy. Key study design aspects were frequently unreported, including sample size justification, registration, randomisation technique and funders. Our evidence map demonstrated that predominantly, investigations were of implants and were in a cardiovascular setting. Clinical investigations were broadly similar between 2012 and 2022, though there was a reduction in the proportion of cardiovascular studies, a move in the share of studies coming out of Europe and North America towards …

Lifespan Of Male And Female App/Ps1 And Appnl-F/Nl-F Mouse Models Of Alzheimer's Disease, Hannah Roberts, Yimin Fang, Kathleen Quinn, Tiarra Hill, Mackenzie R Peck, Andrzej Bartke, Kevin N Hascup, Erin R Hascup

Articles

Alzheimer's disease (AD) disproportionately affects women, yet most preclinical research studies are male-centric. We performed lifespan analyses of male and female AD mouse models (APP/PS1 and APP^NL-F/NL-F) and their shared genetic background control (C57BL/6). Survival curves support significant sex differences between genotypes. Minimal longevity revealed increased age in male APP/PS1, and decreased age in male APP^NL-F/NL-F mice. Maximal longevity revealed an increased average age in males. Furthermore, median lifespan differed between sex and genotype. This study supports dimorphic survival in two mouse models of AD, emphasizing the need to examine mechanisms and treatments in both sexes.

Sport, Soft Disempowerment And The 1966 Fifa World Cup, Richard Woodward

Articles

Sport is increasingly acknowledged as a vital component of the United Kingdom’s arsenal of soft power assets. However, the UK’s attempts to wring soft power from sport have met with mixed success. Many of the UK’s experiences align with an embryonic literature suggesting that sport, as well as enabling the production of soft power, is simultaneously capable of eroding it, a phenomenon dubbed ‘soft disempowerment’. Drawing upon original archival documents, this article examines how the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) commandeered the 1966 World Cup and England’s victory in the competition in a doomed attempt to communicate positive messages …

Use And Benefits Of A Therapeutic Hypnosis Interactive Media Program For Chronic Pain Management: A Pilot Study, Mark P. Jensen, Joy F. Chan, Owen Gottlieb, Laurence I. Sugarman, Emily Stensland

Articles

Chronic pain is a common condition that has significant negative effects on individuals and society. Opioids continue to be the primary treatment provided to the billions of individuals with chronic pain, despite their general lack of efficacy and significant negative side effects. A growing body of research supports the potential of therapeutic hypnosis for helping individuals better manage their chronic pain. However, access to this treatment is limited. The availability of a hypnosis digital therapeutic has the potential to address this access problem. The current study was designed to evaluate the feasibility of a digital therapeutic hypnosis prototype (not yet …

Is The Utpr Extraterritorial Or Discriminatory?, Reuven S. Avi-Yonah

Articles

On January 20 President Trump issued two executive orders on international tax. The first order rejected the OECD’s two-pillar project, stating: The OECD Global Tax Deal supported under the prior administration not only allows extraterritorial jurisdiction over American income but also limits our Nation’s ability to enact tax policies that serve the interests of American businesses and workers. Because of the Global Tax Deal and other discriminatory foreign tax practices, American companies may face retaliatory international tax regimes if the United States does not comply with foreign tax policy objectives. This memorandum recaptures our Nation’s sovereignty and economic competitiveness by …

The Puzzle Of Biologics Manufacturing Platform Patents, Osmat Azzam Jeferson, W. Nicholson Price Ii, S. Sean Tu, Saurabh Vishnubhakat, Arti K. Rai

Articles

The predominance of manufacturing process patents asserted in litigation by originator biologics companies against would-be biosimilar entrants has resulted in a number of Congressional and administrative agency proposals that could increase scrutiny and limit enforceability.

Defining Demand - The Suitability Of Sensor-Based Demand-Controlled Ventilation Within Deep Energy Retrofit Dwellings, Seamus Harrington, Mark Mulville

Articles

This paper reviews a Sensor-Based Demand-Controlled Ventilation (SBDCV) system which seeks to provide fresh air for breathing and to dilute and exhaust pollutants and odours. Previous studies have demonstrated that the constant pressure system increases ventilation extract and inflow based on relative humidity levels and/or presence detection and works on the assumption that the level of ventilation provided is sufficient to control the concentration of all indoor air pollutants, including those that are not occupant generated. This paper presents the results obtained from monitoring the indoor air quality of eight dwellings that had undergone a fabric-first deep energy retrofit and …

Esg Irony: Why Corporate Tax Avoidance Must Be Considered, Reuven S. Avi-Yonah

Articles

Environmental, social, and governance (ESG) investing has been the focus of major attention in corporate law. Many writers praised ESG as the future of corporate governance. The push for ESG comes from the belief that the government is incapable of fulfilling its responsibility of achieving social and environmental goals, and that corporations are frequently in the best position to help. ESG investing has been significantly bolstered by large asset management institutions like BlackRock Group, State Street Global Advisors, and Vanguard Group. The “Big Three” own large stakes in most public corporations, which they have been pushing to address ESG issues.

Tax Experience Isn’T Everything: A Tale Of Two Justices., Reuven S. Avi-Yonah

Articles

Any student of federal income taxation is familiar with a series of important Supreme Court tax decisions written by Justice Harry Blackmun (associate justice, 1970-1994). They would also know of three important decisions written by his contemporary, Justice Thurgood Marshall (associate justice, 1967-1991). It is interesting to compare the two, because Blackmun was the only recent justice with extensive tax practice experience, whereas Marshall had none. Yet, most of Blackmun’s tax opinions were wrong while Marshall’s opinions were right.

Us V. Rahimi, Originalism's Loaded Weapon, And The Lost Boys Of The Supreme Court, Mary Anne Franks

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No abstract provided.

Rivers V. Guerrero, Meagan R. Hurley

Articles

Danny Rivers sought federal habeas relief, arguing that his trial counsel was ineffective. Rivers’s petition was denied, but while his initial habeas appeal was pending, he initiated a second filing to include new information that his prior counsel failed to utilize in an exculpatory report supporting his innocence. Applying 28 U.S.C. § 2244(b)(2), the district court determined it was “without jurisdiction to entertain” the new evidence because Rivers’s filing was a “second or successive” petition. The Fifth Circuit of Appeals agreed.

Waste, Property, And Useless Things, Meredith Render

Articles

How should the law respond to intentionally useless objects that are constructed from scarce materials and thrust into an overcrowded world?

Approximately sixty million tons of electronic waste, or "e-waste" -for example, discarded iPhones, refrigerators, desktop computers -is produced each year. This annual pile of electronic rubbish represents sixty-two billion dollars' worth of tangible raw materials (such as gold and other scarce metals) that has been rendered useless. In addition to wasting raw materials, e-waste clogs our landfills, poisons the groundwater, and taxes our capacity to store it. Worst of all, much of this waste is intentionally created …

Fee-Shifting Shortcuts, Maureen Carroll

Articles

Federal fee-shifting statutes, which allow certain prevailing plaintiffs to recover a reasonable attorney’s fee from the defendant, are critically important to civil rights enforcement. When it comes to the interpretation of these statutes, however, a wide gap separates the doctrine articulated by the Supreme Court and the decisions issued by lower courts. According to the Supreme Court, the calculation of a feeshifting award requires a highly contextualized inquiry, specific to the plaintiff’s attorneys and claims; in the lower courts, by contrast, judges take a set of welltrodden shortcuts that flatten many of the differences the case law makes relevant.

This …

Shadow Banking And Securities Law, Gabriel V. Rauterberg, Jeffery Yufeng Zhang

Articles

Shadow banking may be the single greatest challenge facing financial regulation. Financial institutions that function like banks, but fall outside the scope of banking regulation—aptly termed “shadow banks”—were at the heart of the Global Financial Crisis and most episodes of serious financial stress since then. Scholars have largely focused on one response to this problem: extending traditional banking regulation to shadow banks. Yet more than fifteen years after the crisis, major regulatory efforts along this route have stalled.

In this Article, we explore the uneasy case for greater regulation of shadow banking through a different route—securities law. Our first contribution …

Deputization And Privileged White Violence, Ekow N. Yankah

Articles

A number of high-profile and racially charged killings, such as Trayvon Martin’s, Kenneth Herring’s, Ahmaud Arbery’s, and Jordan Neely’s, have been at the hands of civilians declaring themselves the law. These deaths stemmed from a phenomenon best described as “deputization.” Deputization describes a latent legal power that has empowered White people throughout American history to claim authority to enforce the law, as they see it, upon racial minorities generally and Black people in particular. This power turned the ancient common law duty to police all felons in England into a specific American common law duty to police Blacks. From the …

Next Generation Legal Researchers: Implementing Critical Information Literacy Through The Acrl Framework To Ensure Student Success On The Nextgen Bar Exam, Laura Wilcoxon

Articles

Students who began law school in the fall of 2023 could be among the first to encounter the NextGen Bar Exam. Examinees will now be required to demonstrate proficiency in legal research to become practicing attorneys. This change provides an opportunity to evaluate the pedagogy employed to prepare students for the bar exam and beyond. Incorporating critical information literacy into the legal research curriculum will enable students to master the analytic and metacognitive skills that will be tested on the NextGen Bar Exam. Law librarians can incorporate these skills into legal research instruction by implementing the Framework for Information Literacy …

Regulating Hidden Ai Authorship, Jacob Noti-Victor

Articles

With the rapid emergence of high-quality generative artificial intelligence (“AI”), some have advocated for mandatory disclosure when the technology is used to generate new text, images, or video. But the precise harms posed by nontransparent uses of generative AI have not been fully explored. While the use of the technology to produce material that masquerades as factual (“deepfakes”) is clearly deceptive, this Article focuses on a more ambiguous area: the consumer’s interest in knowing whether works of art or entertainment were created using generative AI. In the markets for creative content—fine art, books, movies, television, music, and the like—producers have …

Flow Dynamics Of Agricultural Waste Nanofibers: Shear, Temperature, And Oscillatory Insights, Bilge N. Altay, Burak Aksoy, James Atkinson, Christopher Lewis, Carlos Diaz-Acosta, Raymond Francis

Articles

The rheology and fiber size of corn stover (CS) and cleaned cotton gin trash (CGT) cellulose nanofibers (CNFs) were studied including behaviors at both moderate and extremely high shear rates, to simulate industrial processes ranging from mixing and pumping to high-speed coating, printing, and extrusion. Particle size analyzer showed that 99% of CS fibers measured around 226 nm, while 85% of CGT fibers were approximately 143 nm. Both CS and CGT CNFs formed gel-like suspensions, and shear flow tests revealed that all samples exhibited shear-thinning behavior, allowing easy flow under shear forces. Gels with higher solid content (1%) demonstrated extended …

Is Ethical Review A Barrier To The Publication Of Research On Violence Against Women And Children For Low- And Middle-Income Country Researchers?, Elizabeth Dartnall, Sarah Homan, Kevin Lalor, Mpho Silima, Chi-Chi Undie

Articles

Producing and publishing research on violence against women (VAW) and violence against children (VAC) is essential for developing evidence-based solutions to these widespread issues. However, researchers in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) face numerous challenges and structural inequities that hinder their ability to contribute to the global knowledge base. Among these, obtaining research ethics approval, which is essential for ensuring research integrity and safeguarding participant welfare, stands out as a particularly critical and often arduous hurdle. Access to research ethics approval presents significant challenges for researchers in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs), due to: (1) limited availability and accessibility of …

Quantifying The Role Of Active Listening And Reassurance In Virtual Health Coach Interactions, Ghulam Hussain, Brian Keegan, Robert Ross

Articles

Conversational Agents have the potential to support healthcare through coaching exercise routines, but are still lacking in demonstrating authentic social behaviours to support engagement. To this end, we present a series of experiments that we conducted in order to investigate how automated health care coaches can be more effective when their interaction style is tailored to demonstrate qualities associated with a good bedside manner, namely active listening and reassurance. To test this, we first developed a dataset of 135 dialogue excerpts from three distinct sources, i.e., original, handcrafted and LLMs, the latter two of which were tuned to demonstrate specific …

A Review Of Chemical Stabilisation Used To Enhance The Mechanical Properties Of Rammed Earth, David Thompson, Charles Augarde, Juan Pablo Osorio

Articles

Rammed earth is a sustainable construction method with a lower carbon footprint and embodied energy compared to traditional materials like steel and concrete. However, its lower mechanical properties when compared to these forms of construction make it vulnerable to seismic forces. This paper reviews the published literature on enhancing rammed earth's mechanical properties through both chemical stabilisation and fibre reinforcement, with a focus on reusing waste materials. The effectiveness of these techniques are highlighted by comparing experimental results with minimum specifications taken from relevant guidelines and standards for building rammed earth structures in seismic zones. These findings demonstrate that chemical …