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No Intelligence Without Statistics: The Invisible Backbone Of Artificial Intelligence, Ernest Fokoue

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The rapid ascent of artificial intelligence (AI) is often portrayed as a revolution born from computer science and engineering. This narrative, however, obscures a fundamental truth: the theoretical and methodological core of AI is, and has always been, statistical. This paper systematically argues that the field of statistics provides the indispensable foundation for machine learning and modern AI. We deconstruct AI into nine foundational pillars—Inference, Density Estimation, Sequential Learning, Generalization, Representation Learning, Interpretability, Causality, Optimization, and Unification—demonstrating that each is built upon century-old statistical principles. From the inferential frameworks of hypothesis testing and estimation that underpin model evaluation, to the …

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

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

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

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

Should The Ordinary Income Rate Apply To Carried Interest?, Reuven S. Avi-Yonah

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In 2008 professor Victor Fleischer published a famous article entitled “Two and Twenty: Taxing Partnership Profits in Private Equity Funds.” The article explained that: Private equity fund managers take a share of the profits of the partnership as the equity portion of their compensation. The tax rules for compensating general partners create a planning opportunity for managers who receive the industry standard “two and twenty” (a two percent management fee and twenty percent profits interest). By taking a portion of their pay in the form of partnership profits, fund managers defer income derived from their labor efforts and convert it …

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

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Introduction:

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

Methodology:

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

The Largest Tax Fraud?, Reuven S. Avi-Yonah

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On October 1, 2020, the Department of Justice indicted Robert T. Brockman on 39 counts of federal tax evasion and related charges.1 The department’s press release explains: The charges stem from an alleged decades-long scheme to conceal approximately $2 billion in income from the IRS as well as a scheme to defraud investors in the software company’s debt securities. . . . According to the indictment, Brockman, a resident of Houston, Texas, and Pitkin County, Colorado, used a web of offshore entities based in Bermuda and Nevis to hide from the IRS income earned on his investments in private equity …

The Bankruptcy Revolving Door, Belisa Pang

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The American consumer bankruptcy system is a costly regime with profound societal implications. Between 2008 and 2023, consumers filed 13.8 million bankruptcy cases across the ninety-four federal bankruptcy districts in the United States, generating over $4 billion in court filing fees alone. When accounting for attorney fees, trustee expenses, creditor costs, and broader economic externalities—such as increased interest rates borne by other consumers—the total financial impact easily reaches tens of billions, if not hundreds of billions, of dollars.

Against that backdrop, this study uncovers a startling phenomenon: nearly 46% of the consumers who filed bankruptcy in 2023 were repeat filers, …

Factors For Patient Trust And Acceptance Of Medical Artificial Intelligence, Ana Bracic, Kayte Spector-Bagdady, Sophie Towle, Rina Zhang, Cornelius A. James, Nicholson W. Price Ii

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Artificial intelligence (AI) is increasingly used in clinical care, but widespread adoption requires patient trust. Trust may be enhanced through systemic governance mechanisms or frontline clinicians providing a human in the loop for AI oversight. However, it is unclear how different approaches specifically influence patient trust in the use of medical AI. The objective is to determine the extent to which patient trust in and choice of medical scenarios involving AI are associated with governance mechanisms, clinician presence, performance, and data quality.

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

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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 …

Should Single-Sales-Factor Formulas Be Constitutional?, Reuven S. Avi-Yonah

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On October 28, 2025, Florida sued California in the Supreme Court over its application of a single-sales-factor (SSF) formula to exclude large out-of-state asset sales. But Florida couched its critique in much broader terms, seemingly attacking the validity of the SSF altogether. Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier (R) stated that: California has created a tax system that punishes economic freedom. We will not tolerate California over-taxing revenue earned in Florida. The Newsom regime is obviously attempting to punish business owners who have fled California due to its disastrous policies. Given that multitudes of California businesses and residents are moving to …

Three Bites Of The Apple, Jeffery M. Kadet, Philip L. Jezzi, Brian J. Visalli, David G. Chamerlain, Stephen L. Curtis, Reuven S. Avi-Yonah

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In her latest letter, “A Second Bite at the Apple,” Kimberly Blanchard repeats her recent criticisms of the September 2024 EU Court of Justice decision concerning two Irish-incorporated Apple subsidiaries. Her letter title, which of course inspired the title of this article, and her explanations recall the 1967 MGM comedy Three Bites of the Apple, in which a helpful stranger offers elaborate explanations for why taxes need not be paid. In the film, and perhaps in this exchange as well, the relevant question is who ultimately benefits from the arrangement.

This exchange began with professor Philip Laroma Jezzi article reassessing …

Resurrecting Immigration Releases, Lindsay Nash

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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 …

Law And The Self-Coordinating Market Idea, Sanjukta Paul

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Much of the focus of the live Symposium was on comparing existing scholarship associated with two intellectual communities. I have no objection to that enterprise in the abstract, though I think it is a bit premature where law and political economy (LPE) is concerned and sets up an apples-to-oranges comparison to the decades-old streams of work and thinking in law and economics (L&E). But I would rather use the privilege of the space in this written Symposium to sketch what I believe is the ultimate substantive nub of contestation in this conversation about the core subject matter of “the economy” …

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

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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

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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?”

Sanctioning Negligent Bankers, Kyle D. Logue, Robert Will Thomas, Jeffery Y. Zhang

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Over just one week in 2023, depositor runs at a few U.S. banks threatened to trigger a worldwide banking crisis. Afterwards, the United States suffered three of the biggest bank failures in the nation’s history; in Europe, Credit Suisse became the largest financial institution to fail since the 2007-2008 Global Financial Crisis. Stunned by this lightning-fast panic, lawmakers, regulators, and academics have called for significant changes to the U.S. financial regulatory framework. Leading among these proposals are calls to improve supervisory oversight of banks, to tighten existing regulations on banks, and to increase deposit insurance limits. But these proposals alone …

Sidewalk Living, Michael C. Pollack

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In City of Grants Pass v. Johnson, the Supreme Court held that the Eighth Amendment does not prohibit a city from enforcing a criminal ban on encampments on public property such as parks and sidewalks. But even if municipalities are now permitted to use tactics such as policing, encampment clearing, arrests, and imprisonment, these are not the right ways to address the problems of public homelessness.

Instead, homelessness must be understood as one of many conflicts over limited public space. At its best, vibrant sidewalk life enhances communities and local economies. But at its worst, every use of these finite …

Frankenstein’S Drugs: Did Gilead Sciences’ Bahamas Tax Caper Create A Multibillion-Dollar Periodic Adjustment?, Stephen L. Curtis, Reuven S. Avi-Yonah

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With about 182 million infections worldwide at the time, the potential value of a cure for the hepatitis C virus (HCV) was staggering.2 The company behind this drug, Pharmasset Inc., was a startup in Princeton, New Jersey, with 42 researchers and $127 million in the bank, churning through $66 million per year with no commercialized products and no codevelopment or commercialization partners. The “Pharmasset combo” was an extremely effective nucleotide analog that could treat HCV-infected individuals across genotypes, known as PSI-7977 (later renamed GS-7977), also called sofosbuvir, the active pharmaceutical ingredient (API) found in multiple current drugs used to treat …

Digital Services Taxes And The Wto, Reuven S. Avi-Yonah, Doron Narotzki

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In an excellent Tax Notes article, Claudio Cipollini argues that the United States has adopted a paradoxical stance regarding digital services taxes. On one hand, the United States has repeatedly characterized DSTs as discriminatory trade barriers that unfairly target U.S. technology firms. On the other, it has systematically obstructed appointments to the Appellate Body of the WTO, leaving the dispute settlement mechanism effectively inoperative and ineffective. Cipollini presents this as a “missed WTO route,” suggesting that a functioning WTO system would primarily serve U.S. interests by disciplining European DSTs under the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS).

This article …

Can The Eu’S Foreign Subsidy Regulation ‘Discipline’ U.S. Subsidies?, Reuven S. Avi-Yonah, Jennifer Farrell, Domenico Imparato

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Stress Test for Anti-Subsidy Rules Recently, globalization has taken a markedly different turn in the form of renewed prominence of state intervention in the economy and a resurgence of industrial policy favoring domestic firms. Even the emergency measures deployed during the COVID-19 pandemic cannot serve as a reliable benchmark: These were primarily aimed at keeping businesses afloat or preventing foreign acquisitions through financial assistance (for example, domestic handouts) or “golden power” regulations.

When Constitutional Protection For Religious Liberty Gets Lost In Translation: A Case Study From Washington State, Robert W. Gomulkiewicz

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Protecting religious liberty can present difficult challenges when religious liberty conflicts with laws prohibiting discrimination. Balancing religious liberty and nondiscrimination requires courts to accurately apply the U.S. Supreme Court’s complex First Amendment jurisprudence, including cases that address compelled speech, expressive association, and church autonomy. Amidst all the complexity, protection for religious liberty can get lost in translation. One important venue where protection can get lost in translation is in religious liberty cases decided by state supreme courts. The decisions of state supreme courts are especially significant because they provide the authoritative construction for state statutes and the state constitution. In …

The Deep Causes Of The Shallow State, Michael E. Herz

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No abstract provided.

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

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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.

A Citizenship Model Of The Fourth Amendment, Danieli Evans

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Fourth Amendment law is in disarray. In recent years, courts and scholars have questioned central aspects of Fourth Amendment doctrine—in particular, the reasonable expectations of privacy test that has governed since the 1960s. Scholars and judges have argued for abandoning this test and instead looking to private law (sub-constitutional rules governing private conduct, such as tort, property, and contract law) to determine Fourth Amendment protection.

At a moment when judges and scholars are questioning core aspects of Fourth Amendment doctrine, the time is ripe to reconsider the values Fourth Amendment law ought to serve. I advance a novel vision for …

The Free Exercise Of Religion As A Privilege, Kyron J. Huigens

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In the span of a decade, the Supreme Court has restructured the Free Exercise Clause entirely. It has removed the counterweight of disestablishment; it has sought parity between religion and secularity by means of strict scrutiny analysis turning on a principle of nondiscrimination; and it has opened the way to a general exemption from secular law for the faithful by ceding the question of what counts as an exercise of religion to the faithful themselves. This Article proposes reading the free exercise of religion as a privilege in response to these changes. This privilege stands against secular law in the …

A New Tax Shelter Wave, Reuven S. Avi-Yonah

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There have been two tax shelter waves in recent memory: The first one ended in 1986, and the second in 2006. We are now amid a third one. The first wave lasted from around 1970 to 1986. It was based on mass marketed shelters sold to individuals with nonwage ordinary income like lawyers, accountants, physicians, and dentists, who were subject to high tax rates. The basic structure of the first wave of tax shelters depended on the Supreme Court’s misguided opinions in Crane and Tufts, which held that the amount realized from the sale of encumbered property included nonrecourse debt.2 …

Read But Not Understood? An Empirical Analysis Of Consumer Comprehension In Homeowners Insurance, Daniel Benjamin Schwarcz, Brenda Cude, Kyle D. Logue, German Marquez Alcala

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Modern contract law assumes that consumers meaningfully assent to the standard forms that govern their daily lives. However, this assumption is widely regarded as a legal fiction for two key reasons: first, most consumers do not read standard forms, and second, even those who do often struggle to fully comprehend their terms and implications. Although the lack of consumer reading has been well documented through empirical research, consumers’ ability to comprehend standard-form contracts has received surprisingly little attention.

This Article addresses the latter issue by empirically examining whether providing excerpts from the dominant standard-form homeowners insurance policy improves consumer understanding …

The Brave New World Of Administrative Law, Amy J. Wildermuth

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Administrative law is in substantial flux. Over the last fifteen years, beginning with its decision in Free Enterprise Fund v. Public Company Accounting Oversight Board, the Supreme Court has transformed administrative law in profound ways. In the decade and a half since that case, we have witnessed core precedents fall or be substantially narrowed, with seemingly more on the horizon. Many have characterized the Court’s project as aggrandizing power to the President, as seeking to rein in runaway agencies, or even as undoing the administrative state.

The reality is more complex. To grasp where the Court’s project might take …

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

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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 …

Reclaiming Homeowner Wealth: A Conversation With Barry, Fried, And Hatfield, Prentiss Cox

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Homeowners in the United States pay residential real estate brokers commission rates that are about twice as high as the commission charges by brokers in comparable countries. Given the enormous size of the residential home sale market—both in aggregate terms and as a percentage of wealth owned by the average homeowner—this cost discrepancy results in U.S. homeowners transferring tens of billions of dollars each year to brokers that would be saved in a more competitive and fair market. In Et Tu, Agent? Commission-Based Steering in Residential Real Estate (“Et Tu?”), Jordan M. Barry, Will Fried, and John William Hatfield provide …