Digital Commons Network^™

A State-Based National Network For Effective Wildlife Conservation, Dale Goble

Articles

State wildlife conservation programs provide a strong foundation for biodiversity conservation in the United States, building on state wildlife action plans. However, states may miss the species that are at the most risk at rangewide scales, and threats such as novel diseases and climate change increasingly act at regional and national levels. Regional collaborations among states and their partners have had impressive successes, and several federal programs now incorporate state priorities. However, regional collaborations are uneven across the country, and no national counterpart exists to support efforts at that scale. A national conservation-support program could fill this gap and could …

The Impact Of The Rise And Fall Of Chevron On The Executive's Power To Make And Interpret Law, Linda Jellum

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The Supreme Court's willingness to defer to agency interpretations of ambiguous statutes has vacillated over the past seventy years. The Court's vacillation has dramatically impacted the executive 's power to make and interpret law. This Article examines how the Court augmented then constricted executive lawmaking power and ceded then reclaimed executive interpretive power with a single case and its legal progeny. Chevron U.S.A., Inc. v. Natural Resources Defense Council, Inc. and its aftermath dramatically altered the executive's power to make and interpret law. Prior to Chevron, Congress had the primary responsibility for lawmaking, while agencies made policy choices primarily when …

Resilience And Water Governance: Adaptive Governance In The Columbia River Basin, Barbara Cosens

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The 1964 Columbia River Treaty between the United States and Canada is currently under review. Under the treaty, the river is jointly operated by the two countries for hydropower and is the largest producer of hydropower in the western hemisphere. In considering the next phase of international river governance, the degree of uncertainty surrounding the drivers of change complicates efforts to predict and manage under traditional approaches that rely on historical ecosystem responses. At the same time, changes in social values have focused attention on ecosystem health, the decline of which has led to the listing of seven salmon and …

Reflections Of Women In Legal Education: Stories From Four Decades Of Section Chairs, Linda Jellum

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No abstract provided.

Dealing With Overcrowding In Prisons: Contrasting Judicial Approaches From The Usa And Ireland., Mary Rogan

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Two recent decisions, one given by the Supreme Court of the United States of America and one of the Irish High Court, address the consequences of overcrowding in prisons. In Brown, Governor of California et at v. Plata et al1 (hereinafter Plata) the US Supreme Court upheld a decision of a three judge federal court requiring the State of California to reduce its prison population to 137.5% of the prison system’s design capacity, requiring the release of up to 46,000 prisoners. The Court agreed that the overcrowding in the Californian prison system had caused the breach of prisoners’ rights under …

Improving Criminal Justice Data And Policy, Mary Rogan

Articles

Criminal justice policy in Ireland is often criticised for lacking a robust evidence base.

Increased knowledge about crime and criminal justice may act to enrich all types of criminological enquiry and policy formation. This paper explores the potential of large population registries, similar to those created in the health sector, to inform criminal justice policymaking. The paper looks at the importance of such data collection for criminal justice research and policy and the potential hurdles to its development.

High-Q Bismuth-Silicate Nonlinear Glass Microsphere Resonators, Pengfei Wang, Ganapathy Murugan, Timothy Lee, Ming Ding, Gilberto Brambilla, Yuliya Semenova, Qiang Wu, Fumihito Koizumi, Gerald Farrell

Articles

The fabrication and characterization of a bismuth-silicate glass microsphere resonator has been demonstrated. At wavelengths near 1550 nm, high-modes can be efficiently excited in a 179-μm diameter bismuth-silicate glass microsphere via evanescent coupling using a tapered silica fiber with a waist diameter of circa 2 μm. Resonances with Q-factors as high as were observed. The dependence of the spectral response on variations in the input power level was studied in detail to gain an insight into power-dependent thermal resonance shifts. Because of their high nonlinearity and high- factors, bismuth-silicate glass microspheres offer the potential for robustly assembled fully integrated all-optical …

The Frying Pan Or The Fire: Public Attitudes About Using Herbicides To Manage Invasive Weeds, Mariah Evans, Kimberly Rollins

Articles

How do we balance risks? This paper assesses hypotheses derived from instrumental rationality and risk society theories about the reasoning strategies that people will use to develop views supportive or oppositional to the use of herbicides to manage cheatgrass (Bromus tectorum), an invasive weed. Cheatgrass is well-known in the population of the American West to increase wildfire risks substantially and to harm the environment in other ways. But are the cures worse than the disease? One demonstrably effective method of cheatgrass suppression is the use of herbicides, and the paper explores sources of support for and opposition to …

The Natural Law Bridge Between Private Law And Public International Law, Richard A. Epstein

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One keg similarity between natural law and international law is that they seek to obtain a stable social order without the intervention of any state authority capable of issuing and enforcing its commands to those subject to its rule. Among ordinary individuals in a state of nature that weakness tends to lead to a stripped-down libertarian regime that features simple rules of acquisition, contract, and protection. The system gains its relative stability from the brute fact that between rough equals the part in the defensive posture will win out, so that great disparities in power are needed to disrupt the …

In Praise Of Realism (And Against 'Nonsense' Jurisprudence), Brian Leiter

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Ronald Dworkin describes an approach to how courts should decide cases that he associates with Judge Richard Posner as a "Chicago School of antitheoretical, no-nonsense jurisprudence." Since Professor Dworkin takes his own view of adjudication to be diametrically opposed to that of the Chicago School, it might seem fair then, to describe Dworkin's own theory as an instance of protheoretical, nonsense jurisprudence. That characterization is not one, needless to say, that Professor Dworkin welcomes. Dworkin describes his preferred approach to jurisprudential questions, to be sure, as theoretical, in opposition to what he calls the practical orientation of the Chicago School. …

Title Vii: A Shift From Sex To Relationships, Victoria Schwartz

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No abstract provided.

Response And Colloquy Concerning The Papers By Jack Balkin And David Strauss, David A. Strauss

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No abstract provided.

Citizens United And Conservative Judicial Activism, Geoffrey R. Stone

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This Article analyzes the recent trend of conservative judicial activism in the Supreme Court and searches for a principled reason to explain it. The conservative majority has struck down several laws in recent years, culminating in its invalidation of an important provision of the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002 in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission. While judicial restraint and originalism are currently seen as conservative principles, neither principle explains these decisions. The author argues that no principle can explain the results of these cases-rather, they can only be explained by the Justices' personal views and policy preferences. The …

Lumpy Property, Lee Anne Fennell

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No abstract provided.

Pay For Regulator Performance, M. Todd Henderson, Frederick Tung

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Few doubt that executive compensation arrangements encouraged the excessive risk taking by banks that led to the recent Financial Crisis. Accordingly, academics and lawmakers have called for the reform of banker pay practices. In this Article, we argue that regulator pay is to blame as well, and that fixing it may be easier and more effective than reforming banker pay. Regulatory failures during the Financial Crisis resulted at least in part from a lack of sufficient incentives for examiners to act aggressively to prevent excessive risk. Bank regulators are rarely paid for performance, and in atypical cases involving performance bonus …

Maritime Health: A Review With Suggestions For Research, Malcolm Maclachlan, Bill Kavanagh, Alison Kay

Articles

International maritime health has largely developed within the sphere of occupational health services and international health problems. We reviewed publications in the journal International Maritime Health from 2000 to 2010 to establish the coverage of the journal and the scope of research in maritime health. We identified six thematic categories: healthcare access, delivery and integration; telehealth; non-communicable diseases and physical health problems; communicable diseases; psychological functioning and health; and safety-related issues. We describe the research within these themes and report on their publication prominence. We also analyse the research in terms of its geographical focus, the population groups addressed and …

Historical Gloss And The Separation Of Powers, Curtis A. Bradley, Trevor W. Morrison

Articles

Arguments based on historical practice are a mainstay of debates about the constitutional separation of powers. Surprisingly, however, there has been little sustained academic attention to the proper role of historical practice in this context. The scant existing scholarship is either limited to specific subject areas or focused primarily on judicial doctrine without addressing the use of historical practice in broader conceptual or theoretical terms. To the extent that the issue has been discussed, accounts of how historical practice should inform the separation of powers often require “acquiescence” by the branch of government whose prerogatives the practice implicates. Such acquiescence …

Can Originalism Be Saved?, David A. Strauss

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No abstract provided.

Was There Ever Such A Thing As Judicial Self-Restraint?, William M. Landes, Lee Epstein

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Richard Posner's version of judicial self-restraint implies that individual Justices who embrace restraint would tend to uphold the constitutionality of a law even if it went against their preferences or ideology. Judge Posner suggests that this form of restraint once existed but no longer does. Using a dataset of cases that considered the constitutionality offederal laws, we explore whether, in line with Judge Posner's hypothesis, the Court grew more activist (that is, more willing to strike laws) over the period between 1937 and 2009 and whether the ideological leanings of Justices, and not judicial self-restraint, better explain how they voted …

Clarification Needed: Fixing The Jurisdiction Venue And Clarification Act, William Baude

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No abstract provided.

Access And The Public Domain, Randal C. Picker

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No abstract provided.

Costly Intellectual Property, Jonathan Masur, David Fagundes

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No abstract provided.

Delegation In Immigration Law, Eric A. Posner, Adam B. Cox

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Immigration law both screens migrants and regulates the behavior of migrants after they have arrived. Both activities are information intensive because the migrant's "type" and the migrant's post-arrival activity are often forms of private information that are not immediately accessible to government agents. To overcome this information problem, the national government can delegate the screening and regulating functions. American immigration law, for example, delegates extensive authority to both private entities--paradigmatically, employers and families-and to the fifty states. From the government's perspective, delegation carries with it benefits and costs. On the benefit side, agents frequently have easy access to information about …

Constitutionalism: East Asian Antecedents, Tom Ginsburg

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No abstract provided.

Forecasting The Flashpoints, Nicholas Stephanopoulos

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No abstract provided.

Inflation Indicators, Jonathan Masur

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No abstract provided.

On The American Paradox Of Laissez Faire And Mass Incarceration, Bernard E. Harcourt

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No abstract provided.

Physical And Regulatory Takings: One Distinction Too Many, Richard A. Epstein

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No abstract provided.

Preserving Political Speech From Ourselves And Others, Aziz Huq

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No abstract provided.

The Politics Of Incivility, Bernard E. Harcourt

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No abstract provided.