Digital Commons Network^™

Latino Education In Texas: A History Of Systematic Recycling Discrimination, Albert H. Kauffman

Faculty Articles

All of Texas was once part of Mexico. Texas has never forgotten it. This is the historical basis for much of the Texas Latino population's struggle for equal educational opportunities. This article will discuss those struggles endured by the Latino population in their quest for equal educational opportunity from the time of Texas's entry into the Union in 1845 to present-with greater emphasis on the last half century. In each Section, I will briefly describe the history of discrimination against Mexican- Americans in that segment of education history and the relationship between the developments in that segment of education history …

It's Complicated: The Challenge Of Prosecuting Tncs For Criminal Activity Under International Law, Jena Martin

Faculty Articles

Like it or not, Transnational Corporations (TNCs) are taking an increasingly active role in larger societal issues and debates. Whether it's a social advocacy campaign that seeks to reduce violence and bullying, a decision by a pharmacy company to stop selling tobacco products, or a sportswear company's decisions to take a stand in solidarity with an advocate's resistance to police brutality, TNCs are becoming increasingly vocal regarding their role in larger societal issues.

But there is a darker side to the increased intermingling between corporations and the larger societal impact; namely the potential for a corporation to be involved, or …

Meditation On The Soles Of The Feet Practice Provides Some Control Of Aggression For Individuals With Alzheimer’S Disease, Nirbhay N. Singh, Giulio E. Lancioni, Oleg N. Medvedev, Rachel E. Myers

Faculty Articles

Alzheimer’s disease is a progressive neurodegenerative condition that affects cognition, mental and physical health, and functionality of older people. As the disease progresses from the mild to moderate stage, there is a concomitant increase in several behavioral variables, chiefly agitation, anger, and aggression. Currently, there are no evidence-based treatments for these behaviors in this population. Three individuals with moderate Alzheimer’s disease were taught an informal mindfulness practice, meditation on the Soles of the Feet (SoF), as a self-management strategy within a multiple-baseline design across participants. All three were able to learn and use the SoF practice to manage their verbal …

A Close Reading Of An Excellent Distant Reading Of Heller In The Courts, George A. Mocsary

Faculty Articles

This invited Comment examines the quantitative analysis of postiDistrict of Columbia v Heller icommon law performed by Professors Eric Ruben and Joseph Blocher in iFrom Theory to Doctrine An Empirical Analysis of the Right to Keep and Bear Arms Afteri Heller Their groundbreaking and provocative work seeks to advance Second Amendment scholarship in two important ways First it aims to describe Second Amendment doctrine by quantifying aspects of that constitutional provision's common law Second it challenges the view that lower courts have deliberately and systematically undercut both the right to bear and the right to keep arms as articulated by …

Parity-Time Symmetry In Optical Microcavity Systems, Jianming Wen, Xiaoshun Jiang, Liang Jiang, Min Xiao

Faculty Articles

Canonical quantum mechanics postulates Hermitian Hamiltonians to ensure real eigenvalues. Counterintuitively, a non-Hermitian Hamiltonian, satisfying combined parity-time (PT) symmetry, could display entirely real spectra above some phase-transition threshold. This stems from the existence of a parameter in the Hamiltonian governing characteristics features of eigenvalues and eigenfunctions. Varying this parameter causes real eigenvalues to coalesce and become complex conjugate pairs, signaling the occurrence of a nontrivial phase transition and the breakdown of PT symmetry. Such an appealing discovery has aroused extensive theoretical interest in extending canonical quantum theory by including non-Hermitian but PT-symmetric operators in the last two decades. Despite much …

Market Power And Antitrust Enforcement, John B. Kirkwood

Faculty Articles

Antitrust is back on the national agenda. The Democratic Party, leading Senators, progressive organizations, and many scholars are calling for stronger antitrust enforcement. One important step, overlooked in the discussion to date, is to reform how market power — an essential element in most antitrust violations — is determined. At present the very definition of market power is unsettled. While there is widespread agreement that market power is the ability to raise price profitably above the competitive level, there is no consensus on how to determine the competitive level. Moreover, courts virtually never measure market power (or its larger variant, …

Labor Organizing In The Age Of Surveillance, Charlotte Garden

Faculty Articles

No abstract provided.

Milking The Estate, David R. Hague

Faculty Articles

Recent Chapter 7 bankruptcy cases are exposing a widespread problem. Chapter 7 trustees are retaining their own law firms to represent them and then in clear breach of their fiduciary duties to creditors-requesting illegitimate legal fees to be paid by the estate. This practice is immoral and particularly harmful to creditors. Indeed, every dollar paid to the trustee and his firm is a dollar that will not be distributed to creditors. The Bankruptcy Code, remarkably, allows a trustee to retain his own law firm to represent him in his capacity as a trustee. But this inherently conflicted arrangement is not …

The Distribution And Lifetime Of Powerful Radio Galaxies As A Function Of Environment And Redshift, David Garofalo, Chandra B. Singh, Alexa Zack

Faculty Articles

Correlations between jet power and active time for z < 0.1 high excitation and low excitation radio galaxies are explored as well as evidence in favor of a specific, non-random distribution for these objects including mid-infrared emitting radio galaxies as a function of environment and redshift. In addition, so-called weak line radio galaxies with FRII jet morphology have been identified as a class of active galaxies in the process of shutting down. This paper identifies common features between these seemingly disparate phenomena described above for the population of radio galaxies, and strings them together by way of a simple phenomenological framework that has shed light on the radio loud/radio quiet dichotomy, the jet-disk connection, and the distribution of all active galaxies as a function of redshift.

How The U.S. Supreme Court Deemed The Workers' Compensation Grand Bargain 'Adequate' Without Defining Adequacy, Michael C. Duff

Faculty Articles

During the second and third decades of the twentieth century the U S Supreme Court issued a handful of opinions rejecting 14th Amendment constitutional challenges by employers to implementation of workers' compensation statutes in the United States Unknown to many the statutes were largely the fruit of privatelysponsored investigations principally by the Russell Sage Foundation and the National Association of Manufacturers of European workers' compensation systems during the first decade of the twentieth century Some of those systems had been in existence since the 1870s and 1880s and many employers preferred them to newlyemerging American employer liability statutes that retained …

High-Intensity Functional Training (Hift): Definition And Research Implications For Improved Fitness, Yuri Feito, Katie M. Heinrich, Scotty J. Butcher, Walker S. Carlos Poston

Faculty Articles

High-intensity functional training (HIFT) is an exercise modality that emphasizes functional,multi-joint movements that can be modified to any fitness level and elicit greater muscle recruitmentthan more traditional exercise. As a relatively new training modality, HIFT is often compared tohigh-intensity interval training (HIIT), yet the two are distinct. HIIT exercise is characterized byrelatively short bursts of repeated vigorous activity, interspersed by periods of rest or low-intensityexercise for recovery, while HIFT utilizes constantly varied functional exercises and various activitydurations that may or may not incorporate rest. Over the last decade, studies evaluating theeffectiveness of HIIT programs have documented improvements in metabolic and …

Positive And Negative Psychological States In Self-Paced Technology Training, Saurabh Gupta

Faculty Articles

Industry reports continue to highlight the importance and growth of e-learning. However, researcher, trainers, and trainees all agree that such training has significantly higher levels of anxiety compared to traditional learning. Thus, anxiety is one of the most important impediments in online learning because it can significantly negatively impact training outcomes. On the other hand, researchers and practitioners have not focused on the positive psychological state of process satisfaction from the training process. This paper presents a research model that reframes the dominant theory in technology training (i.e., socio-cognitive theory) and its impact on learning, which includes the impact of …

A Legal Fempire?: Women In Complex Civil Litigation, Brooke D. Coleman

Faculty Articles

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg made headlines when she said that she would be satisfied with the number of women on the Supreme Court “when there are nine.” But why should that answer have been so remarkable? After all, there were nine men on the Court for nearly all of its history. Yet, Justice Ginsburg’s statement was met with amusement or from some quarters — disdain. What answer would have been considered more appropriate coming from a groundbreaking feminist litigator? Would four have been an acceptable answer? Would five have been presumptuous? This episode reflects our cramped view of how much …

Social Justice And Islamic Jurisprudence, Russell Powell

Faculty Articles

No abstract provided.

Something Old And Something New: Exploring The Recent Amendments To The Federal Rules Of Evidence, Ramona L. Lampley

Faculty Articles

This article provides a practical, nuts and bolts approach to understanding the new amendments to the Federal Rules of Evidence and the proposed changes to Rule 807, with a focus on the policy rationale behind the new rules and pointers for how the new rules can affect evidentiary foundations. The article first addresses the amendment to Rule 803(16), providing the policy reasons prompting the change and offering alternative means of assessing hearsay issues for documents that will not meet the new threshold requirements. In Part II, this article analyzes the new self-authentication Rules 902 (13)-(14). The section begins with a …

Nothing New Under The Sun: The Law-Politics Dynamic In Supreme Court Decision Making, Stephen Matthew Feldman

Faculty Articles

Recent events have seemed to inject politics into American judicial institutions As a result many observers worry that the Supreme Court in particular has become politicized According to this view the Justices should decide cases in accordance with the rule of law and be unmoved by political concerns These worries arise from a mistaken assumption that law and politics can be separated and independent in the process of judicial decision making But at the Supreme Court as well as in the lower courts for that matter decision making arises from a lawpolitics dynamic Adjudication in accord with a pure rule …

Magnetic Reconnection And Blandford-Znajek Process Around Rotating Black Holes, David Garofalo, Chandra B. Singh, Elisabete M. De Gouveia Dal Pino

Faculty Articles

We provide a semi-analytic comparison between the Blandford-Znajek (BZ) and the magnetic reconnection power for accreting black holes in the curved spacetime of a rotating black hole. Our main result is that for a realistic range of astrophysical pa- rameters, the reconnection power may compete with the BZ power. The field lines anchored close to or on the black hole usually evolve to open field lines in general rel- ativistic magnetohydrodynamic (GRMHD) simulations. The BZ power is dependent on the black hole spin while magnetic reconnection power is independent of it for the near force-free magnetic configuration with open field …

Five Decades Of Research On Mitochondrial Nadh-Quinone Oxidoreductase (Complex I), Tomoko Ohnishi, S. Tsuyoshi Ohnishi, John C. Salerno

Faculty Articles

NADH-quinone oxidoreductase (complex I) is the largest and most complicated enzyme complex of the mitochondrial respiratory chain. It is the entry site into the respiratory chain for most of the reducing equivalents generated during metabolism, coupling electron transfer from NADH to quinone to proton translocation, which in turn drives ATP synthesis. Dysfunction of complex I is associated with neurodegenerative diseases such as Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s, and it is proposed to be involved in aging. Complex I has one non-covalently bound FMN, eight to 10 iron-sulfur clusters, and protein-associated quinone molecules as electron transport components. Electron paramagnetic resonance (EPR) has previously …

Constitutional Shapeshifting: Giving The Fourth Amendment Substance In The Technology Driven World Of Criminal Investigation, Gerald S. Reamey

Faculty Articles

For the first hundred years of the Fourth Amendment's life, gains in the technology of surveillance were modest. With the advent of miniaturization and ever-increasing sophistication and capability of surveillance and detection devices, the Supreme Court has struggled to adapt its understanding of "search" to the constantly evolving devices and methods that challenge contemporary understanding of privacy. In response to surveillance innovations, the Court has taken varying positions, focusing first on property-based intrusions by government, then shifting to privacy expectations, and, more recently, resurrecting the view that a trespass to property can define search.

This article surveys this constitutional odyssey, …

Postmodern Free Expression: A Philosophical Rationale For The Digital Age, Stephen Matthew Feldman

Faculty Articles

Three philosophical rationalessearchfortruth selfgovernance and selffulfillmenthave animated discussions of free expression for decades Each rationale emerged and attained prominence in American jurisprudence in specific political and cultural circumstances Moreover each rationale shares a foundational commitment to the classical liberal modernist self But the three traditional rationales are incompatible with our digital age In particular the idea of the classical liberal self enjoying maximum liberty in a private sphere does not fit in the postmodern information society The time for a new rationale has arrived The same sociocultural conditions that undermine the traditional rationales suggest a selfemergence rationale built on the …

The Return Of The Self, Or Whatever Happened To Postmodern Jurisprudence?, Stephen Matthew Feldman

Faculty Articles

Postmodern jurisprudence was all the rage in the 1990s Two of the most renowned postmodernists Stanley Fish and Pierre Schlag both persistently criticized mainstream legal scholars for believing they were modernist selvesindependent sovereign and autonomous agents who could remake the social and legal world merely by writing a law review article Then Fish and Schlag turned on each other Each attacked the other for making the same mistake harboring a modernist self I revisit this skirmish for two reasons First it helps explain the current moribund state of postmodern jurisprudence If two of the leading postmodernists could not avoid embedding …

Fear And Loathing In Persuasive Writing: An Empirical Study Of The Effects Of The Negativity Bias, Kenneth D. Chestek

Faculty Articles

Cognitive psychologists have identified a phenomenon they call the negativity bias in which humans seem to remember and be affected by negative information more strongly than by positive information What are the implications of this bias for legal writers Should they focus on negative themes describing the opposing side as bad instead of positive ones describing their clients as good and worthy More specifically do trial judges fall prey to the negativity biasThis article describes an empirical test in which 163 judges were asked to read different versions of a Preliminary Statement to a trial brief some using positive themes …

Measurement Of Time-Dependent C P Asymmetries In B 0 → K 0 S Η Γ Decays, H. Nakano Et Al., Ratnappuli L. Kulasiri

Faculty Articles

We report a measurement of time-dependent CP violation parameters in B0→K0Sηγ decays. The study is based on a data sample, containing 772×106B¯B pairs, that was collected at the Υ(4S)resonance with the Belle detector at the KEKB asymmetric-energy e+e− collider. We obtain the CPviolation parameters of S=−1.32±0.77(stat)±0.36(syst) and A=−0.48±0.41(stat)±0.07(syst) for the invariant mass of the K0Sη system up to 2.1 GeV/c2.

What's Next: Counter-Stories And Theorizing Resistance (Foreword), Tayyab Mahmud

Faculty Articles

No abstract provided.

What's Next? Into A Third Decade Of Latcrit Theory, Community, And Praxis (Afterword), Steven Bender, Tayyab Mahmud, Francisco Valdes, Shelley Cavalieri, Jasmine Gonzalez Rose, Saru Matambanadzo, Roberto Corrada, Jorge Roig, Zsea Bowmani, Anthony E. Varona

Faculty Articles

No abstract provided.

The Texas Constructive Trust And Its Peculiar Requirements, David Dittfurth

Faculty Articles

Consider two cases. In the first case, you represent the children of a woman who was intentionally and wrongfully killed by her husband. After having pled guilty to negligent homicide, the husband probates his wife's will in which he is the sole beneficiary. In the second case, your client attempts an online transfer of her savings to another of her accounts but enters the account number erroneously and sends her life's savings to a stranger's account. The recipient of this windfall has withdrawn the money in cashier's checks and refuses to return them to her.

Your clients want a court …

The (Mis)Application Of Rule 404(B) Heuristics, Dora W. Klein

Faculty Articles

In all of the federal circuit courts of appeals, application of Rule 404(b) of the Federal Rules of Evidence has been distorted by judicially-created "tests" that, while intended to assist trial courts in properly admitting or excluding evidence, do not actually test for the kind of evidence prohibited by this rule. Rule 404(b) prohibits evidence of "crimes, wrongs, or other acts" if the purpose for admitting the evidence is to prove action in accordance with a character trait. This evidence is commonly referred to as "propensity" evidence, or "once a drug dealer, always a drug dealer" evidence.

This Article examines …

Socialized Liability In Chinese Tort Law, Chenglin Liu

Faculty Articles

This article explores two unique aspects of the Chinese Tort Liability Law (TLL): (1) Article 24 holds that a party not at fault shall share the loss with the victim in non-strict liability cases under undefined circumstances, and (2) the government often shields a party at fault from liability in mass tort cases by disregarding the TLL entirely. These two aspects may seem contradictory; however, they are both based on the same principle of socialized liability, which is first articulated in this article.

Scholars often claim that Article 24 embodies the principle of equitable liability. This article challenges such claims …

The Timing Of Testation, Mark Glover

Faculty Articles

An adult can execute her last will whenever she wants She can do so on her eighteenth birthday or she can wait until she is on her deathbed She can also execute her last will at any point between these two extremes While the timing of testation is up to the individual testator her choice has important implications for the law These implications have been recognized primarily in the realm of willinterpretation as when testation occurs can affect how courts attribute meaning to a will's words By contrast the implications of testation's timing for the law of willauthentication have been …

White Norm, Black Deviation: Class, Race, And Resistance In America’S “Postracial” Media Discourse, Farooq Kperogi, Eduard Fabregat

Faculty Articles

The authors deploy Marxist theory—and Gramscian hegemonic theory in particular—to investigate the subtleties of racial “othering” in the media representations of African Americans in a putatively post-racial America. The paper’s objects of inquiry are an opinion article in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and the reaction it instigated in the Atlanta Black Star. We argue that the contestations of signification between the dominant narrative about African Americans in the AJC and the rhetorical pushback it actuated in the alternative Atlanta Black Star both reproduce and legitimate dominant media framing by highlighting the alterity of subordinate ethnic groups and providing a site for …