Digital Commons Network^™

Understanding The Dean's Job, Barry Vickrey

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

One Continuous Flow: Revelations Surrounding The New Translation, Kerry M. Muhlestein

Faculty Publications

We often underestimate both the complexity and continuity of Joseph Smith's revelatory life. His visions rolled, he said, "like an overflowing surge before [his] mind." Now that they have been compartmentalized into different sections, chapters, and books, we tend to compartmentalize them in our minds. Such a practice, however, limits our ability to see how powerful and continuous this "overflowing surge" really was.

State Administration Vs. Self-Government In The Slovak And Czech Republics, Phillip J. Bryson

Faculty Publications

In the transition experience, the Czech and Slovak Republics have made some effort to achieve fiscal decentralization. From independence to EU accession, the devolution of power designed to strengthen the autonomy of local governments according to the principles of subsidiarity have also included a reform of public administration. The nature of reform efforts and their implications for the fiscal decentralization are analyzed. The failure to achieve a robust autonomy for subnational governments is due to the ongoing adherence to the notion of the "state administration" as opposed to self-government in both republics.

Reconstituting Japanese Law: International Norms And Domestic Litigation, Timothy Webster

Faculty Publications

This paper examines a number of lawsuits challenging racial discrimination in Japan’s private sector. Since Japan does not have a law banning private acts of racial discrimination, victims of racial discrimination invoke international human rights law to buttress their claims for compensation. I argue that Japanese judges are, by and large, receptive to these international law claims, but that the system for adjudicating racial discrimination disputes is inadequate. Specifically, a law that bans private acts of racial discrimination would put Japan in line with recently emergent global norms of equality.

“‘See That You Do Not Refuse The One Who Is Speaking’: Obedience In The Letter To The Hebrews., Felix H. Cortez

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Faith In The Rule Of Law, Marc O. Degirolami

Faculty Publications

This is an essay on Brian Z. Tamanaha's Law as a Means to an End: Threat to the Rule of Law (2006).

For all but the most unflinching consequentialist, "instrumentalism" tends to draw mixed reviews. So it does from Brian Tamanaha. His book, Law as a Means to an End: Threat to the Rule of Law, documents with measured diffidence the ascendancy and current reign of "legal instrumentalism," so entrenched an understanding of law that it is "taken for granted in the United States, almost a part of the air we breathe." Professor Tamanaha shows that in our legal theorizing, …

The Problem Of Religious Learning, Marc O. Degirolami

Faculty Publications

The problem of religious learning is that religion—including the teaching about religion—must be separated from liberal public education, but that the two cannot be entirely separated if the aims of liberal public education are to be realized. It is a problem that has gone largely unexamined by courts, constitutional scholars, and other legal theorists. Though the U.S. Supreme Court has offered a few terse statements about the permissibility of teaching about religion in its Establishment Clause jurisprudence, and scholars frequently urge policies for or against such controversial subjects as Intelligent Design or graduation prayers, insufficient attention has been paid to …

Rational Choice, Reputation, And Human Rights Treaties, Alex Geisinger, Michael Ashley Stein

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Primer For U.S. Lawyers On European Union Government And Law, Charles H. Koch Jr.

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Unintelligent Design In Contract, Peter A. Alces

Faculty Publications

Scholars have expended considerable energy in the effort to "discover" a normative theory of Contract. This Article surveys that effort and concludes that something fundamental about Contract has been missed and has frustrated the search from the outset. Succinctly, Contract doctrine resists the neat formulation theory requires. Theorists' perspectives on Contract may be generalized as attempts to impute either deontology or consequentialism to the Contract law. Focusing largely on deontological constructions of Contract, this Article demonstrates the inconsistencies among the extant heuristics-promise, reliance, and transfer-and more importantly, the failure of any of those constructions to provide a coherent explanation of …

Carrying A Good Joke Too Far, Peter A. Alces, Jason M. Hopkins

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

In Search Of Removal Jurisdiction, Scott Dodson

Faculty Publications

The ubiquitous and somewhat careless use of the term “jurisdictional” by courts has spawned confusion over what is and is not jurisdictional in a variety of contexts, including removal. The issue has critical implications for litigants. Yet it lacks scholarly coverage and is the subject of deep divisions in the lower courts. In this article, I develop an initial framework for tackling the jurisdictional/procedural characterization issues of the removal statute. I build upon the groundwork laid by prior precedent and modify it to account for the quasi-jurisdictional nature of removal and its impact on the federal-state balance of power. I …

Ideological Cohesion And Precedent (Or Why The Court Only Cares About Precedent When Most Justices Agree With Each Other), Neal Devins

Faculty Publications

This Article examines the profound role that ideological cohesion plays in explaining the Supreme Court's willingness to advance a coherent vision of the law - either by overruling precedents inconsistent with that vision or by establishing rule-like precedents intended to bind the Supreme Court and lower courts in subsequent cases. Through case studies of the New Deal, Warren, and Rehnquist Courts, this Article calls attention to key differences between Courts in which five or more Justices pursue the same substantive objectives and Courts which lack a dominant voting block. In particular, when five or more Justices pursue the same substantive …

Expressing Community Values Through Family Law Adjudication, Vivian E. Hamilton

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Disabling Prejudice, Michael E. Waterstone, Michael Ashley Stein

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

The Message Of God's People In The Old Testament, Jiri Moskala

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Incentives Bring Zero-Emission Vehicle Manufacturing To California, Annette M. Nellen

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Comparative Diet Of Three Sympatric Sceloporus In The Semiarid Zapotitlan Valley, Mexico, V. Hugo Serrano-Cardozo, J. A. Lemos-Espinal, Geoffrey R. Smith

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

User Fees In Local Finance: Performance And Potential In Czech And Slovak Republics, Phillip J. Bryson

Faculty Publications

The Czech Republic and Slovakia, like other transition countries in Central and Eastern Europe, have given significant lip service to fiscal decentralization and engaged in public administration reforms. But the subnational governments of their public finance systems still lack relative autonomy, which could be addressed partly through developing independent revenue sources for their municipalities and regions. Currently, such independent revenue sources include the proceeds of a strictly nominal property tax as well as those of a small set of local user fees and taxes designed and approved by the central governments. Together they represent only about 5 percent of total …

Retail Investor Remedies Under Rule 10b-5, O'Hare Jennifer

Faculty Publications

This paper assesses the private remedies available under Rule 10b-5 to retail investors who have been defrauded by false corporate disclosures. After comparing the treatment received by retail investors to the treatment received by institutional investors, I identify several areas in which the federal securities laws disfavor retail investors who have been defrauded by false corporate disclosures, including the creation of a two-tiered system of investor remedies for securities fraud. Institutional investors are permitted to pick and choose which law and forum offers them the most attractive chance for recovery, but retail investors typically do not have this opportunity. They …

Royal Executions: Evidence Bearing On The Subject Of Sanctioned Killing In The Middle Kingdom, Kerry M. Muhlestein

Faculty Publications

The pages of this journal, and other publications, have seen disagreement in the past regarding the methods of and reasons for sanctioned killing in Ancient Egypt. Some of this disagreement stems from having looked at large expanses of time without regard to change, and to arbitrarily imposed limitations. By looking at a larger corpus of evidence and restricting the examination to a specific period of time, this paper establishes that the Middle Kingdom engaged in a number of methods of sanctioned killing for more reasons than has often been supposed.

Time Reversal, Brian E. Anderson, Michele Griffa, Paul A. Johnson, Carene Larmat, Timothy J. Ulrich

Faculty Publications

This article provides an historical overview of Time Reversal (TR), introduces its basic physics, addresses advantages and limitations, and describes some applications of this very active research area of acoustics. In the Geophysics Group at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, we conduct studies of TR of elastic waves in solids. Our work includes application of TR to nondestructive evaluation of materials, as well as to earthquake source characterization, and ground-based nuclear explosion monitoring. We emphasize the term elastic waves here to underscore that we include both compression and shear waves, in contrast to purely acoustic waves that are only compressional.

Learning Policies For Embodied Virtual Agents Through Demonstration, Jonathan Dinerstein, Parris K. Egbert, Dan A. Ventura

Faculty Publications

Although many powerful AI and machine learning techniques exist, it remains difficult to quickly create AI for embodied virtual agents that produces visually lifelike behavior. This is important for applications (e.g., games, simulators, interactive displays) where an agent must behave in a manner that appears human-like. We present a novel technique for learning reactive policies that mimic demonstrated human behavior. The user demonstrates the desired behavior by dictating the agent’s actions during an interactive animation. Later, when the agent is to behave autonomously, the recorded data is generalized to form a continuous state-to-action mapping. Combined with an appropriate animation algorithm …

Clinical Application Of Standardized Cognitive Assessment Using Fmri. Ii. Verbal Fluency, Mark D. Allen, Alina K. Fong

Faculty Publications

In this study, we describe an fMRI version of the verbal fluency test. This is the second in a series of fMRI adaptations of classical neuropsychological tests, for which normative samples of functional activation have been collected from unimpaired control subjects and structured in a manner that makes individual patient evaluation possible in terms of familiar z-score distributions. This fMRI protocol is shown to have strong convergent validity with the FAS phonemic fluency test and to elicit activation patterns highly consistent with a large body of previous neuroimaging studies of verbal fluency. We also present a case study, in which …

Child–Adult Differences In Second-Language Phonological Learning: The Role Of Cross-Language Similarity, Wendy Baker-Smemoe, Pavel Trofimovich, James E. Flege, Molly Mack, Randall Halter

Faculty Publications

This study evaluated whether age effects on second language (L2) speech learning derive from changes in how the native language (L1) and L2 sound systems interact. According to the “interaction hypothesis” (IH), the older the L2 learner, the less likely the learner is able to establish new vowel categories needed for accurate L2 vowel production and perception because, with age, L1 vowel categories become more likely to perceptually encompass neighboring L2 vowels. These IH predictions were evaluated in two experiments involving 64 native Korean- and English-speaking children and adults. Experiment 1 determined, as predicted, that the Korean children were less …

Effects Of Friendship In Transactions In An Emerging Market: Empirical Evidence From Brazil, Wesley Mendes-Da-Silva, Thaís Fernanda Salves De Brito, Rubens Famá, Jonathan T. Liljegren

Faculty Publications

This paper considers the inclusion of human behavioral aspects and implications of cognitive psychology and anthropology in decisions relating to the emerging field of behavioral finance. The formulated hypotheses were tested using 400 questionnaires, answered by students enrolled in MBA programs. The principal results suggest that individuals involved in transactions among friends or among strangers assume different behaviors—friends agree about the price attributed to an asset, while strangers show the propensity to bargain.

Model-Centered Instruction, The Design, And The Designer, Andrew S. Gibbons Iii

Faculty Publications

A model of instruction described by Wenger (1987) identifies three elements that are active during instruction: the mental model the instructor wishes to share with the learner, the external experience used to communicate the mental model, and the evolving mental model of the learner. Gibbons (2003a), writing in response to Seel (2003), noted this three-part description as a bridge concept relating learning and instruction. This view has important practical implications for designers of instruction. For example, Gibbons and Rogers (in press) propose that there exists a natural layered architecture within instructional designs that corresponds with instructional functions. Among these layers …

"I Will Contend With Them That Contendeth With Thee": The Divine Warrior In Jacob's Speech Of 2 Nephi 6-10, Daniel Belnap

Faculty Publications

It is unclear from the text exactly where or when Jacob offered his magnificent discourse recorded in 2 Nephi 6–10, but while such details are missing, the discourse itself stands as one of the most powerful passages of scripture in the Book of Mormon. The purpose of the speech was to answer an ongoing concern of the Nephites. Since their departure from Jerusalem it appears that the Nephites had felt cut off and isolated from God’s promises because they lacked a permanent land of inheritance. By the time of Jacob’s speech, the Nephites had been driven from two lands of …

Fractionation Of The Rice Bran Layer And Quantification Of Vitamin E, Oryzanol, Protein, And Rice Bran Saccharide, Rebecca Schramm, Alicia Abadie, Na Hua, Zhimin Xu, Marybeth Lima

Faculty Publications

Value-added processing with respect to rice milling has traditionally treated the rice bran layer as a homogenous material that contains significant concentrations of high-value components of interest for pharmaceutical and nutraceutical applications. Investigators have shown that high-value components in the rice bran layer vary from differences in kernel-thickness, bran fraction, rice variety, and environmental conditions during the growing season. The objectives of this study were to quantify the amount of rice bran removed at pre-selected milling times and to correlate the amount of rice bran removed at each milling time with the concentration of vitamin E, gamma-oryzanol, rice bran saccharide, …

Shared Parasitoids In A Metacommunity: Indirect Interactions Inhibit Herbivore Membership In Local Communities, James T. Cronin

Faculty Publications

The interaction between species, mediated by a shared natural enemy (i.e., apparent competition), has been the subject of much theoretical and empirical investigation. However, we lack field experiments that assess the importance of apparent competition to metacommunity structure. Here, I conducted a series of field experiments to test whether apparent competition, mediated by shared egg parasitoids (Anagrus nigriventris and A. columbi), occurs between two abundant planthopper species (Delphacodes scolochloa and Prokelisia crocea) of the North American Great Plains. The two planthoppers feed on different plant species within prairie potholes (wet depressions) and, thus, do not interact directly. At the scale …