Digital Commons Network^™

Pleading And Advocating A Negligence Claim Through The Regulation Best Interest Lens, Christine Lazaro, Michael S. Edmiston

Faculty Publications

(Excerpt)

On June 5, 2019, the SEC adopted the Regulation Best Interest Rule Package, consisting of (i) Regulation Best Interest: The Broker-Dealer Standard of Conduct (“Reg. BI”); (ii) Form CRS Relationship Summary and Amendments to Form ADV;(iii) the SEC Interpretation Regarding Standard of Conduct for Investment Advisers; and (iv) the SEC Interpretation Regarding the “Solely Incidental” Prong of the Broker-Dealer Exclusion from the Definition of Investment Adviser. Brokers were obligated to begin compliance with Reg. BI as of June 30, 2020.

Reg. BI contains four component sections mandating duties for brokers and firms: Disclosure, Care, Conflicts of Interest, and Compliance. …

Where Black Lives Matter Less: Understanding The Impact Of Black Victims On Sentencing Outcomes In Texas Capital Murder Cases From 1973 To 2018, Jelani Jefferson Exum, David Niven

Faculty Publications

The systemic disregard for Black lives in America was on full display when footage of a police officer kneeling on the neck of George Floyd went viral. Mr. Floyd’s resultant death set off protests declaring that Black Lives Matter throughout the nation and across the world. While national attention rightfully turned to demanding police accountability for undue violence, the prevailing conversation also incorporated at least a declared concern for addressing institutionalized racism within the criminal justice system and other American institutions. The term of the day became “antiracism.” With regard to police killings, the lesson is that police officers disproportionately …

Small Teaching, Big Impact, Ashley B. Armstrong

Faculty Publications

(Excerpt)

James M. Lang’s thesis in Small Teaching is simple: There are small things that educators can do to improve learning outcomes in their classrooms. Lang asserts that these “small but powerful modifications to our course design and teaching practices” are easy for teachers to incorporate and supported by research on learning. Lang is well steeped in pedagogical best practices—he is the former director of the Center for Teaching Excellence at Assumption College in Worcester, MA, and he regularly writes for the Chronicle of Higher Education.

Unsticking American Tort Theory, Benjamin Sundholm

Faculty Publications

(Excerpt)

For decades, the American legal academy has engaged in a lively debate over the foundations of tort law. A schism between economic theorists and their critics has defined the fundamental arc of the dispute.

Richard Posner, perhaps the most well-known proponent of the law-and-economics movement, conceives of tort law as an instrument for maximizing wealth. According to this view, tort law's primary aim is to impose liability in ways that incentivize people to take cost-justified precautions that maximize societal wealth. Viewing themselves as committed to a classic form of rationality, economic theorists recognize that they cannot do anything about …

How To Bring Your Kids Up Queer: Family Law Realism, Then And Now, Kris Franklin, Noa Ben-Asher

Faculty Publications

(Excerpt)

Paula Ettelbrick fought for us.

As a pragmatic and radical litigator, Ettelbrick spent years trying to use a frequently uncomprehending and often outright hostile court system to protect LGBTQ+ Americans. While her work took her into the many areas of law that touched queer lives, a special focus and passion of her advocacy was reserved for queer families.

Paula also tried to warn us.

In the absence of legal recognition for the families we construct, queer lives are rendered not just invisible but virtually nonexistent; we become legal strangers to our loved ones in ways that violently obliterate our …

Estimating Beam Strength Of Metallic Gear Materials, Edward E. Osakue, Lucky Anetor

Faculty Publications

Expressions for the pulsating or beam strengths of many popular metallic gear materials are derived based on the tensile strength and endurance ratio. The strength values predicted are for a reliability of 99% at load cycles corresponding to that of the endurance strength of the materials. The expressions are based on the consideration of the revised Lewis gear root stress formula by treating the design parameters as random variables associated with the lognormal probability density function and application of the Gerber fatigue failure rule. Pulsating strength predictions are compared with those of AGMA estimates for through-hardened steels and other materials. …

Social Justice As Desistance: Rethinking Approaches To Gender Violence, Deborah M. Weissman

Faculty Publications

Part I of this Article describes most domestic violence intervention programs (DVIPs) as they currently function with regard to gender violence. It critiques the structure of these programs, their close partnership with criminal legal system actors, perceived deficiencies, and it identifies missed opportunities to provide meaningful intervention strategies with those who have harmed. It demonstrates the ways that laws, regulations, and policies governing DVIPs constrain most programs from moving beyond established practices informed by punitive approaches to address the structural conditions that situate gender violence within a political economic framework.

Part II begins with a brief overview of the research …

The Problems, And Positives, Of Passives: Exploring Why Controlling Passive Voice And Nominalizations Is About More Than Preference And Style, Jacob M. Carpenter

Faculty Publications

As professional writers, attorneys should understand and have command of two of “the worst writing weaknesses”—passive voice and nominalizations. Studies show that compared to active voice, passive voice and nominalizations can make writing slower to read, harder to read, harder to comprehend, harder to remember, less concise, less familiar feeling, and less engaging. However, passive voice isn’t always bad. Expert writers can use passive voice to create cohesion, shift emphasis, imply objectivity, and make readers feel more distant and less emotional about an event. The problem is that attorneys commonly use passive voice indiscriminately, unknowingly, and excessively, amplifying its negative …

Cynthia Lucy Stephens, The Borges Enigma: Mirrors, Doubles, And Intimate Puzzles, David Laraway

Faculty Publications

In one of his most celebrated texts, ‘Borges y yo’, Borges describes wandering the streets of Buenos Aires, pausing to take in an unanticipated architectural detail or anything else that happens to catch his attention. That spirit of flâneurie captures something of the experience of reading Cynthia Lucy Stephens’ The Borges Enigma. It is the work of a devoted reader of Borges who accompanies us on a tour of Borges’ texts, pointing out an abundance of unexpected details even as her path seems to be marked less by any strict agenda than by the simple pleasures of exploration. Whether it …

The Other Legacy Of Qasim Amin: The View From 1908, Hoda Yousef

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Both Consumptive And Non-Consumptive Effects Of Predators Impact Mosquito Populations And Have Implications For Disease Transmission, Marie C. Russell, Catherine M. Herzog, Zachary Gajewski, Chloe Ramsay, Andy Mccall

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Toward Liquid Cell Quantum Sensing: Ytterbium Complexes With Ultra-Narrow Absorption, Ashley J. Shin, Changling Zhao, Yi Shen, Claire E. Dickerson, Timothy Luke Atallah

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

“You Don’T Belong In Nashville!”: Politics, Country Music, And The Reception Of Robert Altman’S Nashville, Dan Blim

Faculty Publications

Robert Altman’s film Nashville (1975) generated a prodigious amount of press commentary following its release. Early on, critics praised the film, but a disappointing box office led many to assume a split between big-city liberal audiences and small-town conservative audiences. Subsequent press coverage connected this divide to both the film’s politics and its use and portrayal of country music, as political pundits, music critics, country music stars, and general audiences weighed in. This essay situates the reception of the film within a shifting country music industry, which was growing increasingly aligned with the Republican Party and increasingly suspicious of new …

The Character Of Jury Exclusion, Anna Offit

Faculty Publications

Encounters with the legal system are unevenly distributed throughout the American population, with Black and poor citizens targeted as disparate subjects of surveillance, arrest, and criminal conviction. At the same time, these encounters, as well as a stated belief in the unfairness of the legal system, are commonly viewed as legitimate grounds for excusal from jury service. This follows from an understanding of juror bias that assumes that people with negative experiences with legal actors—police and prosecutors, for example—will be less likely to trust and more likely to discount the contributions of those actors within the context of the jury …

Libraries In The Doughnut Economy, Monika Antonelli, Rene Tanner, Rebekkah Smith Aldrich, Adrian K. Ho

Faculty Publications

This chapter unpacks the principles behind Doughnut Economics and explains how libraries can lead a long overdue social transition by incorporating the principles into their policies and operations. The actualization of Doughnut Economics will bring about a positive transformation of people’s behavior, which in turn will shift the focus of the economy from unfettered growth and opportunistic monetization to the well-being of people and biodiversity on the planet. In addition, libraries can help facilitate a redistribution of wealth in its various forms by supporting and promoting knowledge sharing. The chapter concludes with a discussion of five simple acts that drive …

“Wilfrid Sellars And Liberal Naturalism”, Willem A. Devries

Faculty Publications

An examination of Wilfrid Sellars' somewhat problematic relation to liberal naturalism

Application Of Soil Moisture Active Passive (Smap) Satellite Data In Seismic Response Assessment, Ali Farahani, Mahsa Moradikhaneghahi, Majid Ghayoomi, Jennifer M. Jacobs

Faculty Publications

The proven relationship between soil moisture and seismic ground response highlights the need for a tool to track the Earth’s surface soil moisture before and after seismic events. This paper introduces the application of Soil Moisture Active Passive (SMAP) satellite data for global soil moisture measurement during earthquakes and consequent events. An approach is presented to study areas that experienced high level of increase in soil moisture during eleven earthquakes. Two ancillary datasets, Global Precipitation Measurement (GPM) and Global Land Data Assimilation (GLDAS), were used to isolate areas that had an earthquake-induced increase in soil moisture from those that were …

Band Gap Information Extraction From Materials Science Literature – A Pilot Study, Satanu Ghosh, Kun Lu

Faculty Publications

Purpose

The purpose of this paper is to present a preliminary work on extracting band gap information of materials from academic papers. With increasing demand for renewable energy, band gap information will help material scientists design and implement novel photovoltaic (PV) cells.

Design/methodology/approach

The authors collected 1.44 million titles and abstracts of scholarly articles related to materials science, and then filtered the collection to 11,939 articles that potentially contain relevant information about materials and their band gap values. ChemDataExtractor was extended to extract information about PV materials and their band gap information. Evaluation was performed on randomly sampled information records …

I, Jill Alexander, American Girl Revolutionary, Taraneh M. Haghanikar

Faculty Publications

Analyzing the insider-outsider continuum in Remembrance of the Sun (1986, 2011) by Kate Gilmore, the purpose of this paper is to reveal different levels of being a female outsider protagonist moving along the insider-outsider continuum, maintaining an outsider voice, and at the same time developing an insider perspective. Remembrance of the Sun is a historical fiction authored by an outsider and set in 1978, one year before the Islamic revolution in Iran. After moving from New England to Tehran, Jill, a seventeen-year-old American girl, struggles to adjust to an unfamiliar lifestyle. However, her experience becomes a story of love and …

Genealogy Behind Bars: An Update, Kathrine C. Aydelott

Faculty Publications

This brief essay is an update to “Genealogy Behind Bars: Professional Development Through Prisoner Requests: A Case Study,” in Genealogy and the Librarian: Perspectives on Research, Instruction, Outreach and Management, Carol Smallwood and Vera Gubnitskaia, eds. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2018, which see for context.

Effect Of Connection State & Transport/Application Protocol On The Machine Learning Outlier Detection Of Network Intrusions, George Yuchi, Torrey J. Wagner, Paul Auclair, Brent T. Langhals

Faculty Publications

The majority of cyber infiltration & exfiltration intrusions leave a network footprint, and due to the multi-faceted nature of detecting network intrusions, it is often difficult to detect. In this work a Zeek-processed PCAP dataset containing the metadata of 36,667 network packets was modeled with several machine learning algorithms to classify normal vs. anomalous network activity. Principal component analysis with a 10% contamination factor was used to identify anomalous behavior. Models were created using recursive feature elimination on logistic regression and XGBClassifier algorithms, and also using Bayesian and bandit optimization of neural network hyperparameters. These models were trained on a …

Triton Haze Analogs: The Role Of Carbon Monoxide In Haze Formation, Sarah E. Moran, Sarah M. Hörst, Chao He, Michael J. Radke, Joshua A. Sebree, Noam R. Izenberg, Véronique Vuitton, Laurène Flandinet, François Régis Orthous-Daunay, Cédric Wolters

Faculty Publications

Triton is the largest moon of the Neptune system and possesses a thin nitrogen atmosphere with trace amounts of carbon monoxide and methane, making it of similar composition to that of the dwarf planet Pluto. Like Pluto and Saturn's moon Titan, Triton has a haze layer thought to be composed of organics formed through photochemistry. Here, we perform atmospheric chamber experiments of 0.5% CO and 0.2% CH4 in N2 at 90 K and 1 mbar to generate Triton haze analogs. We then characterize the physical and chemical properties of these particles. We measure their production rate, their bulk composition with …

Shifting Preservice Teachers’ Sources Of Mathematics Teaching Efficacy Through Scaffolded Reflection: Fostering Commitment To Reform-Based Mathematics, Brooke Krejci, Elana Joram, Anthony J. Gabriele

Faculty Publications

Efforts to promote reform-based mathematics instruction in schools are pervasive, yet many teachers continue to use more traditional, procedural methods (Paolucci, 2015). In this chapter, the authors suggest that to achieve sustained adoption of reform-based instruction in mathematics, it is essential for professional development programs to draw teachers’ attention to sources of mathematics teaching efficacy afforded by reform-based teaching, such as enhanced student thinking. Educator preparation programs are ideal settings in which to begin this process, and the authors describe how scaffolded reflection activities within a mathematics methods course were used to focus preservice teachers’ attention on sources of mathematics …

Maximizing Learning Of L2 Adult Learners In Higher Education, Gabriela Olivares-Cuhat

Faculty Publications

In the fall of 2019, the age of 33.5% of students enrolled in US institutions of higher education was 25 and above. However, research in the fields of adult learning, developmental, cognitive, and socio-cognitive theories suggests that this group of students presents L2 instructors with a set of strengths and challenges. One specific concern is that empirical studies have indicated a steady decline in L2 success along with the age of the adult learners (Hakuta et al., 2003). The aim of this article is to examine how teaching practices may be derived from research findings, with a view to better …

Judean Piracy, Judea And Parthia, And The Roman Annexation Of Judea: The Evidence Of Pompeius Trogus, Kenneth Atkinson

Faculty Publications

Pompey the Great’s 63 BCE conquest of the Jewish kingdom known as the Hasmonean State has traditionally been viewed as an inevitable event since the Roman Republic had long desired to annex the Middle Eastern nations. The prevailing consensus is that the Romans captured the Hasmonean state, removed its high-priest kings from power, and made its territory part of the Republic merely through military force. However, Justin’s Epitome of the Philippic Histories of Pompeius Trogus is a neglected source of new information for understanding relations between the Romans and the Jews at this time. Trogus’s brief account of this period …

Unleashing Pets From Dead-Hand Control, Kaity Emerson, Kevin Bennardo

Faculty Publications

Many pet owners feel strongly about their animals. Some feel so strongly that they desire their pets to accompany them to the grave. This Article addresses the validity of pet euthanasia provisions in decedents’ wills.

Pet owners generally have the legal power to humanely euthanize their pets. In addition, the primary focus of the law of wills is to effectuate the wishes of the decedent. These two facts seem to counsel in favor of carrying out a testamentary instruction to humanely euthanize a companion animal. Yet courts generally decline to enforce pet euthanasia provisions whenever an objection is raised by …

The Inequity Of Informal Guidance, Joshua D. Blank, Leigh Z. Osofsky

Faculty Publications

The coexistence of formal and informal law is a hallmark feature of the U.S. tax system. Congress and the Treasury enact formal law, such as statutes and regulations, while the Internal Revenue Service offers the public informal explanations and summaries, such as taxpayer publications, website frequently asked questions, virtual assistants, and other types of taxpayer guidance. Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, the IRS increased its use of informal law to help taxpayers understand complex emergency relief rules implemented through the tax system.

In contrast to many other legal scholars who have examined important administrative law issues regarding informal tax guidance, in …

Citation Stickiness, Computer-Assisted Legal Research, And The Universe Of Thinkable Thoughts, Aaron S. Kirschenfeld, Alexa Z. Chew

Faculty Publications

This article seeks to answer two main questions. The first is whether courts cited the same cases as the parties more often during the print era than during the digital era. The second is what, if anything, the answer to the first question can contribute to the debate about how print-era forms of organizing and describing case law influenced researchers’ behavior. To that end, we sampled cases from 1957, 1987, and 2017, and used “citation stickiness” to study the differences in how parties and judges cited authorities during each of those years. In short, we found that there is less …

The Law According To She-Hulk, Kevin Bennardo

Faculty Publications

First introduced in Marvel comics in 1979, Jennifer Walters is the fictional character best known as the She-Hulk. Her profession is an attorney. While this article occasionally draws from source material elsewhere in the Marvel comics, its primary focus is the third She-Hulk series, which was published in twelve issues from 2014 to 2015. This series is considered to be the most legally focused of the She-Hulk series and was written by an attorney, Charles Soule. Soule himself describes the series as “a book starring a superhero who rarely super heroes. Instead of that, she *gulp* lawyers.”

As is normal …

Automated Legal Guidance At Federal Agencies, Joshua D. Blank, Leigh Z. Osofsky

Faculty Publications

When individuals have questions about Federal benefits, services, and legal rules, they are increasingly seeking help from government chatbots, virtual assistants, and other automated tools. Current forms of automated legal guidance platforms include the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services’s “Emma,” the U.S. Department of Education’s “Aidan,” and the Internal Revenue Service’s “Interactive Tax Assistant.” Most scholars who have studied artificial intelligence and Federal government agencies have not focused on the government’s use of technology to offer guidance to the public. The absence of scholarly attention to automation as a means of communicating government guidance is an important gap in the …