Digital Commons Network^™

Environmental Indifference, Anthony L. Moffa

Faculty Publications

An incarcerated American underclass, disproportionately comprised of minority citizens, has been compelled to live in an unconstitutionally polluted environment. Exposure to radon gas in indoor air is just one example of that pollution. Fortunately, the legal effort to address that particular condition of confinement has already begun; the theoretical and practical discussion in this work strives to both highlight the importance of the issue and inform the doctrinal development. The Eighth Amendment precedent created on the specific issue of radon exposure will very likely control the courts’ treatment of other environmental harms ignored by prison officials. This work, using radon …

Strength In Numbers (Of Words): Empirical Analysis Of Preambles And Public Comments, Anthony L. Moffa

Faculty Publications

The empirical observation of a four-decades-long trend towards longer and longer federal agency rulemakings laid the foundation for this series of studies and associated law review articles. The second in that series, this work will add necessary data, test important hypotheses, and draw new conclusions to guide policymakers. Any serious observer of the Federal Register recognizes that different sections of a rulemaking serve different purposes. And agencies have historically utilized one section in particular to insulate their rules from judicial vacation or remand – the “concise general statement of basis and purpose.” Thus, this new study will collect and analyze …

A Computational Simulation-Based Framework For Estimating Potential Product Impact During Product Design, Christopher S. Mabey, Andrew G. Armstrong, Christopher A. Mattson, John L. Salmon, Nile W. Hatch, Eric C. Dahlin

Faculty Publications

The impact of engineered products is a topic of concern in society. Product impact may fall under the categories of economic, environmental or social impact, with the last category defined as the effect of a product on the day-to-day life of people. Design teams lack sufficient tools to estimate the social impact of products, and the combined impacts of economic, environmental and social impacts for the products they are designing. This paper aims to provide a framework for the estimation of product impact during product design. To estimate product impact, models of both the product and society are required. This …

What Is Your Status Portfolio? Higher Status Variance Across Groups Increases Interpersonal Helping But Decreases Intrapersonal Well-Being, Catarina R. Fernandes, Siyu Yu, Taeya M. Howell, Alison Wood Brooks, Gavin J. Kilduff, Nathan C. Pettit

Faculty Publications

Individuals belong to multiple groups across various domains of life, which in aggregate constitute a portfolio of potentially distinct levels of experienced status. We propose a two-factor model for assessing the effects of an individual’s status portfolio, based on status average (mean status level across groups) and status variance (degree to which status varies across those groups). Five studies using samples in general-life and work-specific contexts reveal the importance of both status average and status variance, the latter of which has been largely unexplored by status researchers to date. Individuals experiencing higher status variance show greater perspective taking, which in …

Models Behaving Badly: The Limits Of Data-Driven Lending, Itzhak Ben-David, Mark J. Johnson, René M. Stulz

Faculty Publications

Data-driven lending relies on the calibration of models using training periods. We find that this type of lending is not resilient in the presence of economic conditions that are materially different from those experienced during the training period. Using data from a small business fintech lending platform, we document that the small business credit supply collapsed during the COVID-19 crisis of March 2020 even though the demand for loans doubled relative to pre-pandemic levels. As the month progressed, most lenders significantly reduced or halted their lending activities, likely due to the heightened risk of model miscalibration under the new economic …

Marketplace Lending: Matching Small Businesses With Specialized Fintech Lenders, Mark J. Johnson

Faculty Publications

Fintech promises improvements in access to credit for small businesses through more efficient search and better pricing. Using novel data from a marketplace platform of 115,000 loan offers from 46 online lenders I show that the primary contribution of fintech is not in precisely measuring and pricing risk, but rather in facilitating search between small firms and preferred-habitat lenders. Loan rate offers are largely unexplained by firm characteristics and differ substantially even for the same applicant. The dispersion in offers is largely explained by the fact that lenders have preferred habitats -- lending to borrowers of certain risk types and …

Workshop Outcomes Report: 1st International Workshop On Seismic Resilience Of Arctic Infrastructure And Social Systems, Majid Ghayoomi, Katharine Duderstadt, Alexander Kholodov, Alexander Shiklomanov, Matthew Turner, Elham Ajorlou

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Follow The Scientists? How Beliefs About The Practice Of Science Shaped Covid-19 Views, Thomas G. Safford, Emily H. Whitmore, Lawrence C. Hamilton

Faculty Publications

“Follow the science” became the mantra for responding to COVID-19 pandemic. However, for the public this also meant “follow the scientists,” and this led to uneasiness as some viewed scientists as not credible. We investigate how beliefs about the way scientists develop their findings affect pandemic-related views. Our analysis shows that beliefs about scientists’ objectivity predict views regrading coronavirus-related risks, behavioral changes, and policy priorities. While political party identity also predicts views about COVID-19-related concerns, these vary by political leaders whose approaches embraced versus dismissed science based strategies, highlighting the importance of perceptions of scientists in shaping pandemic related attitudes …

How Policies Portray Students: A Discourse Analysis Of Codes Of Conduct In Academic Libraries, Megan Bresnahan

Faculty Publications

In academic libraries, “codes of conduct” are policies that define what people who use those libraries are allowed to do in library spaces and serve as rules for enforcement. In this policy discourse analysis, the author examines these policies to understand what dominant discourses emerge about students who use libraries. The discourses represented in these policies portray students through frames of deficit thinking, adultism, exclusion, and surveillance. The study advocates for a critical shift in the design and purpose of these policies, and the results may inspire academic librarians to revise their policies to center care and respect for students.

Photoreceptor Phosphodiesterase (Pde6): Activation And Inactivation Mechanisms During Visual Transduction In Rods And Cones, Rick H. Cote

Faculty Publications

Rod and cone photoreceptors of the vertebrate retina utilize cGMP as the primary

intracellular messenger for the visual signaling pathway that converts a light stimulus into an electrical response. cGMP metabolism in the signal-transducing photoreceptor outer segment reflects the balance of cGMP synthesis (catalyzed by guanylyl cyclase) and degradation (catalyzed by the photoreceptor phosphodiesterase, PDE6). Upon light stimulation, rapid activation of PDE6 by the heterotrimeric G-protein (transducin) triggers a dramatic drop in cGMP levels that lead to cell hyperpolarization. Following cessation of the light stimulus, the lifetime of activated PDE6 is also precisely regulated by additional processes. This review summarizes …

Trauma And Memory In The Prosecution Of Sexual Assault, Cynthia V. Ward

Faculty Publications

Part I of this article traces the history of the recovered memory movement in the criminal prosecution of sexual assault, discussing some prominent cases and their consequences for wrongly convicted defendants. Part II asks why the criminal law was so vulnerable to claims of sexual assault, and other violent crimes, that were often wildly improbable on their face. The article concludes that the structure of recovered memory theory had the effect of disabling checks in the criminal process which are designed to prevent unjust convictions. Part III applies that conclusion to the theory of Trauma-informed Investigation (TII) and the "Neurobiology …

Corporate Commitment To International Law, Jay Butler

Faculty Publications

Corporations are increasingly important actors in international law. But vital questions underlying this development have long gone unanswered: How and why do corporations commit to international law?

This article constructs a general account of business interaction with international legal obligation and suggests that a gateway to demystifying this persistent puzzle lies in corporate opinio juris.

Corporate opinio juris describes a company's subscription to a rule of international law, even though the company is not technically bound by that rule. This subscription functions as a kind of pledge that, once made, has sway over the company and its peers and symbiotically …

Pure Privacy, Jeffrey Bellin

Faculty Publications

n 1890, Samuel Warren and Louis Brandeis began a storied legal tradition of trying to conceptualize privacy. Since that time, privacy's appeal has grown beyond those authors' wildest expectations, but its essence remains elusive. One of the rare points of agreement in boisterous academic privacy debates is that there is no consensus on what privacy means.

The modern trend is to embrace the ambiguity. Unable to settle on boundaries, scholars welcome a broad array of interests into an expanding theoretical framework. As a result, privacy is invoked in debates about COVID-19 contact tracing, police body cameras, marriage equality, facial recognition, …

Benevolent Exclusion, Anna Offit

Faculty Publications

The American jury system holds the promise of bringing commonsense ideas about justice to the enforcement of the law. But its democratizing effect cannot be realized if a segment of the population faces systematic exclusion based on income or wealth. The problem of unequal access to jury service based on socio-economic disparities is a longstanding yet under-studied problem—and one which the uneven fallout of the COVID-19 pandemic only exacerbated. Like race- and sex-based jury discrimination during the peremptory challenge phase of jury selection, the routine dismissal of citizens who face economic hardship excludes not only people but also the diversity …

The Roles Of Supervisory Support And Involvement In Influencing Scientists’ Job Satisfaction To Ensure The Achievement Of Sdgs In Academic Organizations, Majid Ghasemy, Isabel Maria Rosa-Díaz, James Eric Gaskin

Faculty Publications

Job satisfaction is the focus of this study, given its strategic importance, both to generate differentiation and competitive advantages, and to promote better and more sustainable results in organizations. Guided by the Affective Events Theory (AET), the interest is in analyzing the direct and indirect effects of supervisory support and involvement on job satisfaction and highlighting the implications of the academics’ emotions for sustainability-related policies and practices in academic environments. The context selected is the higher education (HE) sector in Malaysia for science disciplines, due to its socioeconomic relevance and its direct link to the Fourth Industrial Revolution (IR4), as …

What Can Mental Health Teach Us About Social Media Screen Time Misestimation?, Mark Keith, Parker Nokes, Alexandra Spruill

Faculty Publications

Mobile platform providers have provided the ability to measure the time consumers spend on each app. This provides the opportunity to measure a consumer’s misestimation of their screentime which is a concept relevant to several mental health attributes such as depression, anxiety, and addiction. We provide additional evidence about the effect of objective screentime on mental health, but add a unique perspective on how screentime misestimation is determined by various mental health attributes. We collected data from a student sample (n=1005) who are from the demographic who most commonly use social media apps (18-29 yr olds). We measured our model …

Journalism As A Public Good: How The Nonprofit News Model Can Save Us From Ourselves, Rosalie Westenskow, Edward L. Carter

Faculty Publications

At a time when many U.S. newspapers find themselves at the edge of a financial precipice, The Salt Lake Tribune’s recent transformation into a 501(c)(3) public charity presents a potentially promising route to economic safety for other daily newspapers. Although the nonprofit, tax-exempt model has been an increasingly popular one for new media outlets, the IRS’s bestowal of such status on a major daily newspaper marks an historic event—one that other newspapers, and their legal counsel, can learn from. This Article outlines several issues such practitioners and owners should be aware of as they consider taking the leap to …

Is Germline Gene Editing Exceptional?, Myrisha S. Lewis

Faculty Publications

Advances in gene editing have recently received significant scientific and media attention. Gene editing, especially CRISPR-Cas9, has revived multiple longstanding ethical debates, including debates related to parental autonomy, health disparities, disability perspectives, and racial and economic inequalities. Germline, or heritable, gene editing generates several newer, neglected bioethical debates, including those about the shared human germline and whether there is a "line" that humans should not cross.

This Article addresses several interrelated ethical and legal questions related to germline gene editing. Those questions address why, if at all, germline gene editing needs to be regulated and, if germline gene editing needs …

The Evolving Technology-Augmented Courtroom Before, During, And After The Pandemic, Fredric I. Lederer

Faculty Publications

Even before the COVID-19 Pandemic, technology was changing the nature of America’s courtrooms. Access to case management and e-filing data and documents coupled with electronic display of information and evidence at trial, remote appearances, electronic court records, and assistive technology for those with disabilities defined the technology-augmented trial courtroom. With the advent of the Pandemic and the need for social distancing, numerous courts moved to remote appearances, virtual hearings, and even virtual trials. This Article reviews the nature of technology-augmented courtrooms and discusses virtual hearings and trials at length, reviewing legality, technology, human factors, and public acceptance, and concludes that …

Legal And Administrative Pitfalls That May Confront Climate Regulation, Jonathan H. Adler

Faculty Publications

This paper surveys the legal vulnerabilities and administrative obstacles to the rapid adoption of regulatory measures capable of achieving meaningful GHG reductions. This analysis does not purport to identify which climate policies would be the most effective in the abstract, or in the absence of administrative and legal constraints. Nor does this paper make any claims about what sorts of measures can pass Congress now or in the future. Rather, this analysis seeks to inform the choice of climate strategies by highlighting the risks faced by climate measures once they are enacted by Congress or promulgated by federal regulatory agencies. …

Race-Conscious Jury Selection, Anna Offit

Faculty Publications

Among the central issues in scholarship on the American jury is the effect of Batson v. Kentucky (1986) on discriminatory empanelment. Empirical legal research has confirmed that despite the promise of the Batson doctrine, both peremptory strikes and challenges for cause remain tools of racial exclusion. But these studies, based on post facto interviews, transcript analysis, and quantitative methods offer little insight into Batson’s critical impact on real-time decision-making and strategy in voir dire. If we increasingly know what kinds of juries are produced in the post-Batson world, we know very little about how they are produced.

This …

Who Gets ‘To Guru’? Scientist Ted Speakers And The Role Of Collective Identity In Peer Evaluation Of Audience Diversification, Brian P. Reschke, Taeya M. Howell

Faculty Publications

As producers diversify to additional audiences, they invite scrutiny of themselves and the products they provide, both by external evaluators as well as peer producers. We argue that in certain conditions, audience diversification may suggest producers represent their producer group, prompting special scrutiny by peers. In these cases, peer evaluation of diversification depends on the correspondence between the identity of the diversifying producer and the collective identity of the producer group, such that peers sanction non-prototypical producers and support exemplary producers. We develop and test hypotheses in the context of science, examining how appeals to the general public—giving a TED …

The Sovereign In Commerce, Kate Sablosky Elengold, Jonathan D. Glater

Faculty Publications

The federal government is increasingly a commercial actor, providing retail services directly through its own agencies and indirectly through privatesector contractors. Government involvement with and in the private sector is intended to capitalize on the expertise and efficiency of businesses, benefit taxpayers, and promote public ends. Yet this involvement also confers advantages that benefit the executive branch and its contractor allies at the expense of consumers and states. Our prior work in these pages examined how a muddle of doctrines that form a sovereign shield can be exploited by contractors and the executive branch to evade civil liability and regulatory …

War Powers Abrogation, Jeffrey M. Hirsch

Faculty Publications

The United States’ peacetime security is based entirely on its all-volunteer armed forces. These volunteers, split equally between full- and part-time servicemembers, risk not only their health and safety, but also their economic stability when they are called away from home for training or active duty. Servicemembers’ duties also interfere with the demands of employers, creditors, and government agencies—which can result in job losses, financial difficulties, and other costs. As a result, the federal government has long used its constitutional war powers to enact legislation protecting servicemembers from many of these hardships. These statutes provide employment leave and antidiscrimination protection, …

The Mark Of Policing: Race And Criminal Records, Eisha Jain

Faculty Publications

This Essay argues that racial reckoning in policing should include a racial reckoning in the use of criminal records. Arrests alone—regardless of whether they result in convictions—create criminal records. Yet because the literature on criminal records most often focuses on prisoner reentry and on the consequences of criminal conviction, it is easy to overlook the connections between policing decisions and collateral consequences. This Essay employs the sociological framework of marking to show how criminal records entrench racial inequality stemming from policing. The marking framework recognizes that the government creates a negative credential every time it creates a record of arrest …

The Surprising Significance Of De Minimis Tax Rules, Leigh Z. Osofsky, Kathleen Delaney Thomas

Faculty Publications

De minimis tax rules — rules that eliminate tax burdens for low-income taxpayers or low-dollar transactions — abound in the tax law. Despite the prevalence of such rules, legal scholarship has treated them as — well — de minimis, or as mere rounding errors that do not merit sustained attention. This perspective is understandable. If de minimis rules address insignificant taxpayers or tax liabilities, aren’t the rules themselves likely to be insignificant? Recent tax law developments have revealed that this conception of de minimis tax rules is deeply misguided. Major allocations of tax law liability, as well as accompanying questions …

Teaching Italian Romanticism Through Philately And Choral Works, Ilona Klein

Faculty Publications

Philately and choral works can be excellent integrative pedagogical tools when teaching Italian Romanticism at the undergraduate level. In the classroom, postage stamps provide an historical narrative for students and can help clarify the political, artistic and cultural mood of the time. The intrinsic symbolism of stamps represents the way a nation wants to be seen by the rest of the world. Instrumental and choral music, in their infinite combination of tones, combine sound with sung words, creating an artistic subtext that reveals the complexity and variety of human aesthetic expression. For the current generation of students accustomed to visual …

An Editing Process For Blind Or Visually Impaired Editors, Matt Baker, E.M. Nightingale, Suzy Bills

Faculty Publications

In the US, hundreds of thousands of individuals with visual disabilities work in occupations that typically entail editing text. Editing technologies for blind or visually impaired people have been analyzed by researchers for usability, accessibility, and feasibility. However, a tutorial is needed to provide blind or visually impaired workers with information on how to use these technologies. Key concepts: Technologies that blind or visually impaired individuals can use for editing text present challenges. Such challenges include the lack of usability in word processors’ text-editing features, navigational and sense-making issues with screen readers, limited text displayed by refreshable braille displays, and …

Arbitration In The Age Of Covid: Examining Arbitration's Move Online, Amy J. Schmitz

Faculty Publications

Arbitration has been moving online over time with the growth of the Internet and Online Dispute Resolution ("ODR"), which includes use of technology to assist online negotiation, mediation, arbitration, and variations thereof Online Arbitration ("OArb ") is nonetheless a unique subset of ODR because it usually culminates in a final and binding award by a neutral third party that is enforceable under the Federal Arbitration Act ("FAA"). Indeed, I have written about OArb on prior occasions, due to its unique status under the FAA and other arbitration laws. However, OArb was relatively limited until the COVID-19 pandemic sparked the acceleration …

Seismic Shifts: The Covid-19 Pandemic's Gendered Fault Lines And Implications For International Law, Shruti Rana

Faculty Publications

As we look towards the pandemic's end, this article examines the pandemic's impacts on the international legal order through a gendered lens. It argues that in the short-term, the pandemic reinforces public-private divides in international law, reinvigorating previous debates over the state's power in social relations-its role in protecting people from, as opposed to perpetrating, harm. It argues that in the long-term, these developments threaten to unravel the most recent gains in international law and global governance that have operated to support and expand the recognition of human rights to marginalised groups. Left unaddressed, this unraveling will further entrench such …