Digital Commons Network^™

Juvenile Punishment, High School Graduation, And Adult Crime: Evidence From Idiosyncratic Judge Harshness, Ozkan Eren, Naci Mocan

Faculty Publications

This paper contributes to the debate on the impact of juvenile crime punishment on high school completion and adult recidivism using administrative data from a southern U.S. state. We exploit random assignment of cases to judges and use idiosyncratic judge stringency in imprisonment to estimate the causal effect of incarceration. We find that juvenile incarceration increases the propensity of being convicted for a drug offense in adulthood while it lowers the propensity to be convicted of a property crime. Juvenile incarceration has also a detrimental effect on high school completion for earlier cohorts, but it has no impact on later …

Constructing Large-Scale Complex Aquifer Systems With Big Well Log Data: Louisiana Model, Hamid Vahdat-Aboueshagh, Frank T.C. Tsai

Faculty Publications

This study introduces a lithofacies modeling method to construct a complex Louisiana stratigraphy model up to depth of 900 m using more than 114,000 well logs. Lithofacies intervals in one well log can be as many as 76. Louisiana comprises a number of interconnected aquifer systems and distinct geological features, such as angular unconformities, domes, and faults. The method contains processes of tessellation, discretization, translation, and interpolation to accommodate these geological features. First, the model domain is tessellated into tiles. Formations have the same dip direction within the same tile, but may have varying dip angles. Each tile is then …

Creating Space For Community Representation In Police Reform, Ayesha Bell Hardaway

Faculty Publications

Input from affected communities is an essential component of the reform process aimed at remedying unconstitutional police practices. Yet, no court in DOJ-initiated police reform consent decree cases has ever granted a community organization’s motion to intervene as a matter of right. Judicial opinions in those cases have largely truncated the Federal Civil Rule 24 analysis when evaluating the interests of impacted communities. Thus, the most success achieved by a small few has been permissive intervention or amici status. The models used by the Department of Justice to elicit the community perspective have largely been frustrating and have failed to …

How The Fourth Amendment Frustrates The Regulation Of Police Violence, Seth W. Stoughton

Faculty Publications

Within policing, few legal principles are more widely known or highly esteemed than the “objective reasonableness” standard that regulates police uses of force. The Fourth Amendment, it is argued, is not only the facet of constitutional law that governs police violence, it sets out the only standard that state lawmakers, police commanders, and officers should recognize. Any other regulation of police violence is inappropriate and unnecessary. Ironically, though, the Constitution does not actually regulate the use of force. It regulates seizures. Some uses of force are seizures. This Article explains that a surprising number of others—including some police shootings—are not. …

Ratemaking As Climate Adaptation Governance, Jonas J. Monast

Faculty Publications

Electric utilities are directly affected by, and in some cases are a source of, many pressing climate adaptation challenges: wildfires, vulnerable infrastructure, extreme storms, and drought. The state Public Utilities Commission (PUC) is one of the most consequential government agencies guiding the electricity sector’s response to climate change. Rate-regulated utilities may not charge ratepayers for new capital investments without PUC approval. When PUCs decide which costs are eligible for rate recovery, they also define which risks utilities seek to manage and which hedging strategies they use to do so. This Article argues that the foundational principles of ratemaking allow the …

Jailhouse Immigration Screening, Eisha Jain

Faculty Publications

Within the past decade, U.S. interior immigration enforcement has shifted away from the street and into the jailhouse. The rationale behind jailhouse screening is to target enforcement efforts on those who fall within federal removal priorities. This Article shows how a program undertaken with the stated aim of targeting immigration enforcement has had precisely the opposite effect: it has massively expanded the reach of immigration enforcement and created extended carceral treatment within the criminal justice system based on suspected immigration status. This approach, in turn, leads to removals that lack adequate process, are inaccurate, or that reflect underlying racial biases …

Market-Anticipatory Approaches To Rural Property Vacancy, Ann M. Eisenberg

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

That Is Enough Punishment: Situating Defunding The Police Within Antiracist Sentencing Reform, Jalila S. Jefferson-Bullock, Jelani Jefferson Exum

Faculty Publications

(Excerpt)

During the summer of 2020, the police killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and others created a movement that unearthed a reality that Black people in the United States have always been aware of: systemic racism, in the form of police brutality, is alive and well. While the blatant brutality of George Floyd’s murder at the hands of police is the flame, the spark was ignited long ago. One need only review the record of recent years — the killings of Eric Garner, Michael Brown, Tamir Rice, Antwon Rose, Alton Sterling, Philando Castile, Breonna Taylor, and countless other souls …

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.

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 …

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, …

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 …

A Model For Defunding: An Evidence-Based Statute For Behavioral Health Crisis Response, Taleed El-Sabawi, Jennifer J. Carroll

Faculty Publications

Too many Black persons and other persons of color are dying at the hands of law enforcement, leading many to call for the defunding of police. These deaths were directly caused by excessive use of force by police officers, but were also driven by upstream and institutional factors that include structural racism, institutional bias, and a historic culture of racialized violence. Public outcry against racial inequities has increased as the authority of police departments has expanded to include not only the authority to respond to and investigate criminal activity, but also to respond to calls regarding behavioral health issues and …

The Sovereign Shield, Kate Sablosky Elengold, Jonathan D. Glater

Faculty Publications

As the federal government has come to rely increasingly on private companies to perform government functions, more businesses are testing the power of the resulting contractual relationships to shield themselves from liability, regulation, and oversight. Such nongovernmental entities seek the benefit of what we call the federal government’s sovereign shield by exploiting three doctrines: preemption, derivative sovereign immunity, and intergovernmental immunity. Because these contractors provide services supporting every conceivable government action, allowing them to act with impunity puts citizens at risk across myriad aspects of their lives.

This Article untangles the doctrines that extend the sovereign shield to private actors …

The End Of School Policing, Barbara A. Fedders

Faculty Publications

Police officers have become permanent fixtures in public schools. The sharp increase in the number of school police officers over the last twenty years has generated a substantial body of critical legal scholarship. Critics question whether police make students safer. They argue that any safety benefits must be weighed against the significant role the police play in perpetuating a school-to-prison pipeline that funnels Black and Brown students and students with disabilities out of schools and into courts, jails, and prisons. In suggesting remedies for this problem, commentators have proposed several regulatory fixes. These include changes to the standards for evaluating …

Disbanding Police Agencies, Anthony O'Rourke, Rick Su, Guyora Binder

Faculty Publications

Since the killing of George Floyd, a national consensus has emerged that reforms are needed to prevent discriminatory and violent policing. Calls to defund and abolish the police have provoked pushback, but several cities are considering disbanding or reducing their police forces. This Essay assesses disbanding as a reform strategy from a democratic and institutionalist perspective. Should localities disband their police forces? One reason to do so is that discriminatory police departments are often too insulated from democratic oversight to be reformed. But can localities succeed in disbanding and replacing their forces with something better? Unfortunately, the structural entrenchment of …

Gender Violence, The Carceral State, And The Politics Of Solidarity, Deborah M. Weissman

Faculty Publications

Part I of this Article examines gender violence committed by the State. It does so within the context of recent initiatives to address abusive police practices to demonstrate that issues of gender violence have been omitted from reform efforts. To that end, it provides a critical review of anti-carceral campaigns, including recent challenges to “stop-andfrisk” practices. Litigation addressing abusive police conduct has failed to identify stop-and-frisk as a particular form of gender violence. Similarly, community campaigns to oversee police body-worn camera policies have overlooked the differential ways in which survivors of gender violence are impacted by these police devices. This …

Electoral Change And Progressive Prosecutors, Ronald F. Wright, Jeffrey L. Yates, Carissa Byrne Hessick

Faculty Publications

While it is clear that a debate is happening about new approaches to the prosecutor's work, it is less clear how deep the changes go. Given the large number of prosecutor offices in the United States, it is possible that much of the change that the media documents is limited to only a few offices; it is also possible that newsworthy stories of recent prosecutor campaign debates are merely the most visible layer of a change that goes deeper. Do the media accounts focus on vivid but exceptional election campaigns, or do news stories over the' last decade reflect a …

From Community Policing To Political Police In Nicaragua, Lucia Dammert, Mary Fran T. Malone

Faculty Publications

In a region plagued by high rates of violent crime and repressive policing practices, Nicaragua has earned a reputation as exceptional. Despite poverty, inequality, and a historical legacy of political violence and repression, Nicaragua has defied regional trends. It has registered low rates of violent crime while deploying policing practices that emphasized prevention over repression. April 2018 marked an end to this exceptionalism. Police attacked anti-government protestors, and launched a sustained campaign against dissidents that continues to the present day. While the Nicaraguan police had long cultivated a reputation as community-oriented and non-repressive, they appeared to quickly change into a …

Blackness As Fighting Words, Etienne C. Toussaint

Faculty Publications

The resurgence of worldwide protests by activists of the Movement for Black Lives (BLM) has ushered a global reckoning with the meaning of this generation’s rallying cry – “Black Lives Matter.” As citizens emblazon their streets with this expression in massive artistic murals, the Trump administration has responded with the militarized policing of non-violent public demonstrations, revealing not merely a disregard for public safety, but far worse, a concerted dismantling of protestors’ First Amendment rights. Nevertheless, BLM protests have persisted. Accordingly, this Essay considers the implications of this generation’s acclamation of Black humanity amidst the social tensions exposed during the …

Qcm Sensor Arrays, Electroanalytical Techniques And Nir Spectroscopy Coupled To Multivariate Analysis For Quality Assessment Of Food Products, Raw Materials, Ingredients And Foodborne Pathogen Detection: Challenges And Breakthroughs†, David K. Bwambok, Noureen Siraj, Samantha Macchi, Nathaniel E. Larm, Gary A. Baker, Rocío L. Pérez, Caitlan E. Ayala, Charuksha Walgama, David Pollard, Jason D. Rodriguez, Souvik Banerjee, Brianda Elzey, Isiah M. Warner, Sayo O. Fakayode

Faculty Publications

© 2020 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. Quality checks, assessments, and the assurance of food products, raw materials, and food ingredients is critically important to ensure the safeguard of foods of high quality for safety and public health. Nevertheless, quality checks, assessments, and the assurance of food products along distribution and supply chains is impacted by various challenges. For instance, the development of portable, sensitive, low-cost, and robust instrumentation that is capable of real-time, accurate, and sensitive analysis, quality checks, assessments, and the assurance of food products in the field and/or in the production line in a food …

Families Coping With Financial Loss Following The Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill, Kathryn Sweet Keating, Sarah Becker, Ifeyinwa F. Davis, Thomas Chandler, Tim Slack, Jaishree Beedasy

Faculty Publications

Objective: This study examines family strategies for coping and adaptation to social disruption from the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill (DHOS) in south Louisiana. Background: The DHOS is a technological disaster of unprecedented scale and ongoing impact, including the socioeconomic disruption of families. Method: Using data from focus groups, grounded-theory methods informed a thematic analysis of spill-related economic loss and coping mechanisms among families in the spill-affected region. Results: Key findings were as follows: (a) long-term economic impacts persisted but were nuanced and differed across places; (b) for families living in multistressor environments, concerns about the DHOS spilled over into …

Psychological, Addictive, And Health Behavior Implications Of The Covid-19 Pandemic, Michael J. Zvolensky, Lorra Garey, Andrew H. Rogers, Norman B. Schmidt, Anka .. Vujanovic, Eric A. Storch, Julia D. Buckner, Daniel J. Paulus, Candice Alfano, Jasper A. J. Smits, Connall O'Cleirigh

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Framing The Second Amendment: Gun Rights, Civil Rights And Civil Liberties, Timothy Zick

Faculty Publications

Gun rights proponents and gun control advocates have devoted significant energy to framing the constitutional right to keep and bear arms. In constitutional discourse, advocates and commentators have referred to the Second Amendment as a "collective, ""civic republican," "individual," and 'fundamental" right. Gun rights advocates have defended the right to keep and bear arms on "law and order" grounds, while gun control proponents have urged regulation based on "public health, " "human rights, " and other concerns. These frames and concepts have significantly influenced how the right to keep and bear arms has been debated, interpreted, and enforced. This Article …

Measuring The Resilience Of Criminogenic Ecosystems To Global Disruption: A Case-Study Of Covid-19 In China, Hervé Borrion, Justin Kurland, Nick Tilley, Peng Chen

Faculty Publications

Copyright: © 2020 Borrion et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. This paper uses resilience as a lens through which to analyse disasters and other major threats to patterns of criminal behaviour. A set of indicators and mathematical models are introduced that aim to quantitatively describe changes in crime levels in comparison to what could otherwise be expected, and what might be expected by way of adaptation and subsequent resumption of …

Expanding The Reach Of Progressive Prosecution, Jeffrey Bellin

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

The Changing Role Of The American Prosecutor, Jeffrey Bellin

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Optical Properties Using Adaptive Selection Of Nir/Swir Reflectance Correction And Quasi-Analytic Algorithms For The Modis-Aqua In Estuarine-Ocean Continuum: Application To The Northern Gulf Of Mexico, Ishan D. Joshi, Eurico J. D'Sa

Faculty Publications

An adaptive selection of the near/shortwave infrared (NIR/SWIR) reflectance correction and the quasi-analytic algorithms (QAAs) is proposed for the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS-Aqua) to utilize the strengths of different correction algorithms and QAAs in a single satellite scene with water types ranging from turbid coastal to clear open ocean waters. A blended satellite product is generated by merging three atmospheric-correction algorithms(AD-ATCOR): 1) iterative NIR correction; 2) management unit of the north sea mathematical models (MUMM); and 3) SWIR, using a spectral threshold-based selection for different water types. The validation analysis of a blended remote sensing reflectance product showed overall …