Digital Commons Network^™

On The Usefulness Of Mock Genomes To Define Heterotic Pools, Testers, And Hybrid Predictions In Orphan Crops, Ingrid Pinheiro Machado, Júlio César Dovale, Felipe Sabadin, Roberto Fritsche-Neto

Faculty Publications

The advances in genomics in recent years have increased the accuracy and efficiency of breeding programs for many crops. Nevertheless, the adoption of genomic enhancement for several other crops essential in developing countries is still limited, especially for those that do not have a reference genome. These crops are more often called orphans. This is the first report to show how the results provided by different platforms, including the use of a simulated genome, called the mock genome, can generate in population structure and genetic diversity studies, especially when the intention is to use this information to support the formation …

Key Parameters Linking Cyber-Physical Trust Anchors With Embedded Internet Of Things Systems, Michele Maasberg, Leslie G. Butler, Ian Taylor

Faculty Publications

Integration of the Internet of Things (IoT) in the automotive industry has brought benefits as well as security challenges. Significant benefits include enhanced passenger safety and more comprehensive vehicle performance diagnostics. However, current onboard and remote vehicle diagnostics do not include the ability to detect counterfeit parts. A method is needed to verify authentic parts along the automotive supply chain from manufacture through installation and to coordinate part authentication with a secure database. In this study, we develop an architecture for anti-counterfeiting in automotive supply chains. The core of the architecture consists of a cyber-physical trust anchor and authentication mechanisms …

Automated Agencies, Joshua D. Blank, Leigh Osofsky

Faculty Publications

This article presents the first comprehensive study of how federal agencies use automated legal guidance tools—such as chatbots, virtual assistants, and decision-tree systems—to explain complex law to the public. The authors show that while automation offers administrative efficiency and wider reach, it often simplifies or distorts underlying legal rules. Through detailed analysis of agency tools and ten semi-structured interviews with officials, the article demonstrates that automated systems can portray unsettled or complex law as clear, omit exceptions, and answer too narrowly, thereby influencing user behavior in ways agencies neither fully appreciate nor monitor.

The study further finds that agencies lack …

Mcconnell’S Gamble, Peter Nemerovski

Faculty Publications

Part I of the Article discusses the recent history of Supreme Court nominations, beginning with President Ronald Reagan’s unsuccessful nomination of Judge Robert Bork in 1987. It attempts to explain how the Senate, in just a few decades, went from confirming three justices unanimously to confirming four consecutive justices with fewer than 55 votes, amidst increasing partisan rancor. Part II summarizes the new rules of the game in light of the actions taken by both parties, and their justifications for those actions, in the years since Scalia’s death. Part III explores what the future of Supreme Court nominations will look …

Gender Violence As A Penalty Of Poverty, Deborah M. Weissman

Faculty Publications

The matter of gender violence, including intimate partner violence (IPV), has long been categorized as a particularly egregious crime. The consequences of IPV are profound and affect all members of the household, family members near and far, and the communities where they live. Gender violence impacts the national economy. Costs accrue to workplaces, health care institutions, and encumber local and state coffers. Survivors are deprived of income, property, and economic stability: conditions that often endure beyond periods of physical injuries. Offenders also experience economic hardship as a result of involvement with the legal system. They often face significant obstacles when …

Supreme Myth Busting: How The Supreme Court Has Busted Its Own Myths, Michael J. Gerhardt

Faculty Publications

This Essay challenges various myths of the Supreme Court, including the myth of the Supreme Court as the only branch in the federal government capable of neutral, non-partisan, juridical interpretations of the Constitution. Through various means, I show how the Supreme Court fails to live up to that myth, especially in its failure to abide by the same code of ethics that other judges follow. The Court’s excuse is that it is not like other courts, but, if we take that excuse at face value, then there is more, not less, reason to require the Supreme Court adhere to the …

Critical Legal Research, Artificial Intelligence, And Systemic Racism: Teaching With Jim Crow Text-Mining, Ellie Campbell

Faculty Publications

On the Books: Jim Crow and Algorithms of Existence is a text-mining project undertaken by University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill libraries to identify racially based laws passed in the state between 1865 and 1967. In the fall 2022, I used the On the Books project to teach a module in my Advanced Legal Research class on critical legal research and artificial intelligence and legal analytics. This article examines the benefits of those modules for teaching critical thinking about legal research structures and legacies of racism in the American legal system.

Humanizing Corporate Governance, Caleb N. Griffin

Faculty Publications

American corporate governance evolved in a different era, for a type of investor who is no longer typical today. Roughly half of Americans own investment funds, but legal and structural impediments prevent these “human investors” from fully participating in corporate democracy.

One response—“so what?”—is based on the assumption that investors are rationally apathetic. Most investors have so little at stake, the argument goes, that it is economically irrational for them to vote in corporate elections. What this argument misses is that investors’ rational apathy is not fixed. Instead, it is a function of the costs and benefits of voting. If …

Mobility Matters: Where Higher Education Meets Transportation, Kate Sablosky Elengold

Faculty Publications

Higher education has long been hailed as the key to social and economic mobility. And yet, mobility itself is one of the greatest barriers to equity in higher education. Although scholars and policymakers have thus far paid scant attention to the role of transportation in higher education, this Article establishes why that oversight undermines educational equity.

Grounding its arguments in both interdisciplinary literature and rich original data from a multi-year mixed-methods research study, this Article demonstrates how transportation law and infrastructure affect college completion, disproportionately hindering completion for students of color. It further argues that higher education law and policy …

The Real Problem With Plea Bargaining, Carissa Byrne Hessick

Faculty Publications

This Response critiques Jeffrey Bellin’s argument that plea‑bargaining reform should focus solely on problems uniquely caused by plea bargaining and instead contends that the practice has fundamentally reshaped American criminal justice in ways that extend far beyond Bellin’s narrow framework. The Response argues that plea bargaining exacerbates systemic issues—including harsh sentencing, coercive leverage, and inaccurate convictions—by insulating legislative excess, weakening trial incentives, and pressuring even innocent defendants to plead guilty. It further maintains that Bellin understates how plea bargaining distorts legislative behavior, affects statutory design, and suppresses political pressure for reform. Most importantly, the Response identifies plea bargaining’s central harm …

Pitfalls Of Progressive Prosecution, Carissa Byrne Hessick

Faculty Publications

This Essay examines the political vulnerabilities facing the progressive prosecution movement, arguing that two core features of its public brand—emphasizing a fundamental break from traditional prosecution and pledging to “do less” by shrinking the criminal justice footprint—have inadvertently exposed reform‑oriented prosecutors to intensified backlash. Drawing on recent examples, the Essay shows how framing progressive prosecution as radically different obscures the long-standing prosecutorial tools these offices still rely on, enabling critics to portray routine exercises of discretion as unprecedented or dangerous. It further explains how decarceral commitments make progressive prosecutors easy targets when crime or disorder rises, both because voters may …

Donating To The District Attorney, Carissa Byrne Hessick, Michael Morse, Nathan Pinnell

Faculty Publications

The United States is the only country that elects its local prosecutors. In theory, these local elections could facilitate local control of criminal justice policy. But the academic literature assumes that, in practice, prosecutor elections fail to live up to that promise. This Article complicates that conventional wisdom with a new, national study of campaign contributions in prosecutor elections. The study offers a more complete empirical account of prosecutor accountability by analyzing contributions to local candidates as well as their election results. It details the amount of money in local prosecutor elections, including from interest groups, and the relationship between …

Fake And Real People In Bankruptcy, Melissa B. Jacoby

Faculty Publications

This essay explores the bankruptcy system’s structural bias in favor of artificial persons—for-profit companies, non-profit enterprises, and municipalities given independent life by law—relative to humans. The favorable treatment extends to foundational issues such as the scope and timing of debt relief, the conditions to receiving any bankruptcy protections, and the flexibility to depart from the Bankruptcy Code by asserting that doing so will maximize economic value. The system’s bias also contributes to the “bad-apple-ing” of serious policy problems, running counter to other areas of law that have deemed harms like discrimination to be larger institutional phenomena rather than merely the …

Multibillion-Dollar Tax Questions, James Alm, Jay A. Soled, Kathleen Delaney Thomas

Faculty Publications

Tax compliance in the United States historically hovers in the 80 percent range, costing the nation approximately half a trillion dollars annually in uncollected tax revenue. To foster greater tax compliance, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) should employ whatever tools are at its disposal. Standard deterrence theory argues that increasing the audit rate and imposing stiffer penalties would foster greater tax compliance. There are political headwinds, however, that strongly suggest that these approaches are not currently viable. Instead, there is a low-cost method that could yield greater tax compliance. Drawing on recent and compelling social science research, the IRS should …

Physicians Spreading Medical Misinformation: The Uneasy Case For Regulation, Richard S. Saver

Faculty Publications

Physicians have played a surprisingly prominent role in the current “infodemic” of false and misleading medical claims. Yet, state medical boards, the governmental agencies responsible for professional licensure and oversight, have sanctioned remarkably few physicians. Pushing back against the widespread criticism of medical boards for insufficient action, this Article questions the overall suitability of licensure regulation to police medical misinformation. First, uncertainty exists about medical boards’ jurisdiction and legal authority. Many misinformation claims have involved physicians communicating publicly, not while treating patients. Given the primarily patient-centered legal and ethical frameworks governing the practice of medicine, serious challenges arise in making …

Secondary Courses Taught By Secondary Faculty: A (Personal) Call To Fully Integrate Skills Faculty And Skills Courses Into The Law School Curriculum Ahead Of The Nextgen Bar Exam, Oscar J. Salinas

Faculty Publications

This essay contends that law schools must reconsider how they educate future lawyers by elevating practical skills and the faculty who teach them, especially as the NextGen bar exam shifts toward assessing real‑world lawyering competencies. Through a blend of analysis and personal narrative, the author demonstrates how the traditional casebook‑Socratic model narrows the definition of merit, sidelines students whose strengths are not centered on rapid oral performance, and reinforces a hierarchy that undervalues skills faculty—who are often women and people of color—despite their central role in preparing students for practice.

Tracing the expansion of experiential learning after the Carnegie Report, …

Crimes Against Probate, Kevin Bennardo, Mark Glover

Faculty Publications

Policymakers have increasingly turned their attention to wrongdoing that affects wills, such as the forgery of wills, the procurement of wills through coercion or deceit, and the destruction or suppression of wills. In particular, they have attempted to deter this misconduct by punishing wrongdoers through new forms of criminal and civil liability. Because the United States is on the precipice of the largest intergenerational wealth transfer in history, a significant portion of which will take place through wills, these attempts of deterrence are well-intentioned. However, their implementation has been flawed.

These implementation difficulties stem from the fact that a will …

Perspective On Predictive Modeling: Current Status, New High-Order Methodology And Outlook For Energy Systems, Dan Gabriel Cacuci

Faculty Publications

This work presents a perspective on deterministic predictive modeling methodologies, which aim at extracting best-estimate values for model responses and parameters along with reduced predicted uncertainties for these best-estimate values. The two oldest such methodologies are the data-adjustment method, which stems from the nuclear energy field, and the data-assimilation method, which is implemented in the geophysical sciences. Both of these methodologies attempt to minimize, in the least-square sense, a user-defined functional that represents the discrepancies between computed and measured model responses. These two methodologies were briefly reviewed and shown to be inconsistent even to first-order in the sensitivities of the …

Markets As Legal Constructions, Gregory Brazeal

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

What Comes Next?, Neil Fulton

Faculty Publications

The United States stands at an important crossroads. Polarization and paralysis are the political norm. Social divisions are deep and seemingly intractable. Concerted action is disappointingly rare. Social and political pressures continue to build like tectonic plates waiting to release. What will come next? This Article begins with a description of the current situation before turning to a consideration of five possible paths forward. First, stasis. There may be more of the same with limited systemic shocks releasing small amounts of pressure without a fundamental change of circumstances. Second, rupture. Building pressure may tear the current political and social system …

South Dakota Legisprudence: A Catalog And Analysis, Neil Fulton

Faculty Publications

Statutes provide much of the modern legal body of law. It is necessary for any lawyer to have a good understanding of "legisprudence," the rules for enactment and interpretation of statutes. South Dakota has developed a useful body of legisprudence through both statutes and cases that provide direction about how statutes should be read. This article provides a descriptive collection and normative assessment of these interpretive rules.

Rap Traps, Thomas Simmons

Faculty Publications

South Dakota repealed the Rule Against Perpetuities in 1983. The repeal proved to be the seed from which the state's trust industry grew. This article-the first of two linked pieces-begins by surveying the common law version of Rule Against Perpetuities ("RAP"), how it has traditionally been taught, and its labyrinthine, counter-intuitive mechanics. It holds many traps for both the wary and the unwary alike. In the pages which follow, a handful of inadequate contemporary reforms to the rule will be outlined, and the potentially devastating application of the rule to trusts and long-term family wealth planning will be touched upon. …

The Supreme Court Corrects A Seventy-Five Year Distortion In Establishment Clause Jurisprudence, Patrick Garry

Faculty Publications

In Kennedy v. Bremerton School District, the US. Supreme Court ruled that the Establishment Clause did not prohibit a high school football coach from offering a brief midfield prayer at the conclusion of games. The Ninth Circuit had held that the coach's free exercise rights had to yield to the Establishment Clause's prohibition of conduct that might reflect a state endorsement of religion. In overturning the Ninth Circuit, the Supreme Court issued an historic and far-reaching ruling on the scope and nature of the Establishment Clause, providing the first truly clarifying decision in this area in the past seventy-five years. …

Barriers To A Cybersecurity Career: Analysis Across Career Stage And Gender, Justin Scott Giboney, Bonnie Brinton Anderson, Geoffrey A. Wright, Shayna Oh, Quincy Taylor, Megan Warren, Kylie Johnson

Faculty Publications

The demand for cybersecurity professionals is high—especially for women. Efforts to attract women to cybersecurity careers are not meeting goals of equal representation. Researchers have not yet identified a theoretical rationale for the differences. To provide a theoretical rationale, we investigate barriers to a cybersecurity career based on career stages defined by Super (1957) and gender. Concerns about a cybersecurity career differ between girls, young adult women, and mid-career women. Girls feel an un- awareness of opportunity and requisite training, whereas adult women are concerned that they will be undervalued in a male-dominated field, and mid-career women are concerned about …

Review Of Terra Schwerin Rowe, Of Modern Extraction: Experiments In Critical Petro-Theology, Rebecca Janzen

Faculty Publications

Terra Schwerin Rowe, Of Modern Extraction: Experiments in Critical Petro-theology (New York: T&T Clark, 2023), 200 pp., $115 (hbk), ISBN: 9780567708342.

How Cost-Effective Are Electric Vehicle Subsidies In Reducing Tailpipe-Co2 Emissions? An Analysis Of Major Electric Vehicle Markets, Tamara L. Sheldon, Rubal Dua, Omar Abdullah Alharbi

Faculty Publications

We estimate the cost-effectiveness of plug-in electric vehicle (PEV) subsidies in reducing tailpipe-CO2 emissions in China, the U.S., and nine European countries. We find that the per-tonne cost of tailpipe-CO2 avoided increases linearly with the government-subsidized percentage of the PEV price. Costs are relatively higher in the Netherlands and Denmark, which subsidized high-priced PEVs including plug-in hybrids, and lower in the U.S., where PEVs replaced higher-emissions cars. Chinese PEV subsidies have a short-run static cost of up to $1,600 per tonne, far exceeding the social cost of carbon, suggesting that subsidies are more a part of China’s industrial policy than …

To The Moon: Strategic Competition In The Cislunar Region, Shawn M. Willis

Faculty Publications

China’s advancing space capabilities, particularly in the cislunar region, call for increased cislunar space domain awareness on the part of the United States. US military and civilian decisionmakers must take into account the full scope of China’s cislunar plans and capabilities as the military builds space strategies and future force designs. The United States must also increase near-term investments that support more robust cislunar space domain awareness.

Atmospheric Meteorological Effects On Forecasting Daily Lightning Occurrence At Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Jon Saul, Torrey J. Wagner, Eric G. Mbonimpa, Brent T. Langhals

Faculty Publications

As the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station and Kennedy Space Center increase their launch rate, any process that could assist in the automation of the currently-manual lightning forecast would be valuable. This work examines the possibility of machine-learning assistance with the daily lighting forecast which is produced by the 45th Weather Squadron. A dataset consisting of 34 lightning, pressure, temperature and windspeed measurements taken from 334 daily weather balloon (rawinsonde) launches in the timeframe 2012-2021 was examined. Models were created using recursive feature elimination on logistic regression and XGClassifier algorithms, as well as Bayesian and bandit optimization of neural network …

Maternal Restricted- And Over- Feeding During Gestation Perturb Offspring Sperm Epigenome In Sheep, Linkai Zhu, Nicole Tillquist, Giovanna Scatolin, Rachael Gately, Mia Kawaida, Amanda Reiter, Sarah Reed, Steven Zinn, Kristen Govoni, Zongliang Jiang

Faculty Publications

In brief: Inadequate maternal nutrition during gestation can have immediate and lifelong effects on offspring. This study shows that maternal restricted - and over- nutrition during gestation do not affect semen characteristics in F1 male offspring but alters offspring sperm sncRNA profiles and DNA methylome in sheep. Abstract: There is a growing body of evidence that inadequate maternal nutrition during gestation can have immediate and lifelong effects on offspring. However, little is known about the effects of maternal nutrition during gestation on male offspring reproduction. Here, using a sheep model of maternal restricted - and over - nutrition (60 or …

The Oncolytic Herpes Simplex Virus Type-1 (Hsv-1) Vaccine Strain Vc2 Causes Intratumor Infiltration Of Functionally Active T Cells And Inhibition Of Tumor Metastasis And Pro-Tumor Genes Vegf And Pdl1 Expression In The 4t1/Balb/C Mouse Model Of Stage Four Breast Cancer, Rafiq Nabi, Farhana Musarrat, Jose Cesar Jose, Ingeborg M. Langohr, Vladimir N. Chouljenko, Konstantin G. Kousoulas

Faculty Publications

Introduction: Oncolytic viruses (OVs) provide new modalities for cancer therapy either alone or in combination with synergistic immunotherapies and/or chemotherapeutics. Engineered Herpes Simplex Virus Type-1 (HSV-1) has shown strong promise for the treatment of various cancers in experimental animal models as well as in human patients, with some virus strains licensed to treat human melanoma and gliomas. In the present study we evaluated the efficacy of mutant HSV-1 (VC2) in a late stage, highly metastatic 4T1 murine syngeneic. Method: VC2 was constructed VC2 using double red recombination technology. For in-vivo efficacy we utilized a late stage 4T1 syngeneic and immunocompetent …