Digital Commons Network^™

The Ethics Of Artificial Intelligence In Legal Advocacy, Elissa Germaine

Faculty Publications

(Excerpt)

The use of AI in our personal and professional lives has entered the public consciousness over the past several months. The legal profession and the securities industry are no exception. This article begins to explore the use of open source generative AI in legal advocacy, and the related ethical implications for securities arbitration practitioners.

Studies have corroborated the impact of AI on the legal profession that many of us have been seeing in practice or hearing and reading about. A Goldman Sachs study predicted that the legal profession will be one of the most likely areas to be impacted …

Humanizing Virtual Dispute Resolution, Elayne E. Greenberg

Faculty Publications

(Excerpt)

How might neutrals and advocates foster interpersonal dynamics when conducting arbitrations and mediations virtually, consistent with the ethical obligations of each profession and the ethical underpinnings of each process?

Virtual dispute resolution for commercial dispute resolution has become the new normal. Yet, the dispute resolution listserves are still peppered with posts from mediators and arbitrators who, although publicly extolling their own commitments to their impartiality and neutrality, are also simultaneously voicing their strong preferences for conducting their dispute resolution processes in person. According to these neutrals, they are unable to attain the same results when the process is conducted …

Copyright’S Capacity Gap, Andrew Gilden, Eva E. Subotnik

Faculty Publications

Most areas of law require that individuals meet a certain threshold of capacity before their decisions — e.g., to marry, to enter into a contract, or to execute an estate plan — are given legal effect. Copyright law, by contrast, gives legal effect to creative decisions by granting the decisionmaker many decades of exclusive rights so long as they are a human being and have demonstrated a “creative spark.” This Article examines the overlooked consequences of this gap in capacity standards between copyright and other areas of law. It shows that this gap has produced numerous opportunities for vulnerable creators …

High Anxiety: Racism, The Law, And Legal Education, Elayne E. Greenberg

Faculty Publications

Conspicuously absent from the United States’ ongoing discourse about its racist history is a more honest discussion about the individual and personal stressors that are evoked in people when they talk about racism. What if they got it wrong? The fear of being cancelled - the public shaming for remarks that are deemed racist - has had a chilling effect on having meaningful conversations about racism. What lost opportunities!

This paper moves this discussion into the law school context. How might law schools rethink their law school curricula to more accurately represent the role systemic racism has played in shaping …

Integration & Transformation: Incorporating Critical Information Literacy And Critical Legal Research Into Advanced Legal Research Instruction, Courtney Selby

Faculty Publications

(Excerpt)

Legal research is not a separate and distinct endeavor from legal analysis and advocacy. These activities are inextricably intertwined in the practice of law. Few would suggest that advocacy includes the process of applying rules to situations in a vacuum without reference to context and consequences. Yet we often see this assumption about the legal research process. Many students presume that conducting legal research is a neutral endeavor, and that when done properly, it delivers the universe of relevant authorities to the researcher. This essay is about my experience integrating critical perspectives into an existing advanced legal research course …

Human Trafficking, Cults, & Coercion: The Use Of Drugs As A Tool, Robin Boyle-Laisure

Faculty Publications

Thanks to the successful prosecution of sex traffickers, the definition and proof of “coercion” now encompasses evidence showing the use of addictive drugs as a tool. This article describes two case examples, and in both, the perpetrators supplied abundant amounts of addictive substantives. Once those victims became addicted and feared the pain of withdrawal, the sex traffickers forced the victims to perform commercial sex acts to pay off the drug debt they incurred, feeding the addiction the traffickers caused. Coercion by way of intentional drug addiction and control is a theory that expands the operative word “coercion.” This short article …

Judge Frankel’S Fifty-Year-Old Invitation To Reconstruct Sentencing, Jelani Jefferson Exum

Faculty Publications

(Excerpt)

America was a different place at the time Judge Marvin Frankel penned his now-famous text Criminal Sentences: Law without Order in 1973. Richard Nixon was the U.S. president. The Vietnam War was ending. The Watergate scandal was unfolding. There was much to grab the public’s attention, and criminal sentencing was not a national or international headline. Just two years earlier, President Nixon had declared a war on drugs and targeted drug abuse as “public enemy number one,” but it would be over a decade before punitive mandatory minimum drug sentences would become our sentencing norm. At the time of …

The Beauty Of Shorts: Ten Tips On Writing A Publishable Short Piece, Robin Boyle-Laisure, Brooke J. Bowman

Faculty Publications

(Excerpt)

Based upon our experience serving on editorial boards of peer-reviewed law journals for over twenty years combined, we encourage faculty who teach legal research and writing to write short scholarly pieces. While books have been written on how to write scholarly articles, and law schools offer students courses on writing journal articles, there is little information about how to write a scholarly piece that is short. This Essay fills that gap and provides advice for constructing a publishable short.

Four Essential Tips For New Attorneys Working With Children And Families, Jennifer Baum

Faculty Publications

(Excerpt)

Congratulations! You’ve started your first legal job working with children and families. Perhaps you work for an institutional provider of legal services for children or as a prosecutor of dependency cases, or perhaps you are defending such cases on behalf of parents and guardians. Or maybe you are in private practice, and this is your first pro bono experience working on a family, immigration, or juvenile court matter. Whatever your role, your job is the same: to represent your client and seek as favorable an outcome as possible.

But you are new, or new to this area of the …

Investing In Abolition, Sandeep Singh Dhaliwal

Faculty Publications

This Article situates the prison within a broader macro-financial trend, what I call “community capture.” As private equity firms have consolidated the market for carceral services, they have also gained control over other essential social infrastructure, like housing and healthcare. By layering debt, fees, and aggressive profit expectations over companies or assets that provide for basic needs, their strategies intensify the economic pressures communities face. These strategies rely on various forms of coordination and legal protection from contestation. To demonstrate this process in the context of mass incarceration, this Article tells the story of Securus, a dominant carceral service company …

Why Corporate Boards Should Include Lgbtq+ People, Jeremy Mcclane, Darren Rosenblum

Faculty Publications

(Excerpt)

Corporate boardrooms sit at the heart of most of society’s most consequential decisions but fall far short of the diversity of our society. The current movement toward board diversification aims to remedy the underrepresentation of marginalized groups on corporate boards. More recently, some efforts have included LGBTQ+ people, even though the basis for their inclusion on corporate boards remains largely unstated. This Article examines both the normative and instrumental bases for LGBTQ+ inclusion in board diversity initiatives, articulating unspoken assumptions and linking LGBTQ+ people to the broader inclusion effort. In so doing, it begins to surface the unique issues …

Integrating An Oral Presentation Assignment Into A Course On Drafting Contracts, Patricia G. Montana

Faculty Publications

(Excerpt)

Law schools have a critical responsibility to train students in effective oral communication skills. Indeed, the American Bar Association’s Standard 302 requires that law schools establish learning outcomes that include student “competency” in, among other things, “[l]egal analysis and reasoning, legal research, problem-solving, and written and oral communication in the legal context.” Yet, apart from clinical and externship offerings, where students can regularly interact with clients, lawyers, judges, and others, and courses like trial or appellate advocacy, which focus on essential courtroom communications, students generally have limited opportunities to practice oral communication skills in a traditional law school classroom. …

A Connoisseur Of Experiences: Academic & Career Planning For Jd Students, Ashley B. Armstrong

Faculty Publications

(Excerpt)

As a legal skills professor who works primarily with first-year law students, I often engage in academic and career planning discussions. In this context, I developed a method designed to help students strategically shape their JD careers. This approach encourages students to think intentionally about their goals and identify opportunities for career exploration throughout their time in law school. This method also allows students to discern key characteristics of legal careers that ultimately will bring them the most job satisfaction in the future. The activity can be introduced in a legal skills classroom, or used in one-on-one academic and …

In Pursuit Of Sustainable Educational Development: The Philippines And The English Dilemma, Rosemary C. Salomone

Faculty Publications

The English language poses a dilemma in meeting the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), especially for education in countries with high multilingualism, high poverty and unequal schooling, such as the Philippines. This chapter considers Goal 1 (reducing poverty), Goal 4 (promoting educational quality) and Goal 10 (reducing inequalities) in relation to what has become an array of executive orders, regulations and laws that have shifted in the political winds, even as the judiciary has tried to navigate a measured course. It underscores how the primacy of English in the national consciousness, tied to global markets, undercuts multilingual policies based in …

Of Systems Thinking And Straw Men, Kate Klonick

Faculty Publications

(Excerpt)

In Content Moderation as Systems Thinking, Professor Evelyn Douek, as the title suggests, endorses an approach to the people, rules, and processes governing online speech as one not of anecdote and doctrine but of systems thinking. She constructs this concept as a novel and superior understanding of the problems of online-speech governance as compared to those existent in what she calls the “standard [scholarly] picture of content moderation.” This standard picture of content moderation — which is roughly five years old — is “outdated and incomplete,” she argues. It is preoccupied with anecdotal, high-profile adjudications in which platforms …

Didn’T I Cover That In Class? Low-Stakes Technique Of Quizzing To The Rescue, Robin Boyle-Laisure

Faculty Publications

(Excerpt)

We all have had those moments when students’ papers do not reflect an important lesson covered in class. For instance, if teaching persuasive writing, you have likely instructed your students to use a full sentence for their point headings in their briefs, only to find phrases where sentences should have been used. Consequently, you find yourself making the same written comments on papers or verbal comments in conferences with students, beginning with, “As I had instructed in class…” In his groundbreaking book, Experiential Learning, researcher and theorist David Kolb introduced the concept of “deep learning,” which can remedy …

Undoing Undue Influence: How The Doctrine Can Avoid Judicial Subjectivity By Omitting The Vulnerability Element, Robin Boyle-Laisure

Faculty Publications

(Excerpt)

The utility of the doctrine of undue influence has been declining for several decades because of its inclusion of the element of vulnerability or, put another way, inquiry into the mind of the one allegedly being influenced. I argue that the courts’ inquiry into the mind of the influencee to determine whether this person was vulnerable is not a useful construct as an element of the doctrine. This Article addresses three contexts in which assessing one’s vulnerability is problematic: (1) in the contract formation process occurring in the general population (meaning not within a high-control group), such as the …

Justice Lazansky On “Repose” At Chief Judge Cardozo’S New York Court Of Appeals, John Q. Barrett

Faculty Publications

(Excerpt)

In 1948, Edward Lazansky of Brooklyn wrote a long letter to his friend Jacob Billikopf of Philadelphia. It included an amusing story that Lazansky had heard at some point about his friend Benjamin N. Cardozo, who had died ten years earlier. Billikopf liked the story. He retyped it and mailed it to prominent people who had known Cardozo.

Lazansky and Billikopf had it right. The story, which generally checks out, should be shared. It gives a glimpse of Cardozo’s talents and virtues, including his judicial sense of humor.

Deliberate Indifference: Respondeat Superior Liability For Municipalities In Civil Rights Cases As An Alternative To Qualified Immunity Reform, Mark C. Niles

Faculty Publications

The police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, Minnesota, has resulted in a renewed focus on adjudication of civil rights claims against government officials and the perceived inadequacy of the legal resolution of these claims. Calls for reform or complete removal of the defense of qualified immunity for government officials have been central to these discussions.

This Article argues that while arguments for qualified immunity reform are convincing and vital, the exclusive focus on this aspect of civil rights adjudication is misplaced and serves as a distraction from a more basic and consequential flaw in the constitutional tort jurisprudence: the …

Bridging The Legal Writing Skills Gap: Pre-Mediation Statements, Elayne E. Greenberg

Faculty Publications

(Excerpt)

In our settlement-dominated legal culture, it is no longer sufficient for legal writing courses to teach students how to write for the court alone. Instead, to be considered practice-competent it is necessary for students to also be able to write for non-adversarial, collaborative settings such as mediation. Mediation has become the primary dispute resolution process to settle legal cases, and it has become common practice for judges to strongly encourage litigating parties to try to settle their case in mediation. While the current legal writing curriculum teaches students how to draft legal memoranda, motions, and appellate briefs for court, …

Crt Forward: Tracking The Attack On Critical Race Theory, Taifha Natalee Alexander, Latoya Baldwin Clark, Kyle Reinhard, Noah Zatz

Faculty Publications

(Excerpt)

Critical Race Theory (CRT) is an interdisciplinary practice and approach to understanding the foundations and maintenance of race and racial subordination in the legal system throughout history. Since its genesis in United States law schools in the mid-1980s, CRT has explored how racial, and other, hierarchies have persisted despite advancements in racial justice made during times like the Reconstruction and Civil Rights eras. CRT contests many of the standard assumptions underlying traditional civil rights discourse, including that the legal system is a neutral apparatus disconnected from the legacy of racial subordination in the United States. Since its inception, CRT …

A Mathematical Modeling Technique To Understand The Role Of Decoy Receptors In Ligand‑Receptor Interaction, Subrata Dey, Aditi Ghosh, Malay Banerjee

Faculty Publications

The ligand‑receptor interaction is fundamental to many cellular processes in eukaryotic cells such as cell migration, proliferation, adhesion, signaling and so on. Cell migration is a central process in the development of organisms. Receptor induced chemo‑tactic sensitivity plays an important role in cell migration. However, recently some receptors identified as decoy receptors, obstruct some mechanisms of certain regular receptors. DcR3 is one such important decoy receptor, generally found in glioma cell, RCC cell and many various malignant cells which obstruct some mechanism including apoptosis cell‑signaling, cell inflammation, cell migration. The goal of our work is to mathematically formulate ligand‑receptor interaction …

Evaluating Ethics Of Machine Learning: Industry 4.0 Implementation In Aerospace And Defense Industries, Lina Khan, Ahmad Elshennawy, Sandra Furterer, Elizabeth Cudney, Chad Laux

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Near-Universal Marriage, Early Childbearing, And Low Fertility: India’S Alternative Fertility Transition, Narae Park, Sangita Vyas, Kathleen Broussard, Dean Spears

Faculty Publications

OBJECTIVETo compare fertility in India to both low-to-middle-income and high-income countries (LMICs and HICs) and describe the patterns that have accompanied India’s transition to low fertility.

METHODS We use data from the Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS), the United Nations (UN), and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) to observe factors associated with fertility decline in 36 Indian states and 76 countries.

RESULTS Although fertility in India has declined to levels similar to HICs, women’s entry into marriage and initiation of childbearing are more in line with patterns found in LMICs. The vast majority of women in …

The Politics Of Justice: Analyzing The Politicization Of Transitional Justice Processes, Erin Bloom, Lisa K. Dicker

Faculty Publications

(Excerpt)

In the United States, the argument for using transitional justice as a mechanism for reckoning with the country's racial injustices—past and present—has gained a broader platform since 2020. While the call for truth, redress, and reform is not new, the mass movement towards it has gained momentum at both the local and national level. At the national level, a House Committee revived a bill first proposed in 1989 to create a commission to study reparations for slavery in the United States and advanced it; though the House has not taken H.R. 40 up for consideration. Representative Sheila Jackson Lee …

Transformational Experiences Beyond Borders Study Abroad And The Further Development Of The Experience Impact Scale, Neil Lundberg, Grant Lundberg, Jennifer Brown, Evan Grunvig, Brian Hill

Faculty Publications

Study abroad has become a useful context to examine transformative experiences within the experience typology concept as developed by Duerden et al. (2018). Even more recent work has used study abroad to develop instruments for measuring experience types, such as the Experience Impact Scale (EIS, Lundberg et al., 2021). Initial results from the EIS suggest the need to continue clarifying the characteristics of each experience type. In particular, the transformative experience is of specific interest. The purpose of this study was to further examine transformative experiences as described by those defining their experience as such, and to gain additional insights …

Persistence And Quality Of Vegetation Cover In Expired Conservation Reserve Program Fields, Mark W. Vandever, Kenneth Elgersma, Sarah K. Carter, Ai Wen, Justin L. Welty, Robert S. Arkle, Timothy J. Assal, David S. Pilliod, David M. Mushet, Rich Iovanna

Faculty Publications

For nearly 40 years, the Conservation Reserve Program (CRP) has implemented practices to reduce soil erosion, improve water quality, and provide habitat for wildlife and pollinators on highly erodible cropland in the United States. However, an approximately 40,470 ha (10 million acres) decline in enrolled CRP land over the last decade has greatly reduced the program's environmental benefits. We sought to assess the program's enduring benefits in the central and western United States by (1) determining the proportion of fields that persist in CRP cover after contracts expired, (2) identifying the type of agricultural production that CRP fields shift to …

Structural, Electronic, And Magnetic Properties Of Cofevge-Based Compounds: Experiment And Theory, Parashu Kharel, Zachary Lehmann, Gavin Baker, Lukas Stuelke, Shah Valloppilly, Paul M. Shand, Pavel V. Lukashev

Faculty Publications

We have carried out a combined theoretical and experimental investigation of both stoichiometric and nonstoichiometric CoFeVGe alloys. In particular, we have investigated CoFeVGe, Co1.25Fe0.75VGe, Co0.75Fe1.25VGe, and CoFe0.75VGe bulk alloys. Our first principles calculations suggest that all four alloys show ferromagnetic order, where CoFeVGe, Co1.25Fe0.75VGe, and Co0.75Fe1.25VGe are highly spin polarized with spin polarization values of over 80%. However, the spin polarization value of CoFe0.75VGe is only about 60%. We have synthesized all four samples using arc melting and high-vacuum annealing at 600 °C for 48 hours. The room temperature x-ray diffraction of these samples exhibits a cubic crystal structure with …

Exploring The Role Of Environmental Features On Student Experience In The University Classroom With The Community Of Inquiry Framework, Heather R. Kennedy, Gloria E. Stafford

Faculty Publications

An active learning classroom design recognizes the importance of students becoming engaged in their own learning. Using a mixed-methods approach, this study compared student-reported data (n = 219) and used the community of inquiry framework to evaluate the impact of environmental features on students’ experience. Students occupied traditional or active-learning classrooms, but the same course content was delivered by the same instructor. Findings indicate a preference for seating at tables versus fixed desks, appropriate personal space and sightlines to the teacher and projector screens, and gratification for forming social connections (i.e., social presence).

Producer And Consumer Perspectives On Supporting And Diversifying Local Food Systems In Central Iowa, Michael C. Dorneich, Caroline C. Krejci, Nicholas Schwab, Tiffanie F. Stone, Erin Huckins, Janette R. Thompson, Ulrike Passe

Faculty Publications

The majority of food in the US is distributed through global/national supply chains that exclude locally-produced goods. This situation offers opportunities to increase local food production and consumption and is influenced by constraints that limit the scale of these activities. We conducted a study to assess perspectives of producers and consumers engaged in food systems of a major Midwestern city. We examined producers’ willingness to include/increase cultivation of local foods and consumers’ interest in purchasing/increasing local foods. We used focus groups of producers (two groups of conventional farmers, four local food producers) and consumers (three conventional market participants, two locavores) …