Digital Commons Network^™

Molecular Data From The Holotype Of The Enigmatic Bornean Black Shrew, Suncus Ater Medway, 1965 (Soricidae, Crocidurinae), Place It In The Genus Palawanosorex, Jonathan A. Nations, Thomas C. Giarla, Muhd Amsyari Morni, Julius William Dee, Mark T. Swanson, Anna E. Hiller, Faisal Ali Anwarali Khan, Jacob A. Esselstyn

Faculty Publications

Although Borneo has received more attention from biologists than most other islands in the Malay Ar-chipelago, many questions regarding the systematic relationships of Bornean mammals remain. Using next-generation sequencing technology, we obtained mitochondrial DNA sequences from the holotype of Suncus ater, the only known specimen of this shrew. Several shrews collected recently in Sarawak are closely aligned, both morphologically and mitochondrially, with the holotype of S. ater. Phylogenetic analyses of mitochondrial sequences indicate that the S. ater holotype and new Sarawak specimens do not belong to the genus Suncus, but instead are most closely related to Palawanosorex muscorum. Until now …

New Species Of Virola (Myristicaceae) From South America, Daniel Santamaría-Aguilar, Laura P. Lagomarsino

Faculty Publications

With about 70 species Virola, is the largest genus of Myristicaceae in the Neotropics, the genus ranked in the top ten genera of abundance across Amazonia. Ten new species are proposed in this striking genus, which are described based on morphology, and are illustrated. The new species were discovered thanks to herbarium specimens collected mainly in the 1980s and 1990s when field documentations were more active. The new species come from Colombia (V. calimensis sp. nov., V. cogolloi sp. nov., V. excisa sp. nov., V. tuckerae sp. nov.), Ecuador (V. alvaroperezii sp. nov., V. bombuscaroensis sp. nov., V. calimensis, V. …

No Guts About It: Captivity, But Not Neophobia Phenotype, Influences The Cloacal Microbiome Of House Sparrows (Passer Domesticus), T. R. Kelly, A. E. Vinson, G. M. King, C. R. Lattin

Faculty Publications

Behavioral traits such as anxiety and depression have been linked to diversity of the gut microbiome in humans, domesticated animals, and lab-bred model species, but the extent to which this link exists in wild animals, and thus its eco- logical relevance, is poorly understood. We examined the relationship between a behavioral trait (neophobia) and the cloacal microbiome in wild house sparrows ( Passer domesticus, n = 22) to determine whether gut microbial diversity is related to per- sonality in a wild animal. We swabbed the cloaca immediately upon capture, assessed neophobia phenotypes in the lab, and then swabbed the cloaca …

Morphology Of Migration: Associations Between Wing Shape, Bill Morphology And Migration In Kingbirds (Tyrannus), Maggie P. Macpherson, Alex E. Jahn, Nicholas A. Mason

Faculty Publications

Morphology is closely linked to locomotion and diet in animals. In animals that undertake long-distance migrations, limb morphology is under selection to maximize mobility and minimize energy expenditure. Migratory behaviours also interact with diet, such that migratory animals tend to be dietary generalists, whereas sedentary taxa tend to be dietary specialists. Despite a hypothesized link between migration status and morphology, phylogenetic comparative studies have yielded conflicting findings. We tested for evolutionary associations between migratory status and limb and bill morphology across kingbirds, a pan-American genus of birds with migratory, partially migratory and sedentary taxa. Migratory kingbirds had longer wings, in …

Compressible Spaces And Ξz-Structures, Craig Guilbault, Kevin Schreve, Molly Moran

Faculty Publications

Bestvina introduced a Z-structure for a group G to generalize the boundary of a CAT(0) or hyperbolic group. A refinement of this notion, introduced by Farrell and Lafont, includes a G-equivariance requirement, and is known as an ξZ-structure. A recent result of the first two authors with Tirel put ξZ-structures on Baumslag–Solitar groups and Z-structures on generalized Baumslag–Solitar groups. We generalize this to higher dimensions by showing that fundamental groups of graphs of closed nonpositively curved Riemannian n-manifolds (each vertex and edge manifold is of dimension n) admit Z-structures, and graphs of negatively curved or flat Riemannian n-manifolds admit ξZ-structures.

A Low-Cost Greenhouse-Based High-Throughput Phenotyping Platform For Genetic Studies: A Case Study In Maize Under Inoculation With Plant Growth-Promoting Bacteria, Rafael Massahiro Yassue, Giovanni Galli, Ronaldo Borsato, Hao Cheng, Gota Morota, Roberto Fritsche-Neto

Faculty Publications

Greenhouse-based high-throughput phenotyping (HTP) presents a useful approach for studying novel plant growth-promoting bacteria (PGPB). Despite the potential of this approach to leverage genetic variability for breeding new maize (Zea Mays L.) cultivars exhibiting highly stable symbiosis with PGPB, greenhouse-based HTP platforms are not yet widely used because they are highly expensive; hence, it is challenging to perform HTP studies under a limited budget. In this study, we built a low-cost greenhouse-based HTP platform to collect growth-related image-derived phenotypes. We assessed 360 inbred maize lines with or without PGPB inoculation under nitrogen-limited conditions. Plant height, canopy coverage, and canopy volume …

Genome And Environment Based Prediction Models And Methods Of Complex Traits Incorporating Genotype × Environment Interaction, José Crossa, Osval Antonio Montesinos-López, Paulino Pérez-Rodríguez, Germano Costa-Neto, Roberto Fritsche-Neto, Rodomiro Ortiz, Johannes W.R. Martini, Morten Lillemo, Abelardo Montesinos-López, Diego Jarquin, Flavio Breseghello, Jaime Cuevas, Renaud Rincent

Faculty Publications

Genomic-enabled prediction models are of paramount importance for the successful implementation of genomic selection (GS) based on breeding values. As opposed to animal breeding, plant breeding includes extensive multienvironment and multiyear field trial data. Hence, genomic-enabled prediction models should include genotype × environment (G × E) interaction, which most of the time increases the prediction performance when the response of lines are different from environment to environment. In this chapter, we describe a historical timeline since 2012 related to advances of the GS models that take into account G × E interaction. We describe theoretical and practical aspects of those …

On The Synthesis And Characterization Of Two Different Titanium-Based Supramolecular Structures Of Identical Stoichiometry, Ryan J. Bujol, Frank R. Fronczek, Noémie Elgrishi

Faculty Publications

Self-assembled supramolecular coordination complexes can take on a wide range of three-dimensional architectures with varying ratios of metal-to-ligand. Control over which architecture will be adopted can be difficult to maintain, as many may form from the starting materials and conditions present. Characterizing the resulting architectures formed can be challenging, in particular when discerning between lower or higher ordered structures of identical stoichiometry. Here we report the synthesis and characterization of a Ti2L3 football-like or pill-shaped capsule, unexpectedly formed from attempts to synthesize variations on a Ti4L6 tetrahedron. The two anionic cores are formed from identical stoichiometric ratios of organic linkers …

On The Asymptotic Convergence And Acceleration Of Gradient Methods, Yakui Huang, Yu Hong Dai, Xin Wei Liu, Hongchao Zhang

Faculty Publications

We consider the asymptotic behavior of a family of gradient methods, which include the steepest descent and minimal gradient methods as special instances. It is proved that each method in the family will asymptotically zigzag between two directions. Asymptotic convergence results of the objective value, gradient norm, and stepsize are presented as well. To accelerate the family of gradient methods, we further exploit spectral properties of stepsizes to break the zigzagging pattern. In particular, a new stepsize is derived by imposing finite termination on minimizing two-dimensional strictly convex quadratic function. It is shown that, for the general quadratic function, the …

A Silver Lining To Russia’S Sanctions-Busting Clause, Michael Bradley, Irving De Lira Salvatierra, W. Mark C. Weidemaier, Mitu Gulati

Faculty Publications

In 2018, Russia began inserting an unusual clause into euro and dollar sovereign bonds, seemingly designed to circumvent future Western sanctions. The clause worked by letting the government pay in roubles if sanctions cut off access to dollar and euro payment systems. The clause received little scrutiny at the time, perhaps because Russia used a state-owned bank, rather than a global investment bank, as underwriter. But with the invasion of Ukraine and the ensuing sanctions imposed by the United States and other governments, the relevance of the clause has become clear. This Essay examines how the market reacted to the …

Judges And Mass Incarceration, Carissa Byrne Hessick

Faculty Publications

This Article argues that judges—long overlooked in contemporary explanations of mass incarceration—have played a central role both through affirmative decisions that increased punishment and through failures to act as a check on prosecutorial power. It traces how judicial choices such as imposing the trial penalty, deferring to sentencing guidelines, allowing coercive plea bargaining, expanding pretrial detention, and adopting narrow or delayed statutory interpretations have structurally reshaped the criminal justice system to favor conviction and incarceration. The Article then proposes practical steps trial judges could implement immediately to reverse these trends, including reducing reliance on pretrial detention, eliminating the trial penalty, …

Saying What The Law Should Be, F. Andrew Hessick

Faculty Publications

Recent years have seen a resurgence of the view that the role of the federal courts is to declare what the law is, not what the law should be. Scholars and judges, including a majority of the current U.S. Supreme Court justices, have expressed this view that the law is fixed at its creation and the function of courts is to declare its meaning. But this view is inaccurate. Descriptively, federal courts often say what the law should be. Judges fashion common law, inject their views into interpretations, and issue opinions that do not merely describe the law but have …

Teaching Law And Science Fiction At The University Of Mississippi, Ellie Campbell, Antonia Eliason

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Turducken™ Legal Writing: Deconstructing The Multi-State Performance Test Genre, Kaci Bishop, Alexa Chew

Faculty Publications

The Multistate Performance Test (MPT) has been praised as the most redeeming part of the otherwise unredeemable bar exam because it most aligns with what new attorneys do in practice. It has also been praised, along with other performance tests, as a useful teaching tool throughout the law school curriculum. This article builds on prior scholarship about the MPT by analyzing the MPT as a tool for teaching and testing legal writing and professional communication skills.

The new insight that this article brings is that the testing aspect of the MPT tends to engulf the teaching aspect; understanding both of …

Racial Capitalism In The Civil Courts, Tonya L. Brito, Kathryn A. Sabbeth, Jessica K. Steinberg, Lauren Sudeall

Faculty Publications

This Essay explores how civil courts function as sites of racial capitalism. The racial capitalism conceptual framework posits that capitalism requires racial inequality and relies on racialized systems of expropriation to produce capital. While often associated with traditional economic systems, racial capitalism applies equally to nonmarket settings, including civil courts.

The lens of racial capitalism enriches access to justice scholarship by explaining how and why state civil courts subordinate racialized groups and individuals. Civil cases are often framed as voluntary disputes among private parties, yet many racially and economically marginalized litigants enter the civil legal system involuntarily, and the state …

Eviction Courts, Kathryn A. Sabbeth

Faculty Publications

This Article examines the legal mechanics of the courts that issue eviction orders. It analyzes these courts in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic and the federal eviction moratoria. The eviction phenomenon preceded the pandemic, but the pandemic exaggerated many of its features. How the eviction courts responded to the eviction moratoria reveals a great deal about how these fora have been functioning all along. While the eviction moratoria were important, the design of eviction courts limited their impact.

The Article identifies ten groups of laws that structure critical design features of eviction courts: (1) filing fee statutes that make …

Policing The Polity, Eisha Jain

Faculty Publications

The era of Chinese Exclusion left a legacy of race-based deportation. Yet it also had an impact that reached well beyond removal. In a seminal decision, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld a law that required people of “Chinese descent” living in the United States to display a certificate of residence on demand or risk arrest, detention, and possible deportation. Immigration control provided the stated rationale for singling out a particular group of U.S. residents and subjecting them to race-based domestic policing. By treating these policing practices as part and parcel of the process of deportation, the Court obscured the full …

Does U.S. Federal Employment Law Now Cover Caste Discrimination Based On Untouchability?: If All Else Fails, There Is The Possible Application Of Bostock V. Clayton County, Kevin Brown, Lalit Khandare, Annapurna Waughray, Kenneth Dau-Schmidt, Theodore M. Shaw

Faculty Publications

This article discusses the issue of whether a victim of caste discrimination based on untouchability can assert a claim of intentional employment discrimination under Title VII or Section 1981. This article contends that there are legitimate arguments that this form of discrimination is a form of religious discrimination under Title VII. The question of whether caste discrimination is a form of race or national origin discrimination under Title VII or Section 1981 depends upon how the courts apply these definitions to caste discrimination based on untouchability. There are legitimate arguments that this form of discrimination is recognized within the concept …

Beyond The Marketplace Of Ideas: Bridging Theory And Doctrine To Promote Self-Governance, David S. Ardia

Faculty Publications

This article proceeds in three parts. Part I examines the longstanding debate over the First Amendment’s purpose and explains why the marketplace of ideas theory has come to dominate both judicial and public understanding of the First Amendment’s speech and press clauses. The marketplace theory’s ascendancy, however, has proven to be problematic. It rests on an overly simplified account of public discourse, treating speech as merely a commodity that can be allocated through market-style transactions, and it has come to embody an extreme version of libertarian economic thinking that is undermining the very democratic processes the First Amendment was intended …

Automated Video Interviewing As The New Phrenology, Ifeoma Ajunwa

Faculty Publications

This Article deploys the new business practice of automated video interviewing as a case study to illuminate the limitations of traditional employment antidiscrimination laws. Employment antidiscrimination laws are inadequate to address the unlawful discrimination attributable to emerging workplace technologies which gatekeep employment opportunities. The Article maintains that the practice of automated video interviewing is based on shaky or unproven social scientific principles that disproportionately impact racial minorities. In this way, the practice of automated video interviewing is analogous to the pseudoscience of phrenology, which enabled societal and economic exclusion through the legitimization of eugenicist and racist attitudes. After parsing the …

Restoring Faith In Military Justice, Eleanor T. Morales, John W. Brooker

Faculty Publications

The military justice system was designed to maintain good order and discipline, strengthen national security, and achieve justice. After military leaders failed to effectively address the sexual assault crisis within the armed forces, Congress lost faith in this system. In response, Congress enacted sweeping legislative reform, transferring prosecutorial discretion for the most serious offenses from commanders to military lawyers. Unlike civilian prosecutions, most decisions within the military justice system have overwhelmingly favored one consideration: maintaining good order and discipline in the unit. While Congress’s reforms change who makes the decisions in many cases, they will have little effect unless military …

The Anti-Parent Juvenile Court, Barbara A. Fedders

Faculty Publications

This Article identifies and analyzes features of the juvenile delinquency court that harm the people on whom children most heavily depend: their parents. By negatively affecting a child’s family—creating financial stress, undermining a parent’s central role in rearing her child, and damaging the parent-child bond—these parent-harming features imperil a child’s healthy growth and development. In so doing, the Article argues, they contravene the juvenile court’s stated commitment to rehabilitation.

In juvenile court, fees and fines are assessed against parents, who also often must incur lost wages to comply with court orders. In addition, while youths of all economic backgrounds and …

The Gender Gap In Academic Patenting, W. Michael Schuster, Miriam Marcowitz-Bitton, Deborah R. Gerhardt

Faculty Publications

The gender gap in academia has long been the focus of public discourse regarding the role of universities in promoting social values. In this study, we consider women’s participation in transferring knowledge from the academy to industry. A prominent model for such transfer is reflected in patent registration for inventions developed through scholarly research. And while academic patenting is a significant component of the professional activities of many faculty members, the extent to which women’s scientific discoveries are patented and commercialized has received relatively little attention.

The U.S. academy is a leader in science and a pioneer of technology transfer. …

How Impeachment Works, Michael J. Gerhardt

Faculty Publications

This Article rejects the common view of the two Trump impeachments as a constitutional debacle. It asserts, instead, that the federal impeachment process retains significant vitality as a mechanism for holding presidents accountable for misconduct in office. If we take a step back from the tiny set of presidential impeachment trials in American history and adopt a more panoramic view of their effects and connections to other disciplinary mechanisms for presidential misconduct, it is easier to see that presidential impeachments still have bite. In fact, they can and do cripple legacies and reputations, create permanent evidentiary records of presidential misconduct, …

Constraining Criminal Laws, F. Andrew Hessick, Carissa Byrne Hessick

Faculty Publications

This Article challenges the modern statutory interpretation of criminal laws. In doing so, it makes two distinct, but related contributions. First, it demonstrates that courts historically played a significantly more active role in interpreting criminal laws than they currently play. In particular, courts routinely interpreted statutes to reach no further than the text or the purpose, and they treated broadly written laws as ambiguous and in need of narrowing constructions. Put simply, courts used their interpretive powers to deliberately favor criminal defendants and constrain the criminal law. Second, it explains how a more active judiciary would combat some of the …

Revisiting Health Care Fraud In The Biden Administration, Joan H. Krause

Faculty Publications

Although not one of the Biden administration’s initial priorities, health care fraud inevitably will be a major concern. First, the federal government’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic—including the disbursement of more than $175 billion in provider relief funds and the loosening of traditionally strict rules on Medicare reimbursement for telehealth services—has created new opportunities to divert health care funds for fraudulent purposes. Second, President Joseph Biden took office in the midst of the incomplete transition from volume-based to value-based payment in the federal health care programs, which will allow fraud to flourish in the gaps between multiple reimbursement systems. Third, …

Nonmarriage And Choice In South Africa And The United States, Holning Lau, Suzanne A. Kim

Faculty Publications

In this Article, we examine three insights about free choice that emerge from studying the development of South Africa’s law of nonmarriage. First, South African jurisprudence advances understandings of nonmarriage as a valid choice. Unlike U.S. jurisprudence, which has been accused of overprivileging marriage and demeaning nonmarriage, South African jurisprudence draws attention to people’s legitimate reasons for choosing not to marry and the dignity interests attached to that choice. South African law helps to broaden the imagination of what is possible when nonmarriage is respected as a valid choice.

Second, South African jurisprudence illuminates the fact that the choice whether …

Not Child’S Play: A Constitutional Game Of Pass The Story In Dobbs, Shurtleff, And Kennedy, John V. Orth, Paul T. Babie

Faculty Publications

This Article suggests that in the effort to find fixed standards for rights, working with vague, indeterminate, silent text, the Supreme Court engages in a constitutional game of pass the story. No one outcome concludes the story; it merely adds another chapter, to which the next set of judges will add their own installment. The quest for standards never ends. The Court’s decisions in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, Shurtleff v. City of Boston, and Kennedy v. Bremerton School District are merely the latest installments in stories that began with the founding. And as with any such story, …

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

Faculty Publications

This Article contextualizes the police defunding movement and the backlash it has generated. The defunding movement emerged from the work of Black-led activists to reassert democratic control over policing and shift resources to social service agencies and other institutions serving community needs. In reaction, states have enacted anti-defunding bills checking local government reduction of law enforcement budgets. These anti-defunding measures continue a long tradition of state and federal control over local police spending, subverting local democratic control over police agencies. These limits include direct legal constraints on local police spending and indirect constraints through grants and authorization to collect fines, …

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 …