Digital Commons Network^™

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 …

Corporate And Securities Law Impact On Social Responsibility And Corporate Purpose, Thomas Lee Hazen

Faculty Publications

The role of social responsibility in corporate governance has been the subject of debate for nearly ninety years. That debate has been reframed over the decades. Several recent events have resulted in increased focus on corporate so-cial responsibility, especially with respect to publicly held corporations. This Ar-ticle explores the law’s two different paths for impacting social responsibility. The current iteration of the corporate responsibility movement has implications for both state law chartering of corporations and federal securities regulation. This Article analyzes the ways in which stated purpose clauses in a corporation’s articles of incorporation may be useful in addressing social …

No Amendment? No Problem: Judges, "Informal Amendment," And The Evolution Of Constitutional Meaning In The Federal Democracies Of Australia, Canada, India, And The United States, John V. Orth, John Gava, Arvind P. Bhanu, Paul T. Babie

Faculty Publications

This article considers the way in which judges play a significant role in developing the meaning of a constitution through the exercise of interpretive choices that have the effect of “informally amending” the text. We demonstrate this by examining four written federal democratic constitutions: those of the United States, the first written federal democratic constitution; India, the federal constitution of the largest democracy on earth; and the constitutions of Canada and Australia, both federal and democratic, but emerging from the English unwritten tradition. We divide our consideration of these constitutions into two ideal types, identified by Bruce Ackerman: the “revolutionary” …

Unlawfully-Issued Sovereign Debt, W. Mark C. Weidemaier, Mitu Gulati

Faculty Publications

In 2016, its economy in shambles and looking to defer payment on its debts, the Venezuelan government of Nicolás Maduro proposed a multi-billion dollar debt swap to holders of bonds issued by the government’s crown jewel, state-owned oil company Petroleós de Venezuela S.A. (PDVSA). A new government now challenges that bond issuance, arguing that it was unlawful under Venezuelan law. Bondholders counter that this does not matter, that PDVSA freed itself of any borrowing limits by agreeing to a choice-oflaw clause designating New York law.

The dispute over the PDVSA 2020 bonds implicates a common problem. Sovereign nations borrow under …

You Can Call Me Al: Regulating How Candidates' Names Appear On Ballots, Peter Nemerovski

Faculty Publications

In electoral politics, names matter. Studies and anecdotal evidence show that candidates whose names suggest a certain ethnic heritage— for example, an Irish-sounding surname in Chicago, or a Hispanic name in South Florida—outperform candidates without such names, and that “American-sounding” names and names with positive connotations can give candidates a leg up. Therefore, candidates for public office often seek to run under the name they regard as most electorally advantageous. Election boards, secretaries of state, and ultimately courts are often called upon to decide whether a particular candidate can run for office under a particular name.

This Article looks at …

There Was Nothing “Neutral” About Executive Order 9066, Eric L. Muller

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Taxing Nudges, Kathleen Delaney Thomas

Faculty Publications

Governments are increasingly turning to behavioral economics to inform policy design in areas like health care, the environment, and financial decision-making. Research shows that small behavioral interventions, referred to as “nudges,” often produce significant responses at a low cost. The theory behind nudges is that, rather than mandating certain behaviors or providing costly economic subsidies, modest initiatives may “nudge” individuals to choose desirable outcomes by appealing to their behavioral preferences. For example, automatically enrolling workers into savings plans as a default, rather than requiring them to actively sign up, has dramatically increased enrollment in such plans. Similarly, allowing individuals to …

Shocking Business Bankruptcy Law, Melissa B. Jacoby

Faculty Publications

The intersection of major crises and financial distress generates no shortage of stock stories. This Essay offers one more: how shocks can be used opportunistically in big Chapter 11 cases to unravel bankruptcy law, and to shift the system further away from the objective of responding to overindebtedness.

Barring Married Same-Sex Couples From Joint Adoption: Comparative Perspectives And The Case Of Taiwan, Holning S. Lau

Faculty Publications

Taiwan is the first country in Asia to legalize same-sex marriage, but it forbids married same-sex couples from jointly adopting children. This article examines this restriction through the lens of comparative law, which brings into focus two main insights. First, we see that, out of all countries that have legalized same-sex marriage, Taiwan is one of only two that bar married same-sex couples from joint adoption. As this article will explain, the fact that Taiwan’s policy is so anomalous should spur skepticism of the policy’s appropriateness. Second, judicial opinions from around the world contain persuasive reasoning that further calls into …

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 …

Monopolizing Whiteness, Erika K. Wilson

Faculty Publications

In racially diverse metropolitan areas throughout the country, school district boundary lines create impermeable borders, separating affluent and predominantly white school districts from low-income, predominantly nonwhite school districts. The existence of predominantly white and affluent school districts in racially diverse metropolitan areas has material consequences and symbolic meaning. Materially, such districts receive greater educational inputs such as higher per-pupil spending, higher teacher quality, and newer facilities than their neighboring more racially diverse districts. Symbolically, owing to the material and status-based value attached to whiteness, the districts are also viewed as elite, which creates a magnetic effect that draws white affluent …

The Final Act -- Deportation By Ice Air, Deborah M. Weissman, Angelina Godoy, Havan Clark

Faculty Publications

Deportation is a legal concept about which much has been written. But it is more complicated. For noncitizens, forced expulsion is a lived experience occurring in time and space — an act against the body, mostly black and brown bodies. In this Article, we part ways with the well-established narratives of deportation and the punishment/non-punishment paradigm to conceive of deportation not only as a legal concept, but as a physical act — the final act — that is, the culmination of the immigration enforcement dragnet. The physical removal of persons from the United States requires a complex system comprised 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 …

Occupational Hazard: A Critique Of California Elections Code § 13107(A)(3), Peter Nemerovski

Faculty Publications

This Article argues that California’s occupational designation option should be abolished, having outlived whatever usefulness it may have had in 1931. Today, it is a source of headaches for elections officials across the state. It often leads to litigation over whether a candidate’s chosen designation is inaccurate or might mislead voters. It is inconsistently enforced. It is frequently used by candidates not to provide voters with helpful information but to gain an electoral advantage over their opponents. The time has come for California to join the forty-nine states that do not automatically allow candidates to include their occupations on the …

Law In The Shadows Of Confederate Monuments, Deborah R. Gerhardt

Faculty Publications

Hundreds of Confederate monuments stand across the United States. In recent years, leading historians have come forward to clarify that these statues were erected not just as memorials but to express white supremacist intimidation in times of racially oppressive conduct. As public support for antiracist action grows, many communities are inclined to remove public symbols that cause emotional harm, create constant security risks and dishonor the values of equality and unity. Finding a lawful path to removal is not always clear and easy. The political power brokers who choose whether monuments will stay or go often do not walk daily …

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 …

Black Adventism In North America, Trevor O'Reggio

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

A Radial Basis Function Finite Difference Scheme For The Benjamin–Ono Equation, Benjamin F. Akers, Tony Liu, Jonah A. Reeger

Faculty Publications

A radial basis function-finite differencing (RBF-FD) scheme was applied to the initial value problem of the Benjamin–Ono equation. The Benjamin–Ono equation has traveling wave solutions with algebraic decay and a nonlocal pseudo-differential operator, the Hilbert transform. When posed on ℝ, the former makes Fourier collocation a poor discretization choice; the latter is challenging for any local method. We develop an RBF-FD approximation of the Hilbert transform, and discuss the challenges of implementing this and other pseudo-differential operators on unstructured grids. Numerical examples, simulation costs, convergence rates, and generalizations of this method are all discussed.

Superior Polyaniline Cathode Material With Enhanced Capacity For Ammonium Ion Storage, Shelton Farai Kuchena, Ying Wang

Faculty Publications

A paradigm shift in aqueous rechargeable batteries has seen the development of nonmetal ammonium ions (NH4+) as charge carriers. NH44+ ions have a molecular weight of 18 g mol-1 and hydrated ionic size of 3.31 Å, which are smaller than those of metal ions, leading to faster kinetics during charge transfer. Yet few electrode materials have been studied for this type of battery. This work is the first effort to show that polyaniline (PANI) is an excellent material for NH4+ ion storage, and thus further proves that NH4+ ions can be used as effective charge carriers in aqueous ion battery …

Validation Of A Machine Learning Brain Electrical Activity-Based Index To Aid In Diagnosing Concussion Among Athletes, Jeffery J. Bazarian, Robert J. Elbin, Douglas J. Casa, Gillian A. Hotz, Christopher Neville, Rebecca M. Lopez, David M. Schnyer, Susan Yeargin Ph.D., Atc

Faculty Publications

Importance An objective, reliable indicator of the presence and severity of concussive brain injury and of the readiness for the return to activity has the potential to reduce concussion-related disability.

Objective To validate the classification accuracy of a previously derived, machine learning, multimodal, brain electrical activity–based Concussion Index in an independent cohort of athletes with concussion.

Design, Setting, and Participants This prospective diagnostic cohort study was conducted at 10 clinical sites (ie, US universities and high schools) between February 4, 2017, and March 20, 2019. A cohort comprising a consecutive sample of 207 athletes aged 13 to 25 years with …

Salt Marsh Elevation Limit Determined After Subsidence From Hydrologic Change And Hydrocarbon Extraction, R. Eugene Turner, Yu Mo

Faculty Publications

Levee construction aboveground and hydrocarbon removal from belowground in coastal wetlands can create hydrologic changes that increase plant stress through flooding. But the significance of the subsidence they cause individually or in combination is contested. This study untangled them to demonstrate elevational limits of salt marshes by studying dredged and natural waterways in two salt marshes in Louisiana, USA. The areas had a homogenous plant cover before drilling for oil and gas extraction peaked in the 1960s, and now are a mixed network of natural waterways and dredged canals used to drill wells with an average drill date of 1965.8 …

Bottom-Up Approach To Assess The Molecular Structure Of Aqueous Poly(N‑Isopropylacrylamide) At Room Temperature Via Infrared Spectroscopy, Habtom B. Gobeze, Jianbo Ma, Fedra M. Leonik, Daniel G. Kuroda

Faculty Publications

© 2020 American Chemical Society The structure of poly(N-isopropylacrylamide) (PNIPAM) in solution is still an unresolved topic. Here, the PNIPAM structure in water was investigated using a bottom-up approach, involving the monomer, dimer, and trimer, and a combination of infrared (IR) spectroscopies as well as molecular dynamics simulations. The experiments show that the monomer and oligomers exhibit a broad and asymmetric amide I band with two underlying transitions, while PNIPAM presents the same major transitions and a minor one. Analysis of the 2D IR spectra and theoretical modeling of the amide I band indicates that the two transitions of the …

Primordial Scalar Power Spectrum From The Hybrid Approach In Loop Cosmologies, Bao Fei Li, Javier Olmedo, Parampreet Singh, Anzhong Wang

Faculty Publications

We compare the primordial scalar power spectra in the loop cosmological models using the effective dynamics of the hybrid approach to cosmological perturbations in which the background is loop quantized, but the perturbations are Fock quantized. The three loop cosmological models under consideration are the standard loop quantum cosmology (LQC), the modified LQC-I (mLQC-I) and the modified LQC-II (mLQC-II) in the spatially flat Friedmann-Lemaître-Robertson-Walker universe with a Starobinsky potential. These models arise from different regularizations of the classical Hamiltonian constraint in the symmetry reduced spacetimes and aim to capture certain features of quantization in loop quantum gravity. When applying the …

Magnetic Order And Fluctuations In The Quasi-Two-Dimensional Planar Magnet Sr(Co1-Xnix)2as2, Yaofeng Xie, Yu Li, Zhiping Yin, Rui Zhang, Weiyi Wang, Matthew B. Stone, Huibo Cao, D. L. Abernathy, Leland Harriger, David P. Young, J. F. Ditusa, Pengcheng Dai

Faculty Publications

We use neutron scattering to investigate spin excitations in Sr(Co1-xNix)2As2, which has a c-axis incommensurate helical structure of the two-dimensional (2D) in-plane ferromagnetic (FM) ordered layers for 0.013=x=0.25. By comparing the wave vector and energy dependent spin excitations in helical ordered Sr(Co0.9Ni0.1)2As2 and paramagnetic SrCo2As2, we find that Ni doping, while increasing lattice disorder in Sr(Co1-xNix)2As2, enhances quasi-2D FM spin fluctuations. However, our band structure calculations within the combined density functional theory and dynamic mean field theory (DFT+DMFT) failed to generate a correct incommensurate wave vector for the observed helical order from nested Fermi surfaces. Since transport measurements reveal increased …

Efficient Low-Cost Procedure For Microextraction Of Estrogen From Environmental Water Using Magnetic Ionic Liquids, Paula Berton, Noureen Siraj, Susmita Das, Sergio De Rooy, Rodolfo G. Wuilloud, Isiah M. Warner

Faculty Publications

In this study, three magnetic ionic liquids (MILs) were investigated for extraction of four estrogens, i.e., estrone (E1), estradiol (E2), estriol (E3), and ethinylestradiol (EE2), from environmental water. The cation trihexyl(tetradecyl)phosphonium ([P66614]+), selected to confer hydrophobicity to the resulting MIL, was combined with tetrachloroferrate(III), ferricyanide, and dysprosium thiocyanate to yield ([P66614][FeCl4]), ([P66614]3[Fe(CN)6]), and ([P66614]5[Dy(SCN)8]), respectively. After evaluation of various strategies to develop a liquid-liquid microextraction technique based on synthesized MILs, we placed the MILs onto a magnetic stir bar and used them as extracting solvents. After extraction, the MIL-enriched phase was dissolved in methanol and injected into an HPLC-UV for …

Towards A Reduced Phase Space Quantization In Loop Quantum Cosmology With An Inflationary Potential, Kristina Giesel, Bao Fei Li, Parampreet Singh

Faculty Publications

We explore a reduced phase space quantization of loop quantum cosmology (LQC) for a spatially flat Friedmann-Lemaître-Robertson-Walker (FLRW) universe filled with reference fields and an inflaton field in a Starobinsky inflationary potential. We consider three separate cases in which the reference fields are taken to be the Gaussian dust, the Brown-Kuchař dust, and massless Klein-Gordon scalar reference fields respectively. This is a "two-fluid"model in which reference fields act as global clocks providing a physical time in an inflationary spacetime, and allow bypassing various technical hurdles in conventional quantum cosmological models. The reduced phase space is obtained in terms of the …

High-Resolution Sampling Of A Broad Marine Life Size Spectrum Reveals Differing Size- And Composition-Based Associations With Physical Oceanographic Structure, Adam T. Greer, John C. Lehrter, Benjamin M. Binder, Aditya R. Nayak, Ranjoy Barua, Ana E. Rice, Jonathan H. Cohen, Malcolm N. Mcfarland, Alexis Hagemeyer, Nicole D. Stockley, Kevin M. Boswell, Igor Shulman, Sergio Derada, Bradley Penta

Faculty Publications

Observing multiple size classes of organisms, along with oceanographic properties and water mass origins, can improve our understanding of the drivers of aggregations, yet acquiring these measurements remains a fundamental challenge in biological oceanography. By deploying multiple biological sampling systems, from conventional bottle and net sampling to in situ imaging and acoustics, we describe the spatial patterns of different size classes of marine organisms (several microns to ∼10 cm) in relation to local and regional (m to km) physical oceanographic conditions on the Delaware continental shelf. The imaging and acoustic systems deployed included (in ascending order of target organism size) …

Perceived Vulnerability To Covid-19 Infection From Event Attendance: Results From Louisiana, Usa, Two Weeks Preceding The National Emergency Declaration, Ran Li, Bingcheng Yang, Jerrod Penn, Bailey Houghtaling, Juan Chen, Witoon Prinyawiwatkul, Brian E. Roe, Danyi Qi

Faculty Publications

Background: Individual perceptions of personal and national threats posed by COVID-19 shaped initial response to the pandemic. The aim of this study was to investigate the changes in residents' awareness about COVID-19 and to characterize those who were more aware and responsive during the early stages of the pandemic in Louisiana.

Methods: In response to the mounting threat of COVID-19, we added questions to an ongoing food preference study held at Louisiana State University from March 3rd through March 12th, 2020. We asked how likely it was that the spread of the coronavirus will cause a national public health crisis …

Juvenile Leaves Or Adult Leaves: Determinants For Vegetative Phase Change In Flowering Plants, Darren Manuela, Mingli Xu

Faculty Publications

Vegetative leaves in Arabidopsis are classified as either juvenile leaves or adult leaves based on their specific traits, such as leaf shape and the presence of abaxial trichomes. The timing of the juvenile-to-adult phase transition during vegetative development, called the vegetative phase change, is a critical decision for plants, as this transition is associated with crop yield, stress responses, and immune responses. Juvenile leaves are characterized by high levels of miR156/157, and adult leaves are characterized by high levels of miR156/157 targets, SQUAMOSA PROMOTER BINDING PROTEIN-LIKE (SPL) transcription factors. The discovery of this miR156/157-SPL module provided a critical tool for …