Digital Commons Network^™

All Human Rights Are Equal, But Some Are More Equal Than Others: The Extraordinary Rendition Of A Terror Suspect In Italy, The Nato Sofa, And Human Rights, Chris Jenks, Eric Talbot Jensen

Faculty Scholarship

On November 4, 2009, an Italian court found a group of Italian military intelligence agents, operatives from the Central Intelligence Agency and a U.S. Air Force (USAF) officer guilty of the 2003 kidnapping of terror suspect Abu Omar. Thrown in a van on the streets of Milan, the abduction took Abu Omar from Italy to Egypt, where he was allegedly tortured and interrogated about his role in recruiting fighters for extremist Islamic causes, including the insurgency in Iraq. This essay posits that lost amidst politically charged rhetoric about Bush administration impunity and the “war on terror” is that the Italian …

Preventing Accidents In Offshore Oil And Gas Operations: The U.S. Approach And Some Contrasting Features Of The Norwegian Approach, Michael S. Baram

Faculty Scholarship

This working paper deals with the U.S. approach for governing the safety of offshore oil and gas operations and preventing major accidents during exploratory drilling and production. It evaluates the statutory and regulatory framework, and agency implementation and reliance on industrial standards, and then suggests reforms to improve the efficacy of this governance system. References are made to the blowout at the drilling rig operated by British Petroleum to support the evaluation and reforms. References are also made to Norwegian laws and regulations governing oil and gas operations in the North Sea. As one of the world’s largest sources of …

Mainstreaming Privacy Torts, Danielle K. Citron

Faculty Scholarship

In 1890, Samuel Warren and Louis Brandeis proposed a privacy tort and seventy years later, William Prosser conceived it as four wrongs. In both eras, privacy invasions primarily caused psychic and reputational wounds of a particular sort. Courts insisted upon significant proof due to those injuries’ alleged ethereal nature. Digital networks alter this calculus by exacerbating the injuries inflicted. Because humiliating personal information posted online has no expiration date, neither does individual suffering. Leaking databases of personal information and postings that encourage assaults invade privacy in ways that exact significant financial and physical harm. This dispels concerns that plaintiffs might …

The Visible Hand: Coordination Functions Of The Regulatory State, Robert B. Ahdieh

Faculty Scholarship

We live in a coordination economy. As one surveys the myriad challenges of modern social and economic life, an ever increasing proportion is defined not by the need to reconcile competing interests, but by the challenge of getting everyone on the same page. Conflict is not absent in these settings. It is not, however, the determinative factor in shaping our behaviors and resulting interactions. That essential ingredient, instead, is coordination.

Such coordination is commonly understood as the function of the market. As it turns out, however, optimal coordination will not always emerge, as if led “by an invisible hand.” Even …

The Humanitarian Foss Project, Ralph A. Morelli, Allen Tucker, Trishan R. De Lanerolle

Faculty Scholarship

The Humanitarian Free and Open Source Software (Humanitarian FOSS) Project is primarily an educational project whose goal is to engage more undergraduates in building free and open source software (FOSS) that benefits their community. Over the past four years, increasing numbers of undergraduates and computer science programs have been inspired by the Humanitarian FOSS project to make significant contributions to several active open source software development projects that have benefited organizations such as the Portland, Maine Ronald McDonald House, and the New York City Salvation Army. This article provides examples of several Humanitarian FOSS projects and describes other initiatives aimed …

Imperfect Alternatives: Networks, Salience, And Institutional Design In Financial Crises, Robert B. Ahdieh

Faculty Scholarship

With the benefit of hindsight — and some aspiration to foresight — it is useful to consider the type of regulatory regime that might best address financial crises. What could policymakers have done to prevent the recent crisis? And once the crisis started, what interventions might have alleviated it? These questions have been widely debated, with an eye to both substantive policy and the design of effective regulatory institutions. This Article speaks to the latter project — one of comparative institutional analysis — though with a framework that implicates our substantive policy choices as well. It begins with an account …

Erisa & Uncertainty, Brendan S. Maher, Peter K. Stris

Faculty Scholarship

In the United States, retirement income and health insurance are largely provided through private promises made incident to employment. These “benefit promises” are governed by a statute called ERISA, which many healthcare and pension scholars argue is the cause of fundamental problems with our nation’s health and retirement policy. Inevitably, however, they advance narrowly tailored proposals to amend the statute. This occurs because of the widely-held view that reform should leave undisturbed the underlying core of the statute. This Article develops a theory of ERISA designed to illustrate the unavoidable need for structural reform.

Collaboration Is Our Future, Clem Guthro

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Social Semiotics In The Fair Use Analysis, H. Brian Holland

Faculty Scholarship

Fair use is perhaps the most contested doctrine in all of copyright law. New technologies that not only enable increased audience engagement with cultural works, but also facilitate the use of these "raw materials" to produce new works have made fair use more controversial. At another level, these technologies have made visible an audience, not of passive content consumers, but of active participants in discourse around and about those works.

This Article presents an argument for an expansion of fair use based on social semiotic theory, rather than on theories of authorship or rights of autonomy of subsequent authors. Instead, …

Alternative Burdens On Freedom Of Conscience, Adam Kolber

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Resolving The Dilemma Of Nonjusticiable Causation In Failure-To-Warn Litigation, Neil B. Cohen, Aaron Twerski

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Resolving The Dilemma Of Non-Justiciable Causation In Failure To Warn Litigation, Aaron D. Twerski, Neil B. Cohen

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Shipping The Runners To The Race: A Sport Tourism Interpretation Of The Alchian-Allen Theorem, Steven Cobb, Douglas J. Olberding

Faculty Scholarship

This paper provides empirical support for the Alchian and Allen "shipping the good apples out" hypothesis. The hypothesis version tested here involves estimating the effect of travel cost on the quality of a weekend trip to Cincinnati, where travel cost is measured by time spent in travel and visit quality is measured by the amount of discretionary spending associated with the trip. Using linear regression analysis on data from race participants in the 2008 Flying Pig marathon and half marathon races, strong and robust evidence is found to support the validity of this hypothesis. Specifically, travel distance does …

Location-Based Services: Time For A Privacy Check-In, Chris Conley, Nicole Ozer, Hari O'Connell, Ellen Ginsburg, Tamar Gubins

Faculty Scholarship

Need to get directions when you are lost? Want to know if your friends are in the neighborhood? Location-based services – applications and websites that provide services based on your current location – can put this information and more in the palm of your hand.

But outdated privacy laws and varying corporate practices could mean that sensitive information about who you are, where you go, what you do, and who you know end up being shared, sold, or turned over to the government.

Can location-based services protect your privacy? Do they? And what can we do to improve the situation? …

Should The Patient Conquer?, William M. Sage

Faculty Scholarship

In 1596, Robert Bainbridge carved “The patient shall conquer” into the wall of his cell in the Tower of London. It is highly unlikely that Bainbridge was an early advocate for recipients of medical care, imprisoned perhaps by a cruel sheriff denied his payroll taxes or by a domineering barber refused his fee. But its unintended meaning would immediately provoke sympathy from many health care reformers. As we confront the critical challenges of implementing national health-care reform, however, whether the patient should conquer is a legitimate topic for debate. Does the patient’s conquest risk the collapse of the health-care system …

It's All In A Day's Work: Managing The Institutional Repository, Pamela Bluh

Faculty Scholarship

An overview of the decision to select the Digital Commons as the platform for the institutional repository and comments on why library technical services is well suited to manage the repository.

The Determinants Of Technical Efficiency Of Manufacturing Firms In Ghana, Hasan A. Faruq, David Yi

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Sharp Weighted Estimates For Classical Operators [Post-Print], David Cruz-Uribe Sfo, José María Martell, Carlos Perez

Faculty Scholarship

See abstract at: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0001870811003136

From Knowledge To Ideas: The Two Faces Of Innovation, James Bessen

Faculty Scholarship

Innovative ideas have unique properties arising from low communication costs. But ideas come from knowledge that is costly to communicate. “Formalizing” knowledge — codifying, developing standards, etc. — reduces these costs. In a simple model, formalization is associated with changes in the nature of competition between two equilibrium regimes. In one, knowledge is formalized, new technology replaces old and patents increase innovation incentives. In the other, knowledge is not formalized, old technology coexists with new, patents decrease innovation incentives and firms sometimes freely exchange knowledge. The equilibrium changes as technology improves over a life-cycle, affecting firm strategy, innovation policy, geographic …

Pennsylvania's Sales And Use Tax: Has Nearly $1 Billion Been 'Zapped' Away In Fraud?, Richard Thompson Ainsworth

Faculty Scholarship

The Sales and Use Tax is an essential part of Pennsylvania’s revenue profile. Not only is it the State’s second largest revenue source, it has historically played a critical role in reducing the volatility of Pennsylvania’s overall tax collections. The sales tax is also critical to the city of Philadelphia, and Allegheny County. During the current economic downturn both the revenue and structural attributes of this levy should be pushing it to the front of the tax policy line.

The two topics that should rest atop Pennsylvania’s tax policy agenda should be: (1) joining the Streamlined Sales Tax initiative and …

From Pound To Olson: The Avant-Garde Poet As Pedagogue, Alan Golding

Faculty Scholarship

Ezra Pound’s sense of himself as poet-pedagogue—including his insistent desire to reform American higher education—is inseparable from his literary avant-gardism and his commitment to the principle of “discovery” or “newness.” This connection between experimental poetics and pedagogy forms a central part both of Pound’s significance as a writer and of his influence on a later avant-gardist and didact like Charles Olson, and anticipates the complexities of the subsequent relationship between American poetic avant-gardes and the academy. Olson was both a teacher at and rector of Black Mountain College, and in an unlikely conjunction, the forms of his institutional life enter …

Health And Fitness Professionals’ Knowledge, Attitudes, And Behaviors Toward Dietary Supplements., Gina H. Blunt, Kristi M. King

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

The Civil Judicial Subsidy, Brendan S. Maher

Faculty Scholarship

American society does not require civil litigants to bear the actual cost of using the court; those costs are borne almost entirely by the taxpayer (i.e., the “civil judicial subsidy”). In this Article I ask: is that right? Or is there a more desirable way to apportion court usage costs between the state and litigants?

I develop an evaluative framework that facilitates analysis of the purpose, contours, and cost of the current judicial subsidy. We subsidize court use because, in theory, there are certain “social positives” associated with public adjudication. To date the unspoken assumption has been that these social …

How Lawyers (Come To) See The World: A Narrative Theory Of Legal Pedagogy, Randy D. Gordon

Faculty Scholarship

Even if one believes that law is not an autonomous discipline, few would dispute that it is a conservative institution and that its members are trained via a pedagogical method quite different from that of other professions. A central aspect of this training is the case method and — thus — the specialized narrative form that appellate opinions take. This essay examines the case method and suggests ways to crack it open — without discarding it — and thereby achieve one of the goals set forth in the Carnegie Report: namely, to supplement the analytical, rule-based mode of reasoning inherent …

Out From Under The Shadow Of The Federal Constitution: An Overlooked American Constitutionalism, Christian G. Fritz

Faculty Scholarship

Most scholars of constitutional law and history equate American constitutionalism with the Federal constitution. This spotlight on the Federal constitution rests on a series of modern assumptions that elevate the status of the Federal constitution over the rich history of state constitutions, and inevitably neglect the central constitutional tenet of the American Revolution - the sovereignty of the people. Viewing American constitutionalism from the perspective of the constitutional legacy of the Revolution suggests a modified paradigm in which state constitutions play a critical role in our understanding the full meaning of American constitutionalism. The idea of a collective sovereign introduced …

What's So Hard About Sex Equality?: Nature, Culture, And Social Engineering, Linda C. Mcclain

Faculty Scholarship

Why is sex equality so hard to achieve? Social cooperation between women and men in various domains of life is assumed to be a fundamental and necessary building block of society, but proves hard to secure on terms of equality. One answer is that feminist quests for equality in private and public life are a form of misguided social engineering that ignores natural sex difference. This chapter examines arguments that nature and culture constrain feminist law reform. Appeals to nature argue that brain science and evolutionary psychology find salient differences between women and men, limiting what social engineering can achieve …

Vat Fraud - Technological Solutions, Richard Thompson Ainsworth

Faculty Scholarship

Every VAT/GST allows missing trader fraud. The fraud is simple, and can be simply prevented (with technology). The fraud arises when a business makes a purchase without paying VAT, collects VAT on an onward sale, and then “disappears” without remitting the tax. Missing trader fraud is common in high-value/low-volume goods sold across borders – computer chips and cell phones are the classic examples. But the fraud easily migrates when pursued. It operates well with goods as wide ranging as xenon bulbs, automobiles, and earth moving equipment.

The recent appearance of MTIC fraud in tradable CO2 permits and VoIP is a …

Civil Rights Violations = Broken Windows: De Minimis Curet Lex, Anita Bernstein

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

If The Shoe Fits: Institutional Repositories And Technical Services, Pamela Bluh

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Smartchoices: A Geospatial Tool For Community Outreach And Educational Research, Jack Dougherty

Faculty Scholarship

With SmartChoices, a Web-based map and data sorting application, parents in the metropolitan Hartford, CT region can navigate a myriad of school choices for their children. Developed through collaborative work between Jack Dougherty, a professor at Trinity College, students enrolled Dougherty's course, and a local community partner, the site illustrates the power of community-connected teaching and learning.