Digital Commons Network^™

The Coming Health Insurance Transition, Brendan S. Maher

Faculty Scholarship

For decades, the dominant form of private health insurance in the United States—by far—has been employment-based group health insurance. Somewhere in the range of 175 million employees and their families receive health care coverage through a system in which employers serve as financiers, procurers, administrators, and fiduciaries of the health insurance promise. An overwhelming percentage of those health insurance arrangements are governed by ERISA, with little room for state law.

That is going to change.

This Article explains—for the first time anywhere—why and how. Because of the tremendous and as-yet unrecognized power of an obscure-sounding funding arrangement called the Individual …

Ai Slop, Jessica Silbey, Woodrow Hartzog

Faculty Scholarship

The term “AI slop” has become popular to describe the output of generative AI systems seen as voluminous, low quality, or the result of little effort. When AI-generated music and videos flood platforms, they are called slop. Peer-reviewed journals and legal tribunals are drowning in low-quality and low-reliability AI slop submissions.  Employees are seen to be producing mountains of slop in their reports and communications with each other. The term has inertia and heft, and the phenomenon has significant consequences. Most of them are not good.

But the boundaries of “AI slop” and its usefulness in policy discussions are not …

Connecting Families Through Cash Transfers And An Enabling Environment In Colombia, Mexico, And The Philippines: A Qualitative Study, Johanna K P Greeson, John Gyourko, Sarah Wasch, Kristin Mallory, Lory Fehlig, Cesar Jácome, Nestor David Lara Yanes, Fátima Areli Ruiz Gutiérrez, Dennis Guamos, Adele R. Lehman

Faculty Scholarship

Nearly 700 million people worldwide live in extreme poverty, and almost half of the world’s population lives below the poverty line. Cash transfer programs are increasingly used to address poverty’s effects on family well-being, yet less is known about how families experience programs that combine cash transfers with peer-driven mutual aid. Children International’s (CI) Community Independence Initiative (CII) provides conditional cash transfers and promotes family-led goal setting, mutual support, and shared learning. This qualitative study explored how families in Colombia, Mexico, and the Philippines experienced CII and made meaning of its material and relational components. We conducted focus groups with …

Lessons Learned For The Independent Panel For Evidence For Action Against Amr From Previous International Science Panels: Stakeholder Views From The 2025 Lagos Workshop, Iruka N. Okeke, Anthony Mcdonnell, Ayodele A. Akinyele, Javier Guzman, Kevin Outterson

Faculty Scholarship

In September, 2024, the UN General Assembly assigned the Quadripartite Joint Secretariat on Antimicrobial Resistance (AMR) the task of establishing an Independent Panel for Evidence for Action against AMR (IPEA). To promote stakeholder views and input around the constitution and functioning of this Panel, which could feed into the Quadripartite Joint Secretariat’s consultation process, we independently commissioned seven papers to examine the lessons that could be learned from other high-level scientific panels. We then convened 85 stakeholders, primed with the background papers. The Workshop, held in Lagos, Nigeria in April, 2025, drew representation from around the world, particularly low-income or …

A Quantitative Content Analysis Of Media Framing Of Illegal Mining In Ghana, Ebenezer Ato Kwamena Aidoo, Patrick Ansah, Fredrick Daoyenikye, Maame Aba Afful

Faculty Scholarship

Illegal mining in Ghana has attracted considerable public and policy attention due to its far-reaching environmental, social, and health consequences. Our study examines how Ghanaian news media frame illegal mining, the tone of media coverage, and the stakeholders represented in news narratives. Using a quantitative content analysis, 800 news articles were sampled from six widely read media outlets, Daily Graphic, Ghanaian Times, TV3 Ghana, GTV, Joy FM, and Citi Newsroom. A multivariate analysis of variance (MANOVA) was employed to examine differences in framing, tone, and stakeholder representation across outlets. Findings indicate that news organizations emphasize distinct frames, resulting in varied …

Trial By Fire: Disaster Justice And Lessons Learned, Clifford Villa

Faculty Scholarship

Disaster Justice reflects the intersection of environmental justice and disaster law. The study of disaster justice is becoming increasingly essential as disasters become more frequent and devastating in the face of accelerating climate change. Disaster law is marked by statutes such as the federal Stafford Act and by theory such as the “disaster cycle” of readiness, response, and recovery. Environmental justice recognizes that the distribution of harms such as bad air or water quality may be distributed inequitably among groups such as low-income populations or racial minorities. In similar fashion, the adverse impacts of disasters may also be distributed inequitably …

Beyond Ai Detection: A Pilot Study Of Integrevise And Viva-Based Verification Of Student Understanding In Ai-Mediated Assessment, James Hutson, Kyle Poyer, Kelvin Adshola Atologun

Faculty Scholarship

This article examines the Integrevise platform through a repeated cross-sectional, multicycle pilot case study of viva-based verification in AI-mediated assessment environments. Integrevise pairs a submitted written artifact with a short adaptive viva in which students explain their work, reasoning, and application in their own words. Rather than functioning as an AI detector or automated grading system, the platform operates as a diagnostic assessment layer intended to surface comprehension, authorship confidence, and disengagement risk before final grades become the only available signal. The pilot was conducted across Fall 2025 and Spring 2026 at a private liberal arts college in the Midwest; …

There Is No Free Benchmark: An Institutional View Of Legal Ai Benchmarking, Neel Guha, Andy K. Zhang, Christine Tsang, Christopher D. Manning, Julian Nyarko, Daniel E. Ho

Faculty Scholarship

Despite substantial excitement around the use of AI in law, little information exists on the performance and associated risks of the domain’s widely marketed tools. Recent work, for instance, has demonstrated the significant potential for “hallucinations” — wherein models make up facts, law, and precedent — leading Chief Justice Roberts to spotlight this risk in his annual report on the judiciary. We argue that there is a need for public AI benchmarking in law. First, relative to other AI application domains, the legal AI ecosystem lacks legibility — there is little information about the design and performance of many commercial …

Free Expression And Civil Rights On Campus: Consistency And The Kant-Rawls Heuristic, David M. Schizer

Faculty Scholarship

Universities learned hard lessons in the months after Hamas attacked Israel on October 7. 2023. This painful and challenging time highlighted the urgent need to pursue two critical goals, which sometimes are in tension with each other. First, universities have to protect academic freedom and free expression. This is their life blood. Second, universities also have to honor their legal and moral obligation to combat discrimination, including antisemitism.

Yet this is easier said than done. Protecting free expression means allowing speech that is controversial and even offensive. But this speech can contribute to a hostile environment. So, in seeking both …

Other People's Poverty, Emmanuel Hiram Arnaud, Shaun Ossei-Owusu

Faculty Scholarship

Puerto Ricans have a relationship with the United States that is historically unparalleled. They have been citizens of the United States since 1917, served in every major conflict since World War I, and have been influential members of American culture, politics, and society. Yet, Puerto Rico is not fully part of the United States. The island of 3.2 million people— more than the population of eighteen states—is a U.S. territory. This means the federal government wields its complete and largely unrestrained plenary power over the Island, often treating Puerto Ricans differently than the rest of the United States. This differential …

Evolving Networks: Information Exchanges Reshaping Of Global Finance, Andrew P. Morriss, Charlotte Ku

Faculty Scholarship

This article challenges the characterization of international financial centers (IFCs), often called "tax havens," as enablers of tax evasion and money laundering. Drawing on an extensive analysis of tax treaties, regulatory statutes, and historical literature, we explore the evolution of the global information exchange network, its impact on integrating IFCs into the global financial system, and the resulting curtailment of their use for illicit purposes. The expansion of treaties, from Mutual Legal Assistance Treaties (MLATs) to Tax Information Exchange Agreements (TIEAs) and multilateral frameworks like the OECD's Common Reporting Standard (CRS), has significantly limited the potential for secrecy-driven financial activities …

Jurisdictional Waters, Jamison E. Colburn

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Some Realism About Constitutional Remedies, Thomas P. Schmidt, Gillian E. Metzger

Faculty Scholarship

The Supreme Court has wavered between two approaches to questions of executive power, which are often labeled institutional formalism and realism. Formalism treats an institution like the presidency as a “black box” to which the Constitution assigns certain powers. In Trump v. Hawaii,  for example, the Supreme Court upheld President Trump’s infamous travel ban by focusing not on the “particular President” and his past call for a “complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States,” but rather on “the authority of the Presidency itself.” That is the language of institutional formalism.

Realism, on the other hand, peers into the “black …

The Colonial Borders Within: Racial Profiling, Language, And Civil Juries, Jasmine Gonzales Rose

Faculty Scholarship

This Article builds on the scholarship of Kevin R. Johnson, whose work has long illuminated how immigration law and constitutional doctrine have enabled the subordination of Latines through racial profiling,2 language discrimination,3 and exclusion from civic institutions, like juries.4 His analyses of juror exclusion and the importance of a diverse judiciary underscore how the composition of civil and criminal factfinders shapes both recognition of harm and the remedies afforded.5 Long before the current period of intensified, abusive immigration enforcement, his scholarship traced the historical roots of these practices, examined their contemporary manifestations, and revealed the ways in which the law …

Projected U.S. Cardiovascular Disease Burden From Heat Exposure For Future Greenhouse Gas Scenarios, Gokul Parmeswaran, Sai Rahul Ponnana, Santosh Kumar Sirasapalli, Niketh Surya, Tong Zhang, Zhuo Chen, Jean-Eudes Dazard, Salil V. Deo, Sanjay Rajagopalan

Faculty Scholarship

Importance: Climate change may reverse decades of improvements in cardiovascular disease (CVD) mortality in the US; however, comprehensive regional projections of heat-related CVD burden in the US are unavailable. Objective: To use the county-level observed (2010-2016) heat-related CVD burden in the US to obtain the projected rates through 2050 according to the mean (shared socioeconomic pathway [SSP] 2-4.5) and high (SSP5-8.5) greenhouse gas (GHG) emission pathways. Design, Setting, and Participants: This cross-sectional ecological analysis used county-level summary data including all counties in the contiguous US from 2010 through 2016 as baseline data with projections to 2030 and 2050 under SSP …

Defining Civil Rico's "Injury To Business Or Property" Requirement: The Supreme Court Takes A Few Steps, Says It Punts, But Actually Fumbles, Randy D. Gordon

Faculty Scholarship

Throughout its history, the RICO statute has presented lawyers with something of an interpretive parlor game. It is indefinite along multiple dimensions and thereby given multiple interpretations, even down to the word level. In Medical Marijuana v. Horn, the Supreme Court set out to define one of RICO's civil-standing provisions: Namely, whether the statute's "injury to business or property" requirement can be satisfied when a plaintiff suffers both economic and personal injuries. In a 5-4 decision, members of the Court engaged in an interpretive battle over the meaning of the phrase and succeeded only in holding that civil RICO does …

The Unitary Executive And The Federal Reserve, Lev Menand

Faculty Scholarship

The U.S. Supreme Court may soon embrace an interpretation of the U.S. Constitution that would significantly expand the power of the president over federal administrators and invalidate key provisions in dozens of federal statutes. A critical question is whether this interpretation — known as the unitary executive theory (UET) — would also render unconstitutional central bank independence (CBI), an arrangement where a country’s monetary policy is formulated by a semiautonomous body of experts insulated from partisan political pressure. Several justices have suggested that it would not, and a growing scholarly literature has proposed ways for the Court to distinguish the …

Inexcuseable? Building An Artificial Intelligence Microexpert On Contract Excuse Doctrine, Mark Edwin Burge

Faculty Scholarship

This article details and advocates for a general methodology for creating a "microexpert" grounded in a user-defined set of legal sources and widelyaccessible tools for integrating generative artificial intelligence (AI) into legal analysis. The study focuses particularly on background contract excuse doctrines of impossibility, impracticability, and frustration of purpose, which are collectively a methodologically challenging area of law to rationalize due to factintensive variables that undermine their predictability. Particular challenges include assessing the foreseeability of the event that led to the contract's nonperformance, the extent of the hardship or burden on the party seeking excuse, and the purpose of the …

Tokenized Real Estate: The Law And Tech Of Digital Deeds, Christopher K. Odinet, Andrea Tosato

Faculty Scholarship

The advent of blockchain technology has generated bold claims that non-fungible tokens (NFTs) can fundamentally transform real estate. Proponents assert that digital assets can tokenize real property interests: the concept of using digital tokens to represent ownership rights in physical property. Their goal is to allow buyers and sellers to transfer real estate through simple blockchain transactions, thereby eliminating traditional intermediaries, reducing costs, and accelerating deal velocity. This Essay provides the first comprehensive legal analysis examining whether American law actually supports such a direct tokenization of real estate rights.

Our investigation reveals a stark disconnect between technological capability and legal …

Thinking Constructively About International Law, Monica Hakimi

Faculty Scholarship

The international order that has defined the post-World War II period is being radically transformed, presenting a once-in-a-generation opportunity to reconstitute its basic foundations. The pressing questions for international lawyers are about the roles their enterprise can and should play going forward. I argue in this Article that most lack the analytic framework they need even to begin tackling these questions. Worse, most seem mired in an old theory about law that corrupts how they approach their enterprise. My goals in the Article are to expose the prevalence of this bad theory and to present the grounds for discarding it, …

The Territorial Continuum: American Samoa, Criminal Adjudication, And Territorial Administration, Emmanuel Hiram Arnaud

Faculty Scholarship

The standard account of American territorial expansion posits that territorial acquisition moved along a spectrum of sovereignty. The federal government acquired new inhabited land through conquest or purchase, and the Constitution tasked Congress with organizing and administering the new territories until they were ready to become states. That pattern came to an abrupt halt in 1898 when, at the conclusion of the Spanish-American War, the Supreme Court, fearing the extension of citizenship to, and the permanent integration of, non-White populations into the American polity, suddenly pronounced that the Constitution authorized the holding of colonies. The Court thus sentenced new territories, …

An International Approach To Homelessness. Part Ii. Slums Demolition Or Upgrading?, Pranit Lanjewar, Jaroslaw Richard Romaniuk

Faculty Scholarship

In search of the best approach to eradicating homelessness in underdeveloped countries with large populations, we conducted interviews with professionals involved in different models of helping the unhoused. Although it has been established that the Housing First model combined with human services is the best model to end homelessness, the cost of housing might be prohibitive for many national governments. In situations where governments are over-whelmed by the numbers of homeless people, communities and organizations develop specific methods and practices to meet the needs of unhoused individuals. For the purpose of this paper, phenomenological research was undertaken to learn how …

The Business Of Ai-Producing Startups: Evidence From A Worldwide Survey, James Bessen, Stephen Michael Impink, Robert Seamans

Faculty Scholarship

We report results from a multi-year, worldwide survey of artificial intelligence (AI)-producing startups to describe the types of technologies, frameworks, data protection, and partnerships nascent firms use to develop their AI products. Analyses of our survey findings also inform how startups gather the resources to commercialize their AI applications in alignment with their entrepreneurial strategies, address competitive barriers, and respond to regulations. These data provide initial evidence of the perceived impact of these products on their customers’ tasks and industries, suggesting that these firms’ AI products not only reduce labor costs but augment human capabilities.

Nonlinear Bivariate Associations And Mononuclear Cell‐Type‐Specific Expression Level Differences In The Sting Signalling Pathway, David Kaplan

Faculty Scholarship

Understanding intracellular signalling pathways is crucial since they regulate essential functional activities. Bivariate relationships have been useful in delineating these pathways in clinical samples. In our previous studies, we have found many linear associations between pathway components, and we have interpreted these correlations as rheostatic regulators. Increases in an upstream component are correlated with a commensurate downstream increase. Here, we report a quantitative analysis of molecules in the STING pathway by assessing the variance in human peripheral blood mononuclear cell-type-specific molecular expression from patients with atherosclerotic coronary artery disease. The induction of the type I interferon track by this pathway …

Chicana Professionalism: Embracing Greñas, Glitter & Boots, Luz E. Herrera

Faculty Scholarship

The current political moment, where immigrant identity is scapegoated and academic freedom is threatened, requires an affirmation of personal identity, a recognition of personal struggle, and a celebration of resilience. This Essay embraces the ideas that professional identity development is temporal and that the current conceptualization of professionalism requires embarking on a reflection journey that addresses the dissonance between personal conscience and professional duty.   Part I briefly revisits the work of Professor Margaret E. Montoya, one of the first Chicana law professors that describes the formation of her professional identity as a law student. It explores the status of Latinas …

Evidence And Assessing Verbatim Transcription Quality Of Black English And Standard American English, L. Alexander Walker Iii

Faculty Scholarship

This chapter explores the accuracy of private transcription services when transcribing Black English and Standard American English. Courts and lawyers in the US regularly rely on transcripts from such services, but third-party verification of their accuracy, especially with respect to their quality when faced with nonstandard language varieties, is lacking. This study draws on experimental methods to contrast the quality of transcription services offered by transcribers and AI route. The quantitative results show that transcription by humans and AI resulted in more mistakes when transcribing Black English than when transcribing Standard American English. Furthermore, a qualitative analysis reveals that these …

Liberal Trade And President Trump: Never The Twain Shall Meet, Joel Adu-Quaye, Petros C. Mavroidis

Faculty Scholarship

This paper seeks to distinguish between two consequences of the tariff policies enacted by both Trump administrations: (1) their adverse effects on free trade and (2) the existential damage inflicted upon the transnational institutions responsible for enforcing its rules and obligations. Although difficult to quantify the latter, there is an intuitive sense that this is what matters most. The global order appears to be shifting from a rule-based framework to one characterized by increasing disorder and unpredictability. Within this new world order, actions are permissible so long as they align with the, often ill-defined, national interests of powerful nations.

Trends And Outcomes Of Alcoholic Acute Pancreatitis In Patients With Alcohol Use Disorder Treated With Naltrexone In The United States: Before And After The Covid-19 Pandemic, Mohammad Zaahid Sheriff, Adrian Lindsey

Faculty Scholarship

Background: The role of naltrexone in improving acute alcoholic pancreatitis (AAP) outcomes in alcohol use disorder (AUD) patients, remains unclear. Aim: We aimed to assess the temporal trends in AAP incidence and the impact of naltrexone use on clinical outcomes in AUD patients. Methods: We conducted a retrospective cohort study using de-identified patient data from the TriNetX database, including all adults (≥ 18 years) diagnosed with AUD. AAP patients were then identified and stratified by naltrexone exposure. The incidence and prevalence of AAP in AUD patients were assessed pre-(March 2015–2019) and post-COVID-19(March 2020–2025). Propensity score matching (PSM) (1:1) was performed …

Meeting The Challenge Of Civic Education In Hyperpolarized Times, Linda C. Mcclain

Faculty Scholarship

What role can civic education play in polarized times? That is the pressing question posed by Civic Education in Polarized Times, edited by Elizabeth Beaumont and Eric Beerbohm.1 As Beaumont’s introduction explains, “as political polarization has intensified across the world, civic education seems more urgent, but it has also become more challenging.” (P. 1.) The volume brings together an eminent group of education scholars, legal scholars, political theorists, and philosophers to consider challenging questions about how to carry out civic education “in a polarized era” and “for a polarized era.” (P. 2.)

Amicus Brief In Trump V. Barbara: An Originalist Defense Of Birthright Citizenship, Jed Handelsman Shugerman, Evan D. Bernick

Faculty Scholarship

For nearly all of the first 235 years under the Constitution, the citizenship of every child born in the United States to alien parents, with immaterial exceptions, was a given. Then, in 2025, the Trump administration changed course. Even though the Fourteenth Amendment makes no mention of limiting birthright citizenship to the children of domiciled parents, the Government now claims that is what “subject to the jurisdiction thereof” has always meant. While the Government and its amici admit that the common law recognized the citizenship of children of transient aliens, their remaining “survey of history range[s] from the constitutionally irrelevant” …