Digital Commons Network^™

Creating Mixed-Income Developments In Chicago: Developer And Service Provider Perspectives, Mark L. Joseph

Faculty Scholarship

Mixed-income development has been embraced by policymakers across the country as a promising means of deconcentrating poverty and revitalizing inner city neighborhoods. The unprecedented scale of Chicago’s effort at mixed-income development provides an important opportunity to learn about the possibilities and challenges of this approach. Most of the new developments have completed at least one pre-occupancy phase of construction, marketing, and resident outreach. This paper explores the perspectives of two key actors in the mixed income development process: private developers and social service providers. In Depth interviews were conducted with 26 individuals working on nine of Chicago’s major new mixed-income …

Scientific, Legal, And Ethical Foundations For Texas Water Law, Gabriel Eckstein, Amy Hardberger

Faculty Scholarship

Water law is the field of law concerned with the ownership, control, and use of water resources, both surface and subsurface. Although most closely related to property law, recent developments in other legal fields, especially in environmental law, have heavily influenced the interpretation, application, and development of water law. As a result, water law today encompasses a broad perspective and often takes into account individual and community rights, environmental issues, commerce and economics, and other societal and legal concerns.

Significantly, modern water law is also an interdisciplinary practice. In light of the continuously expanding body of knowledge of the hydrologic …

Maternal Investment Influences Expression Of Resource Polymorphism In Amphibians: Implications For The Evolution Of Novel Resource-Use Phenotypes, Ryan A. Martin

Faculty Scholarship

Maternal effects - where an individual's phenotype is influenced by the phenotype or environment of its mother - are taxonomically and ecologically widespread. Yet, their role in the origin of novel, complex traits remains unclear. Here we investigate the role of maternal effects in influencing the induction of a novel resource-use phenotype. Spadefoot toad tadpoles, Spea multiplicata, often deviate from their normal development and produce a morphologically distinctive carnivore-morph phenotype, which specializes on anostracan fairy shrimp. We evaluated whether maternal investment influences expression of this novel phenotype. We found that larger females invested in larger eggs, which, in turn, produced …

Judicial Evaluation Of Expert Opinions: Recent Developments, David J. Stout

Faculty Scholarship

The paper addresses the basic rules of Daubert v. Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals, Inc. and Rule 702 under both federal and New Mexico law. The paper attempts to distill in summary form the essential principles of the Alberico scientific validity analysis. The focus is on the validity analysis because of its centrality to the admissibility of scientific opinion evidence. Third, it examines the two recent New Mexico decisions that further explain important issues relating to expert opinion evidence.

Community Violence And Health Risk Factors Among Adolescents On Chicago's Southside: Does Gender Matter?, Dexter R. Voisin

Faculty Scholarship

We assessed community violence, school engagement, negative peer influences, mental health problems, and human immunodeficiency virus risk among 563 black adolescents. Boys reported higher rates of community violence exposures and gang involvement, while girls reported higher mental health distress. In the presence of multiple risk factors, negative peer norms were the strongest correlate of human immunodeficiency virus risk behaviors.

Testimony Before The U.S. Sentencing Commission On The Tribal Law And Order Act, Kevin Washburn

Faculty Scholarship

Under longstanding policy, the U.S. Sentencing Commission takes the position that tribal court convictions ought not be counted for purposes of evaluating a convicted defendant's criminal history. Because in some cases this policy underestimates a defendant's criminal history, it undermines the utilitarian and retributive purposes of federal sentencing. The Tribal Law and Order Act, currently pending in Congress and supported by the President, should cause the United States Sentencing Commission to reconsider its position on tribal convictions. The Act would provide clear federal authorization for tribal court felony sentences of up to three years per offense as long as tribal …

Section 230 Of The Cda: Internet Exceptionalism As A Statutory Construct, H. Brian Holland

Faculty Scholarship

Since its enactment in 1996, Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act has become perhaps the most significant statute in the regulation of online content, and one of the most intensely scrutinized.

The essay begins with a brief introduction to Section 230. As interpreted and applied by the judiciary, this statute is now conceived as a broad grant of immunity from tort liability.—broad not only in terms of those who can claim its protection but also in terms of predicate acts and causes of action to which such immunity extends.

Working from this foundation, I then seek to position the …

Where The Tiger Survives, Biodiversity Thrives, Philip J. Nyhus, Ronald Tilson

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Introduction: Remembering Stephanie Feldman Aleong, Kathy L. Cerminara

Faculty Scholarship

Kathy Cerminara, Introduction: Remembering Stephanie Feldman Aleong, 34 Nova Law Review 565 (2010).

John B. West: Founder Of The West Publishing Company, Robert M. Jarvis

Faculty Scholarship

Robert Jarvis, John B. West: Founder of the West Publishing Company, 50 American Journal of Legal History 1 (2010). Explores the career of John B. West (1852-1922), founder of the West Publishing Company, and discusses the reasons why he has become a forgotten man, ignored by the company that bears his name and all but unknown in the profession he single-handedly revolutionized.

Fact Or Fiction: The Legal Construction Of Immigration Removal For Crimes, Maureen A. Sweeney

Faculty Scholarship

Thousands of long-term legal permanent residents are deported from the United States each year because they have been convicted of criminal offenses, many quite minor. These deportations occur without any of the constitutional safeguards that generally protect criminal defendants. Immigration authorities rely on cases asserting that such deportations are not punishment for the crime, but merely collateral consequences of the conviction. This article challenges that reasoning. It argues that its factual and doctrinal foundation has completely disintegrated over the last 20 years. Far-reaching changes in immigration law and enforcement have rendered deportation for aggravated felonies a “definite, immediate and largely …

Bonding Limited Liability, Robert J. Rhee

Faculty Scholarship

Limited liability is considered a “birthright” of corporations. The concept is entrenched in legal theory, and it is a fixed reality of the political economy. But it remains controversial. Scholarly debate has been engaged in absolute terms of defending the rule or advocating its abrogation. Though compelling, these polar positions, often expressed in abstract arguments, are associated with disquieting effects. Without limited liability, efficiency may be severely compromised. With it, involuntary tort creditors bear some of the cost of an enterprise. Most other proposals for reforming limited liability have been incremental, such as modifying veil piercing. However, neither absolutism nor …

Fulfilling Government 2.0'S Promise With Robust Privacy Protections, Danielle Keats Citron

Faculty Scholarship

The public can now “friend” the White House and scores of agencies on social networks, virtual worlds, and video-sharing sites. The Obama Administration sees this trend as crucial to enhancing governmental transparency, public participation, and collaboration. As the President has underscored, government needs to tap into the public’s expertise because it doesn’t have all of the answers. To be sure, Government 2.0 might improve civic engagement. But it also might produce privacy vulnerabilities because agencies often gain access to individuals’ social network profiles, photographs, videos, and contact lists when interacting with individuals online. Little would prevent agencies from using and …

From The Greenhouse To The Poorhouse: Carbon Emissions Control And The Rules Of Legislative Joinder, David A. Super

Faculty Scholarship

Pending legislation to address carbon emissions would include large subsidies for existing emitters. These subsidies make little sense economically or politically. Worse, they divert resources needed to address two crucial issues that the proposed legislation largely ignores: the impact of raising carbon costs on low-income people and the massive structural federal deficit. A carbon tax or cap-and-trade system would increase costs substantially not only for transportation but for food and housing. With poverty rising even before the current economic downturn, these price increases’ consequences could be dire. The structural deficit will require deflationary tax increases or spending cuts. Combining carbon …

Shattering The Equal Pay Act's Glass Ceiling, Deborah Thompson Eisenberg

Faculty Scholarship

This Article provides the first empirical and rhetorical analysis of all reported Equal Pay Act (EPA) federal appellate cases since the Act’s passage. This analysis shows that as women climb the occupational ladder, the manner in which many federal courts interpret the EPA imposes a wage glass ceiling, shutting out women in non-standardized jobs from its protection. This barrier is particularly troubling in light of data that shows that the gender wage gap increases for women as they achieve higher levels of professional status. The Article begins by examining data regarding the greater pay gap for women in upper-level jobs. …

Visionary Pragmatism And The Value Of Privacy In The Twenty-First Century, Danielle Keats Citron, Leslie Meltzer Henry

Faculty Scholarship

Despite extensive scholarly, legislative, and judicial attention to privacy, our understanding of privacy and the interests it protects remains inadequate. At the crux of this problem is privacy’s protean nature: it means “so many different things to so many different people” that attempts to articulate just what it is, or why it is important, generally have failed or become unwieldy. As a result, important privacy problems remain unaddressed, often to society’s detriment.

In his newest book, Understanding Privacy, Daniel J. Solove aims to reverse this state of affairs with a pluralistic conception of privacy that recognizes the societal value …

What Is The Scope Of The Duty To Provide Veterinary Care?, Susan J. Hankin

Faculty Scholarship

State criminal laws prohibiting cruelty to animals -- which includes both abuse and neglect -- have provided the primary means through which our legal system has protected animals. In some states, including Maryland, Virginia, and the District of Columbia, these laws include explicit provisions that require owners to provide their animals with veterinary care. In other jurisdictions, such a duty has been implied from more general anti-cruelty language. None of these laws, however, make clear what level of care is required. They also leave unanswered the question of whether the treatment choices of owners who do seek care for an …

Government Speech 2.0, Helen L. Norton, Danielle Keats Citron

Faculty Scholarship

New expressive technologies continue to transform the ways in which members of the public speak to one another. Not surprisingly, emerging technologies have changed the ways in which government speaks as well. Despite substantial shifts in how the government and other parties actually communicate, however, the Supreme Court to date has developed its government speech doctrine – which recognizes “government speech” as a defense to First Amendment challenges by plaintiffs who claim that the government has impermissibly excluded their expression based on viewpoint – only in the context of disputes involving fairly traditional forms of expression. In none of these …

The Posse Comitatus Act And Disaster Response, Michael Greenberger, Arianne Spaccarelli

Faculty Scholarship

The federal government’s failure to quickly send active duty troops and other military assets to Louisiana in the wake of Hurricane Katrina primarily stems from its narrow interpretation of the Posse Comitatus Act (PCA), which generally bars the use of federal troops for domestic law enforcement. As this chapter explains, the complete breakdown of law and order during a catastrophic emergency such as Hurricane Katrina allows the president to unilaterally deploy federal troops. This authority to deploy federal troops in response to certain natural disasters, in accordance with the PCA and the Constitution, is found in the Insurrection Act, Stafford …

From Eugenics To The "New" Genetics: "The Play's The Thing", Karen H. Rothenberg

Faculty Scholarship

Genetics occupies a place in the public imagination with which few areas of science can compete. It is popularly understood to be the “science of life,” concerned with the essence of humanity: a subject that generates both awe and fear. These divergent emotions are encapsulated in the “promise versus peril” debate: the promise of an end to human disease is countered by the peril embodied in the discriminatory capacity of genetic essentialism. This debate has become ingrained in popular culture, and its dramatic potential has been effectively realized in theatre.

Plays have always been written and performed as expressions of …

Corrective Lenses For Iris: Additional Reforms To Improve Epa's Integrated Risk Information System, Rena I. Steinzor, Wendy E. Wagner, Lena Pons, Matthew Shudtz

Faculty Scholarship

The Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) Integrated Risk Information System (IRIS) is the most important toxicological database in the world. Not only is it the single most comprehensive database of human health information about toxic substances, it also serves as a gateway to regulation, as well as to a range of public and private sector efforts to protect against toxic substances. IRIS “profiles” of individual substances include a number of scientific assessments of the substance’s toxicity to humans by various means of exposure – by inhalation, contact with the skin, and so on. Federal regulators rely on the assessments to do …

Death Ineligibility And Habeas Corpus, Lee B. Kovarsky

Faculty Scholarship

I examine the interaction between what I call 'death ineligibility' challenges and the habeas writ. A death ineligibility claim alleges that a criminally-confined capital prisoner belongs to a category of offenders for which the Eighth Amendment forbids execution. By contrast, a 'crime innocence' claim alleges that, colloquially speaking, a capital prisoner 'wasn’t there, and didn’t do it.' In the last eight years, the Supreme Court has identified several new ineligibility categories, including mentally retarded offenders. Configured primarily to address crime innocence and procedural challenges, however, modern habeas law is poorly equipped to accommodate ineligibility claims. Death Ineligibility traces the genesis …

Cognition-Enhancing Drugs: Can We Say No?, Frank Pasquale

Faculty Scholarship

Normative analysis of cognition-enhancing drugs frequently weighs the liberty interests of drug users against egalitarian commitments to a "level playing field." Yet those who would refuse to engage in neuroenhancement may well find their liberty to do so limited in a society where such drugs are widespread. To the extent that unvarnished emotional responses are world-disclosive, neurocosmetic practices also threaten to provide a form of faulty data to their users. This essay examines underappreciated liberty-based and epistemic rationales for regulating cognition-enhancing drugs.

Access To Medicine In An Era Of Fractal Inequality, Frank Pasquale

Faculty Scholarship

Those in the richest countries have far more income and wealth than those in poor countries. Moreover, the most fortunate in the richest countries – particularly those in the top centile of the income distribution – are far richer than those around them. Most dramatically, even within that top centile, the richest of the rich have far more resources than even their elite peers. Like fractals, the patterns of distribution repeat at various levels.

This pattern of fractal inequality ensures that spending that seems trivial to those at the top of an income distribution can overwhelm the purchasing power of …

Beyond Innovation And Competition: The Need For Qualified Transparency In Internet Intermediaries, Frank Pasquale

Faculty Scholarship

Internet service providers and search engines have mapped the web, accelerated e-commerce, and empowered new communities. They also pose new challenges for law. Individuals are rapidly losing the ability to affect their own image on the web - or even to know what data are presented about them. When web users attempt to find information or entertainment, they have little assurance that a carrier or search engine is not biasing the presentation of results in accordance with its own commercial interests.

Technology’s impact on privacy and democratic culture needs to be at the center of internet policy-making. Yet before they …

Privacy As Product Safety, James Grimmelmann

Faculty Scholarship

Online social media confound many of our familiar expectaitons about privacy. Contrary to popular myth, users of social software like Facebook do care about privacy, deserve it, and have trouble securing it for themselves. Moreover, traditional database-focused privacy regulations on the Fair Information Practices model, while often worthwhile, fail to engage with the distinctively social aspects of these online services.

Instead, online privacy law should take inspiration from a perhaps surprising quarter: product-safety law. A web site that directs users' personal information in ways they don't expect is a defectively designed product, and many concepts from products liability law could …

The Internet Is A Semicommons, James Grimmelmann

Faculty Scholarship

The Internet is a semicommons. Private property in servers and network links coexists with a shared communications platform. This distinctive combination both explains the Internet's enormous success and illustrates some of its recurring problems.

Building on Henry Smith's theory of the semicommons in the medieval open-field system, this essay explains how the dynamic interplay between private and common uses on the Internet enables it to facilitate worldwide sharing and collaboration without collapsing under the strain of misuse. It shows that key technical features of the Internet, such as its layering of protocols and the Web's division into distinct "sites," respond …

Mothers, Domestic Violence And Child Protection: An American Legal Perspective, Leigh S. Goodmark

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Procedural Due Process In Pennsylvania: How The Commonwealth Court Clarified An Ambiguous Concept, John L. Gedid

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Walking The Legal Tightrope: Solutions For Achieving A Balanced Life In Law, Leslie L. Cooney

Faculty Scholarship

For over twenty years, issues surrounding women and their status in the legal profession have been documented, analyzed, and reported. The American Bar Association (ABA) Commission on Women in its 1988 study concluded that a thorough reexamination of attitudes and structures within the legal profession was needed to remedy the underrepresentation of women in the positions of power within the profession-law firm partnerships and judicial appointments. Nearly a decade later, the ABA Commission on Women found that little progress had been made in female representation and concluded the mere passage of time alone would not render sufficient corrections. Although the …