Digital Commons Network^™

Sect And Superstition: The Protestant Framework Of American Codification, Kellen R. Funk

Faculty Scholarship

Elite lawyers who debated codification in the nineteenth-century United States treated codification as inseparable from a liberal Protestant textualism that had taken hold in the early national era. Legislators declared codification to be the necessary final step of the Protestant Reformation and frequently characterized common law lawyers as beholden to ‘superstition’ and ‘priestcraft’. Their opponents denounced the codifiers’ idea that texts alone could adequately convey common meanings and delighted to point out the endlessly fracturing glosses on supposedly ‘clear’ texts that divided the positivists into an ever-increasing number of sects.

Many works have addressed the relationship between populism and positivism …

Opening Dialogue, Lee C. Bollinger, Geoffrey R. Stone

Faculty Scholarship

To set the stage for the excellent essays that make up this volume on the future of free speech, let’s begin where we often do when thinking together about the First Amendment: with some basic facts and fundamental observations about the constitutional command that “Congress shall make no law ... abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press.”

Of course, in the United States, “free speech” is not only part of the constitutional Bill of Rights; it is also a cultural and social norm by which we choose to live. Several of the essays in this volume therefore take …

Strategic Integration Of Ai In Higher Education And Industry: The Ai8-Point Model, Emily Barnes, James Hutson

Faculty Scholarship

The AI8-Point Model, derived from extensive experience in technology, AI, and higher education administration, addresses the critical need for cost-effective, high-impact strategies tailored to higher education. Despite the transformative potential of AI in enhancing student engagement, optimizing processes, and improving educational outcomes, institutions often struggle with practical implementation. The AI8-Point Model fills this gap by offering strategies that balance cost and impact. Visualized as a circle divided into four quadrants, the model encompasses phases of student engagement and institutional interaction: pre-enrollment beyond institutional control, pre-enrollment within institutional control, post-enrollment within institutional control, and post-enrollment beyond institutional control. Each quadrant contains …

Immigration Enforcement Creep In Immigrant & Employee Rights, Angela D. Morrison

Faculty Scholarship

As the only agency charged with enforcing the Immigration Reform and Control Act’s antidiscrimination provisions, the Immigrant and Employee Rights (“IER”) section of the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division plays an important role in protecting worker rights. Yet over the past decade, IER has moved from worker protection to immigration enforcement: a phenomenon this Article terms “immigration enforcement creep.”

This observation is based on ten years of data collected from IER’s settlement agreements, complaints filed, and telephone interventions. The data show that rather than protect noncitizen workers from unlawful discrimination, IER has moved its focus to enforcing immigration laws …

Is John Stuart Mill's On Liberty Obsolete?, Vincent A. Blasi

Faculty Scholarship

In On Liberty, published in 1859, John Stuart Mill argues for the “absolute” protection of the “liberty of thought and discussion.” Ever the empiricist, he maintains that such uncompromised freedom, not for all communication or self-expression but for the subset of those activities that qualifies as thought and discussion, would generate the best overall consequences for societies such as Great Britain and the United States. The advent of digital technology has altered how thought and discussion is generated, distributed, and received in ways that might problematize some of the empirical assumptions upon which Mill's argument in On Liberty is …

School Nutrition Stakeholders Find Utility In Mealsim: An Agent-Based Model, Melissa Pflugh Prescott

Faculty Scholarship

Objective: To obtain feedback from school nutrition stakeholders on an agent-based model simulating school lunch to inform model refinement and future applications. Design: Qualitative study using online discussion groups. Setting: School nutrition professional stakeholders across the US. Participants: Twenty-eight school nutrition stakeholders. Phenomenon of Interest: Perceptions and applicability of MealSim for school nutrition stakeholders to help reduce food waste. Analysis: Deductive approach followed by inductive analysis of discussion group transcripts. Results: Stakeholders appreciated the customizability of the cafeteria characteristics and suggested adding additional characteristics to best represent the school meal system, such as factors relating to school staff supervision of …

Lay Advisor Interventions For Hypertension Outcomes: A Systematic Review, Meta-Analysis And A Re-Aim Evaluation, Sonal J. Patil, Leila Bushweller, Eno-Obong Udoh, Irina Todorov, Robert Saper, Kurt C. Stange, Shari Bolen

Faculty Scholarship

Introduction: Lay advisor interventions improve hypertension outcomes; however, the added benefits and relevant factors for their widespread implementation into health systems are unknown. We performed a systematic review to: (1) summarize the benefits of adding lay advisors to interventions on hypertension outcomes, and (2) summarize factors associated with successful implementation in health systems using the Reach, Effectiveness, Adoption, Implementation, Maintenance (RE-AIM) framework. Methods: We systematically searched several databases, including Ovid MEDLINE, CINAHL, PsycINFO from January 1981 to May 2023. All study designs of interventions delivered solely by lay advisors for adults with hypertension were eligible. If both arms received the …

Continuing Benefits Of The Montreal Protocol And Protection Of The Stratospheric Ozone Layer For Human Health And The Environment, Laura S. Bruckman

Faculty Scholarship

The protection of Earth’s stratospheric ozone (O3) is an ongoing process under the auspices of the universally ratified Montreal Protocol and its Amendments and adjustments. A critical part of this process is the assessment of the environmental issues related to changes in O3. The United Nations Environment Programme’s Environmental Effects Assessment Panel provides annual scientific evaluations of some of the key issues arising in the recent collective knowledge base. This current update includes a comprehensive assessment of the incidence rates of skin cancer, cataract and other skin and eye diseases observed worldwide; the effects of UV radiation on tropospheric oxidants, …

Genocide In Gaza: Analysis Of International Law And Its Application To Israel’S Military Actions Since October 7, 2023, Susan Akram

Faculty Scholarship

The prohibition of the crime of genocide is a peremptory norm of international law from which no derogation is permitted. In light of the extraordinary implications of a finding that Israel may be committing genocide against the Palestinian people in Gaza, the University Network for Human Rights, the International Human Rights Clinic at Boston University School of Law, the International Human Rights Clinic at Cornell Law School, the Centre for Human Rights at the University of Pretoria, and the Lowenstein Human Rights Project at Yale Law School have conducted a thorough legal analysis of Israel’s acts since October 7, 2023, …

Us Neonatal Intensive Care Unit Registered Dietitian Nutritionists Salary Description And Correlates: Results Of A Survey, Rosa K. Hand, Sharon Groh-Wargo

Faculty Scholarship

Background: This survey described the compensation of neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) registered dietitian nutritionists (RDNs) in the United States and examined correlates of higher salaries within this group. Methods: A cross-sectional online survey was completed in 2021 by 143 NICU RDNs from 127 US hospitals who reported hourly wage in US dollars (USD). We used initial bivariate analyses to assess the relationship of selected institution-level and individual-level variables to hourly wage; the rank-sum test for binary variables; bivariate regression and Pearson correlation coefficients for continuous variables; the Kruskal–Wallis test for categorical variables. Variables with a compelling relationship to the …

A Turn-Off Fluorescent Sensor For Metal Ions Quantifies Corrosion In An Organic Solvent, Lianlian Liu, Zechariah Pfaffenberger, Mark Siegel, Anuj Saini, Lydia Kisley

Faculty Scholarship

We demonstrate that the corrosion of AISI 1045 medium carbon steel and pure aluminum can be quantified by the turn-off fluorescent sensor Phen Green-SK (PGSK) in ethanol-based solutions. We first evaluate the dependence of the chelation enhanced quenching of PGSK on iron and aluminum ion concentrations. Subsequently, we apply PGSK to examine the anodic dissolution of metal corrosion. The observed time-dependent PGSK-quenching quantifies the corrosion rates of two metals over 24 h of immersion in ethanol-based solutions. The PGSK-based quantification of corrosion is compared to scanning electron microscopy and electrochemical techniques, including open circuit potential and Tafel extrapolation. The corrosion …

The Efficacy Of Telemental Health Interventions For Mood Disorders Pre-Covid-19: A Narrative Review, Alyssa M. Edwards, Jordan C. Petitt, Martha Sajatovic, Sanjana Kumar, Jennifer B. Levin

Faculty Scholarship

The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic saw a significant surge in the utilization of telemental health (TMH) services. This narrative review aimed to investigate the efficacy of TMH for serious mood disorders prior to the COVID-19 pandemic. A search across databases was conducted for randomized controlled trials focusing on TMH interventions for mood disorders, encompassing major depressive disorder (MDD) and bipolar disorder (BD). Study and patient characteristics, interventions, and outcomes were extracted. From a pool of 2611 papers initially identified, 17 met the inclusion criteria: 14 focused on MDD, while 4 addressed BD. Among these, 6 papers directly compared TMH …

Simulacra And Historical Fidelity In Digital Recreation Of Lost Cultural Heritage: Reconstituting Period Materialities For The Period Eye, Trent Olsen, James Hutson, Charles O'Brien, Jeremiah Ratican

Faculty Scholarship

The advancement of digital technologies in art history has opened avenues for reconstructing lost or damaged cultural heritage, a need highlighted by the deteriorated state of many artworks from the 1785 Salon. Grounded in the concept of the “Period Eye” by art historian Michael Baxandall, which emphasizes understanding artworks within their original historical and cultural contexts, this study proposes a subfield focused on Reconstituting Period Materialities for the Period Eye. This methodology bridges comprehensive historical research with generative visual artificial intelligence (AI) technologies, facilitating the creation and immersive virtual reality viewing of artworks. Beyond mere visual replication, the approach aims …

Advancing Sentiment Analysis Through Emotionally-Agnostic Text Mining In Large Language Models (Llms), Jay Ratican, James Hutson

Faculty Scholarship

The conventional methodology for sentiment analysis within large language models (LLMs) has predominantly drawn upon human emotional frameworks, incorporating physiological cues that are inherently absent in text-only communication. This research proposes a paradigm shift towards an emotionallyagnostic approach to sentiment analysis in LLMs, which concentrates on purely textual expressions of sentiment, circumventing the confounding effects of human physiological responses. The aim is to refine sentiment analysis algorithms to discern and generate emotionally congruent responses strictly from text-based cues. This study presents a comprehensive framework for an emotionally-agnostic sentiment analysis model that systematically excludes physiological indicators whilst maintaining the analytical depth …

Resonant Perceptions: Exploring Autistic Aesthetics Through Embodied Cognition, James Hutson, Piper Hutson

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

The Role Of Student Motivation In Integrating Ai Into Web Design Education: A Longitudinal Study, Jason Lively, James Hutson

Faculty Scholarship

Amidst the current wave studies of artificial intelligence (AI) in education, this longitudinal case study, spanning Spring 2023 to Spring 2024, delves into the integration of AI in the UI/UX web design classroom. By introducing both text-based and image-based AI tools to students with varying levels of skill in introductory web design and user experience (UX) courses, the study observed a significant enhancement in student creative capabilities and project outcomes. The utilization of text-based generators markedly improved writing efficiency and coding, while image-based tools facilitated better ideation and color selection. These findings underscore the potential to augment traditional educational methods, …

The Perennial Eclipse: Race, Immigration, And How Latinx Count In American Politics, Rachel F. Moran

Faculty Scholarship

In 2016, the U.S. Supreme Court decided Evenwel v. Abbott, a case challenging the use of total population in state legislative apportionment as a violation of the Equal Protection Clause. The plaintiffs sued Texas, alleging that the State impermissibly diluted their voting power because they lived in areas with a high proportion of voting-age citizens. When total population was used to draw district lines, the plaintiffs had to compete with more voters to get their desired electoral outcomes than was true for voters in districts with low proportions of voting-age citizens. The Court rejected the argument, finding that states enjoy …

Persistent Identifiers And The Next Generation Of Legal Scholarship, Aaron Retteen, Malikah Hall-Retteen

Faculty Scholarship

This article discusses the importance of the most common persistent identifiers in scholarly communications—the digital object identifier and the ORCID identifier—to legal scholarship. Persistent identifiers help preserve and disseminate academic content and data-driven services that leverage this information standard are now integrated into the publication process. Because legal publishers have not widely adopted persistent identifiers, the legal discipline cannot enjoy the benefits offered by this system. This article looks at barriers to implementing persistent identifiers among legal publishers and provides an anecdotal example of creating a sustainable workflow between the law library and student-run law journals.

The Submerged Administrative State, Gabriel Scheffler, Daniel E. Walters

Faculty Scholarship

The United States government is experiencing a reputation crisis: after decades of declining public trust, many Americans have lost confidence in the government’s capacity to perform its basic functions. While various explanations have been offered for this worrying trend, these existing accounts overlook a key factor: people are unfamiliar with the institutions that actually do most of the governing—administrative agencies—and they devalue what they cannot easily observe. The “submerged” nature of the administrative state is, we argue, a central reason for declining trust in government.

This Article shows that the administrative state is systematically submerged in two ways. First, administrative …

Constitutional Rights And Remedial Consistency, Katherine Mims Crocker

Faculty Scholarship

When the Supreme Court declined definitively to block Texas’s S.B. 8, which effectively eliminated pre-enforcement federal remedies for what was then a plainly unconstitutional restriction on abortion rights, a prominent criticism was that the majority would have never tolerated the similar treatment of preferred legal protections—like gun rights. This refrain reemerged when California enacted a copycat regime for firearms regulation. This theme sounds in the deep-rooted idea that judge-made law should adhere to generality and neutrality values requiring doctrines to derive justification from controlling a meaningful class of cases ascertained by objective legal criteria.

This Article is about consistency, and …

The Rise, Fall, And Rise Of Cyber Civil Libertarianism, Hannah Bloch-Wehba

Faculty Scholarship

Using sexual speech as its focal point, this essay explores the ambiguous legacy of cyber civil liberties and the ascent of alternative paradigms for digital freedom. From its inception, cyberlaw was characterized by a moral panic over sexual speech, pornography, and the protection of children familiar to First Amendment scholars. Important civil libertarian victories recognized that sexual speech and pornography were constitutionally protected from state intervention. The civil libertarian paradigm saw government regulation as the primary threat to free speech online, the marketplace as the more appropriate mechanism for regulating expression, and courts as the rightful arbiters of these disputes. …

The Remedial Rationale After Sffa, Olatunde C.A. Johnson

Faculty Scholarship

After the Supreme Court’s ruling in Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. President & Fellows of Harvard College (SFFA) limiting the ability of higher education institutions to use race as a factor to advance diversity in the student body, at least one prominent commentator suggested that universities should now justify their affirmative action policies based not on diversity but on the need to remedy discrimination. Chief Justice John Roberts’s majority opinion deems diversity — the rationale established in Regents of the University of California v. Bakke and affirmed in Grutter v. Bollinger — a “commendable” goal. But the …

Distinguishing Family Poverty From Child Neglect, Joshua Gupta-Kagan

Faculty Scholarship

Family courts and child protective services (“CPS”) agencies surveil, regulate, and separate hundreds of thousands of families for neglect annually. These families are overwhelmingly poor, and the history of this legal system reveals an expectation, if not an intention, to intervene in poor families. This raises the question whether family courts and CPS agencies are “confusing poverty and neglect” or if they intervene for more than “just poverty,” as a raging debate in the field is framed.

The law fails to help resolve this debate. Instead of distinguishing poverty from neglect, or providing nuanced examinations of what social science has …

Ethical Imperatives And Challenges: Review Of The Use Of Machine Learning For Predictive Analytics In Higher Education, Emily Barnes, James Hutson, Karriem Perry

Faculty Scholarship

The escalating integration of machine learning (ML) in higher education necessitates a critical examination of its ethical implications. This article conducts a comprehensive review of the application of ML for predictive analytics within higher education institutions (HEIs), emphasizing the technology's potential to enhance student outcomes and operational efficiency. The study identifies significant ethical concerns, such as data privacy, informed consent, transparency, and accountability, that arise from the use of ML. Through a detailed analysis of current practices, this review underscores the need for HEIs to develop robust ethical frameworks and technological infrastructures to navigate these challenges effectively. The findings reveal …

Optimizing Adult Learner Success: Applying Random Forest Classifier In Higher Education Predictive Analytics, Emily Barnes, James Hutson, Karriem Perry

Faculty Scholarship

This study examines the application of the Random Forest Classifier (RF) model in predicting academic success among adult learners in higher education. It focuses on evaluating the model's effectiveness using key statistical measures like accuracy, precision, recall, and F1 score across a comprehensive dataset from 2013–14 to 2021–22, which includes variables such as age, ethnicity, gender, Pell Grant eligibility, and academic performance metrics. The research highlights the RF model's capability to handle large datasets with varying data types and demonstrates its superiority over traditional regression models in predictive accuracy. Through an iterative process, the study refines the RF model to …

The Post-Pandemic Job Market For Academic Librarians In The Southeast United States, Louise Lowe, J.B. Hill, Jenna Eastwood Hill, Claresta Icasia

Faculty Scholarship

This study examines the state of the post-pandemic academic library job market in the Southeastern region of the United States. This analysis of academic librarian job advertisements collected from 2022 and 2023 reveals that while some new jobs have emerged there is a continued demand for traditional roles, prior work experience and the ALA-accredited master’s degree. Diversity, equity, and inclusion are prominent in job advertisements despite some regional political opposition. Remote work options are limited, signaling a nuanced approach to work modality post-pandemic.

Getting Merger Guidelines Right, Keith N. Hylton

Faculty Scholarship

This paper is on the new Merger Guidelines. It makes several arguments. First, that the Guidelines should be understood as existing in a political equilibrium. Second, that the new structural presumption of the Merger Guidelines (HHI = 1,800) is too strict, and that an economically reasonable revision in the structural presumption would have increased rather than decreased the threshold. Whereas the new Guidelines lowers the threshold to HHI 1,800 from HHI 2,500, an economically reasonable revision would have increased the threshold to HHI 3,200. I justify this argument using a bare-bones model of Cournot competition. Third, it seems unlikely, …

Marketing, Other Intangibles, And Output Growth In 61 United States Industries, Leo Sveikauskas, Rachel Soloveichik, Corby Garner, Peter B. Meyer, James Bessen, Matthew Russell

Faculty Scholarship

Experts in the System of National Accounts (SNA) recently considered whether marketing could be included as a capital asset in the national accounts and later recommended that marketing should be an intangible in the 2025 SNA (IMF, 2022, 2023). This paper prepares macroeconomic measures of the United States marketing stock and develops similar measures within 61 industries. We find that, from 1987 to 2020, marketing capital contributed approximately as much to output growth (0.18 percentage point per year) as R&D (0.15) or software (0.19) did. Software grew more rapidly, but marketing had a larger factor share. Marketing contributes even more …

Government Misinformation Platforms, Janet Freilich

Faculty Scholarship

There is a harmful mismatch between how information published by the government is perceived-as highly trustworthy-and the reality that it is often not. This Article shows that the government frequently collects information from third party private entities and publishes it with no review or vetting. Although this information is riddled with errors and inaccuracies, scholars, policymakers, and the public treat the information with unwarranted confidence because it derives from the government. Further, institutional imprimatur (and consequent trust) attaches to information even tangentially associated with the government and to information where the government explicitly disclaims review.

This Article highlights the ubiquity …

Self-Reported Determinants Of Covid-19 Vaccine Acceptance Among Persons With And Without Autoimmune Disease, Jenny D. Gong, Maya Mattar, Donald D. Anthony, Adam T. Perzynski, Nora G. Singer

Faculty Scholarship

Objective: Patients with autoimmune disease (AD) are at increased risk for complications from COVID-19 infection, so, optimizing vaccine utilization in this population is of particular importance. We compared COVID-19 vaccination perspectives among persons with and without AD. Methods: 471 patients in the MetroHealth System and Cleveland Veteran Affairs Medical Center completed a 38-item questionnaire between August 2021 and February 2022. This survey containing questions regarding COVID-19 vaccine perceptions and demographics was administered both to unvaccinated individuals and individuals who delayed vaccination for at least 2 months. Multivariable ordinary least squares regression models were created to assess factors associated with vaccination …