Digital Commons Network^™

Molecular Targets For Diabetes Mellitus-Associated Erectile Dysfunction, Elizabeth Yohannes, Jinsook Chang, Mark R. Chance

Faculty Scholarship

Protein expression profiles in rat corporal smooth muscle tissue were compared between animal models of streptozotocin-induced diabetes mellitus (STZ-DM) and agematched controls (AMCs) at 1 week and 2 months after induction of hyperglycemia with STZ treatment. At each time point, protein samples from four STZ-DM and four AMC rat corpora tissues were prepared independently and analyzed together across multiple quantitative two-dimensional gels using a pooled internal standard sample to quantify expression changes with statistical confidence. A total of 170 spots were differential expressed among the four experimental groups. A subsequent mass spectrometry analysis of the 170 spots identified a total …

Digital Copyright Reform And Legal Transplants In Hong Kong, Peter K. Yu

Faculty Scholarship

Since the mid-1990s, countries have struggled to respond to copyright challenges created by the internet and new communications technologies. Although the law and policy debate in recent years has focused primarily on the entertainment industry’s aggressive tactics toward individual end-users, online service providers, and other third parties, a recent wave of legislative actions and lobbying efforts has rejuvenated the debate on the proper legal response to the digital copyright challenges.

Like many other jurisdictions, Hong Kong, in the past few years, has been busy exploring copyright law reform to respond to challenges created by the internet and new communications technologies. …

How We Lost The High-Tech War Of 2020: A Warning From The Future, Charles J. Dunlap Jr.

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

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.

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 …

The Decline Of Investment Banking: Preliminary Thoughts On The Evolution Of The Industry 1996-2008, Robert J. Rhee

Faculty Scholarship

In this paper, I provide a basic, preliminary financial analysis of several prominent, independent investment banks: Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Merrill Lynch, Lehman Brothers, and Bear Stearns. I provide the following data: (1) segmentation of net revenue by products and services, (2) return on average equity, (3) leverage ratio, and (4) debt to equity ratio. Although the data analysis here is very basic, it still tells an interesting narrative of the evolution of the investment banking industry. The investment banking industry has undergone significant change in the twelve-year period 1996 to 2008. In the mid-1990s, banks had a balance mix …

Punishment As Suffering, David C. Gray

Faculty Scholarship

In a series of recent high-profile articles, a group of contemporary scholars argue that the criminal law is a grand machine for the administration of suffering. The machine requires calibration, of course. The main standard we use for ours is objective proportionality. We generally punish more serious crimes more severely and aim to inflict the same punishment on similarly situated offenders who commit similar crimes. In the views of these authors, this focus on objective proportionality makes ours a rather crude machine. In particular, it ignores the fact that 1) different offenders may suffer to a different degree when subjected …

Can An Ethical Person Be An Ethical Prosecutor? A Social Cognitive Approach To Systemic Reform, Lawton P. Cummings

Faculty Scholarship

This Article argues that certain key structural factors within the prosecutorial system in the United States lead to prosecutorial misconduct by systematically encouraging 'moral disengagement' in prosecutors. 'Moral disengagement' refers to the social cognition theory developed by Albert Bandura and others, which identifies the mechanisms that operate to disengage an individual’s moral self-sanctions that would otherwise inhibit the individual from engaging in injurious conduct. Empirical studies have shown that a person’s level of moral disengagement, as a dispositional trait, is an accurate predictor of the person’s level of aggression and anti-social behavior, and that an individual’s level of moral disengagement …

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.

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 …

The Unmasking Option, James Grimmelmann

Faculty Scholarship

In the recent "Skanks in NYC" case, the plaintiff dropped her defamation lawsuit once the court had unmasked the John Doe defendant. Although the plaintiff was criticized for her seemingly pretextual use of a lawsuit, the outcome was substantively just. The harasser got almost exactly what she deserved for trying to humiliate her victim: embarrassment of her own.

This brief essay discusses a counterintuitive proposal inspired by the Skanks in NYC case: that the law unmask anonymous online harassers as a substitute for litigation, rather than as an aid to it. Identifying harassers can be an effective way of holding …

Sexual Abuse Of Power, Michal Buchhandler-Raphael

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Criminalizing Coerced Submission In The Workplace And In The Academy, Michal Buchhandler-Raphael

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Thinking Like A Public Interest Lawyer: Theory, Practice, And Pedagogy, Jocelyn Simonson

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Breaking Up Is Hard To Do: Should Financial Conglomerates Be Dismantled?, James A. Fanto

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

La Caja De Pandora: Improving Access To Hospice Care Among Hispanic And African-American Patients, Kathy L. Cerminara, Alina M. Perez

Faculty Scholarship

Many patients clinging to hope in the form of potentially curative treatment could benefit from hospice services, but, for the most part, it is not until the patient accepts the finality of his or her condition that the physical, psychological and social benefits of hospice care become accessible to the patient and his or her family. Under current Medicare regulations and other health care payers’ policies, patients must abandon the hope of curative treatment before opting for hospice services. As a result, many terminally ill patients access the services late, sometimes a few hours before death. Scholars have proposed that …

Sexting And Teenagers: Omg R U Going 2 Jail???, Catherine Arcabascio

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

With A Little Help From My Friends: The Attorney's Role In Assisting Pro Se Litigants In Negotiations, Lynn A. Epstein

Faculty Scholarship

In these difficult economic times, more litigants are attempting to handle their lawsuits without hiring attorneys. Even without seeking formal representation, these pro se litigants may want some assistance from attorneys. This advice seeking may be especially prevalent in the area ofnegotiation where no formalized procedures are in place but where the consequences of an inadequate settlement are disastrous for the self-represented Attorneys may want to assist pro se litigants in their negotiations but feel reluctant to do soforfear of triggering an attorney-client relationship and its accompanying malpractice exposure. Attorneys who are reluctant to give informal advice to pro se …

The Rhetoric Of Catharsis And Change: Law School Autobiography As A Nonfiction Law And Literature Subgenre, Carlo A. Pedrioli

Faculty Scholarship

To date, little scholarship, if any, has addressed the autobiographies of law students, which have appeared in law review articles and books since at least the late 1970s. This shortcoming of law and literature scholarship in the nonfiction genre of autobiography is problematic. In the interest of understanding diverse perspectives in the legal community, legal scholars with autobiographical interests ought to give attention to the autobiographies of different individuals in this community, including the law students who will be the future members of the profession. Also, this shortcoming leaves a gap in the narrative discourse of the law since lawyers …

Pregnant Man: A Conversation, Darren Rosenblum, Noa Ben-Asher, Mary Anne Case, Elizabeth Emens, Berta E. Hernandez-Truyol,, Vivian M. Gutierrez, Lisa C. Ikemoto, Angela Onwuachi-Willig, Jacob Willig-Onwuachi, Kimberly Mutcherson, Peter Siegelman, Beth Jones

Faculty Scholarship

I'm a law professor who works on gender, sexuality, and culture in the international and comparative context. That's my head working. In "real" life, my partner, Howard, and I have been engaged in having a baby together for several years, a project that came to fruition with the birth of our daughter Melina. Of course, such a project evokes intensely complex feelings and thoughts. Beyond a simple transposition of the personal onto the political, I feel so fortunate to have engaged in myriad conversations with a variety of friends and colleagues who think much more carefully about the family and …

Health Reform: What's Insurance Got To Do With It? Recognizing Health Insurance As A Separate Species Of Insurance, Wendy K. Mariner

Faculty Scholarship

Health insurance can be, and to a large extent already is, a separate species of insurance. This article describes the different views of insurance that made health reform contentious. It argues that the goals of health reform are incompatible with conventional views of insurance. Nonetheless, reforming health insurance to achieve those goals does not require as dramatic shift as some might think, because health insurance has already become primarily a means of paying for health care, rather than a simple risk spreading device for specified losses.

Justice And Elegance For Hedgehogs - In Life, Law, And Literature, Linda C. Mcclain

Faculty Scholarship

At a time when value pluralism and even value polarization seem to be undeniable facts of contemporary life, Ronald Dworkin unrepentantly defends the unity of value. His point of departure is the Greek poet Archilochus’s saying, “The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing,” made famous in liberal philosopher Isaiah Berlin’s essay, The Hedgehog and the Fox. In his forthcoming book, Justice for Hedgehogs, Dworkin argues for the integration of ethics, personal morality, and political morality and contends that law is a branch of political morality that in turn is a branch of morality, broadly understood. …

Complimentary And Complementary Discrimination In Faculty Hiring, Angela Onwuachi-Willig

Faculty Scholarship

This Article focuses on one form of discrimination in faculty hiring. Specifically, this Article concentrates on discrimination against the "overqualified" minority faculty candidate, the candidate who is presumed to have too many opportunities and thus gets excluded from faculty interview lists and consideration. In so doing, this Article poses and answers the question: "Can exclusion from interviewing pools and selection based upon the notion that one is just 'too good' to recruit to a particular department constitute an actionable form of discrimination?" Part I of this Article begins by briefly reviewing the changes in faculty diversity and inclusion at colleges …

Blind Expertise, Christopher Robertson

Faculty Scholarship

The United States spends many billions of dollars on its system of civil litigation, and expert witnesses appear in a huge portion of cases. Yet litigants select and retain expert witnesses in ways that create the appearance of biased hired guns on both sides of every case, thereby depriving factfinders of a clear view of the facts. As a result, factfinders too often arrive at the wrong conclusions, thus undermining the deterrence and compensation functions of litigation. Court-appointment of experts has been widely proposed as a solution, yet it raises legitimate concerns about accuracy and has failed to gain traction …

Reasonable Expectations In Socio-Cultural Context, Nancy Kim

Faculty Scholarship

Under the objective theory of contract, courts interpret the intent of the parties in adopting a particular contractual term according to the reasonable meaning of that term, or the meaning that a reasonable person would assign to that term. Courts adopt the objective theory to determine all aspects of the understanding between the parties-from the determination of contract formation, to an evaluation of the meaning of written or spoken terms, to an assessment of contract performance. In a series of articles, Professor Melvin Eisenberg explained how modern contract law evolved from the will theory to the classical model, and from …

The Politics Of Nature: Climate Change, Environmental Law, And Democracy, Jedediah Purdy

Faculty Scholarship

Legal scholars’ discussions of climate change assume that the issue is one mainly of engineering incentives, and that “environmental values” are too weak, vague, or both to spur political action to address the emerging crisis. This Article gives reason to believe otherwise. The major natural resource and environmental statutes, from the acts creating national forests and parks to the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts, have emerged from precisely the activity that discussions of climate change neglect: democratic argument over the value of the natural world and its role in competing ideas of citizenship, national purpose, and the role and …

“Equal Citizenship Stature”: Justice Ginsburg’S Constitutional Vision, Neil S. Siegel

Faculty Scholarship

In this essay, Professor Siegel examines the nature and function of constitutional visions in the American constitutional order. He argues that Associate Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg possesses such a vision and that her vision is defined by her oft-stated commitment to “full human stature,” to “equal citizenship stature.” He then defends Justice Ginsburg’s characteristically incremental and moderate approach to realizing her vision. He does so in part by establishing that President Barack Obama articulated a similar vision and approach in his Philadelphia speech on American race relations and illustrated its capacity to succeed during the 2008 presidential election.

A Post-Race Equal Protection?, Trina Jones, Mario L. Barnes, Erwin Chemerinsky

Faculty Scholarship

Most vividly demonstrated in the 2008 election of the first African-American President of the United States, post-race is a term that has been widely used to characterize a belief in the declining significance of race in the United States. Post-racialists, then, believe that racial discrimination is rare and aberrant behavior as evidenced by America’s pronounced racial progress. One practical consequence of a commitment to post-racialism is the belief that governments - both state and federal - should not consider race in their decision making. One might imagine that the recent explosion in post-racial discourse also portends a revised understanding of …