Digital Commons Network^™

The Association Of Participating In A Summer Prelaw Training Program And First-Year Law School Students’ Grades, Heather M. Buzick, Christopher Robertson, Jessica Findley, Heidi Burross, Matthew Charles, David M. Klieger

Faculty Scholarship

This study estimates the association of participation in a nine-week online educational program to prepare students for post-graduate (juris doctorate) education and law school grades. We collected registrar data from 17 U.S. law schools for participants and non-participants from the same year and a prior year. We compared first-semester law school grades between participating and non-participating students weighted by propensity scores. Course participation was associated with improved first-semester grades in a keyed course (Contracts Law) and overall grade point average. According to pre- and post-survey responses, a substantial portion of those who completed the program reported feeling more prepared for …

A Concrete Proposal For Data Loyalty, Neil Richards, Woodrow Hartzog, Jordan Francis

Faculty Scholarship

Congress and state legislators are finally experimenting with new privacy frameworks, rights, and duties to move past the thoroughly critiqued “notice and choice” model for data privacy. While many new privacy proposals seek a more fortified version of the fair information practices, some legislators have placed a duty of data loyalty at the heart of their proposed privacy bills. This is important because a duty of data loyalty has the potential to anchor American privacy law in a way analogous to how the European Union approach is grounded in fundamental rights of privacy and data protection.

Unfortunately, there remains some …

Aspirational Laws In Action: A Field Experiment, Ben Depoorter, Stephan Tontrup

Faculty Scholarship

This article examines aspirational laws in a randomized field experiment. We analyze the impact of an unenforced public smoking ban on individual behavior and attitudes. The findings indicate that aspirational laws, like public smoking bans, can make rights holders sensitive to behavior that violates their rights, irrespective of the material consequences of infringements and their personal views about the law. The results present a mixed position in the debate between rights-based social movement lawyering and critics of hollow rights. On the one hand, aspirational laws can create unforeseen social frictions when rights are declared, but their implementation and enforcement are …

Restorative Justice Diversion As A Structural Health Intervention In The Criminal Legal System The Criminal Legal System, Thalia Gonzalez

Faculty Scholarship

A new discourse at the intersection of criminal justice and public health is bringing to light how exposure to the ordinariness of racism in the criminal legal system—whether in policing practices or carceral settings—leads to extraordinary outcomes in health. Drawing on empirical evidence of the deleterious health effects of system involvement coupled with new threats posed by COVID-19, advocates and academics have increasingly called for race-conscious public health-driven reforms to carcerality in the United States. Recognizing the significance of health to carceral reform, the initiation of a health justice grounded lexicon in criminal justice has opened the doorway to new …

Misinformation And Covid-19, Dorit Rubenstein Reiss

Faculty Scholarship

The COVID-19 pandemic’s impact on our world cannot be overstated. One of its noticeable features was the prominence of misinformation generally, and anti-vaccine misinformation more specifically. This article provides a breakdown of the five major themes of antivaccine misinformation and the way they were used to create fear, uncertainty, and doubt about COVID- 19 vaccines. Long before the pandemic, anti-vaccine activists argued using a five-part playbook. They argued that (1) vaccine preventable diseases were not really dangerous, (2) vaccines were dangerous and ineffective, (3) there were alternative treatments that were better than (dangerous and ineffective) vaccines, (4) there was a …

The Dog That Didn’T Bark: Looking For Techno-Libertarian Ideology In A Decade Of Public Discourse About Big Tech Regulation, Jodi L. Short, Reuel E, Schiller, Susan Sibley, Noah Jones, Babak Hammatian, Lee Anna Bowman-Carpio

Faculty Scholarship

The internet was built on the techno-libertarian ideology that “information wants to be free,” and that ideology has played a prominent role in academic and policy debates about regulating the internet and the big technology companies that dominate it.2 Techno-libertarian ideology has generated a constellation of claims about tech and regulation—from the suggestion that regulation will stifle innovation in the complex, dynamic tech sector, to the assertion that the large platform companies are literally not regulable. In this article, we explore how much traction such claims and ideologies have in the broader public discourse about big tech and regulation. We …

Regulatory Managerialism As Gaslighting Government, Jodi L. Short

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Restorative Justice Diversion As A Structural Health Intervention In The Criminal Legal System, Thalia Gonzalez

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

The Mediating Effect Of Caregiving Relationship Quality On The Association Between Caregiving Stressors And Mental Health Problems Among Older Spousal Caregivers, Fei Wang, Elliane Irani

Faculty Scholarship

Providing care to a spouse can be especially challenging for older adults given their compounding stressors resulting from aging and caregiving. This cross-sectional study examines the relationships between caregiving stressors and caregiver mental health problems and the potential mediator (i.e., caregiving relationship quality) of these associations. A total of 431 Americans (≥65 years) were selected from the National Study of Caregiving. Path analysis shows that care assistance was positively associated with caregiver mental health problems, and this association was mediated by negative relationship quality (Indirect effect =.14, p =.016). Moreover, role overload was positively associated with caregiver mental health problems, …

Fostering Durable Skills Development: Leveraging Student Worker Programs, James Hutson, Elizabeth Macdonald, Lisa Young, Susan Edele, Chris Smentkowski

Faculty Scholarship

The past half century has witnessed exponential increases in the cost of a college degree paralleled by an increase of undergraduate students who are employed during matriculation. While the impact on learning outcomes due to off-campus employment continues to receive much attention, there has been little attention paid to students employed on-campus through student worker programs and their benefits, especially in developing durable skills and improving retention. Research has demonstrated that engagement in oncampus activities improves retention and persistence in students. Additionally, employers desire power or durable skills (formerly known as “soft skills”), and that student worker programs are suited …

Exploring Data Use In Nonprofit Organizations, Duncan J. Mayer, Robert L. Fischer

Faculty Scholarship

Organizations around the world have increasingly employed data for a variety of purposes, and nonprofit organizations are no exception. This article reviews the use of data in nonprofit organizations, including the types of data collected and accessed, the motivations for data capture, and the barriers to systematic use of data. The literature shows that nonprofit organizations capture a variety of data, including public and financial data, performance measures, program evaluation data, and volunteer information. Organizations use these with diverse motivations such as program or organizational improvement, marketing, and accountability. Prominent barriers faced by organizations include challenges in identifying meaningful information, …

Open Educational Resources And Institutional Repositories: Roles, Challenges, And Opportunities For Libraries, James Hutson, Susan Edele, Elizabeth Macdonald, Paul Huffman, Nancy Messina, Maggie Pavone, Carla Mueller, Gabriela Romero

Faculty Scholarship

The adoption of digital-born, Open Educational Resources (OER) has been proven to improve student retention and learning outcomes, and OER has the flexibly to support multiple modalities of instruction. Institutional Repositories are uniquely situated to act as a platform to support and distribute content that can be created collaboratively between faculty researchers as well as students. However, faculty are still largely hesitant to adopt OER sources for a variety of reasons, not least among them being a lack of exposure and understanding of the potential benefits for both faculty and students in keeping curriculum affordable, up-to-date, and nimble through media-rich, …

Essential Property, Timothy M. Mulvaney, Joseph William Singer

Faculty Scholarship

For a sizable swath of the U.S. population, incomes and wealth are insufficient to cover life’s most basic necessities even in the most ordinary of times. A disturbingly resilient explanation for this state of affairs rests on the view that resource inequities are avoidable through self-reliance, a stance that invites observers to see people in poverty as morally suspect. This Article advances a counterview in contending that the widespread lack of essential resources did not simply arise naturally via individuals’ life choices but instead has been, in very meaningful part, created and perpetuated by our system of property laws.

The …

Designing For Justice: Pandemic Lessons For Criminal Courts, Cynthia Alkon

Faculty Scholarship

March 2020 brought an unprecedented crisis to the United States: COVID-19. In a two-week period, criminal courts across the country closed. But, that is where the uniformity ended. Criminal courts did not have a clear process to decide how to conduct necessary business. As a result, criminal courts across the country took different approaches to deciding how to continue necessary operations and in doing so many did not consider the impact on justice of the operational changes that were made to manage the COVID-19 crisis. One key problem was that many courts did not use inclusive processes and include all …

The Role Of Virtual Reality In Art Therapy To Mitigate Autism Spectrum Disorder (Asd) Symptoms, James Hutson

Faculty Scholarship

Traditional art therapy sessions are designed for face-to-face engagement with patients as with other mental health services such as counseling. However, the pandemic of 2019 severely limited access to these services and, initially, led to widespread cancelation and postponement until the nature of COVID-19 could be better understood. When treatment resumed, video conferencing was the preferred method of holding therapy sessions one-on-one to diagnose patients and provide services. Similar approaches were taken in art therapy with less efficacy given the hands-on nature of the required activities. With the rise of virtual reality (VR) as a more widely accessible technology since …

Would You Make It To The Future? Teaching Race In An Assisted Reproductive Technologies And The Law Classroom, Sonia Gipson Rankin

Faculty Scholarship

Would you make it to the future? For the last five years, I have started my Assisted Reproductive Technology (ART) lecture in Family Law with this question. Students take the query seriously. They ponder their lived experiences such as home training, medical history, education, financial well-being, personality traits, work ethic, and social graces when determining if they would be the “model DNA” someone might select in a future society. The good-natured jokes about being nearsighted, having a pitiful jump shot, and wearing orthodontic headgear turn reflective when someone raises the question: would someone in the future select my race? In …

Artificial Intelligence And The Disruption Of Higher Education: Strategies For Integrations Across Disciplines, James Hutson, Theresa Jeevanjee, Vanessa Vander Graaf, Jason Lively, Joe Weber, Graham Weir, Kathryn Arnone, Geremy Carnes, Kathi Vosevich, Daniel Plate, Michael Leary, Susan Edele

Faculty Scholarship

Artificial intelligence (AI) and its impact on society have received a great deal of attention in the past five years since the first Stanford AI100 report. AI already globally impacts individuals in critical and personal ways, and many industries will continue to experience disruptions as the full algorithmic effects are understood. Higher education is one of the industries that will be greatly impacted; consequently, many institutions have begun accelerating its adoption across disciplines to address the fast-approaching market shift. Recent advances with the technology are especially promising for its potential to create and scale personalized learning for students, to optimize …

Comments Of The Cordell Institute For Policy In Medicine & Law At Washington University In St. Louis, Neil Richards, Woodrow Hartzog, Jordan Francis

Faculty Scholarship

The Federal Trade Commission—with its broad, independent grant of authority and statutory mandate to identify and prevent unfair and deceptive trade practices—is uniquely situated to prevent and remedy unfair and deceptive data privacy and data security practices. In an increasingly digitized world, data collection, processing, and transfer have become integral to market interactions. Our personal and commercial experiences are now mediated by powerful, information-intensive firms who hold the power to shape what consumers see, how they interact, which options are available to them, and how they make decisions. That power imbalance exposes consumers and leaves them all vulnerable. We all …

Contractual Complexity, Spencer Williams

Faculty Scholarship

Lawyers, judges, scholars, and clients all agree on one thing about contracts: they are complex. But what does this actually mean? What is contractual complexity and where does it come from? Despite widespread agreement that contracts are complex, the literature on contracts has yet to effectively define contractual complexity. Furthermore, the literature lacks a general theory of complexity that connects it to the broader body of contracts scholarship. This Article aims to fill these gaps. Drawing on complexity theory, the Article argues that contractual complexity is the degree of interactivity between a contract’s terms. Building on this definition, the Article …

Responsibility, Lawyering, Justice, David Mcgowan

Faculty Scholarship

Between 1942 and 1946, approximately 112,000 persons of Japanese ancestry were ordered to leave their homes and were transported to internment camps where they were held under armed guard. Four cases litigated before the United States Supreme Court dealt with orders related to this policy: Hirabayishi v. United States, Yasui v. United States, Korematsu v. United States, and ex parte Endo. Property deprivation related to internment was at issue in Oyama v. California. This note discusses whether the Solicitor General of the United States violated a duty of candor in Hirabayashi and Yasui or in Korematsu. That question requires analysis …

Gamification In Education: A Study Of Design-Based Learning In Operationalizing A Game Studio For Serious Games, James Hutson, Ben Fulcher, Joe Weber

Faculty Scholarship

The gamification of learning has proven educational benefits, especially in secondary education. Studies confirm the successful engagement of students with improved time on task, motivation and learning outcomes. At the same time, there remains little research on games and learning at the postsecondary level of education where traditional pedagogies remain the norm. Studies that have been conducted remain almost exclusively restricted to science programs, including medicine and engineering. Moreover, postsecondary subject-matter experts who have created their own gamified experiences often are forced to do so on an ad hoc basis either on their own, teaching themselves game engines, or with …

Virtual Reality And Learning: A Case Study Of Experiential Pedagogy In Art History, James Hutson, Trent Olsen

Faculty Scholarship

While images are central to the discipline of art history, surprisingly little research has been conducted on the uses of digital environments for teaching in the discipline. Over the past decade, more studies have emerged considering the egalitarian space that can be used by students and teachers in web-based applications and social media. A body of literature has begun to emerge out of a small network of scholars and educators interested in digital humanities and art history, providing examples of how new tools can be integrated into the standard slideshow and lecture format of the field. At the same time, …

Letting Offenders Choose Their Punishment?, Gilles Grolleau, Murat C. Mungan, Naoufel Mzoughi

Faculty Scholarship

Punishment menus allow offenders to choose the punishment to which they will be subjected from a set of options. We present several behaviorally informed rationales for why punishment menus may serve as effective deterrents, notably by causing people to refrain from entering a calculative mindset; reducing their psychological reactance; causing them to reconsider the reputational impacts of punishment; and reducing suspicions about whether the act is enforced for rent-seeking purposes. We argue that punishment menus can outperform the traditional single punishment if these effects can be harnessed properly. Our observations thus constitute a challenge, based on behavioral arguments, to the …

Discredited Data, Ngozi Okidegbe

Faculty Scholarship

Jurisdictions are increasingly employing pretrial algorithms as a solution to the racial and socioeconomic inequities in the bail system. But in practice, pretrial algorithms have reproduced the very inequities they were intended to correct. Scholars have diagnosed this problem as the biased data problem: pretrial algorithms generate racially and socioeconomically biased predictions, because they are constructed and trained with biased data.
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/="/">This Article contends that biased data is not the sole cause of algorithmic discrimination. Another reason pretrial algorithms produce biased results is that they are exclusively built and trained with data from carceral knowledge sources – the …

Balancing Rights And Responsibilities: The Role Of Government And Citizens In Combatting Gun Violence, Michael Ulrich

Faculty Scholarship

Congress passed the first federal legislation on firearms safety in decades at nearly the same moment that the Supreme Court issued its first major Second Amendment decision since 2008. It will take time to assess the effects of these actions on both gun safety and Second Amendment rights, but, with gun violence skyrocketing across the country, it is clear that finding a balance between rights and safety is desperately needed. The public is ill-equipped to protect itself against the broad harms of gun violence, so the government has a central role to play in addressing those harms and the racial …

Proportioning Collection Space And Learning In An Academic Library: Collection Performance Indicators, Christopher Stewart, Louise Lowe

Faculty Scholarship

Assessment on university campuses increasingly emphasizes learning outcomes and student success. Academic librarians need to identify relationships between their collection spaces and the learning activities of the university in order to play a role in the environment of assessment. Measuring the propor- tions of discipline-oriented content of library collections and comparing those proportions to discipline-oriented learning activities produces collection performance indicators. Academic libraries can use collection performance indicators to assess how well their collection spaces correspond to student demand and student success using readily available metrics. Collection performance indicators answers a gap in library literature per- taining to relationships between …

Cognitive Functioning And Prevalence Of Seizures Among Older Persons In Uganda: A Hospital-Based, Cross-Sectional Study, Martha Sajatovic

Faculty Scholarship

There is limited data on the prevalence of seizures and dementia among older persons in Uganda. We evaluated cognitive functioning, and the prevalence and factors associated with seizures among older persons attending an outpatient medical clinic in Uganda. We randomly selected older adults (60 years and above) attending Kiruddu National Referral Hospital medical outpatient clinics between October 2020 and March 2021. We excluded individuals with a history of head injury, brain tumors, mental retardation, co-morbidity with HIV and patients who have had recent brain surgery. Cognitive functioning was assessed using the Identification for Dementia in Elderly Africans (IDEA) tool. We …

The Role Of Law And Myth In Creating A Workplace That 'Looks Like America', Susan Bisom-Rapp

Faculty Scholarship

Equal employment opportunity (EEO) law has played a poor role in incentivizing effective diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) and harassment prevention programming. In litigation and investigation, too many judges and regulators credit employers for maintaining policies and programs rather than requiring employers to embrace efforts that work. Likewise, many employers and consultants fail to consider the organizational effects created by DEI and harassment programming. Willful ignorance prevents the admission that some policies and programming harm those most in need of protection.

This approach has resulted in two problems. One is a doctrinal dilemma because important presumptions embedded in antidiscrimination law …

Symptom Severity Mixity In Older-Age Bipolar Disorder: Analyses From The Global Aging And Geriatric Experiments In Bipolar Disorder Database (Gage-Bd), Farren B.S. Briggs, Martha Sajatovic

Faculty Scholarship

Objective: Some individuals with bipolar disorder (BD) experience manic and depressive symptoms concurrently, but data are limited on symptom mixity in older age bipolar disorder (OABD). Using the Global Aging & Geriatric Experiments in Bipolar Disorder Database, we characterized mixity in OABD and associations with everyday function. Methods: The sample (n = 805), from 12 international studies, included cases with both mania and depression severity ratings at a single timepoint. Four mixity groups were created: asymptomatic (A), mixed (Mix), depressed only (Dep), and manic only (Man). Generalized linear mixed models used mixity group as the predictor variable; cohort was included …

Competency-Based Social Work Education: 25 Years Of Innovation & Leadership, Zoë Breen Wood, Marjorie N. Edguer, David L. Hussey, Mark Chupp, Grover C. Gilmore, Paul M. Kubek

Faculty Scholarship

The white paper chronicles the 25-year history of one graduate school of social work’s efforts in competency-based curriculum innovation. The authors argue that curriculum change is organizational change and share their experiences with a variety of curriculum assessment, design, and delivery efforts. Beginning with the development of the first social work competencies (labeled Abilities), pioneering efforts in assessment and holistic curricular design and delivery are reviewed. A new, one-semester, social work generalist curriculum is introduced. Emphasis is placed on the importance of developing a competency-based curriculum that is integrated both horizontally and vertically and that engages the social work student …