Digital Commons Network^™

Knowledge-Driven Interpretative Conditional Diffusion Model For Contrast-Free Myocardial Infarction Enhancement Synthesis, Shuo Li

Faculty Scholarship

Synthesis of myocardial infarction enhancement (MIE) images without contrast agents (CAs) has shown great potential to advance myocardial infarction (MI) diagnosis and treatment. It provides results comparable to late gadolinium enhancement (LGE) images, thereby reducing the risks associated with CAs and streamlining clinical workflows. The existing knowledge-and-data-driven approach has made progress in addressing the complex challenges of synthesizing MIE images (i.e., invisible myocardial scars and high inter-individual variability) but still has limitations in the interpretability of kinematic inference, morphological knowledge integration, and kinematic-morphological fusion, thereby reducing the transparency and reliability of the model and causing information loss during synthesis. In …

Reasoning From Injustice, Robert L. Tsai

Faculty Scholarship

In a series of lectures at Yale Law School, the Harvard political theorist Judith Shklar critiqued leading models of justice as overly abstract and lacking a realistic account of the social dynamics that perpetuate injustice. In this essay, Professor Tsai builds on Shklar’s account of injustice as a social phenomenon by offering a structural reading of key literary texts that explore the nature of legal injustice—from the Book of Job to Harriett Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Frederick Douglass’s The Heroic Slave. A close reading of these texts permits us to flesh out Shklar’s observations and “give injustice …

The Sports Parent's Predicament, Katharine B. Silbaugh

Faculty Scholarship

Youth sport enjoys a favored status in American culture, encouraged by policymakers and local communities, pursued by parents, and remembered through rose-colored lenses by adults. Most lawyers are familiar with Justice Harry Blackmun’s ode to the magical qualities of baseball in Flood v. Kuhn, in which he took the liberty of running through his own memories of scores of baseball legends.¹ Congress and presidents want children to continue in sport.² Many in the health field argue that sport is important because exercise is important, and sport is treated as the natural manifestation of exercise.³ An enormous number—perhaps …

Benchmarking Age-Gates, Katharine B. Silbaugh

Faculty Scholarship

This article examines how legal actors—particularly legislators, judges, and attorneys—invoke chronological age to justify the application of legal rules to adolescents. In doing so, they often rely on comparisons to existing “age-gates,” treating these thresholds (such as ages 18 or 21) as self-justifying reference points. Age 18, marking the legal transition from childhood to adulthood, and age 21, the former age of majority and current sales age for certain controlled substances, serve as especially powerful rhetorical anchors in age-based legal reasoning. These anchor points shape how legal actors advocate for or against particular age thresholds, often substituting analogy for substantive …

Performance Leads Governance: A Comment On Professor Tallarita’S Dual-Class Analysis, David J. Berger, Pierluigi Matera

Faculty Scholarship

The rise of dual-class stock structures in corporate governance has sparked intense academic, legal, and regulatory debate. In his recent contribution, Dual-Class Contracting, Professor Tallarita persuasively challenges some contemporary interpretations of contractarian theories by showing that dual-class structures do not reflect bespoke bargaining or firm-specific negotiation, but rather result from lawyer-driven standardization, social norms, and path dependency.

Drawing on Tallarita’s empirical findings, we argue that the reality of dual-class structures extends beyond governance formality. Specifically, we contend that investor behavior is driven not by structural governance ideals, but by corporate performance and mission alignment. Companies increasingly design governance structures based …

Criminal Court's Disability, Zohra Ahmed

Faculty Scholarship

Do criminal courts meaningfully accommodate psychiatric disability? A review of competency proceedings across the United States suggests not. In competency to stand trial proceedings, criminal court actors offer a narrow vision of psychiatric disability that excludes many defendants. Ultimately, the institutional context of criminal court undermines even the meagre accommodations that the competency framework provides.

Competency proceedings are the constitutional accommodations available to disabled defendants if they can establish that they are unable to consult with their lawyers or if they do not have a rational or factual understanding of the proceedings against them. After a finding of incompetency, the …

De Minimis Copying: An Empirical Study, Jessica Silbey, Samantha Zyontz

Faculty Scholarship

In the internet age, the copyright de minimis defense has increased in relevance as copyright lawsuits (and IP generally) are more mainstream and infringement liability more widespread. This Article is the first empirical analysis of copyright de minimis defense cases, collecting and analyzing all such decisions since the mid-19th century. It traces the doctrine’s development over the past century and its evolution in the digital era, when copying has become even more ubiquitous but its triviality remains widely disputed. The Article’s aim is not only to map the de minimis defense to learn more about it doctrinally—asking when is copying …

Near Real-Time Monitoring Reveals Extensive Recent Forest Disturbance In Ghana’S Protected Areas, Luofan Dong, Xiaojing Tang, Foster Mensah, Bashara Ahmed Abubakari, Kelsee H. Bratley, Pontus Olofsson, Curtis E. Woodcock

Faculty Scholarship

The Protected Areas (PAs) in Ghana play a critical role in preserving the abundant biodiversity of the West Africa Green Belt. But recent changes in policies and regulations have facilitated logging and mining activities, which have accelerated forest disturbances. While there is a consensus that PAs are undergoing destructive change, the extent, rate, and locations of forest disturbances are undocumented. In this study, we applied the fusion near real-time (FNRT) algorithm that utilizes Landsat, Sentinel-1, and Sentinel-2 data and sampling to monitor forests in the PAs of Ghana. The results reveal that 704.74 (±177.24) km2 of forest in the PAs …

Mcmc-Net: Accelerating Markov Chain Monte Carlo With Neural Networks For Inverse Problems, Anuj Abhishek

Faculty Scholarship

In many computational problems, using the Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) can be prohibitively time-consuming. We propose MCMC-Net, a simple yet efficient way to accelerate MCMC via neural networks. The key idea of our approach is to substitute the true likelihood function of the MCMC method with a neural operator based surrogate. We extensively evaluate the accuracy and speedup of our method on three different partial differential equation-based inverse problems where likelihood computations are computationally expensive, namely electrical impedance tomography, diffuse optical tomography, and quantitative photoacoustic tomography. MCMC-Net performs similar to the classical likelihood counterpart but with a significant speedup. …

Whose Burden, Whose Benefit? Revisiting Ethical Trade-Offs In The Who Guidelines On Scaling Up Mass Azithromycin Administration, Maple Goh, A. M. Viens, Safura Abdool Karim, Aaron S. Kesselheim, Kevin Outterson

Faculty Scholarship

Author summary

• New evidence suggests that mass drug administration of azithromycin (MDAA) can significantly reduce childhood mortality in high-burden, low-resource settings, yet the World Health Organization’s (WHO) 2020 guidelines take a cautious approach due to concerns about antimicrobial resistance (AMR).
• While the WHO guidelines cite ethical principles, they insufficiently address key considerations, such as intergenerational justice, equitable burden sharing, and the structural determinants of health that shape infectious disease vulnerability.
• Global AMR policy often prioritizes conservation over access in ways that disproportionately burden low-income countries, despite high-income countries also bearing significant responsibility for the emergence and spread of AMR.
• A …

Llm-Gaode: Large-Language-Model Augmented Neural Ordinary Differential Equation Network For Video Nystagmography Classification, Shuo Li

Faculty Scholarship

Benign paroxysmal positional vertigo (BPPV), a common type of vertigo with complex etiologies, is traditionally diagnosed using video nystagmography (VNG). Current automated methods lack diagnostic precision owing to subjective interpretation of eye movement characteristics. To address these challenges, we introduce a large language model-augmented Gram-based attentive neural ordinary differential equation (LLM-GAODE), an innovative and data-driven framework integrating eye-tracking technology with a Gram-based attention mechanism and a neural ordinary differential equation network to improve BPPV classification. Furthermore, when the neural network exhibits low confidence in its predictions, an LLM can supplement the process with advanced reasoning in natural language. LLM-GAODE was …

Dementia As A Critical Lens On The Role Of Narrative In Medical Training And Practice, Erin Gentry Lamb

Faculty Scholarship

Narrative holds an important place within medicine and medical education, but an uncritical use of narrative can have troubling consequences for the care of patients who have limited or no capacity for self-narration, such as those living with dementia. We argue that the guiding principles in the use of narrative within medicine and medical education must be inclusivity and opportunity. We illustrate how medical training can benefit from a more inclusive definition of narrative, and we present a selection of innovative approaches to narrative coming out of literary studies, narrative gerontology, and medical and health humanities that focus on metaphor, …

Reconceptualizing Metadata Management As A Design Discipline, Rebecca B. French

Faculty Scholarship

Libraries are increasingly exploring design approaches, but their utility has been overlooked in the area of metadata management. This article argues that metadata management should be considered a design discipline. Key elements of design epistemology and their relevance to cataloging and metadata work are explored through a case study of developing a workflow to update OCLC numbers in a library catalog. Conceptualizing metadata management through the lens of design provides a new view of the field that expands possibilities for education, advocacy, research, and practice.

The Ethics Of Industry-Funded Speakers’ Bureaus—How They Disseminate Innovation And Could Corrupt Medicine, Jennifer E. Miller, Christopher Robertson

Faculty Scholarship

It is often said that a business without marketing is dead. But when a medical product is marketed irresponsibly, it is patients who may pay with their lives. In this context, Wieberdink et al¹ examine participation in industry-sponsored speakers’ bureaus by academic clinical faculty, conceptualizing the practice as a form of conflicted and irresponsible pharmaceutical marketing. Reviewing 129 US allopathic medical school conflict-of-interest (COI) policies, they found that less than 40% prohibit industry speakers’ bureau participation outright, while 19% impose conditional restrictions, such as requiring that faculty retain control over presentation content. Wieberdink et al¹ advocate for a …

Report Of The National Expert For The United States In Mapping Third Party Litigation Funding In The European Union, Maya Steinitz

Faculty Scholarship

Commercial third-party litigation funding (“TPLF”) is not centrally regulated in the United States.  It is subject to the overlapping jurisdiction of state and federal courts, state and federal legislatures, regulatory agencies, and bar associations. Legislation, regulation, and oversight of TPLF is being undertaken at each of those levels – much of it centered around the questions of when and whether TPLF should be disclosed; how to mitigate conflicts of interest created by TPLF (including the potential for claimants to lose control over their case to funders); and the identification of any foreign individuals, entities, or countries that may be providing …

Cognition, White Matter Hyperintensities And Suicide Risk In Late-Life Depression Patients: An Exploratory Study, Martha Sajatovic

Faculty Scholarship

Objective: Suicide among older adults represents a major public health concern and is closely associated with late-life depression (LLD). White matter hyperintensities (WMHs), frequently observed in the aging population, have been linked to both LLD and cognitive impairment. However, the role of WMH burden and cognitive dysfunction in older adults with LLD who have recently attempted suicide remains unclear. This study aims to investigate differences in WMH burden and cognitive performance across three groups: LLD patients with a recent suicide attempt (recent suicide attempt group, RSA), non-suicidal LLD patients (non-suicidal group, NS), and healthy older adults (healthy comparison group, HC). …

Toward A Unified Neuroaesthetic Framework For Art-Based Interventions In Substance Use Recovery - A Review, Piper Hutson, James Hutson

Faculty Scholarship

Art-based interventions have gained increasing recognition as complementary strategies for substance use disorder (SUD) recovery and prevention, yet the field remains fragmented across clinical art therapy, community-based programs, and expressive digital practices. This article advances a unified neuroaesthetic framework that integrates sensory regulation, narrative integration, and interpersonal synchronization as the core mechanisms of healing. Drawing on recent U.S.-based empirical studies (post-2020), the paper synthesizes evidence from multiple modalities, including visual arts, music therapy, dance/movement practices, and digital storytelling, each demonstrating measurable effects on craving reduction, stress regulation, identity reconstruction, and social connection. Neuroscientific insights are central: findings highlight how creative …

Gaming As Therapeutic Modality For Military Veterans: Evidence, Mechanisms, And Program Design, Piper Hutson, James Hutson

Faculty Scholarship

This study synthesizes interdisciplinary evidence on game-based interventions for military veterans, mapping neurological mechanisms to clinically relevant outcomes while outlining design principles for community programs that leverage interactive media. The review characterizes how structured gameplay supports emotional regulation through attentional control, predictable feedback schedules, and reward-mediated learning that elevates motivation and mood; links to dopaminergic signaling and reduced rumination suggest plausible pathways for affective stabilization. Executive functions receive targeted engagement via strategy, puzzle, and action mechanics that demand working memory, cognitive flexibility, inhibition, and rapid decision-making, providing ecologically valid practice with measurable transfer to daily functioning. Social architectures in multiplayer …

Premenopausal Transition In Neurodivergent Women With Musculoskeletal Syndromes: Mechanisms, Risks, And Neuroinclusive Therapeutics, Piper Hutson, James Hutson

Faculty Scholarship

Neurodivergent women with chronic musculoskeletal syndromes experience disproportionate premenopausal symptom burdens that are poorly characterized in extant clinical paradigms and practice. The compounded interplay of estrogen fluctuations in premenopause with sensory–executive differences and baseline nociception from joint or connective-tissue pathology yields intensified pain, mood dysregulation, and functional decline. Evidence indicates estrogen modulates nociception, neuroinflammation, bone remodeling, and monoaminergic signaling; premenopausal variability magnifies pain, affective lability, and cognitive drift—effects accentuated in autism and ADHD. Coexisting hypermobility, fibromyalgia, or connective-tissue disorders compromise joint integrity and proprioception, increasing susceptibility to estrogen-dependent changes in bone microarchitecture and tendon homeostasis. This article advances an integrative …

The God Prompt And Deus Ex Machina: Techno-Theological Tropes And Operational Metaphors In Generative Media, James Hutson

Faculty Scholarship

This study reframes two durable tropes—the ―God Prompt‖ and the deus ex machina—as analytic lenses for understanding how contemporary generative systems stage beginnings and endings of cultural production. The ―God Prompt‖ denotes command-driven synthesis in which minimal textual instructions instantiate content on demand, crystallizing a production loop of input, model execution, and post hoc evaluation that orients anticipation toward instantaneous yield and controllable variation. The deus ex machina names an externally imposed resolution that interrupts causal development—historically a crane-borne god, functionally an algorithmic override—thereby concentrating attention on closure mechanics rather than world-building continuity. Read together, the pair offers a compact …

Designing For Complementarity: Skills, Work, And Education In The Age Of Ai — A Review, James Hutson

Faculty Scholarship

This review synthesizes 2023–2025 evidence on how generative AI and automation are reconfiguring role structures, skill demands, and entry pathways, and proposes design principles that shift attention from task substitution to role redesign and talent architecture. Theoretical framework: Drawing on task-based labor economics, socio-technical systems design, and humancapital complementarity, the review distinguishes domains where substitution pressures concentrate from those where augmentation dominates. Method: A narrative review of peerreviewed studies, official statistics, and policy/industry reports prioritized empirically grounded findings on employment effects, skills, governance, and program outcomes; inclusion emphasized methodological transparency and recency. Results and discussion: Convergent evidence shows contraction in …

Quilting As Reproductive Justice Information Activism, Liz Chenevey

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Joinder, Not Jurisdiction: Toward A New Theory Of Standing, Adam N. Steinman

Faculty Scholarship

This Article builds on an important development in the Supreme Court’s standing jurisprudence to propose a novel theory that would allow more meaningful access to federal courts while vindicating legitimate separation-of-powers concerns. In its recent decision in TransUnion LLC v. Ramirez, the Supreme Court endorsed a theory of standing based on Article II, writing that litigation between private parties—even when explicitly authorized by Congress—can run afoul of the executive branch’s interest in “how to prioritize and how aggressively to pursue legal actions against defendants who violate the law.” This Article II move has been justifiably criticized. But it is …

Trump Epa’S Proposed Revocation Of Greenhouse Gas Endangerment Finding Raises Tangle Of Legal Issues, Michael B. Gerrard

Faculty Scholarship

On July 29, 2025, at an auto dealership in Indiana, Lee Zeldin, Administrator of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), announced a proposal to withdraw the Endangerment Finding for greenhouse gases (GHGs), which has been EPA’s legal basis for using the Clean Air Act to fight climate change. This action, which will surely be fought in court once it becomes final, raises a host of legal issues. This article discusses the legal basis for and significance of the Endangerment Finding; Zeldin’s principal arguments for revoking it, and challenges that will be raised to them; the range of possible outcomes in …

From Displacement To Design: Reframing Work, Skills, And Education For The Ai-Transformed Economy A Review, James Hutson

Faculty Scholarship

Between 2023 and 2025, the U.S. labor market entered a period of accelerated restructuring driven by generative artificial intelligence (AI) and automation. Routine, entry-level cognitive roles—particularly in clerical, customer service, and junior technical positions—contracted sharply as intelligent systems assumed high-volume, rules-based tasks. While these displacements echo past automation cycles, the present transformation is distinct in its scope, affecting both knowledge work and creative functions, and in its speed, amplified by enterprise-scale adoption. Simultaneously, demand has surged for specialized AI-related positions, interdisciplinary roles blending domain expertise with AI fluency, and ―durable skills‖ that remain resistant to automation. Drawing on labor market …

Most-Favored-Nation's False Promises, George A. Bermann

Faculty Scholarship

Most-favoured-nation (MFN) protection seems decidedly straightforward both in meaning and operation, certainly as compared to other investment protections, such as fair and equitable treatment, which are plagued with indeterminacy. But the clarity of meaning and ease of application of MFN clauses are largely illusory. An examination of arbitral case law reveals seriously underestimated uncertainties surrounding the doctrine’s scope and workings. But the problems with MFN run far deeper. MFN may have the virtue of enhancing the level of protection of foreign investments. But States do not only extend benefits; they also withhold them. MFN disrespects the balance that States sought …

Bank Supervision And Article Ii, Kathryn Judge

Faculty Scholarship

The administrative state is again at a cross roads. The Supreme Court seems poised to continue its march toward trying to fit all of government neatly into one of the three constitutionally enumerated branches. An important front of this shift has been a flattening of the mechanisms through which officers of the United States may be held appropriately accountable for their actions. Waning are the days when Congress had the flexibility to create the institutions it believed were “necessary and proper” for carrying into execution important policy aims and to determine the appropriate mechanisms for accountability in conjunction with considering …

Forgoing Nuclear: Nuclear Power Plant Closures And Carbon Emissions In The United States, Luke Petach

Faculty Scholarship

This paper examines the effect of nuclear power plant decommissioning on electricity generation and carbon emissions in the United States. Using data on nuclear reactor closures in the United States between 1993 and 2022 and data on state-level carbon emissions and electricity generation from the Energy Information Administration (EIA), this paper adopts a difference-in- differences (DiD) approach to estimate the effect of nuclear decommissioning. Two-way fixed-effects (TWFE) DiD estimates suggest a nuclear plant closure increases annual state-level per capita carbon emissions between 6% and 8%. The increase in state-level carbon emissions is driven by a substitution toward fossil fuel electricity—particularly …

Algorithmic Governance And The Boardroom: Empirical And Strategic Perspectives On Ai Integration In Corporate And Educational Oversight, James Hutson, Guarango Banerjee

Faculty Scholarship

The accelerating digitization of executive decision-making has prompted critical re-examination of the function and value of traditional boards of directors within corporate and educational institutions. Empirical research consistently reveals that human boards, while ostensibly tasked with strategic insight and fiduciary oversight, are frequently constrained by structural inefficiencies—such as director overcommitment, inflated compensation, and persistent conflicts of interest—that undermine organizational performance. Against this backdrop, the integration of Artificial Intelligence agents, either as analytic adjuncts or autonomous decision-makers, emerges as a plausible avenue for enhancing board effectiveness. This article synthesizes global case studies, peer-reviewed findings, and real-time technological developments to critically evaluate …

Harnessing The Electronic Health Record To Identify And Enroll People With Epilepsy Into A Self-Management Program: Implementation And Scalability In A Clinical Setting, Clara Adeniyi, Richard Barigye, Jessica Black, Nicole Fiorelli, Carrie Rogers, Martha Sajatovic

Faculty Scholarship

Rationale: “Self-management for people with epilepsy and a history of negative health events” (SMART) is an 8-week, remotely delivered, Epilepsy Self-Management (ESM) program. The ongoing EXPANDing self-management support in healthcare networks (EXPAND) initiative leveraged the Electronic Health Record (EHR) to identify SMART candidates, simplify recruitment, and reduce staff workload. Methods: This is an ongoing implementation effort at two Level 4 Epilepsy Centers (Iowa and Cincinnati) using the Epic EHR which follows 9326 People With Epilepsy (PWE). The EHR uses pre-visit screening to identify PWE with a recent seizure; barriers to medication adherence; depression symptoms; age 18–25; or residence in rural …