Digital Commons Network^™

Size-Tunable Tellurium Quantum Dots By Glancing Angle Deposition, S. M. Sayem, Salim Hussain, Fernando Maia De Oliveira, Ranjitha Kumarapuram Hariharalakshmanan, Gregory Guisbiers, Tansel Karabacak

Faculty Scholarship

Tellurium has a unique helical crystal arrangement and pronounced anisotropy that influence its electronic and optical properties at the nanoscale. This study reports the synthesis of pure tellurium quantum dots (Te QDs) on silicon wafer using glancing angle deposition (GLAD). Quasi-hemispherical dots with lateral sizes ranging from 9 to 28 nm and vertical dimensions of 6 to 10 nm were produced as a function of the deposition duration. A comparison of the dot sizes with the Bohr radii of the charge carriers indicated a regime of strong to intermediate confinement. Structural analyses confirmed the polycrystalline nature and trigonal phase of …

Senate Bipartisan Permit Reform Bill Would Upend Many Environmental Laws, Michael B. Gerrard

Faculty Scholarship

On September 26, the Republican chairs and Democratic ranking members of two key Senate committees released the Bipartisan American Affordability and Jobs Act of 2026 (BAAJA). The full Senate is expected to take up the bill on November 9 (a week after the midterm elections). Its future in the House is uncertain.

The bill, the culmination of years of negotiations on permitting reform, is very good for the proponents of many kinds of energy projects (both clean and fossil), especially electricity transmission. It is very bad for environmental groups and other project opponents who want to challenge these projects in …

Fifty Years After Estelle V. Gamble—Where Does Carceral Health Law Go From Here?, James René Jolin, Jenean Docter, Benjamin A. Barsky

Faculty Scholarship

Fifty years ago, the US Supreme Court decided Estelle v.Gamble—a landmark case commonly known for establishing a duty on the government to provide health services to incarcerated people, whether before or after conviction. In this column, we offer a brief critical reappraisal of Estelle by reviewing its demanding legal standard and identifying a set of related litigation barriers that stymie the availability of relief in federal court. Given these constraints, we argue for a carceral health law paradigm that moves beyond the current, dominant focus on litigation.We use Medicaid law and policy as a case study to explore the …

Generative Ai In Art And Design Education: Keeping The Human In The Creative Loop, James Hutson, Daniel Suarez

Faculty Scholarship

Research on generative artificial intelligence in education reveals a persistent divergence between successful assisted performance and the development of independent knowledge, creative judgment, and transferable skill. Studies of art and design additionally identify opportunities for iterative exploration alongside concerns about visual fixation, uncertain authorship, and dependence on generated alternatives. These findings create an instructional problem: educators need to determine which creative decisions should remain with learners, which operations can receive bounded assistance, and which activities can be delegated without bypassing the intended learning. Existing scholarship addresses these questions through research on scaffolding, human-AI collaboration, assessment, and psychological ownership, but these …

Ai Slop, Jessica Silbey, Woodrow Hartzog

Faculty Scholarship

The term “AI slop” has become popular to describe the output of generative AI systems seen as voluminous, low quality, or the result of little effort. When AI-generated music and videos flood platforms, they are called slop. Peer-reviewed journals and legal tribunals are drowning in low-quality and low-reliability AI slop submissions.  Employees are seen to be producing mountains of slop in their reports and communications with each other. The term has inertia and heft, and the phenomenon has significant consequences. Most of them are not good.

But the boundaries of “AI slop” and its usefulness in policy discussions are not …

Patents And Incentives To Assign, License, Or Litigate, Keith N. Hylton

Faculty Scholarship

This paper presents a model of the activity of patent intermediaries and potential infringers in a system of costly patent litigation.  Because the intermediary, in comparison to the inventor, has a more credible threat to sue, both the revenue from infringement litigation and the intrinsic value of the patent are greater in the intermediary’s hands.  The central finding is that intermediaries license patents to potential infringers when infringement litigation is inefficient. Intermediaries tend to acquire high-quality patents from inventors and assign low-quality patents to potential infringers. Another issue this model addresses is the differential between the private and the social …

Tellurium Selenide Quantum Wires Synthesized By Pulsed Laser Ablation In Liquids, Rajendra Subedi, Francisco Ruiz-Zepeda, Iono Hill, Geraldine Hallais, Etienne Herth, Gregory Guisbiers

Faculty Scholarship

Tellurium–selenide (TexSe1-x) binary alloys are promising chalcogenide systems with tunable optoelectronic properties, yet their synthesis in quantumly confined one-dimensional forms remains limited. Here, we report the synthesis of TexSe1-x quantum wires (QWs) via a two-step pulsed laser ablation in liquids (PLAL) approach, enabling surfactant-free formation of alloyed nanostructures under non-equilibrium conditions. A tellurium colloid is first generated and subsequently exposed to selenium ablation, promoting in-situ alloying through repeated plasma-bubble interactions at high repetition rate. The resulting QWs exhibit an average diameter of ~17 ± 4 nm and a length of ~475 ± 46 nm. Structural and chemical analyses (XRD, Raman, …

Socially-Minded Investors And Corporate Behavior, Merritt B. Fox, Menesh S. Patel

Faculty Scholarship

Many equity investors are concerned with the world’s worsening social and environmental problems and are losing faith in the capacity of political institutions to respond. Corporate behavior is often contributing to these problems. Some investors, at least if fully informed as to costs and benefits involved, would favor corrective changes to corporate behavior even where that would lessen their investment returns. Two important questions arise: (1) given existing law, are such willing-to-sacrifice equity investors currently affecting firm behavior; and (2) should there be legal reform that makes firms more sensitive to these willing-to-sacrifice investors’ preferences? This Article seeks to answer …

Community Ai Resilience: A Five-Pillar Framework For Preparing Communities For An Ai-Transformed World, Robin D. Anderson, Nicholas A. Curtis

Faculty Scholarship

Current artificial intelligence readiness strategies focus almost exclusively on two priorities: expanding access to AI tools and developing a technical workforce. While necessary, these efforts are insufficient. AI seems likely to transform how people work and, with that, to reshape how individuals derive meaning, how families function, and how communities organize. This paper presents the Community AI Resilience Framework, a five-pillar model addressing the human systems dimensions of AI transformation: (1) Economic Resilience and Regulatory Adaptation; (2) Social Cohesion and Belonging Infrastructure; (3) Psychological Resilience and Identity Reconstruction; (4) Civic and Educational Renewal; and (5) Ecological and Leisure Commons Management. …

Trial By Fire: Disaster Justice And Lessons Learned, Clifford Villa

Faculty Scholarship

Disaster Justice reflects the intersection of environmental justice and disaster law. The study of disaster justice is becoming increasingly essential as disasters become more frequent and devastating in the face of accelerating climate change. Disaster law is marked by statutes such as the federal Stafford Act and by theory such as the “disaster cycle” of readiness, response, and recovery. Environmental justice recognizes that the distribution of harms such as bad air or water quality may be distributed inequitably among groups such as low-income populations or racial minorities. In similar fashion, the adverse impacts of disasters may also be distributed inequitably …

From Theory To Practice Implementing A Mission, Vision, And Values Statement To Support Change In An Academic Library Liaison Program, Patricia Fiorillo, Kristy Padron

Faculty Scholarship

Academic library liaison programs historically varied in their functions and adapted to their organizational needs and priorities. This case study examines the integration of a mission, vision, and values statement into the liaison program at Florida Atlantic University Libraries. Originating from business and organizational theories, these statements have been adopted by nonprofit organizations, including academic libraries, to guide administrative processes and services. The study highlights a re-visioning of an established liaison program during a period of transition. This fostered a shared understanding of the library’s priorities and documented its goals and objectives. This alignment was particularly crucial as Florida Atlantic …

Beyond Ai Detection: A Pilot Study Of Integrevise And Viva-Based Verification Of Student Understanding In Ai-Mediated Assessment, James Hutson, Kyle Poyer, Kelvin Adshola Atologun

Faculty Scholarship

This article examines the Integrevise platform through a repeated cross-sectional, multicycle pilot case study of viva-based verification in AI-mediated assessment environments. Integrevise pairs a submitted written artifact with a short adaptive viva in which students explain their work, reasoning, and application in their own words. Rather than functioning as an AI detector or automated grading system, the platform operates as a diagnostic assessment layer intended to surface comprehension, authorship confidence, and disengagement risk before final grades become the only available signal. The pilot was conducted across Fall 2025 and Spring 2026 at a private liberal arts college in the Midwest; …

State Policy And Regulatory Approaches To Sustainable Aviation Fuel Across The United States, Somtochukwu Attamah, Mary Johnson, Lara Fowler, Michael D. Helbing

Faculty Scholarship

Sustainable Aviation Fuel (SAF) represents a critical lever for achieving near-term decarbonization of the aviation industry. SAF can be manufactured for “drop-in” use in existing aircraft and fueling systems, allowing manufacturers to achieve lifecycle greenhouse gas (GHG) savings relative to standard jet fuel. However, U.S. policy is still disjointed: federal incentives are accompanied by diffuse state efforts, which means uneven market-based feedback and investment risk. After outlining the federal policy context, this Article conducts a comparative analysis of SAF-related policy frameworks across the fifty states. This includes a variety of government solutions offered in the form of enacted and proposed …

There Is No Free Benchmark: An Institutional View Of Legal Ai Benchmarking, Neel Guha, Andy K. Zhang, Christine Tsang, Christopher D. Manning, Julian Nyarko, Daniel E. Ho

Faculty Scholarship

Despite substantial excitement around the use of AI in law, little information exists on the performance and associated risks of the domain’s widely marketed tools. Recent work, for instance, has demonstrated the significant potential for “hallucinations” — wherein models make up facts, law, and precedent — leading Chief Justice Roberts to spotlight this risk in his annual report on the judiciary. We argue that there is a need for public AI benchmarking in law. First, relative to other AI application domains, the legal AI ecosystem lacks legibility — there is little information about the design and performance of many commercial …

Classical Liberalism And Property, Thomas W. Merrill

Faculty Scholarship

Classical liberalism is characterized by several key attributes. Its central normative criterion is the well‑being of the individual, not some aggregate like society or the nation‑state. Individuals are presumptively regarded as responsible actors, capable of judging their own best interests and accountable for their actions that interfere with the well‑being of others. Because individuals are presumptively regarded as responsible actors, there is a strong preference for imposing only minimal obligations on them through the power of the state, and these usually involve general negative duties that are universal in character, chiefly to forbear from using force or fraud to interfere …

Prompted Props, Human Pipelines: Evaluating Ai-Generated 3d Assets For Game-Ready Environments, Andrew Begemann, James Hutson

Faculty Scholarship

Generative AI systems increasingly promise rapid 3D asset production for game development, yet their practical viability depends on whether generated models can move beyond visual preview into editable, optimized, engine-ready workflows. This article presents a practice-led comparative case study of a stylized fantasy tavern environment produced through two workflows: a human-authored Blender pipeline and an AI-assisted pipeline using Meshy 6 and Hunyuan 3D. Using a fixed asset list, shared visual theme, documented prompts, production-time tracking, visual comparison, topology inspection, UV-map analysis, and post-generation labor accounting, the study evaluates whether text-to-3D tools function as production substitutes, ideation accelerators, or conditional asset …

Owning Geothermal Energy, Gabriel Eckstein

Faculty Scholarship

Geothermal energy holds vast potential for decarbonizing the U.S. energy system, yet the sector remains significantly underdeveloped, supplying only 0.4% of the nation's electricity. A principal barrier to growth is the fragmented and ambiguous legal landscape currently governing ownership of geothermal resources: thirty-three states lack any clear statutory or common-law framework identifying who owns subsurface thermal energy. This Article examines the physical characteristics of geothermal energy, recent developments in the U.S. geothermal sector, and the principal doctrinal approaches that might govern ownership of subsurface heat, including the ad coelum doctrine, common-pool and open-access frameworks, the rule of capture, and public …

Jurisdictional Waters, Jamison E. Colburn

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

On The Right To Obscurity, Woodrow Hartzog, Evan Selinger

Faculty Scholarship

Tragically, U.S. privacy law has neglected to address a significant dimension of privacy. While lawmakers and judges have routinely recognized intrusions into our secluded spaces and breaches of our confidentiality and secrecy, they have largely failed to protect our most common yet also our most underappreciated form of privacy: the practical obscurity that allows us to live freely and with dignity. Obscurity, which is the state of protection that arises when personal information is difficult for some people to obtain or correctly interpret, serves several vital interests: (1) it safeguards our ability to express ourselves without fear that everything we …

Five Urban Futures For A Hot Planet: U.S. Legal Scenarios, Michael B. Gerrard

Faculty Scholarship

If current climate change trends continue, flooding, extreme heat, wildfires, and water scarcity will make the homes of millions of people in the United States increasingly uninhabitable. This change could happen by the end of the century, perhaps sooner. Most people will want to stay in their current homes, but there is no coherent policy to fortify the most vulnerable places. Nor is the current legal system equipped to handle what may become one of the largest migrations in U.S. history, as people flee intolerable climate conditions. This Article envisions five scenarios for cities in the future: sprout, grow, stay, …

The Impact Of Ai Companions On Family Law, Clare Huntington

Faculty Scholarship

People of all ages and backgrounds regularly use AI companions — virtual friends, lovers, and confidantes powered by artificial intelligence. As a new form of relationship, this development poses novel doctrinal and policy questions for family law. As a doctrinal matter, what does child neglect look like when a parent delegates caretaking to an AI companion? How should standards for elder neglect adapt to the widespread use of robotic caregivers? Should lawmakers impose mandatory reporting requirements on therapy bots if children share experiences of abuse or neglect? And can people designate an AI companion as a health care proxy? As …

Projected U.S. Cardiovascular Disease Burden From Heat Exposure For Future Greenhouse Gas Scenarios, Gokul Parmeswaran, Sai Rahul Ponnana, Santosh Kumar Sirasapalli, Niketh Surya, Tong Zhang, Zhuo Chen, Jean-Eudes Dazard, Salil V. Deo, Sanjay Rajagopalan

Faculty Scholarship

Importance: Climate change may reverse decades of improvements in cardiovascular disease (CVD) mortality in the US; however, comprehensive regional projections of heat-related CVD burden in the US are unavailable. Objective: To use the county-level observed (2010-2016) heat-related CVD burden in the US to obtain the projected rates through 2050 according to the mean (shared socioeconomic pathway [SSP] 2-4.5) and high (SSP5-8.5) greenhouse gas (GHG) emission pathways. Design, Setting, and Participants: This cross-sectional ecological analysis used county-level summary data including all counties in the contiguous US from 2010 through 2016 as baseline data with projections to 2030 and 2050 under SSP …

Strongly Confined Bismuth Antimonide Quantum Dots, Min Khadka, Rajendra Subedi, Qiaohui Zhou, Xin Lu, Joelin A. Agyei-Mensah, Miguel José-YacamáN, Guillaume Lang, Etienne Herth, Gregory Guisbiers

Faculty Scholarship

Bismuth antimonide (Bi1–xSbx) has emerged as a highly promising material for quantum applications due to its complex band structure. In this study, spherical Bi1–xSbx quantum dots (QDs), with a diameter of around 8 ± 2 nm, were successfully synthesized by pulsed laser ablation in liquids. The energy bandgap was determined at 2.02 ± 0.27 eV, which is significantly higher than the bulk value (∼0.025 eV). The strong confinement nature of the dots was confirmed by the Raman peak shifts. The chemical composition of the Bi1–xSbx QDs was measured to be around 77 ± 2 at. % of Bi and 23 …

Prompting As A New Medium: Greenbergian Medium Specificity And The Iterative Unpredictability Of Ai Art, Samantha Shapiro, James Hutson

Faculty Scholarship

This article argues that AI prompting should be understood not as a tool, technique, or accessory to image generation, but as a medium in its own right. Drawing on Clement Greenberg’s theory of medium specificity, it contends that a medium becomes legible through the operations peculiar to itself, namely, the constraints, affordances, and formal procedures that distinguish it from neighboring arts. Existing scholarship has asked whether prompting counts as art, whether prompt engineering constitutes a creative skill, and whether the prompt itself can be aesthetic; however, these accounts often stop short of a sustained theory of prompting as medium. This …

Defining Civil Rico's "Injury To Business Or Property" Requirement: The Supreme Court Takes A Few Steps, Says It Punts, But Actually Fumbles, Randy D. Gordon

Faculty Scholarship

Throughout its history, the RICO statute has presented lawyers with something of an interpretive parlor game. It is indefinite along multiple dimensions and thereby given multiple interpretations, even down to the word level. In Medical Marijuana v. Horn, the Supreme Court set out to define one of RICO's civil-standing provisions: Namely, whether the statute's "injury to business or property" requirement can be satisfied when a plaintiff suffers both economic and personal injuries. In a 5-4 decision, members of the Court engaged in an interpretive battle over the meaning of the phrase and succeeded only in holding that civil RICO does …

How Ai Destroys Institutions, Woodrow Hartzog, Jessica Silbey

Faculty Scholarship

Civic institutions—the rule of law, universities, and a free press—are the backbone of democratic life. They are the mechanisms through which complex societies encourage cooperation and stability, while also adapting to changing circumstances. The real superpower of institutions is their ability to evolve and adapt within a hierarchy of authority and a framework for roles and rules, while maintaining legitimacy for the knowledge produced and the actions taken. Purpose-driven institutions built around transparency, cooperation, and accountability empower individuals to take intellectual risks and challenge the status quo. This happens through the machinations of interpersonal relationships within those institutions, which broaden …

Poor Esg: Regressive Effects Of Climate Stewardship, Zohar Goshen, Assaf Hamdani, Alex Raskolnikov

Faculty Scholarship

The rise of inequality and global warming are the two ultimate challenges of our time. After decades of congressional failure to address climate change, the private sector has stepped in and adopted a set of environmental, social, and governance (ESG) policies as a market-based solution to a public policy failure. ESG advocates hope that corporate executives would save our planet. Where Congress failed, ESG will succeed.

This Article argues that if ESG-driven climate stewardship ever achieves the scale necessary to have a real impact on global warming, it will hurt the poor. Legislative interventions to combat climate change are nearly …

The Political Transformation Of Corporate America, 2001–2022, Reilly S. Steel

Faculty Scholarship

This article reconciles conflicting views about the political landscape of corporate America with new data on the revealed political preferences of 97,469 corporate directors and executives at 9,005 different U.S. companies. Driven largely by turnover, I find that average observed ideology for directors and executives has shifted meaningfully to the left over time, changing from modestly conservative in 2001 to roughly centrist by 2022. This finding supports a middle-ground position between conventional wisdom casting “big business” as a conservative stronghold and revisionist views holding the opposite. Counterfactual simulations and a difference-in-differences design suggest multifaceted reasons for these changes, and hand-collected …

The Federal Reserve’S Fiscal Agent Mandate And The Problem For Central Bank Independence, Lev Menand, Joshua Younger

Faculty Scholarship

The Federal Reserve is among the most powerful organs of government. It is tasked primarily with maintaining the growth of monetary and credit aggregates consistent with long-run maximum employment and price stability. This mandate is widely known and the subject of extensive public debate. But another mandate lies within the statute that is largely overlooked — to serve as fiscal agent of the United States. This distinct responsibility is older, and also important. This Article offers a comprehensive assessment of where the Fed’s two mandates overlap and occasionally sharply conflict: in the market for U.S. government debt. First, it identifies …

Sticky Charters? The Surprisingly Tepid Embrace Of Officer-Protecting Waivers In Delaware, Jens Frankenreiter, Eric L. Talley

Faculty Scholarship

This article examines the response to Delaware’s much-heralded 2022 legal reform that permitted corporations, for the first time, to adopt charter provisions exculpating corporate officers from liability for breaching their fiduciary duty of care. Contrary to widespread predictions that corporate actors would swiftly adopt officer exculpation provisions, our analysis — using both traditional and generative artificial intelligence (AI) methods — reveals a surprisingly low rate of uptake, over three years after the reform’s enactment.

Our study makes both methodological and substantive contributions. Methodologically, we present a novel application of large language models (LLMs) to identify and interpret technical clauses in …