Digital Commons Network^™

Brownfields Cleanup: A Look Back And Ahead Toward Superfund Authority, Clifford Villa

Faculty Scholarship

Did you know that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, through the Superfund program within each of the ten regional offices across the United States, has millions of dollars to spend each year for cleaning up contaminated sites that are not designated “Superfund” sites? Not many people seem to know that, even lawyers who practice in environmental law, or even law professors who teach it. If these elite folks do not know that, then how would ordinary community members know that, people with busy lives who don’t do Superfund for a living? The short answer is, they probably don’t know either.

Civil Procedure Update 2021 (Handout And Slide Deck), Verónica C. Gonzales, Julio C. Romero

Faculty Scholarship

This presentation aims to 1) review recent amendments to the state and federal rules of civil procedure; 2) help you understand the impact of recent federal and state published opinions interpreting and applying the rules of civil procedure; and 3) assess your understanding of the updates.

Law Enforcement's Lochner, Miriam H. Baer

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Can “Asians” Truly Be Americans?, Vinay Harpalani

Faculty Scholarship

Recent, tragic events have brought more attention to hate and bias crimes against Asian Americans. It is important to address these crimes and prevent them in the future, but the discourse on Asian Americans should not end there. Many non-Asian Americans are unaware or only superficially aware of the vast diversity that exists among us, along with the challenges posed by that diversity. Some have basic knowledge of the immigration and exclusion of Asian Americans, the internment of Japanese Americans which was upheld in Korematsu v. United States, and the “model minority stereotype”, but these are Asian Americans 101. This …

Quantification Of The Effects Of Hydrophobicity And Mass Loading On The Effective Coverage Of Surface-Immobilized Elastin-Like Peptides, Zihang Su, Julie N. Renner

Faculty Scholarship

Elastin-like peptides (ELPs) immobilized to solid surfaces have recently gained attention for use in electrochemical applications in sensing as well as bioenabled electrode assembly. Key to the success of these applications is understanding how ELPs impact the access and electron transfer of reacting species to the solid surface (effective surface coverage). In this study, short ELPs with varying hydrophobicity and sequence length were designed for gold attachment, and the effect on the ability of a redox probe to access a gold surface was characterized by cyclic voltammetry. A quantitative model describing the relationship between ELP effective surface coverage as a …

Firm Differences: Skill Sorting And Software, James Bessen, Chen Meng, Erich Denk

Faculty Scholarship

Recent research shows that much recent rise in wage inequality comes from growing differences between firms, especially sorting of skilled workers to high-paying firms. This paper explores the role of proprietary software in these changes. Using job ad data, we find that proprietary software is strongly associated with firm wage fixed effects and also with firm skills. Software accounts for half or more of skill sorting across firms. Moreover, both skill sorting and firm wage effects are greater for larger firms. The huge growth in proprietary software helps explain the growth in skill sorting that increases wage inequality.

Secular Invocations And The Promise Of Religious Pluralism, Jay D. Wexler

Faculty Scholarship

The Supreme Court has considered the constitutionality of “legislative prayer” twice, once in the 1983 case of Marsh v. Chambers and once in the 2014 case of Town of Greece v. Galloway. Although both of those cases upheld challenged invocation practices on the basis that such practices predated the adoption of the First Amendment, they also placed additional limits on the nature of such prayer programs, including that they be non-discriminatory, as Justice Kennedy explained in Town of Greece. In response to Justice Kennedy’s non-discrimination mandate, hundreds of secular individuals in the wake of Town of Greece asked to give …

Digital Humanities And Virtual Reality: A Review Of Theories And Best Practices For Art History, James Hutson, Trent Olsen

Faculty Scholarship

The technology of virtual reality (VR) has had proven educational benefits over the last three decades. And yet, most research conducted on these benefits has been confined to science programs, especially in Computer Science. The application of VR technology for the Digital Humanities is only now beginning to receive attention, but more study needs to be conducted on its uses within various humanistic disciplines. In order to expand on the research at a pivotal time in education when modalities expand beyond the dominant face-to-face model to incorporate more hybrid, distance education, and online learning, this study reviews the literature and …

Technological Tethereds: Potential Impact Of Untrustworthy Artificial Intelligence In Criminal Justice Risk Assessment Instruments, Sonia M. Gipson Rankin

Faculty Scholarship

Issues of racial inequality and violence are front and center in today’s society, as are issues surrounding artificial intelligence (AI). This Article, written by a law professor who is also a computer scientist, takes a deep dive into understanding how and why hacked and rogue AI creates unlawful and unfair outcomes, particularly for persons of color.

Black Americans are disproportionally featured in criminal justice, and their stories are obfuscated. The seemingly endless back-to-back murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Ahmaud Arbery, and heartbreakingly countless others have finally shaken the United States from its slumbering journey towards intentional criminal justice …

Derjaguin-Landau-Verwey-Overbeek Energy Landscape Of A Janus Particle With A Nonuniform Cap, Siddharth Rajupet, Aidin Rashidi, Christopher L. Wirth

Faculty Scholarship

A colloidal particle is often termed “Janus” when some portion of its surface is coated by a second material which has distinct properties from the native particle. The anisotropy of Janus particles enables unique behavior at interfaces. However, rigorous methodologies to predict Janus particle dynamics at interfaces are required to implement these particles in complex fluid applications. Previous work studying Janus particle dynamics does not consider van der Waals interactions and realistic, nonuniform coating morphology. Here we develop semianalytic equations to accurately calculate the potential landscape, including van der Waals interactions, of a Janus particle with nonuniform coating thickness above …

International Collaboration Framework For The Calculation Of Performance Loss Rates: Data Quality, Benchmarks, And Trends (Towards A Uniform Methodology), Alan J. Curran, Kunal Rath, Arash Khalilnejad, Roger H. French

Faculty Scholarship

The IEA PVPS Task 13 group, experts who focus on photovoltaic performance, operation, and reliability from several leading R&D centers, universities, and industrial companies, is developing a framework for the calculation of performance loss rates of a large number of commercial and research photovoltaic (PV) power plants and their related weather data coming across various climatic zones. The general steps to calculate the performance loss rate are (i) input data cleaning and grading; (ii) data filtering; (iii) performance metric selection, corrections, and aggregation; and finally, (iv) application of a statistical modeling method to determine the performance loss rate value. In …

Computationally-Efficient Spatiotemporal Correlation Analysis Super-Resolves Anomalous Diffusion, Shawn Yoshida, William Schmid, Nam Vo, William Calabrase, Lydia Kisley

Faculty Scholarship

Anomalous diffusion dynamics in confined nanoenvironments govern the macroscale properties and interactions of many biophysical and material systems. Currently, it is difficult to quantitatively link the nanoscale structure of porous media to anomalous diffusion within them. Fluorescence correlation spectroscopy super-resolution optical fluctuation imaging (fcsSOFI) has been shown to extract nanoscale structure and Brownian diffusion dynamics within gels, liquid crystals, and polymers, but has limitations which hinder its wider application to more diverse, biophysically-relevant datasets. Here, we parallelize the least-squares curve fitting step on a GPU improving computation times by up to a factor of 40, implement anomalous diffusion and two-component …

Robust Inference Of Kinase Activity Using Functional Networks, Serhan Yılmaz, Daniela M. Schlatzer, Mark R. Chance, Mehmet Koyutürk

Faculty Scholarship

Mass spectrometry enables high-throughput screening of phosphoproteins across a broad range of biological contexts. When complemented by computational algorithms, phospho-proteomic data allows the inference of kinase activity, facilitating the identification of dysregulated kinases in various diseases including cancer, Alzheimer’s disease and Parkinson’s disease. To enhance the reliability of kinase activity inference, we present a network-based framework, RoKAI, that integrates various sources of functional information to capture coordinated changes in signaling. Through computational experiments, we show that phosphorylation of sites in the functional neighborhood of a kinase are significantly predictive of its activity. The incorporation of this knowledge in RoKAI consistently …

Intergenerative Transdisciplinarity In “Glocal” Learning And Collaboration, Peter J. Whitehouse

Faculty Scholarship

In this report, authors from North America, Africa, Europe, and Asia share commonalities and differences in the lessons we are learning from COVID-19, especially about scholarship and collaboration. We represent different ages and disciplines hence our focus on intergenerational perspectives and transdisciplinary considerations. Our work is intergenerative{that is going "between to go beyond" by connecting creative sources of culture and focusing on the emergent, that is responding to changes in the context in which we work. And importantly in our view, we will point beyond whatever the next phase of COVID or even the next pandemic brings to a more …

Environmental Effects Of Stratospheric Ozone Depletion, Uv Radiation, And Interactions With Climate Change: Unep Environmental Effects Assessment Panel, Update 2020, Laura S. Bruckman

Faculty Scholarship

This assessment by the Environmental Effects Assessment Panel (EEAP) of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) provides the latest scientific update since our most recent comprehensive assessment (Photochemical and Photobiological Sciences, 2019, 18, 595–828). The interactive effects between the stratospheric ozone layer, solar ultraviolet (UV) radiation, and climate change are presented within the framework of the Montreal Protocol and the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. We address how these global environmental changes affect the atmosphere and air quality; human health; terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems; biogeochemical cycles; and materials used in outdoor construction, solar energy technologies, and fabrics. In many cases, …

Dysregulating The Media: Digital Redlining, Privacy Erosion, And The Unintentional Deregulation Of American Media, Jon M. Garon

Faculty Scholarship

Netflix, Amazon, YouTube, and Apple have been joined by Disney+, Twitch, Facebook, and others to supplant the broadcast industry. As the FCC, FTC, and other regulators struggle, a new digital divide has emerged. The current regulatory regime for television is built upon the government’s right to manage over-the-air broadcasting. As content producers shift away from broadcast and cable, much of the government’s regulatory control will end, resulting in new consequences for public policy and new challenges involving privacy, advertising, and antitrust law. Despite the technological change, there are compelling government interests in a healthy media environment. This article explores the …

Revitalizing Greenhouse Gas Permitting Inside A Biden Epa, Matt Haber, Seema Kakade

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Shopping For An Ir: The Search, Adoption, And Implementation Of The University Of Louisiana At Lafayette’S Institutional Repository Platform, Zachary G. Stein

Faculty Scholarship

Institutions wishing to disseminate their scholarship on a wide scale have influenced the need for institutional repositories (IR). These repositories provide institutions the opportunity to display and preserve what they have to offer in an open access environment. The University of Louisiana at Lafayette (UL Lafayette) had attempted to adopt an IR for years and finally achieved this goal. Many issues impacted the adoption, including funding, deciding on the appropriate platform solutions, and marketing the need for contributions from faculty and university administration. There is much optimism for the IR, as it is also included in the university’s Quality Enhancement …

Deceive, Profit, Repeat: Public Deception Schemes To Conceal Product Dangers, Wes Henricksen

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Isotonic Ion Replacement Can Lower The Threshold For Selective Infrared Neural Inhibition, Junqi Zhuo, Zihui Ou, Yuhan Zhang, Elizabeth M. Jackson, Sachin S. Shankar, Matthew T. Mcpheeters, Hillel J. Chiel, Michael W. Jenkins

Faculty Scholarship

Significance: Infrared (IR) inhibition can selectively block peripheral sensory nerve fibers, a potential treatment for autonomic-dysfunction-related diseases (e.g., neuropathic pain and interstitial cystitis). Lowering the IR inhibition threshold can increase its translational potentials. Aim: Infrared induces inhibition by enhancing potassium channel activation. We hypothesized that the IR dose threshold could be reduced by combining it with isotonic ion replacement. Approach: We tested the IR inhibition threshold on the pleural-abdominal connective of Aplysia californica. Using a customized chamber system, the IR inhibition was applied either in normal saline or in isotonic ion-replaced saline, which could be high glucose saline, high choline …

Influence Of Non-Uniform Elevated Temperature On The Structural Stability And Strength Of Gypsum-Sheathed Cold-Formed Steel Beam Channel Members, Elias Ali

Faculty Scholarship

The objective of this paper is to computationally explore the structural stability and strength of gypsum-protected CFS (cold-formed steel) beam channel sections under non-uniform elevated temperatures when exposed to standard fire on one side of the panel and subjected to pure bending. When a CFS member is subjected to fire (or thermal gradients) its material properties change—but this change happens around the cross-section and along the length creating a member which is potentially non-uniform and unsymmetrical in its response even if the apparent geometry is uniform and symmetric.Computational finite element models were analyzed in ABAQUS to establish steady-state thermal gradients …

Divorce And The Collapse Of The Three-Legged Stool: Setting Servicemembers Up For Success In The Age Of Brs And Covid-19, Kan Samuel

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

What Is Privacy? That’S The Wrong Question, Woodrow Hartzog

Faculty Scholarship

Privacy has never had a precise meaning. But in the early 1900s, the concept took on new life as a term of art in legal frameworks. The result has been a bit of a mess, as no singular definition has been adequate for all purposes. Daniel Solove, perhaps the most influential privacy scholar of our day, wrote at the turn of the millennium that privacy was “a concept in disarray.”

In this short essay reflecting upon Solove’s impact on the modern study of information privacy, I argue that the chaos and futility of competing conceptualizations of privacy is why Solove’s …

Does A Rising Tide Lift All Boats? Sea Level Rise, Land Use, And Property Rights, Laura M. Padilla

Faculty Scholarship

This Article considers the competing interests of landowners, governments, and academics; Part I describes the problem-sea level rise and its projected acceleration. Part II details sea level rise physical and economic impacts. Part III discusses a range of adaptation responses to the problem, and Part IV explores the sea level rise-adaptation strategies' potential legal challenges. This Article focuses on California, but the problems, solutions, and challenges pervade coastal communities everywhere.

Algorithms In Business, Merchant-Consumer Interactions, & Regulation, Tabrez Y. Ebrahim

Faculty Scholarship

The shift towards the use of algorithms in business has transformed merchant–consumer interactions. Products and services are increasingly tailored for consumers through algorithms that collect and analyze vast amounts of data from interconnected devices, digital platforms, and social networks. While traditionally merchants and marketeers have utilized market segmentation, customer demographic profiles, and statistical approaches, the exponential increase in consumer data and computing power enables them to develop and implement algorithmic techniques that change consumer markets and society as a whole. Algorithms enable targeting of consumers more effectively, in real-time, and with high predictive accuracy in pricing and profiling strategies. In …

Preserving The Fruits Of Labor: Impediments To University Inventor Mobility, Brenda M. Simon

Faculty Scholarship

Academic inventors must overcome numerous obstacles when they seek to leave their parent universities. The results of their work are often intertwined in what I call "innovation-essential components," which are important aspects of the. innovative process that create strong ties to the parent university, such as data, patents, trade secrets, grants, contracts, materials, and other agreements and restrictions. Innovation-essential components effectively bind university inventors to their parent institutions, making departure unworkable without the university's approval. Universities sometimes further complicate inventor mobility by entering into unlawful agreements with other academic institutions in their efforts to prevent inventor movement or by engaging …

Law Enforcement’S Lochner, Miriam H. Baer

Faculty Scholarship

Long-established rules of constitutional criminal procedure empower the government to cheaply and efficiently demand information from businesses and corporations, even when those entities are themselves targets of criminal investigations. These rules have become extremely valuable to government investigators, notwithstanding their contestable premises and wide-ranging effects on employees, owners, and consumers.

This ease of access era, however, may be nearing its end. A convergence of changes in how the Supreme Court views Fourth Amendment privacy rights on the one hand, and how it conceptualizes corporate personhood on the other, is apt to trigger an erosion of government enforcement power. At the …

Clearing Opacity Through Machine Learning, Arti K. Rai, W. Nicholson Price Ii

Faculty Scholarship

Artificial intelligence and machine learning represent powerful tools in many fields, ranging from criminal justice to human biology to climate change. Part of the power of these tools arises from their ability to make predictions and glean useful information about complex real-world systems without the need to understand the workings of those systems.

But these machine-learning tools are often as opaque as the underlying systems, whether because they are complex, nonintuitive, deliberately kept secret, or a synergistic combination of those three factors. A burgeoning literature addresses challenges arising from the opacity of machine-learning systems. This literature has largely focused on …

Practicing The Be Practice Ready: Making Competent Legal Researchers Using The New Process And Practice Method, Jason Murray

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

The Chinese Advantage In Emergency Law, Ugo Mattei, Guanghua Liu, Emanuele Ariano

Faculty Scholarship

This Article has a twofold purpose. On the one hand, it offers comparative materials for an informed discussion of COVID-determined emergency law in China and Italy by assessing its normative implications and political genealogy. On the other hand, it explores the essential contiguity between the ‘state of exception’ triggered by the pandemic and the possible geopolitical shifts in global legal hegemony in the actual phase of surveillance capitalism which is witnessing a decline of law as a form of social organization and its replacement by the predictive models elaborated by technology. In this respect, the traditional Western iconography has long …