Digital Commons Network^™

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 …

Connecting Families Through Cash Transfers And An Enabling Environment In Colombia, Mexico, And The Philippines: A Qualitative Study, Johanna K P Greeson, John Gyourko, Sarah Wasch, Kristin Mallory, Lory Fehlig, Cesar Jácome, Nestor David Lara Yanes, Fátima Areli Ruiz Gutiérrez, Dennis Guamos, Adele R. Lehman

Faculty Scholarship

Nearly 700 million people worldwide live in extreme poverty, and almost half of the world’s population lives below the poverty line. Cash transfer programs are increasingly used to address poverty’s effects on family well-being, yet less is known about how families experience programs that combine cash transfers with peer-driven mutual aid. Children International’s (CI) Community Independence Initiative (CII) provides conditional cash transfers and promotes family-led goal setting, mutual support, and shared learning. This qualitative study explored how families in Colombia, Mexico, and the Philippines experienced CII and made meaning of its material and relational components. We conducted focus groups with …

State Legislatures: Guardians Of The Federal Balance, Practical Strategies For Monitoring, Strengthening, And Sustaining American Federalism (Remarks), Christian G. Fritz

Faculty Scholarship

My remarks today are drawn from my book, Monitoring American Federalism: The History of State Legislative Resistance, and from an essay I wrote this year for the Center for the Study of Federalism about the responsibility of state legislators to sound the alarm when the federal government overreaches its constitutional authority.

Lessons Learned For The Independent Panel For Evidence For Action Against Amr From Previous International Science Panels: Stakeholder Views From The 2025 Lagos Workshop, Iruka N. Okeke, Anthony Mcdonnell, Ayodele A. Akinyele, Javier Guzman, Kevin Outterson

Faculty Scholarship

In September, 2024, the UN General Assembly assigned the Quadripartite Joint Secretariat on Antimicrobial Resistance (AMR) the task of establishing an Independent Panel for Evidence for Action against AMR (IPEA). To promote stakeholder views and input around the constitution and functioning of this Panel, which could feed into the Quadripartite Joint Secretariat’s consultation process, we independently commissioned seven papers to examine the lessons that could be learned from other high-level scientific panels. We then convened 85 stakeholders, primed with the background papers. The Workshop, held in Lagos, Nigeria in April, 2025, drew representation from around the world, particularly low-income or …

2026 Concise Summer Update To The Corporations Curriculum - Caremark: The Board’S Duty Of Oversight Regarding Work Force Safety & Sexual Misconduct, Sarah Haan

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

De-Centering And Re-Centering Digital Scholarship, Ten Years On, Matthew Hunter, Aaron Retteen, Micah Vandegrift

Faculty Scholarship

Ten years after the publication of a manifesto attempting to describe what digital scholarship could do for and within libraries, some of the original authors reflect on the progress of the call-to-action. This article describes areas in which the integration of digital scholarship activities as core parts of librarianship has and has not become commonplace and traces larger-scale developments in the academy and global knowledge landscape that have contributed to the accuracy of the predictions made in 2017.

Trademarks, Functionality, And Competition, Glynn Lunney

Faculty Scholarship

Courts and commentators have long thought that the purpose of trademark and unfair competition law is to distinguish fair competition from unfair competition and prohibit the latter. Yet, trademark law has a more fundamental, more foundational purpose. Before trademark law can distinguish fair competition from unfair competition, there must first be competition. That makes ensuring competition trademark law’s highest priority. Identifying and prohibiting unfair competition becomes, by necessity, a subordinate concern. Until 1982, courts recognized this hierarchy and enforced a broad and flexible functionality limitation on trademark or trade dress protection to ensure competitive markets. In 1982, however, this changed. …

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 …

Validating Valuation: How Statistical Learning Can Cabin Expert Discretion In Valuation Disputes, Andrew C. Baker, Jonah B. Gelbach, Eric L. Talley

Faculty Scholarship

This article challenges conventional methods used in financial valuation across transactional and litigation domains. We show that conventional valuation methods allow for considerable discretion, making it possible for each side’s experts to submit dramatically varying valuations simply by choosing among facially reasonable values of parameters that must be selected to carry out conventional valuations. We use large-scale empirical simulations powered by real-world data to demonstrate the scope of such discretion. We next consider several alternatives based on data-driven machine learning approaches, and show that they offer both approximately unbiased estimates of valuation and substantially reduced variability in valuation results. Consequently, …

A Quantitative Content Analysis Of Media Framing Of Illegal Mining In Ghana, Ebenezer Ato Kwamena Aidoo, Patrick Ansah, Fredrick Daoyenikye, Maame Aba Afful

Faculty Scholarship

Illegal mining in Ghana has attracted considerable public and policy attention due to its far-reaching environmental, social, and health consequences. Our study examines how Ghanaian news media frame illegal mining, the tone of media coverage, and the stakeholders represented in news narratives. Using a quantitative content analysis, 800 news articles were sampled from six widely read media outlets, Daily Graphic, Ghanaian Times, TV3 Ghana, GTV, Joy FM, and Citi Newsroom. A multivariate analysis of variance (MANOVA) was employed to examine differences in framing, tone, and stakeholder representation across outlets. Findings indicate that news organizations emphasize distinct frames, resulting in varied …

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 …

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 …

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 …

The Coming Privatization Of Corporate Law, Dorothy S. Lund, Eric L. Talley

Faculty Scholarship

For more than a century, American corporate law has revolved around a simple competitive premise: State governments supply corporate law while companies choose their state of incorporation, and the market rewards the state offering the best corporate law product. Delaware’s longstanding market dominance (especially for public companies) is often explained through the confluence of its unusually attractive institutional package: expert judges, extensive precedent, a specialized bar, an enabling statute, and a legislature that — at least traditionally — treats corporate law as something to be calibrated technocratically rather than politicized.

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 …

Presidential Immunity: Before And After Trump, Thomas P. Schmidt

Faculty Scholarship

“All the officers of government,” the Supreme Court said long ago, “from the highest to the lowest, are creatures of the law, and are bound to obey it.” Despite that ringing and categorical language, however, the Court has held that the President — the “highest” and most powerful of all government officers — is “immune” from judicial oversight in several respects. Indeed, when the Court held last Term that former presidents are presumptively immune from criminal prosecution for officials acts, the dissenters warned: “In every use of official power, the President is now a king above the law.”

This Article …

What Is To Be Done About The Radical Far-Right?, Bernard E. Harcourt

Faculty Scholarship

The far Right in America has become radical. In the process, it has outmaneuvered the progressives. In the first months of his second mandate, President Trump has mounted a revolution (or counterrevolution) against the liberal democratic state. Steve Bannon said he was Leninist and wanted to “smash the state.” President Trump has done just that. In this essay, I explore the far Right’s embrace of Lenin. I return to the Hegelian roots of Lenin’s politics to explain what he meant by “smashing the state machine.” I then argue that the Left should reclaim Lenin’s dialectics and his call, in the …

The Contested Contingent Constitution: Plutocrats, Right-Wing Populists, And Labor Rights In The U.S., Kate Andrias

Faculty Scholarship

Constitutional labor rights have long been negligible in the United States. Now, with the ascendance of Donald Trump’s right-wing authoritarianism, even statutory labor rights are under threat. Yet there is an apparent paradox: While the Trump Administration seeks to declare the NLRB unconstitutional and has decimated federal workers’ rights, Trump’s “Make America Great Again” (MAGA) movement rose to power in part by invoking the plight of the American worker. The more populist wing of the American Right does not expressly challenge the constitutionality of labor law. Indeed, some right-wing populists urge an expansion of labor rights, emphasizing such goals as …

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 …

Other People's Poverty, Emmanuel Hiram Arnaud, Shaun Ossei-Owusu

Faculty Scholarship

Puerto Ricans have a relationship with the United States that is historically unparalleled. They have been citizens of the United States since 1917, served in every major conflict since World War I, and have been influential members of American culture, politics, and society. Yet, Puerto Rico is not fully part of the United States. The island of 3.2 million people— more than the population of eighteen states—is a U.S. territory. This means the federal government wields its complete and largely unrestrained plenary power over the Island, often treating Puerto Ricans differently than the rest of the United States. This differential …

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 …

Beyond The "Mucha Woman": Ornamental Invariance And Sarah Bernhardt's Cross-Gender Poster Persona, 1894-1899, Rose Mary Weigand, James Hutson

Faculty Scholarship

Alphonse Mucha's recurring female figure is often treated as a unified Art Nouveau type, alternately interpreted as an erotic commodity, a decorative ideal, or an emblem of the New Woman. This article argues that the category becomes analytically unstable when it is applied to the theater posters Mucha designed for Sarah Bernhardt. Through close visual comparison of Gismonda (1894), Lorenzaccio (1896), Médée (1898), and Hamlet (1899), with JOB (1896) serving as a commercial countertype, the study develops the concept of ornamental invariance: a stable graphic system that preserves celebrity recognition while role, costume, narrative action, and gender change. Mucha's elongated …

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 …

Less Prep, More Presence: Implementing Pattern Teaching In Library Instruction Lesson Planning To Reduce Stress, Liana Bayne-Lin

Faculty Scholarship

As a liaison librarian at an R2 university, I support three STEM departments in their teaching and learning needs. Like many liaison librarians, one of the main activities I do to provide that support is guest lecturing in classes on information literacy topics like finding, using, evaluating, and citing scientific information sources. Like many  liaison librarians, I didn't get a lot of pedagogy instruction in library school, and had to learn by doing during my first year. And, like many teaching librarians, my desire to connect with my students in a genuine, authentic way is deep.

Going into the second …

Jurisdictional Waters, Jamison E. Colburn

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

The Administrative Law Of Mccarthyism, Nicholas Handler

Faculty Scholarship

This Article recovers the largely overlooked legal and administrative history of the federal loyalty-security program, and argues that it played a formative role in the development of modern civil service protections and administrative law. During the McCarthy era, the United States Civil Service Commission (CSC), under pressure from Congress, implemented a sweeping loyalty program aimed at rooting out purportedly disloyal federal employees. Though often remembered as a moment of political overreach and civil liberties violations, this Article shows that the loyalty program simultaneously catalyzed a surprising expansion in procedural rights for government workers—both through internal reforms initiated by the CSC …

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 …

Aggregation And The “Universal” Injunction, Portia Pedro, Adam N. Steinman

Faculty Scholarship

In this Essay, we begin with a brief summary of the CASA decision’s holding regarding the availability of “universal” injunctions. Part II discusses the relationship between remedies and judicial review and the important role that such injunctions play in that regard. Part III explores how class actions could serve as an alternative path for federal courts, after engaging in judicial review, to make their decisions meaningful by requiring officials to comply with the law and to cease illegal actions or policies. We also respond to several objections to the use of class actions in this context. The final Part addresses …