Digital Commons Network^™

The Poly Problem In Zoning: Redefining "Family" For A Changing Society, Aric K. Short, Tanya Pierce

Faculty Scholarship

Single-family zoning has long dictated not only where people may live but also with whom. Although extensively critiqued for perpetuating racial and economic exclusion, these laws also privilege relationships defined by blood, marriage, or adoption and marginalize nontraditional families. This Article focuses on a particularly overlooked group: polyamorous families who often face legal uncertainty, social exclusion, and housing discrimination due to restrictive zoning definitions of “family.”

As polyamory gains cultural visibility and increasing legal recognition—through West 49th Street, LLC v. O’Neill and municipal reforms in cities like Somerville and Cambridge—now is the time to examine zoningÊs role in reinforcing outdated …

Transforming Blood Management Systems In Developing Countries Through Technological And Artificial Intelligence-Driven Innovations, Sandeep Bhargava, Shaun Aaron Abram, Srividhya Ragavan

Faculty Scholarship

It is critical to ensure the safe and quality supply of blood among various stakeholders; however, this remains a significant challenge in today’s world, especially in developing countries. These countries face severe problems, including blood shortages, fragmented regulatory frameworks, and inconsistent quality control measures. To tackle these challenges, countries like India are trying to implement the use of artificial intelligence (AI) and its derivative platforms to transform blood collection, testing, storage, and distribution by enabling interoperability, real-time compliance monitoring, automated donor screening, optimized inventory management, and advanced component separation. The article argues that developing countries must adopt both regulatory reform …

The Exactions Illusion: Sheetz’S Missing Dissent, Lee Anne Fennell, Timothy M. Mulvaney

Faculty Scholarship

In April 2024, the Supreme Court unanimously handed down Sheetz v. County of El Dorado, a land use exactions case billed as narrow, inevitable, constitutionally compelled, and obviously correct.  It was none of those things. Sheetz instead ushered in an open-ended shift of policy control over the built environment from state and local legislatures to courts. By its terms, the holding extended the Court’s stringent “exactions” test—which requires the government to prove nexus and proportionality between development conditions and development impacts—beyond its original context of parcel-specific administrative bargains to reach an unspecified set of legislated property conditions. Yet the decision’s …

Differential Validity In Fair Lending, Spencer Caro, Talia B. Gillis, Scott Nelson

Faculty Scholarship

Fair lending’s disparate impact doctrine aims to address lending disparities. But which disparities? Traditional fair lending has narrowly focused on equal outcomes — examining differences in loan approval rates or interest rates. However, this singular focus overlooks other dimensions of disparities that are essential for fair credit access. This article challenges the conventional emphasis on equal outcomes, demonstrating how it has failed to address deep-rooted inequalities in traditional credit allocation while also stifling innovation in machine-learning and alternative data. We argue that disparities in the validity of creditworthiness predictions — the accuracy with which a model identifies creditworthy applicants — …

Does Law Constitute Society?, Jeremy K. Kessler

Faculty Scholarship

The resistance of capitalist inequality to legal reform has led a growing number of scholars to reconsider the explanatory virtues of Marxist legal thought. But what are those virtues? Some scholars hold that what makes Marxist legal thought special is its ability to explain the development of legal relationships in terms of the development of extra-legal relationships — specifically, the relations of production as they adapt to changes in the productive forces. Other scholars argue that this focus on the causal process by which extra-legal change (or stasis) drives legal change (or stasis) is too reductive. They contend that Marxist …

Hybrid Server–Ai Architecture For Persistent Generative Game Worlds: Achieving Scalable, Consistent, And Low-Latency Interactive Environments, Jay Ratican, James Hutson

Faculty Scholarship

Generative artificial intelligence has demonstrated remarkable capabilities in real-time content creation for interactive entertainment, yet current implementations struggle with the persistence, consistency, and scalability demanded by modern multiplayer and long-form gaming environments. This paper presents a hybrid server–AI architecture that fuses the deterministic reliability of authoritative multiplayer server frameworks with the creative flexibility of state-aware generative systems. The proposed three-tier design consists of (1) a deterministic server backend leveraging technologies such as Unity Netcode for GameObjects, Unreal Engine 5’s dedicated servers, and Amazon GameLift to maintain authoritative and persistent world state; (2) a state-aware generative layer responsible for producing real-time …

Resilient Dispute Resolution Systems For International Energy Conflicts, Guillermo J. Garcia Sanchez

Faculty Scholarship

Energy-related conflicts are on the rise, spanning diverse issues such as the impacts of rare mineral mining on local communities, the impacts of sanctions on energy investments due to the Russia-Ukraine war, and the impacts of expanded subsidies on the electric vehicle and solar panel industries. Increasingly, companies, communities, and governments are clashing over the challenges of pursuing disparate and sometimes competing energy policies. This Article argues that dispute resolution mechanisms in the energy investment sector must be fundamentally rethought. Traditional semi-adjudicatory models, which focus on winners and losers, fail to accommodate the complex and multifaceted nature of contemporary energy …

Originalism, Official History, And Perspectives Versus Methodologies, Keith N. Hylton

Faculty Scholarship

This paper addresses a well-worn topic: originalism, the theory that judges should interpret the U.S. Constitution in a manner consistent with the intent of its framers. I am interested in the real-world effects of originalism. The primary effect advanced by originalists is the tendency of the approach to constrain the discretion of judges. However, I identify another effect of originalism: the creation of official histories, a practice that imposes a hidden tax on society. Another question I consider is whether originalism should be considered a methodology of analyzing the law or a perspective on the law; I argue that originalism …

Priority Without Progress: The Fda's Neglected Tropical Disease Voucher Program After 18 Years, Maple Goh, Kevin Outterson, Aaron Kesselheim

Faculty Scholarship

Introduction: To incentivize drug and vaccine development for neglected tropical diseases (NTDs), US Congress created the Priority Review Voucher (PRV) program in 2007. Sponsors that obtain Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approval for an eligible product receive a voucher redeemable to accelerate review of another product.

Methods: We reviewed the program’s public health impact by examining all 14 vouchers awarded for NTD products between 2007 and 2024, including the timing of FDA approval relative to World Health Organization (WHO) Prequalification, Essential Medicines List inclusion, first use in endemic countries, and voucher disposition.

Results: Eight (57%) achieved WHO …

Allocating Electricity, Alexandra B. Klass, Dave Owen

Faculty Scholarship

The U.S. electricity system is premised on the ideas that utilities have a duty to serve all customers in their service territories and that electricity supply should always meet demand. Until recently, there has been little reason to question these foundational premises. U.S. electricity demand has remained flat for over a decade, and during earlier periods of growth, new energy generation plants were relatively easy to build. Now, however, electricity experts predict massive load growth—most notably from data centers to power artificial intelligence and cryptocurrency—and building new power plants is no longer easy.

Major efforts are underway to increase electricity …

Sounding The Alarm: The Role Of States In Monitoring The Federal Government, Christian G. Fritz

Faculty Scholarship

In December 2025, more than 40 bipartisan state legislative leaders from over 30 states, working through the National Conference of State Legislatures, issued a resolution titled “Federalism Restoration and State Empowerment.” The distinctive feature of American federalism has long been understood to be the distribution of powers between the national and state governments. This foundational element of our system of government—shared sovereignty—warrants revisiting by K-12 teachers and students. Although states may attempt to limit national power in ways such as withholding cooperation, exerting political pressure, and challenging federal authority through legal and institutional channels, this Digest focuses on the role …

Private Equity, Public Utility, Kristen Van De Biezendos, Melissa Powers

Faculty Scholarship

The explosion of investment in artificial intelligence and cryptocurrencies has spurred a data center boom, with politicians jostling to attract companies to build data centers in their states. The potential financial windfall from these data centers has also attracted the attention of private equity firms, which are seeking to capitalize on the potential riches to be made in supplying these projects with electricity by buying regulated public electric utilities. These utilities are unusual in our capitalist system, in that they are subject to both state and federal regulation regarding their duties to serve the public and the amount they can …

Women In Law And The Draft, Thomas Helgerman, Benjamin David Pyle

Faculty Scholarship

Between 1964 and 1973, women’s representation in full-time law school programs rose fivefold, from 3.7% to 20.1%. This paper examines whether Vietnam War draft policy contributed to this increase. In 1968, men enrolled in law school lost eligibility for 2-S student deferments, threatening law schools’ tuition revenues and incentivizing schools to admit more women to stabilize enrollment. To test this mechanism, we construct a school-by-year dataset of enrollment counts split by women/men and full-time/part-time status. Using a uniform adoption difference-in-differences design, we find that women’s representation rises by 2 percentage points in full-time programs relative to part-time programs (which were …

The Spectrum Of Bipolar Disorder In Older Adults, Hui Xin Ng, Martha Sajatovic

Faculty Scholarship

The absolute number and relative proportion of individuals with older-age bipolar disorder (OABD) is expected to rise due to the global aging of the population, necessitating a greater understanding of the unique characteristics of OABD and the trajectory of aging with BD in order to improve the health span of people with BD. This review summarizes current knowledge on OABD, examining its clinical presentation, neurobiology, and treatment, as well as identifying key gaps and future directions for research. OABD is characterized by relatively greater cognitive impairment and somatic burden, despite potentially reduced mood symptom severity compared to younger-age bipolar disorder …

Microfluidic Capillary Transit Velocity As A Functional Measure For Sickle Cell Disease And In Vitro-Derived Red Blood Cells, Solomon Oshabaheebwa, Yuxuan Du, Christopher L. Wirth, Zoe Sekyonda, Zoe Sekyonda, Bryan L. Benson, Payam Fadaei, Yusang B. Ley, Michael A. Suster, Pedram Mohseni, Umut A. Gurkan

Faculty Scholarship

Emerging therapies in sickle cell disease (SCD) aim to restore healthy red blood cell (RBC) function, but they often yield heterogeneous cellular responses. There are no proven techniques to evaluate restored rheological functionality and heterogeneity in these RBCs. We present a biomimetic microcapillary network, high-speed imaging, and computational algorithms to analyze RBC capillary velocity profiles of the entire sample population at single-cell resolution. Using peripheral RBCs from SCD patients and healthy donors, we showed that RBC capillary transit velocity correlated with cell shape, hydrodynamic adaptability, and elongation index. Healthy RBCs exhibited a velocity distribution skewed toward higher values, whereas RBCs …

Thermoelectrochemical Synthesis Of Nanostructured Cupric Oxide (Cuo) Using Kmno4 As An Oxidant, Tony A. Hall, Michael Ibukun Kolawole, Janak Paudel

Faculty Scholarship

This research focuses on combining hydrothermal (hot water treatment) and electrochemical synthesis (EC) forming an advanced method termed ″thermoelectrochemical (TEC)” that introduces a rapid and controllable electrochemical strategy for synthesizing cupric oxide (CuO) nanostructures using potassium permanganate (KMnO4) as an oxidant under a constant electric potential at 75 °C for 3 h. The influence of applied voltage polarity on phase evolution, oxidation state, and morphology was systematically investigated. Under a positive bias of +Δ5 V, the copper substrate was fully oxidized into stoichiometric CuO, as confirmed by sharp XRD reflections, Raman-active Cu−O modes, and EDS spectra dominated by Cu−O composition. …

Barriers, Attitudes, And Solutions For Brain Health Research Training In Lmics: A Trainee Cross-Sectional Study In Uganda, Mark Kaddumukasa, Carla M. Conroy, Christopher J. Burant, Shirley Moore

Faculty Scholarship

Background: Neurological disorders remain a challenge in sub-Saharan Africa, with limited expertise and credible research data to guide interventions and disease prevention. Training the next generation of clinical researchers requires a focused and concerted effort to stem the growing neurological disease burden. The US National Institute of Health (NIH) research training funded through the Fogarty International Center (FIC) Global Brain Disorders Research program gave trainees an opportunity to participate in mentored neurology research and training for 1–2.5 years. We conducted a descriptive cross-sectional study among mentees of 2 FIC research programs to assess the training experience and inform program refinement. …

Unlocking The Benefits Of Transparent And Reusable Science For Climate Risk Management, Adam B. Pollack, Lisa Auermuller, Casey D. Burleyson, Jentry Campbell, Madison Condon, Courtney Cooper, Matteo Coronese, Sönke Dangendorf, James Doss-Gollin, Prabhat Hegde, Casey Helgeson, Robert E. Kopp, Jan Kwakkel, Corey Lesk, Justin Mankin, Robert E. Nicholas, Jennie Rice, Samantha Roth, Vivek Srikrishnan, Moira Scheeler, Nancy Tuana, Chris Vernon, Mengqi Zhao, Klaus Keller

Faculty Scholarship

People around the world seek climate risk information to guide their decisions. For instance, projections about future flood risk inform where households choose to live, how lenders manage credit risks, and which communities receive federal funding. Yet data limitations and fundamental validation challenges raise important concerns about the reliability of such projections. The principles of transparency and reusability help address these concerns by enabling scrutiny of assumptions and methods, development of foundational data and tools, and consistent application of evaluation standards. While there is ongoing debate about how much transparency commercial climate risk services should provide, many expect noncommercial actors …

Existence Of Traveling Waves Of Lotka Volterra Type Models With Delayed Diffusion Term And Partial Quasimonotonicity, William Barker

Faculty Scholarship

This paper investigates the existence of traveling wave solutions for diffusive two-species Lotka–Volterra systems with delays in both the reaction and diffusion terms under partial monotonicity assumptions. The model incorporates small-memory effects in the homo- geneous diffusion term, representing a modification of the random-walk interpretation underlying Fick’s law. We extend the partial (cross) monotone iteration method to systems satisfying a partial quasi-monotone condition through the construction of appropriate upper and lower solutions. Convergence of the iteration is established using Schauder’s fixed point theorem.

Targeting Investment In On-Farm Surface Water Storage For Groundwater Conservation, Kent Kovacs

Faculty Scholarship

Optimal investment in conservation requires balancing the benefits of conservation against its costs. We model the benefit of groundwater, less the cost of conserving groundwater through a subsidy for on-farm surface water storage. On-farm surface water storage reduces arable land but provides a substitute for groundwater used in irrigation. The average social net benefit from conserving water is $12.32 per acre-foot after thirty years with the current subsidy for surface storage, and the aquifer thickness rises by 10.6%. The average social net benefit of groundwater conserved rises by lowering the subsidy, but the volume of conservation also declines. A third …

The Brady Materiality Standard, Brandon L. Garrett, Adam M. Gershowitz

Faculty Scholarship

The Brady doctrine requires prosecutors to disclose all favorable and material evidence to the defense. To effectuate that rule, the U.S. Supreme Court has defined materiality as a “reasonable probability” that the evidence would have affected the outcome at trial. But apart from that definition, the Court has resisted offering any further guidance to lower courts. While far too little is known about how Brady materiality claims are actually adjudicated, there is strong evidence that courts often reject Brady claims involving withheld evidence on the grounds that the evidence was not significant enough to be material.

To examine how Brady …

Are There Ecological Consequences Of Urban Adaptation? A Test Of Eco-Evolutionary Dynamics In A Terrestrial Isopod (Oniscus Asellus), Aaron Yilmaz, Grace Bellino, Ryan A. Martin

Faculty Scholarship

Urbanization affects many aspects of the environment with the potential to alter both ecological and evolutionary processes. However, while examples of urban evolution are accumulating, tests of urban eco-evolutionary dynamics are rare. We carried out a reciprocal transplantation experiment using the terrestrial isopod Oniscus asellus to test how adaptation to the urban heat island influenced ecological processes. As isopods are important decomposers, we asked if leaf-litter decomposition differed among reciprocal transplant treatments and used a separate laboratory experiment to isolate the effects of temperature on rates of isopod leaf consumption. We found that leaf-litter decomposition was greater in urban habitats, …

Owning The Green Grid: The Political Economy Of Renewable Energy Policy Design, Joshua A. Basseches

Faculty Scholarship

How corporate ownership of the electricity grid matters to state-level renewable energy policymaking.

Historically (and for the foreseeable future), most public policy action in the United States to combat the global climate crisis has taken place at the state level. Former President Joe Biden’s administration marked a significant departure from that trend, as his policies pursued a strategy of “electrify everything” (transportation, buildings, and industry). But who owns the electricity system that is the linchpin of such a strategy, and how does this ownership affect the policy preferences of interest groups at the state level? Owning the Green Grid addresses …

Clinical Correlates Of Insomnia Symptoms In Young Children With Autism Spectrum Disorder, Megan L. Wenzell, Stephanie Griggs, Camdyn Roark, Megha Patil, Manav Patel

Faculty Scholarship

Objective: To examine clinical correlates of insomnia symptoms in children with autism spectrum disorder ascertained from a general outpatient autism clinic. Study design: This analysis included 103 children with autism spectrum disorder (mean age = 5.8 ± 2.2 years; range 2-10, 77.7% male). A multidisciplinary team assessed medical and psychosocial histories using parent ratings from the Pediatric Autism Insomnia Rating Scale (PAIRS), Aberrant Behavior Checklist (ABC), Brief Autism Mealtime Behavior Inventory, and the Parent Health-Related Quality of Life and Family Functioning and Family Functioning Surveys. Height and weight were collected. Children in the current sample with scores on the PAIRS …

Unwanted Medical Treatment Harms Patients: Taxonomy Of Healthcare Consent Infractions, Thaddeus Pope

Faculty Scholarship

Patients in the United States are subject to an ever-growing “avalanche” of unwanted medical treatment (UMT).  This is ethically, economically, and legally wrong. First, UMT constitutes a serious violation of patient autonomy and self-determination.  Second, it is waste (and often fraud or abuse) of scarce healthcare resources.  Third, but for rare exceptions, administering UMT contravenes settled legal rules and principles around consent and battery.

This article describe four types of unwanted medical treatment and how the law addresses (or fails to address) them.  The four types of UMT are (1) treatment over patient objections, (2) treatment with zero consent, (3) …

Epa And Nepa’S International Cooperation Provision, Terrence Neal

Faculty Scholarship

The goal of this Article is to analyze and highlight EPA 's authority to undertake international activities - a topic that has been more overlooked than EPA 's foreign policy role itself. In accomplishing this goal, it places particular focus on the nature and scope of Section 102(2)(I) of the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA). This Article asserts that Section 102(2)(I) is not merely a policy statement. It prescribes both an authorization and a discretionary duty to engage in international environmental cooperation. NEPA's text and legislative history, as well as persuasive judicial and administrative decisions, affirm this. After clarifying Section …

Beyond Digital Pessimism: How A Focus On Trust Can Enhance Eu Digital Law, Neil Richards, Woodrow Hartzog, Claire Boine, Lea Despotis

Faculty Scholarship

Lawmakers looking to foster technological innovation on the European market are adopting laws they hope will promote consumer trust in digital products. Their strategy can be broken down into three components. First, they aim to empower consumers to choose how much data they want to share with companies through an express consent framework. Second, they seek to avoid harms from digital products through product safety law such as adapting the Product Safety Regulation to digital products or adopting the AI Act. Third, they endeavor to prevent manipulation of consumers through digital means.

In this essay, we argue that while laudable, …

Spending Programs And The New Roberts Court, Nicole Huberfeld

Faculty Scholarship

The Supreme Court is poised to place new limits on Congress’s spending power at the urging of states vying for regulatory dominance, particularly in health care and public health. This article is the first to highlight and catalog the throughlines of argumentation, which sparked after states successfully challenged the ACA but have grown into opposing more than Medicaid’s cooperative federalism. This means federal and state programs that heavily rely on federal spending power are at risk, so studying this pattern is imperative. The article begins with a descriptive account of increasing spending power challenges, which make use of converging factors …

The Anonymous Officer, Shawn E. Fields

Faculty Scholarship

(Forthcoming 2026) Masked, plainclothes immigration agents in unmarked vans have terrorized communities in Chicago, Los Angeles, Minneapolis, and beyond. The indiscriminate violence committed by federal officers who at times appear indistinguishable from paramilitary units has forced immigrants into hiding and left lawmakers scrambling to address a growing and largely legal anonymity crisis in law enforcement. This Article explores the undertheorized implications of anonymous law enforcement, situating the rise of masked policing within a larger project of democratic retrogression and executive aggrandizement. Anonymity in policing and immigration enforcement frustrates core democratic norms of transparency, accountability, and legitimacy, providing the opacity needed …

Trump's War On Diversity, Equity, And Inclusion, Nancy C. Marcus

Faculty Scholarship

Among the many head-spinning developments that have occurred from the first days of President Trump’s second presidency are his attacks on DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion), including anti-DEI edicts targeting educational institutions. This article provides a chronology and analysis of the early 2025 Trump administration’s attacks on DEI targeting schools nationwide, the resulting harms, and responses thereto, including litigation. A discernible refrain in the early litigation challenging President Trump’s anti-DEI attacks targeting educational institutions across the country has been how those attacks cross a clear constitutional line: the prohibition of unconstitutionally obscure governmental mandates. At its core, the void-for-vagueness doctrine …