Digital Commons Network^™

Jd-Next: A Randomized Experiment Of An Online Scalable Program To Prepare Diverse Students For Law School, Katherine Cheng, Jessica Findley, Adriana Cimetta, Heidi Burross, Matt Charles, Cayley Balser, Ran Li, Christopher Robertson

Faculty Scholarship

As one of two companion papers, this article explains our efforts to create and evaluate a program called JD-Next, which exposed students to legal education, prepared them to succeed, and assessed their ability to do so. JD-Next is a fully online, noncredit, seven-and-a-half-week course to train potential JD students in case reading and analysis skills before their first year of law school. This article focuses on rigorously testing the exposure and preparation functions of this program in 2019 to determine whether participation in such a course can improve law school confidence and performance of matriculating students. In the companion article, …

Poor Writing, Not Specialized Concepts, Drives Processing Difficulty In Legal Language, Eric H. Martinez, Francis Mollica, Edward Gibson

Faculty Scholarship

Despite their ever-increasing presence in everyday life, contracts remain notoriously inaccessible to laypeople. Why? Here, a corpus analysis (n ≈10 million words) revealed that contracts contain startlingly high proportions of certain difficult-to-process features–including low-frequency jargon, center-embedded clauses (leading to long-distance syntactic dependencies), passive voice structures, and non-standard capitalization–relative to nine other baseline genres of written and spoken English. Two experiments (N=184) further revealed that excerpts containing these features were recalled and comprehended at lower rates than excerpts without these features, even for experienced readers, and that center-embedded clauses inhibited recall more-so than other features. These findings (a) undermine …

The Property Law Of Tokens, Juliet M. Moringiello, Christopher K. Odinet

Faculty Scholarship

Non-fungible tokens—or NFTs, as they are better known—have taken the world by storm. The idea behind an NFT is that by owning a certain thing (specifically, a digital token that is tracked on a blockchain), one can hold property rights in something else (either a real or intangible asset). In the early part of 2021, NFTs for items ranging from a gif of a pop-tart cat with a rainbow tail, to Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey’s first tweet, to a New York Times column (about NFTs!) have sold for millions of dollars over the internet. Promoters assert that NFTs are the …

Ethical Quagmires For Government Lawyers: Lessons For Legal Education, Susan Saab Fortney

Faculty Scholarship

Each presidential administration faces its own challenges related to the ethics of government officials and lawyers. What distinguished the Trump presidency was the steady stream of news reports that related to controversies involving government lawyers. In examining various controversies, this Essay argues that the ethical standards applicable to government lawyers are often thorny and debatable. Fortney discusses how controversies involving alleged misconduct by government lawyers reveal the range and complexity of ethical dilemmas that government lawyers encounter. This Essay asserts that legal educators should do more to empower government lawyers to deal with such ethics issues. To highlight key ethics …

Using Mhealth To Improve Adherence And Reduce Blood Pressure In Individuals With Hypertension And Bipolar Disorder (Itab-Cv): Study Protocol For A 2-Stage Randomized Clinical Trial, Jennifer B. Levin, Farren Briggs, Mahboob Rahman, Kurt Stange, Douglas Einstadter, Celeste Weise, Carla Conroy, Joy Yala, Ethan Radatz, Martha Sajatovic

Faculty Scholarship

Background: Cardiovascular disease in individuals with mental health conditions such as bipolar disorder is highly prevalent and often poorly managed. Individuals with bipolar disorder face significant medication adherence barriers, especially when they are prescribed multiple medications for other health conditions including hypertension. Poor adherence puts them at a disproportionate risk for poor health outcomes. As such, there is a need for effective interventions to improve hypertension medication adherence, particularly in patients that struggle with adherence due to mental health comorbidity. Methods: This 5-year project uses a 2-stage randomized controlled trial design to evaluate a brief, practical adherence intervention delivered via …

Using Mhealth To Improve Adherence And Reduce Blood Pressure In Individuals With Hypertension And Bipolar Disorder (Itab-Cv): Study Protocol For A 2-Stage Randomized Clinical Trial, Jennifer B. Levin, Farren Briggs, Mahboob Rahman, Kurt C. Stange, Douglas Einstadter, Celeste Weise, Carla Conroy, Joy Yala, Ethan Radatz, Martha Sajatovic

Faculty Scholarship

Background: Cardiovascular disease in individuals with mental health conditions such as bipolar disorder is highly prevalent and often poorly managed. Individuals with bipolar disorder face significant medication adherence barriers, especially when they are prescribed multiple medications for other health conditions including hypertension. Poor adherence puts them at a disproportionate risk for poor health outcomes. As such, there is a need for effective interventions to improve hypertension medication adherence, particularly in patients that struggle with adherence due to mental health comorbidity. Methods: This 5-year project uses a 2-stage randomized controlled trial design to evaluate a brief, practical adherence intervention delivered via …

What The Harm Principle Says About Vaccination And Healthcare Rationing, Christopher Robertson

Faculty Scholarship

Clinical ethicists hold near consensus on the view that healthcare should be provided regardless of patients’ past behaviors. In classic cases, the consensus can be explained by two key rationales—a lack of acute scarcity and the intractability of the facts around those behaviors, which make discrimination on past behavior gratuitous and infeasible to do fairly. Healthcare providers have a duty to help those who can be helped. In contrast, the COVID-19 pandemic suggests the possible recurrence of a very different situation, where a foreseeable acute shortage of healthcare resources means that some cannot be helped. And that shortage is exacerbated …

Examining How Congruence In And Satisfaction With Dyadic Care Type Appraisal Contribute To Quality Of Life In Heart Failure Care Dyads, Elliane Irani, Seunghee Margevicius

Faculty Scholarship

AIMS: Given the complexity of heart failure (HF) management, persons with HF and their informal caregivers often engage in dyadic illness management. It is unknown how congruent appraisal of dyadic HF care type is associated with dyadic health. Our aim was to examine how congruence in and satisfaction with appraisal of dyadic HF care type contribute to quality of life (QOL) for dyads. METHODS AND RESULTS: This is a secondary analysis of cross-sectional data on 275 HF care dyads (patients 45.1% female, caregivers 70.5% female). Congruent appraisal and satisfaction were assessed using the Dyadic Symptom Management Type instrument. Quality of …

Respiratory Morbidity And Neurodevelopmental Outcomes In Infants Born Preterm: A Complex Web, Anna Maria Hibbs

Faculty Scholarship

This commentary is on the original article by Yu et al. on pages 1246–1253 of this issue.

Evaluation Of Periodontal Status And Cytokine Levels In Saliva And Gingival Crevicular Fluid Of Patients With Inflammatory Bowel Diseases, Andre Paes Batista Da Silva

Faculty Scholarship

Background: Periodontal diseases and inflammatory bowel diseases (IBD, ulcerative colitis [UC] and Crohn disease [CD]) have been reported to present with increased salivary and gingival crevicular fluid (GCF) concentrations of cytokines. The aim of this study was to evaluate the salivary and GCF levels of TNF-α, IL-1β, IL-10, and IL-17A and their associations with the periodontal statuses of UC, CD, and non-IBD patients, and to analyze the interrelationships among these cytokines, IBD conditions, and periodontal diseases. Methods: This cross-sectional study was performed with a total of 131 patients (62 women and 69 men, mean age 42.96±13.02 years). Patients were divided …

Daubert/Kumho Tire And The Legal Malpractice Expert Witness, Warren Trazenfeld, Robert M. Jarvis

Faculty Scholarship

In legal malpractice cases, parties almost always end up using expert witnesses. Whether a particular legal malpractice expert is qualified to testify often is a hotly contested issue. In this Article, the authors provide recommendations for how to qualify a legal malpractice expert and how to challenge a legal malpractice expert’s qualifications.

The Use Of The Go/No-Go Successive Matching-To-Sample Procedure With Nonverbal Auditory Stimuli To Establish Equivalence Classes And Speaker Behavior, Robbie Hanson, Jillian Sordello, Thea Skau Engell, Caio F. Miguel

Faculty Scholarship

The purpose of the current study was to extend the findings on the use of the go/ no-go successive matching-to-sample (S-MTS) procedure to establish auditory equivalence classes. Eight college students learned to conditionally relate nonverbal auditory stimuli into three, 3-member classes. Following training, all participants met the emergence criterion for symmetry, and six out of eight participants met the emergence criterion for transitivity/equivalence. Furthermore, all participants responded with either an experimenter-defined or a unique tact, and five participants related these names intraverbally. Although these results replicate previous findings, albeit with stimuli that cannot be echoed, possible verbal mediation via tact …

Cop-“Like”: The First Amendment, Criminal Procedure, And The Regulation Of Police Social Media Speech, Jonathan Abel

Faculty Scholarship

What happens when a law-enforcement officer makes an offensive comment on social media? Increasingly, police departments, prosecutors, courts, and the public have been confronted with the legal and normative questions resulting from officers’ racist, sexist, and violent social media comments. On one side are calls for severe discipline and termination. On the other are demands that officers be permitted to express their views without fear of retaliation. The regulation of police social media speech has been largely conceived of in First Amendment terms. But because an officer’s comments affect her ability to testify, criminal procedure is also employed in regulating …

Periodic Functions Related To The Gompertz Difference Equation, Tom Cuchta, Nick Wintz

Faculty Scholarship

We investigate periodicity of functions related to the Gompertz difference equation. In particular, we derive difference equations that must be satisfied to guarantee periodicity of the solution.

Racial Justice And Peace, Yuvraj Joshi

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

International Society Of Sports Nutrition Position Stand: Tactical Athlete Nutrition, Drew E. Gonzalez, Matthew J. Mcallister, Hunter S. Waldman, Arny A. Ferrando, Jill Joyce, Nicholas D. Barringer, J. Jay Dawes, Adam J. Kieffer, Travis Harvey, Chad M. Kerksick, Jeffrey R. Stout, Tim N. Ziegenfuss, Annette Zapp, Jamie L. Tartar, Jeffrey L. Heileson, Trisha A. Vandusseldorp, Douglas S. Kalman, Bill I. Campbell, Jose Antonio, Richard B. Kreider

Faculty Scholarship

This position stand aims to provide an evidence-based summary of the energy and nutritional demands of tactical athletes to promote optimal health and performance while keeping in mind the unique challenges faced due to work schedules, job demands, and austere environments. After a critical analysis of the literature, the following nutritional guidelines represent the position of the International Society of Sports Nutrition (ISSN).

Consensus Embedding For Multiple Networks: Computation And Applications, Mengzhen Li, Mehmet Koyutürk

Faculty Scholarship

Machine learning applications on large-scale network-structured data commonly encode network information in the form of node embeddings. Network embedding algorithms map the nodes into a low-dimensional space such that the nodes that are “similar” with respect to network topology are also close to each other in the embedding space. Real-world networks often have multiple versions or can be “multiplex” with multiple types of edges with different semantics. For such networks, computation of Consensus Embeddings based on the node embeddings of individual versions can be useful for various reasons, including privacy, efficiency, and effectiveness of analyses. Here, we systematically investigate the …

Racial Trauma In Civil Rights Representation, Angela Onwuachi-Willig, Anthony V. Alfieri

Faculty Scholarship

Narratives of trauma told by clients and communities of color have inspired an increasing number of civil rights and antiracist lawyers and academics to call for more trauma-informed training for law students and lawyers. These advocates have argued not only for greater trauma-sensitive practices and trauma-centered interventions on behalf of adversely impacted individuals and groups but also for greater awareness of the risks of secondary or vicarious trauma for lawyers who represent traumatized clients and communities. In this Article, we join this chorus of attorneys and academics. Harnessing the recent civil rights case of P.P. v. Compton Unified School District …

Vesting, Jed Handelsman Shugerman

Faculty Scholarship

"The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America." The Executive Vesting Clause is one of three originalist pillars for the unitary executive theory, the idea that the President possesses executive powers like removal without congressional limitations (that is, the powers are indefeasible). An underlying assumption is that "vest" connotes a formalist approach to separation of powers rather than a more functional system of Madisonian checks and balances. Assumptions about "vesting" for official powers are likely the result of semantic drift from property rights and ahistoric projections back from the later Marshall Court doctrine …

An Argument Against Unbounded Arrest Power: The Expressive Fourth Amendment And Protesting While Black, Karen Pita Loor

Faculty Scholarship

Protesting is supposed to be revered in our democracy, considered “as American as apple pie” in our nation’s mythology. But the actual experiences of the 2020 racial justice protesters showed that this supposed reverence for political dissent and protest is more akin to American folklore than reality on the streets. The images from those streets depicted police officers clad in riot gear and armed with shields, batons, and “less than” lethal weapons aggressively arresting protesters, often en masse. In the first week of the George Floyd protests, police arrested roughly 10,000 people, and approximately 78 percent of those arrests were …

Protecting The Guild Or Protecting The Public? Bar Exams And The Diploma Privilege, Milan Markovic

Faculty Scholarship

The bar examination has long loomed over legal education. Although many states formerly admitted law school graduates into legal practice via the diploma privilege, Wisconsin is the only state that recognizes the privilege today. The bar examination is so central to the attorney admissions process that all but a handful of jurisdictions required it amidst a pandemic that turned bar exam administration into a life-or-death matter.

This Article analyzes the diploma privilege from a historical and empirical perspective. Whereas courts and regulators maintain that bar examinations screen out incompetent practitioners, the legal profession formerly placed little emphasis on bar examinations …

Should Data Drive Private Law?, Christoph Busch, Catalina Goanta, Katarzyna Kryla-Cudna, Monika Leszczynska, Vanessa Mak

Faculty Scholarship

This special issue tackles the question of whether and how data shapes private law. The development of new technologies enabled the generation, collection and processing of both personal and non-personal data on an unprecedented scale. The implications

of this phenomenon for private law are threefold. One, how does data affect our understanding of technology regulation in private law relationships? Two, how does data affect the way in which private law is applied? Three, what is the role of data in the design of law from a public policy perspective that transcends doctrinal considerations relating to private law?

The “End” Of Neutrality: Tumultuous Times Require A Deeper Value, Carol Pauli

Faculty Scholarship

This essay has observed that, when times are tumultuous, third parties who intend to be neutral may need some mooring beyond the norms that are shifting. It argues that neutrality is an unsatisfying value in such times and suggests that neutrals look to the deeper values of their field. It proposes human dignity as a good place to begin, and it invites others to explore whether an initial commitment to the inherent worth of every person would make a helpful difference in practice.

Taking Courthouse Discrimination Seriously: The Role Of Judges As Ethical Leaders, Susan Saab Fortney

Faculty Scholarship

Sexual misconduct allegations against Alex Kozinski, a once powerful judge in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9^th Circuit, spotlighted concerns related to sexual harassment in the judiciary. Following news reports related to the alleged misconduct, Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Jr. charged a working group with examining safeguards to deal with inappropriate conduct in the judicial workplace. Based on recommendations made in the Report of the Federal Judiciary Workplace Conduct Working Group, the Judicial Conference approved a number of reforms and improvements related to workplace conduct in the federal judiciary. The reforms included revising the Code of …

Natural Transplants, Vanessa Casado-Pérez, Yael R. Lifshitz

Faculty Scholarship

Policymakers are constantly faced with the complex task of managing novel challenges. At times, these challenges result from new technologies: Consider fights over allocating air rights for drones or decisions about how to share scarce vaccines in a pandemic. Other times the resources are old, but the challenges are new, such as how to fairly allocate water in times of unprecedented drought or previously undesirable rare earth minerals that are in demand for modern manufacturing and energy production. Often, instead of carefully tailoring a regime to the new resource, decisionmakers simply rely on mechanisms they are familiar with. When jurisdictions …

Lumpy Social Goods In Energy Decarbonization: Why We Need More Than Just Markets For The Clean Energy Transition, Daniel E. Walters

Faculty Scholarship

To avoid the worst consequences of global climate change, the United States must achieve daunting targets for decarbonizing its electric power sector on a very short timescale. Policy experts largely agree that achieving these goals will require massive investment in new infrastructure to facilitate the deep integration of renewable fuels into the electric grid, including a new national high-voltage electric transmission network and grid-scale electricity storage, such as batteries. However, spurring investment in these needed infrastructures has proven to be challenging, despite numerous attempts by regulators and policymakers to clear a path for market-driven investment. Unchecked, this problem threatens to …

Laws And Norms With (Un)Observable Actions, Claude Fluet, Murat C. Mungan

Faculty Scholarship

We analyze the interactions between social norms, the prevalence of acts, and policies when people cannot directly observe actors’ behavior and must rely on noisy proxies. Norms provide ineffective incentives when acts are committed either very frequently or very infrequently, because noisy signals of behavior are then too weak to alter people’s beliefs about others’ behavior. This cuts against the dynamics of the ‘honor-stigma’ model (Bénabou and Tirole 2006; 2011), and leads to the opposite positive and normative conclusions with even modest errors. The review process through which public signals are provided is then an additional policy variable. When the …

Making The Case For The Accelerated Withdrawal Of Aducanumab, Peter J. Whitehouse

Faculty Scholarship

U.S. Food and Drug Administration-s (FDA) approval of aducanumab (Aduhelm® in the US) as a treatment for mild cognitive impairment of the Alzheimer type and Alzheimer-s disease has raised such major concerns about efficacy, safety, FDA processes, and regulatory capture that Biogen-s license to market this biologic should be immediately withdrawn. Aducanumab has not demonstrated benefit to patients, failed to meet regulatory guidelines, and is likely to cause both individual and societal harm.

Langdell And The Foundation Of Classical Contract Law, Daniel P. O'Gorman

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Obesity Accelerates Acute Promyelocytic Leukemia In Mice And Reduces Sex Differences In Latency And Penetrance, John W. R. Kincaid, Gretchen Weiss, Anne E. Hill-Baskin, Heidi M. Schmidt, Ovwoioise Omoijuanfo, Cheryl L. Thompson, Rose C. Beck, Nathan A. Berger

Faculty Scholarship

Objective: Obesity has emerged as a prominent risk factor for multiple serious disease states, including a variety of cancers, and is increasingly recognized as a primary contributor to preventable cancer risk. However, few studies of leukemia have been conducted in animal models of obesity. This study sought to characterize the impact of obesity, diet, and sex in a murine model of acute promyelocytic leukemia (APL). Methods: Male and female C57BL/6J.mCG+/PR mice, genetically predisposed to sporadic APL development, and C57BL/6J (wild type) mice were placed on either a high-fat diet (HFD) or a low-fat diet (LFD) for up to 500 days. …