Digital Commons Network^™

Brief Of Amici Curiae Naacp Legal Defense & Educational Fund, Inc.; Legal Aid Society — Employment Law Center; Professor D. Wendy Greene; And Professor Angela Onwuachi-Willig In Support Of Plaintiff/Appellant's Petition For Rehearing En Banc, Angela Onwuachi-Willig, D. Wendy Greene

Faculty Scholarship

The NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc. (“LDF”) is a nonprofit legal organization that has fought to achieve racial justice and ensure that America fulfills its promise of equality for all. Since 1964, LDF has worked to enforce Title VII of the Civil Rights Act (“Title VII”) by representing individual plaintiffs and plaintiff classes in challenges to discriminatory employment practices engaged in by employers in such cases as Griggs v. Duke Power Co., 401 U.S. 424 (1971); Albemarle Paper Co. v. Moody, 422 U.S. 405 (1975); and Phillips v. Martin Marietta Corp., 400 U.S. 542 (1971). …

Radial Acceleration Relation In Rotationally Supported Galaxies, Stacy S. Mcgaugh, Federico Lelli

Faculty Scholarship

We report a correlation between the radial acceleration traced by rotation curves and that predicted by the observed distribution of baryons. The same relation is followed by 2693 points in 153 galaxies with very different morphologies, masses, sizes, and gas fractions. The correlation persists even when dark matter dominates. Consequently, the dark matter contribution is fully specified by that of the baryons. The observed scatter is small and largely dominated by observational uncertainties. This radial acceleration relation is tantamount to a natural law for rotating galaxies.

Is The Supreme Court Disabling The Enabling Act, Or Is Shady Grove Just Another Bad Opera?, Robert J. Condlin

Faculty Scholarship

After seventy years of trying, the Supreme Court has yet to agree on whether the Rules Enabling Act articulates a one or two part standard for determining the validity of a Federal Rule. Is it enough that a Federal Rule regulates “practice and procedure,” or must it also not “abridge substantive rights”? The Enabling Act seems to require both, but the Court is not so sure, and the costs of its uncertainty are real. Among other things, litigants must guess whether the decision to apply a Federal Rule in a given case will depend upon predictable ritual, judicial power grab, …

Eugenics, Jim Crow, And Baltimore's Best, Garrett Power

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

The Logic Of Contract In The World Of Investment Treaties, Julian Arato

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Detritus Quality And Locality Determines Survival And Mass, But Not Export, Of Wood Frogs At Metamorphosis, Joseph R. Milanovich, Kyle Barrett, John A. Crawford

Faculty Scholarship

Single-site experiments have demonstrated detritus quality in wetlands can have strongly negative, neutral, and even positive influences on wildlife. However, an examination of the influence of detritus quality across several regions is lacking and can provide information on whether impacts from variation in detritus quality are consistent across species with wide ranges. To address this gap in regional studies we examined effects of emergent and allochthonous detritus of different nutrient qualities on amphibians and assessed a mechanism that may contribute to potential impacts. We used aquatic mesocosms to raise wood frogs (Rana sylvatica) from two regions of the United States …

Restoring Hope For Heirs Property Owners: The Uniform Partition Of Heirs Property Act, Thomas W. Mitchell

Faculty Scholarship

For well over 125 years, many Americans have lost their tenancy-in-common property involuntarily in various legal proceedings. For example, courts throughout this country have often resolved partition actions, a legal proceeding in which a tenant in common seeks to exit a tenancy in common, by ordering a forced, partition sale of the property even when these courts could have ordered a remedy that would have preserved the property rights of the tenants in common. Though partition sales have negatively impacted a broad cross section of people in this country, the sales have particularly impacted poor and disadvantaged African-Americans, Hispanics, white …

License Plate Reader Technology: Transportation Uses And Privacy Risks, Johanna Zmud, Jason Wagner, Maarit Moran, James P. George

Faculty Scholarship

NCHRP Report/Task 136: License Plate Reader Technology: Transportation Uses and Privacy Risks, presents a review of transportation uses of license plate reader (LPR) technology, relevant regulatory and judicial cases, and current trends in public opinion. Detailed case studies were completed for five transportation uses to assess current context, benefits, and challenges. Guidance on strategies and practices is provided to guide transportation agencies in balancing between beneficial uses of LPR data and the protection of individual privacy. These best practices should be understood as the minimum aspirations for an agency’s policies, procedures, and controls. Due to the unique requirements of individual …

(In)Valid Patents, Paul Gugliuzza

Faculty Scholarship

Increasingly, accused infringers challenge a patent’s validity in two different forums: in litigation in federal court and in post-issuance review at the Patent and Trademark Office (PTO). These parallel proceedings have produced conflicting and controversial results. For example, in one recent case, a district court rejected a challenge to a patent’s validity and awarded millions of dollars in damages for infringement. The Federal Circuit initially affirmed those rulings, ending the litigation over the patent’s validity. In a subsequent appeal about royalties owed by the infringer, however, the Federal Circuit vacated the entire judgment — including the validity ruling and damages …

The Role Of Design Choice In Intellectual Property And Antitrust Law, Stacey Dogan

Faculty Scholarship

When is it appropriate for courts to second-guess decisions of private actors in shaping their business models, designing their networks, and configuring the (otherwise non-infringing) products that they offer to their customers? This theme appears periodically but persistently in intellectual property and antitrust, especially in disputes involving networks and technology. In both contexts, courts routinely invoke what I call a “non-interference principle” — the presumption that market forces ordinarily bring the best outcomes for consumers, and that courts and regulators should not meddle in the process. This non-interference principle means, for example, that intermediaries need not design their networks to …

Accounting For Rising Corporate Profits: Intangibles Or Regulatory Rents?, James Bessen

Faculty Scholarship

Since 1980, US corporate valuations have risen relative to assets and operating margins have grown. The possibility of sustained economic rents has raised concerns about economic dynamism and inequality. But rising profits could come from political rents or, instead, from returns to investments in intangibles. Using new data on Federal regulation and data on lobbying, campaign spending, R&D, and organizational capital, this paper finds that both intangibles and political factors account for a substantial part of the increase in profits, but since 2000 political factors are more important. A difference-in-differences analysis finds that major expansions of regulation increase profits significantly.

Information Technology And Learning On-The-Job, James Bessen

Faculty Scholarship

Economists disagree how much technology raises demand for workers with pre-existing skills. But technology might affect wages another way: through skills learned on the job. Using instrumental variables on 9 panels of workers from 1989 to 2013, this paper estimates that workers who use information technology (IT) have wage growth that is about 2% greater than non-IT workers, all else equal, implying substantial learning. This effect persists over time, implying sustained productivity growth from IT. Also, it benefits workers both with and without college degrees. Because many more college-educated workers use IT, college wages grow faster, contributing to economic inequality.

Cnn Money Interviews Serge Martinez, My Chipotle Nightmare, Serge A. Martinez

Faculty Scholarship

Article on low-wage quoting professor Serge Martinez on low-wage workers.

Response Of A Doublet To A Nearby Dc Electrode Of Uniform Potential, Christopher L. Wirth

Faculty Scholarship

The electric-field-assisted directed assembly of spherical colloidal particles near an electrode has been studied for nearly three decades. Recently, focus has shifted to the electric-field-assisted assembly and propulsion of nonspherical (i.e., anisotropic) particles. This paper describes calculations and results for a doublet of asymmetric ζ potential and size responding to a dc electric field. The doublet experienced a net vertical force that depended on both the asymmetry in ζ potential and lobe size. In addition, the doublet experienced a net lateral force perpendicular to the applied electric field. The lateral force depended on the difference in ζ potential of the …

Involvement In The Juvenile Justice System For African American Adolescents: Examining Associations With Behavioral Health Problems, Dexter R. Voisin

Faculty Scholarship

While researchers have found that African American youth experience higher levels of juvenile justice involvement at every system level (arrest, sentencing, and incarceration) relative to their other ethnic counterparts, few studies have explored how juvenile justice involvement and number of contacts might be correlated with this broad range of problems. A convenience sample of 638 African American adolescents living in predominantly low-income, urban communities participated in a survey related to juvenile justice involvement. Major findings using logistic regression models indicated that adolescents who reported juvenile justice system involvement versus no involvement were 2.3 times as likely to report mental health …

Detrending Changes The Temporal Dynamics Of A Semantic Fluency Task, Steven Lenio, Frances M. Lissemore, Martha Sajatovic, Kathleen A. Smyth, Curtis Tatsuoka, Wojbor A. Woyczynski, Alan J. Lerner

Faculty Scholarship

Objective: To study the dynamics of clustering semantic fluency responses and switching between clusters. Methods: We conducted a cross-sectional study of participants (N = 60) in a study of patient reported outcomes who were given the Saint Louis University Mental Status test. Sixty-second animal naming tests were scored for the timing of responses as well as the clustering of responses into semantic categories. Time scores were detrended to correct for exponential exhaustion and normalize the time scale across individuals. Results: Grouped by number of responses given, low performers (LP; Carter et al., 2012) switched between clusters fewer times than medium …

Process Without Procedure: National Security Letters And First Amendment Rights, Hannah Bloch-Wehba

Faculty Scholarship

Each year, the FBI uses tens of thousands of NSLs to obtain “transactional records” related to telephone calls, emails, text messages, online forums, and other communicative activity. NSLs are usually accompanied by nondisclosure orders that prevent recipients from speaking about or acknowledging the requests. Although over 100,000 NSLs have been issued since 2001, there have been fewer than 10 known judicial challenges.

I argue that the absence of procedural safeguards within the NSL authority has created a de facto regime of automatic compliance with the requests, endangering First Amendment rights in the process. NSLs are explicitly directed at uncovering the …

Brief For Professors, Czyzewski V. Jevic Holding Corp. As Amicus Curiae, Laura Spitz

Faculty Scholarship

We urge that the decision of the Circuit Court should be affirmed because Petitioners were not injured or prejudiced by the settlement--they are not worse off than if the settlement had been rejected. Aside from that, the remaining issue is whether the bankruptcy court had discretion to approve the instant settlement even though it did not strictly follow the priority rule. We believe that the courts correctly decided not to apply the absolute priority rule under the circumstances of this case. We urge that the Rule need not be followed by a bankruptcy court in approving a settlement. Alternatively, if …

Gcc Vat: The Intra-Gulf Trade Problem, Richard Thompson Ainsworth, Musaad Alwohaibi

Faculty Scholarship

It seems reasonably clear that by January 1, 2018 events will be set in motion for the adoption of a community-wide 5% value added tax (VAT) in the six Member States of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC).

The GCC’s Framework VAT document is expected to be published by the end of October 2016. One of the clearest, consistently placed observations is that the Arabian VATs will be destination-based and modeled on a European credit-invoice design. Intra-Gulf business-to-business (B2B) transactions will be effectively zero-rated by the supplier, and the buyer’s VAT will be directed to the destination jurisdiction. It is not …

The Origin Of Efficient Triplet State Population In Sulfur-Substituted Nucleobases, Marvin Pollum, Nicholas Dunn, Carlos E. Crespo-Hernández

Faculty Scholarship

Elucidating the photophysical mechanisms in sulfur-substituted nucleobases (thiobases) is essential for designing prospective drugs for photo-and chemotherapeutic applications. Although it has long been established that the phototherapeutic activity of thiobases is intimately linked to efficient intersystem crossing into reactive triplet states, the molecular factors underlying this efficiency are poorly understood. Herein we combine femtosecond transient absorption experiments with quantum chemistry and nonadiabatic dynamics simulations to investigate 2-thiocytosine as a necessary step to unravel the electronic and structural elements that lead to ultrafast and near-unity triplet-state population in thiobases in general. We show that different parts of the potential energy surfaces …

Brief Amici Curiae Of Professors Of History, Political Science, And Law In Support Of Respondent, Kristin Collins, Catherine E. Stetson, Jessica K. Jacobs

Faculty Scholarship

Sex-based laws premised on archaic presumptions about the proper roles of men and women run afoul of established constitutional principles, especially when they interfere with the parent-child relationship. Amici write to explain the history of the federal government’s use of sex-based classifications in the regulation of citizenship. In its regulation of intergenerational and interspousal citizenship transmission, the federal government has perpetuated outdated gender-based norms concerning proper parental roles, even when those norms have been rejected in other legal and social contexts. In addition, the laws governing derivative citizenship have significantly encumbered the ability of American fathers to transmit citizenship to …

Two Narratives Of Platform Capitalism, Frank Pasquale

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Breaking Bad Facts: How Intriguing Contradictions In Fiction Can Teach Lawyers To Re-Envision Harmful Evidence, Cathren Koehlert-Page

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Addressing Microaggressions: Transgressing The Line Between Professional And Social Activism, Karla Scott, Victoria Defrancisco, Maureen Ebben

Faculty Scholarship

The focus of this workshop is the often overlooked day-to-day wearing down of people in oppressed groups as recipients of microaggressions. While most who are sympathetic to this problem know what a microaggression is, faculty, staff and students tend to fear addressing such aggressions. They simply may not know how to do so effectively. In this hands-on workshop participants will grapple with specific scenarios and be invited to try out different communicative responses and other tools to work toward creating a more inclusive climate for all. The workshop comes from an intersectional feminist perspective, shinning a light on oppressive behaviors …

Readings On L2 Reading: Publications In Other Venues 2015–2016, Shenika Harris, Carolina Bernales, Gabriela Romero-Ghiretti, Haley Dolosic, Huan Liu, Tracy Van Bishop

Faculty Scholarship

This feature offers an archive of articles published in other venues during the past year and serves as a valuable tool to readers of Reading in a Foreign Language (RFL). It treats any topic within the scope of RFL and second language reading. The articles are listed in alphabetical order, each with a complete reference as well as a brief summary. The editors of this feature attempt to include all related articles that appear in other venues. However, undoubtedly, this list is not exhaustive.

Law And Economics: Contemporary Approaches, Frank Pasquale, Martha T. Mccluskey, Jennifer Taub

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

The Distinctive Role Of Justice Samuel Alito: From A Politics Of Restoration To A Politics Of Dissent, Neil S. Siegel

Faculty Scholarship

Justice Samuel Alito is regarded by both his champions and his critics as the most consistently conservative member of the current Supreme Court. Both groups seem to agree that he has become the most important conservative voice on the Court. Chief Justice John Roberts has a Court to lead; Justice Antonin Scalia and his particular brand of originalism have passed on; Justice Clarence Thomas is a stricter originalist and so writes opinions that other Justices do not join; and Justice Anthony Kennedy can be ideologically unreliable. Justice Alito, by contrast, is unburdened by the perceived responsibilities of being Chief Justice, …

The Quest For A User-Friendly Copyright Regime In Hong Kong, Peter K. Yu

Faculty Scholarship

The quest for a user-friendly copyright regime began a decade ago when the Hong Kong government launched a public consultation on "Copyright Protection in the Digital Environment" in December 2006. Although this consultation initially sought to address Internet-related challenges, such as those caused by peer-to-peer file-sharing technology, the reform effort quickly evolved into a more comprehensive digital upgrade of the Hong Kong copyright regime.

A decade later, however, Hong Kong still has not yet amended its Copyright Ordinance. Thus far, three consultation exercises have been launched in December 2006, April 2008 and July 2013. Two bills have also been introduced …

Rejecting Charity: Why The Irs Denies Tax Exemption To 501(C)(3) Applicants, Terri Lynn Helge

Faculty Scholarship

New charitable organizations generally must file an application for exemption (Form 1023) and await approval from the Internal Revenue Service. Unfortunately, the criteria the Internal Revenue Service uses to evaluate applications has not always been transparent. If an application is approved, the Internal Revenue Service determination letter and the application for exemption are required to be made publicly available and can be requested from the Internal Revenue Service or the organization itself. Prior to 2004, in the case of denials, neither the application nor the Internal Revenue Service’s correspondence setting forth its rationale for the denial were made publicly available. …

The Uniform Commercial Code Survey: Introduction, Jennifer S. Martin, Colin P. Marks, Wayne Barnes

Faculty Scholarship

The survey that follows highlights the most important developments of 2015 dealing with domestic and international sales of goods, personal property leases, payments, letters of credit, documents of title, investment securities, and secured transactions. Along with the usual descriptions of interesting judicial decisions in these areas, which are highlighted in the survey, there has also been important legislative progress. The 2010 amendments to U.C.C. Article 9 have been adopted in all fifty states, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico. Those revisions were summarized in the Introduction to the 2009 survey. Additionally, the 2012 amendments to U.C.C. Article 4A, which …