Digital Commons Network^™

The Limits Of Law At The Limits Of Life: Lessons From Cannibalism, Euthanasia, Abortion, And The Court-Ordered Killing Of One Conjoined Twin To Save The Other, George J. Annas

Faculty Scholarship

The subject is law at the beginning and end of life. Most of my work is in the area of general health law: law and medicine, public health law, and health and human rights. But this is my favorite subject area, and I expect you to ask me the hardest questions you can. I am not saying I can answer them, but if I cannot that is my fault, not yours. I am going to make a pretty broad argument today about law and medicine; specifically about how new medical technology and medical practice standards have eclipsed religion (and sometimes …

“Partial-Birth Abortion” And The Supreme Court, George J. Annas

Faculty Scholarship

Aortion has long been, and remains, the most politicized medical procedure in the United States. It has been the subject of more state and federal legislation than all other medical procedures combined. The U.S. Supreme Court, which almost never hears cases about medical procedures, has regularly heard cases over the past 25 years concerning the constitutionality of various state laws designed to limit abortion. Thus, it was only a matter of time before the Court would hear a case on the constitutionality of laws restricting so-called partial-birth abortion. When the Court heard a challenge to Nebraska's law, statutes relating to …

Testing Poor Pregnant Women For Cocaine: Physicians As Police Investigators, George J. Annas

Faculty Scholarship

In 1989, Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall surmised that “declaring a war on illegal drugs is good public policy . . . [but] the first, and worst, casualty of war will be the precious liberties of our citizens.” The same year, in the midst of President George Bush's “war on drugs,” the Medical University of South Carolina initiated a program to screen selected pregnant patients for cocaine and to provide positive test results to the police. At a time of high public concern about “cocaine babies,” this program seemed reasonable to the university and local public officials. Drug-screening programs in …

The Theory Of Tort Doctrine And The Restatement Of Torts, Keith N. Hylton

Faculty Scholarship

The lack of detailed implications and general failure to come to grips with important features of tort doctrine have been substantial shortcomings in the dominant positive theory framework of Holmes and Posner. I extend the dominant framework below to enable it to justify various intentional tort doctrines, and the specific form and allocation of strict liability rules within tort law. After developing the positive framework, I apply it to the Restatement (Third) of Tort Law. The theory explains many of the detailed provisions and commentary of the Restatement, and identifies one area in which the Restatement (Third) seems inconsistent with …

Of Theory And Practice, Tamar Frankel

Faculty Scholarship

Much has been written about theory and practice in the law, and the tension between practitioners and theorists. Judges do not cite theoretical articles often; they rarely "apply" theories to particular cases. These arguments are not revisited. Instead the Essay explores the working and interaction of theory and practice, practitioners and theorists.

The Essay starts with a story about solving a legal issue using our intellectual tools - theory, practice, and their progenies: experience and "gut." Next the Essay elaborates on the nature of theory, practice, experience and "gut." The third part of the Essay discusses theories that are helpful …

Conjoined Twins: The Limits Of Law At The Limits Of Life, George J. Annas

Faculty Scholarship

Conjoined twins have been the subject of scientific exhibits, medical study, human curiosity, and even entertainment, but until the year 2000, conjoined twins had never been the subject of a courtroom battle. A unique case that was the subject of two British court decisions deserves study.1 The case illustrates the difficulty of applying legal principles to unprecedented life-and-death decisions involving proposed medical interventions for children — particularly when parents and physicians disagree about what should be done.

Rape, Murder, And Formalism: What Happens If We Define Mistake Of Law?, Gerald F. Leonard

Faculty Scholarship

The criminal law maxim "ignorance of the law is no excuse" represents a broad doctrine of strict liability in an area of law that usually insists on a culpable state of mind as a prerequisite for liability. For that reason, many scholars have attacked the harsh mistake-of-law rules as incompatible with basic principles of culpability. Other scholars have come to the defense of the maxim, and courts have adhered to it quite strongly even as the list of exceptions to the maxim has slowly grown. Oddly enough, however, this debate has proceeded without a definition of mistake of law. Distinguishing …

The Managing Lawmaker In Cyberspace: A New Power Model, Tamar Frankel

Faculty Scholarship

This paper is about the power of The Internet Corporation for Names and Numbers (ICANN). It examines how this power was created, augmented, strengthened, and reigned in. ICANN poses a puzzle. It is essentially an unregulated and undemocratic monopoly. Yet, ICANN's exercise of power has been fairly contained. Since ICANN is a monopoly, what prevents it from taking a far more high-handed and extensive ruling posture?

Even though at first blush my analogy is counterintuitive, I analogize ICANN to a managing lawmakers of market infrastructures, such as the New York Stock Exchange, while recognizing their differences. Unlike theExchange, ICANN has …

When Did The Constitution Become Law?, Gary S. Lawson, Guy Seidman

Faculty Scholarship

Conventional wisdom and Supreme Court doctrine hold that the federal Constitution became legally effective on March 4, 1789, when the first session of Congress began. This conclusion is wrong, or at least seriously incomplete. Evidence from the Constitution, its adoption, and contemporaneous understandings reflected in treaties, statutes, and state constitutions demonstrates that the Constitution did not have a single effective date. Instead, different parts of the Constitution took effect in stages, beginning on June 21, 1788, when New Hampshire became the ninth state to ratify the document, and continuing at least until April 30, 1789, when President Washington was sworn …

Quality Control, Enterprise Liability, And Disintermediation In Managed Care, John V. Jacobi, Nicole Huberfeld

Faculty Scholarship

The authors examine the potential of enterprise liability for managed care organizations in light of current health-care finance realities. They conclude that, despite the recent trend toward more loosely structured managed care organizations, such as disintermediated or patient-directed plans, plan-based enterprise liability best serves the goal of reducing medical injury by permitting a focus on entities with sufficient scope to translate liability pressure into support for systemic risk-reduction measures. Advancing plan-based enterprise liability in an era of disengaged managed care organizations will require an extension of tort liability to firms with little control but much influence over their business partners.

Congressional Power To Require Dna Testing, Larry Yackle

Faculty Scholarship

Many states fail to conduct, or even to permit, DNA testing of biological materials in circumstances in which the results might exonerate convicts under sentence of death. Senator Patrick Leahy thinks that Congress should enact a statute requiring states to provide for testing when it promises to reveal the truth. Leahy's idea is sensible as a matter of policy. I mean in this Article to argue that it is also constitutionally feasible.

A Framework For The Rejuvenation Of The American Labor Movement, Michael C. Harper

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Outrelativizing Relativism: A Liberal Defense Of The Universality Of International Human Rights, Robert D. Sloane

Faculty Scholarship

This Article seeks to provide a new framework, rooted in classical liberalism, for understanding and defending the universality of international human rights. After reviewing the philosophical and historical development of the idea of universality, I argue in Part II that none of the traditional justifications for conceiving of international human rights as universal succeed. Cultural pluralism therefore must be accepted as a descriptive truth. But to acknowledge the cultural contingency of values as a descriptive claim does not, by itself, undermine the normative claim that human rights are, or should be, universal. Instead, it points to the need to justify …

Rethinking The Debates Over Health Care Financing: Evidence From The Bankruptcy Courts, Melissa B. Jacoby, Teresa A. Sullivan, Elizabeth Warren

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

The Supreme Court, Bush V. Gore, And Rough Justice, William P. Marshall

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Cowboy Prosecutors And Subpoenas For Incriminating Evidence: The Consequences And Correction Of Excess, Robert P. Mosteller

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Customary International Law And Torture: The Case Of India, A. Mark Weisburd

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

The Impossibility Of Lujan's Project, Gene R. Nichol

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

The Future Of Educational Diversity: Old Decrees, New Challenges, John Charles Boger, Elizabeth Jean Bower

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Making And Breaking Rank: Some Thoughts On Recent Canadian Law School Surveys, Margot Young

All Faculty Publications

The recent emergence of various surveys evaluating Canadian law schools has introduced greater notions of rank among these law schools. Three different types of law school surveys can be identified. Collectively and individually, these surveys threaten a number of normative goals for legal education: humanistic professionalism, pluralistic legal education and diversity. While it is important to acknowledge the need for accountability, it is essential, as well, that legal educators think carefully about what values and perspectives ought to underpin such evaluation.

Analysis Of Inorganic Materials Using Advanced Nmr And Nqr Techniques, Anthony Adrian Mrse

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Several advanced solid-state nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) and nuclear quadrupole resonance (NQR) techniques have been applied to inorganic materials of commercial interest. The specific techniques applied to each system were chosen to solve specific obstacles which impeded the flow of industrial science.

First, the dispersion of brominated flame retardants in polymers is monitored using pulsed ⁸¹Br NQR (nuclear quadrupole resonance) techniques. The NQR spectrometer consists of a homemade NMR console and an automatically tuned loop-gap resonator probe. The two factors which affect the ⁸¹Br NQR transition frequencies of brominated aromatics are: electron-donating and withdrawing substituents on the ring …

Analysis Of Near-Infrared Dye-Labeled Sanger Sequencing Fragments With Gel Electrophoresis Using The Time-Resolved Flourescence Lifetime Indentification Methods, Suzanne Jeanel Lassiter

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

The research presented in this dissertation involves the identification of sequencing fragments with time-resolved methods. For this application, near-infrared heavy-atom tricarbocyanine dyes were developed in our laboratory, which can be excited with a single laser and emission collected using a single detection channel. The dyes have four spectroscopically unique, but relatively short lifetimes that can be altered by the intramolecular heavy-atom they contain. The work described here involves the optimization of dye-primer chemistry for preparing Sanger sequencing reactions for longer reads and the optimization of the separation matrix for capillary gel electrophoresis that produces favorable statistical analysis of the aforementioned …

The Association Of Food Cravings And Preferences With Food Intake, Corby Kyle Martin

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

An ubiquitous assumption about food intake behavior is that people eat the types of foods that they crave and prefer. Food preferences reflect hedonic ratings of the degree to which people like certain foods. The present study investigated the association of food cravings and hedonic ratings with food intake behavior, assessed in the laboratory with a Universal Eating Monitor (Kissileff, Klingsberg, & Van Itallie, 1980). The study sample consisted of 162 adults who completed the Food Craving Inventory (FCI; White, Whisenhunt, Williamson, Greenway, & Netemeyer, 2001), a questionnaire that measures craving, including cravings for specific types of foods (i.e., High …

The Constitution As Based On The Consent Of The Governed—Or, Should We Have An Unwritten Constitution?, Thomas B. Mcaffee

Scholarly Works

It is useful to embrace continuity in describing basic differences we have in giving effect to the Constitution, especially if particular ways of communicating help us convey and understand what is at stake. The individual who originated the term “non-interpretivist” to describe judicial review implementing the unwritten constitution, for example, continues to believe that the best approach to constitutional interpretation is not “textualist,” but is properly characterized as “supplemental.” In his view, “much American constitutional adjudication, including but not limited to decisions under due process liberty and the right of privacy, involves the interpretation of an unwritten and essentially common …

Artin-Schreier Families And 2-D Cycle Codes, Cem Guneri

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

We start with the study of certain Artin-Schreier families. Using coding theory techniques, we determine a necessary and sufficient condition for such families to have a nontrivial curve with the maximum possible number of rational points over the finite field in consideration. This result produces several nice corollaries, including the existence of certain maximal curves; i.e., curves meeting the Hasse-Weil bound.We then present a way to represent two-dimensional (2-D) cyclic codes as trace codes starting from a basic zero set of its dual code. This representation enables us to relate the weight of a codeword to the number of rational …

Their Own Preposessions: The Establishment Clause 1999-2000, Leslie C. Griffin

Scholarly Works

No abstract provided.

The Prudent Prosecutor, Leslie C. Griffin

Scholarly Works

No abstract provided.

Heavy Metal Distribution For Aqueous And Solid Phases In Urban Runoff, Snowmelt And Soils, Donald W. Glenn Iii

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

At the start of the third millennium, over 50% of the world’s population lives in urban areas. Anthropogenic activities associated with urban development such as traffic generate significant particulate and heavy metal mass loadings. Ten urban highway sites located throughout the metropolitan area of Cincinnati, Ohio were studied. Storm water, snow and transportation land use soil/residual complexes (RSCs) were collected at each site. For the storm water, results are presented for a series of eight rainfall runoff events over a two-year period and included analyses between dissolved and particulate-bound fractions of heavy metals (Pb, Cu, Cd and Zn), and water …

Age At Death In The Human Skeleton: A Combined Analysis Of Four Phase-Based Aging Systems To Determine Effieciency And Accuracy In Multifactorial Age Range Assignments, Jennifer Carol Giesecke

LSU Master's Theses

Analyses of human skeletal remains by physical anthropologists necessitate precise methods for the determination of age at death. Physical anthropologists recognize that the most accurate estimations of age at death are produced from evaluation of multiple indicators of age. To this end, three skeletal sites, the auricular surface, pubic symphysis, and right fourth sternal rib end, are often evaluated for age in adult skeletal remains. However, as of yet, no standardized method of combining the respective estimates of age provided at these sites has been reported. The above mentioned skeletal sites of 49 females and 77 males from the Hamann-Todd …

Glacial Deposits, Vol. 29, 2000-2001, Department Of Geography-Geology

Glacial Deposits

Newsletter of the Department of Geography-Geology