Digital Commons Network^™

Multiple Paths To Critical Reflection: A Flexible Model Of Teacher Learning And Its Impact On Student Achievement, Susan B. Koba, Carol T. Mitchell

Transactions of the Nebraska Academy of Sciences and Affiliated Societies

This research evaluated impact of the Omaha Public Schools' Urban Systemic Program professional development model on mathematics and science teacher change and student achievement. The model offered various participation pathways, focused teachers' learning in three areas (beliefs, content, and pedagogy) and required teacher reflection during classroom strategy implementation. To determine teacher change, observations, interviews, action research, pre-post perception profiles, retrospective pre-post surveys (beliefs and understandings), and exit surveys were completed. Participants' action research determined impact . on students' understandings. Criterion Referenced· Tests, as well as leadership pre- and post- surveys, action research and interviews determined school change. To evaluate program …

Exercise And Diabetes Influence Antioxidant Activity And Gene Expression In Female Rats, Janet E. Steele, Karynn E. Kucera, Cory A. Ciccone, Mary E. Connealy

Transactions of the Nebraska Academy of Sciences and Affiliated Societies

The goal of this study was to examine the influence of exercise training and type I diabetes on the activity of aconitase and superoxide dismutase (SOD), on levels of reduced glutathione (GSH), on the expression of genes responsible for glutathione synthesis (Gclc, g-glutamylcysteine synthase; Gss, glutathione synthetase), and on the expression of genes responsible for the formation of two potassium channels (Kcnd2, I_to; KCNQl, I_Ks) in cardiac muscle. Forty female Sprague-Dawley rats were divided into four groups: sedentary controls, sedentary diabetics, trained controls, and trained diabetics. Diabetes was induced via streptozotocin injection, and training consisted of …

Recognizing Multijurisdiction Class Action Judgments Within Canada: Key Questions—Suggested Answers, Janet Walker

All Papers

No abstract provided.

The Corporate Social Responsibility Movement As An Ethnographic Problem, John M. Conley, Cynthia A. Williams

All Papers

Over the past decade, the business world has devoted an extraordinary amount of attention to the concept of "corporate social responsibility." CSR derives from the idea that the responsibility of a corporation extends beyond the traditional Anglo-American objective of providing maximal financial returns to its shareholders. Instead, CSR proponents have argued, the legitimate concerns of a corporation should include such broader objectives as sustainable growth, equitable employment practices, and long-term social and environmental well-being. CSR is now the focus of a well-defined and energetic movement that has manifested itself in a variety of ways. It is, in the anthropologist Sally …

Victims And The Significance Of Causing Harm, Guyora Binder

Journal Articles

Many criminal law theorists find the punishment of harm puzzling. They argue that acts should be evaluated only on the basis of the risks they create and the actors' awareness of those risks; that punishing results violates both desert and utility. This article explains punishment of harm on the basis of political theory rather than moral philosophy. Punishing harm helps legitimize the rule of law by vindicating victims. A rule of law state precludes cycles of organized retaliatory violence by asserting a monopoly on retaliatory force, thereby depriving individuals and groups of the option of securing their own dignity. We …

The Legal Profession: From The Revolution To The Civil War, Alfred S. Konefsky

Contributions to Books

Published as Chapter 3 in The Cambridge History of Law in America, Volume II, The Long Nineteenth Century (1789–1920), Michael Grossberg & Christopher Tomlins, eds.

The American legal profession matured and came to prominence during the century prior to the Civil War. Before the Revolution, across some 150 years, lawyers in different colonies underwent different experiences at different times. By the beginning of the eighteenth century, more lawyers were entering professional life. After the revolution and the defection by the Tory lawyers, the remaining quickly burnished their images in the glow of republican ideals while grasping new market opportunities. For …

"Everybody Loves Trees": Policing American Cities Through Street Trees, Irus Braverman

Journal Articles

Recently, municipalities have been investing large sums of money as well as much bureaucratic and professional effort into making their cities not only a more "treefull" place, but also a place that surveys, measures, regulates, and manages its trees. This article explores the transformation of the utilitarian discourse on trees, which focuses on the benefits of trees and greenery, into a normative discourse whereby trees are not only considered good but are also represented as if they are or should be loved by everybody. This transformation is not only the result of top-down governmental policies. It is also a consequence …

Governing Certain Things: The Regulation Of Street Trees In Four North American Cities, Irus Braverman

Journal Articles

Most sociolegal studies of the urban street focus on the human element. By focusing on the tree, my Article offers a unique perspective on the interrelations between various actors within the public spaces of modern North American cities. Situated at the intersection of legal geography, anthropology, and Science and Technology Studies, this Article demonstrates how natural artifacts function as technologies of governance, thereby masking crucial political interventions behind a natural facade. The tensions between nature and the city, as embedded in both the construction and the regulation of street trees, provide an unusual perspective on the management of urban populations …

A New Look At Neo-Liberal Economic Policies And The Criminalization Of Undocumented Migration, Teresa A. Miller

Journal Articles

This paper situates the current “crisis” surrounding the arrival and continued presence of undocumented immigrants in the United States within penological trends that have taken root in American law over the past thirty years. It positions the shift from more benevolent to the increasingly harsh legal treatment of undocumented immigrants as the continuation of a succession of legal reforms criminalizing immigrants, and governing immigration through crime. By charting the increasing salience of crime in public perceptions of undocumented immigrants, and comparing the immediately preceding criminal stigmatization of so-called “criminal aliens”, this paper exposes current severity toward undocumented immigrants as consistent …

What Is This "Lobbying" That We Are So Worried About?, Lloyd Hitoshi Mayer

Journal Articles

Lobbying is both an essential part of our democratic process and a source of some of our greatest fears about dangers to that process. Yet when Congress, the public, and scholars consider loosening or, as is more often the case, tightening the restrictions on lobbying, they usually assume that everyone knows what activities are in fact lobbying. They therefore overlook the fact that multiple definitions of lobbying currently exist in the various federal laws addressing lobbying. This Article seeks to fill this gap by answering the question of how lobbying should be defined for purposes of the existing federal laws …

Religion At A Public University, Gerard V. Bradley

Journal Articles

On March 6, 2007, the College of William & Mary announced a “compromise” solution to its polite civil war over the historic Wren Chapel. In a joint statement with President Gene Nichol, the Board of Visitors declared that permanent display of the Christian cross within the Chapel would resume. The cross would be moved, however, from its former place at center stage on the Chapel altar. Accompanying the elocated display would be a plaque “explaining the College's Anglican roots.” The compromise further provided that, when needed during certain worship services, the cross could be moved back to the altar. When …

The Memory Gap In Surveillance Law, Patricia L. Bellia

Journal Articles

U.S. information privacy laws contain a memory gap: they regulate the collection and disclosure of certain kinds of information, but they say little about its retention. This memory gap has ever-increasing significance for the structure of government surveillance law. Under current doctrine, the Fourth Amendment generally requires government agents to meet high standards before directly and prospectively gathering a target's communications. The law takes a dramatically different approach to indirect, surveillance-like activities, such as the compelled production of communications from a third party, even when those activities yield the same information as, or more information than, direct surveillance activities. Because …

Do Churches Matter? Towards An Institutional Understanding Of The Religion Clauses, Richard W. Garnett

Journal Articles

In recent years, several prominent scholars have called attention to the importance and role of First Amendment institutions and there is a growing body of work informed by an appreciation for what Professor Balkin calls the infrastructure of free expression. The freedom of expression, he suggests, requires more than mere absence of government censorship or prohibition to thrive; [it] also require[s] institutions, practices and technological structures that foster and promote [it]. The intuition animating this scholarship, then, is that the freedom of expression is not only enjoyed by and through, but also depends on the existence and flourishing of, certain …

Legal Status And Effect On Children, Margaret F. Brinig, Steven L. Nock

Journal Articles

One of the haunting claims of each poor, unmarried mother in Edin and Kefalas' Promises I Can Keep is that at least she can guarantee she will love her child, even though she cannot promise to make a lifelong commitment to a mate. That love, each young mother says, will be a sustaining gift both to her and the child. Similarly, in work done by sociologists McLanahan and Garfinkel to counteract the claim that it was not single parenting that made children's prospects dim, but poverty, sociologists have found that many of the bad effects of single parenting go away …

A Comparison Of Child Advocacy Laws In Abuse And Neglect Cases In England And The United States, Pamela Newell

Journal Articles

No abstract provided.

Bringing Clarity To Title Clearing: Tax Foreclosure And Due Process In The Internet Age, James J. Kelly Jr.

Journal Articles

The foreclosure of property tax liens performs an essential economic function by reconnecting underutilized properties to the real estate market. To clear title in an efficient and just manner, local jurisdictions foreclosing on tax liens require clear, balanced procedures for the provision of notice to affected parties. In its 2006 decision in Jones v. Flowers, the U.S. Supreme Court found that the foreclosing jurisdiction's lack of direct follow-up on returned notice mailings denied the addressee due process because the foreclosing party did not take steps that would be chosen by one desirous of actually informing the property owner. In subjecting …

Children's Beliefs And Family Law, Margaret F. Brinig

Journal Articles

In a recent series of opinions authored by Justice Stevens, the Court has recognized that children may have independent religious rights, and that these may be in conflict with their parents'. The questions for this piece are whether considering children's rights independently is a good thing whether it is warranted by children's actual religious preferences and whether children's religious activities actually do anything measurable for the children.

I do not advocate that the Supreme Court become more involved with family law than it has been since the substantive due process days of Meyer and Pierce. I am also not one …

Free Speech And The Case For Constitutional Exceptionalism, Roger P. Alford

Journal Articles

Excerpts from the Article

Embodied in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is the evocative proposition that [e]veryone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression. But beneath that level of abstraction there is anything but universal agreement.

This book review argues that the dissonance between countries need not be challenged in pursuit of uniformity. Indeed, in those cases in which the differences reflect an appropriate balance of competing goods, it should be celebrated. Constitutional exceptionalism recognizes and celebrates each country's attempt to optimize the general welfare of that country by balancing competing goods in a manner consistent with …

The Rise Of Spanish And Latin American Criminal Theory, Luis E. Chiesa

Journal Articles

No abstract provided.

Judicial Enforcement Of The Establishment Clause, Richard W. Garnett

Journal Articles

This paper is the author’s contribution to a roundtable conference, held in October of 2008 at Notre Dame Law School, devoted to Prof. Kent Greenawalt’s book, Religion and the Constitution: Establishment and Fairness. It is suggested that Greenawalt’s admirably context-sensitive approach to church-and-state questions might lead us to think that the best course for judges is to find (somehow) some bright-line, on-off “rules” and “tests”, constructed to identify and forbid the most obvious violations of the Religion Clause’s core (whatever that is), and to give up on -- or, perhaps, “underenforce” -- the rest.

Drawing Back From The Abyss, Or Lessons Learned From Count Von Count, John Henry Schlegel

Journal Articles

No abstract provided.

Real-Time Implementation Of A Statcom On A Wind Farm Equipped With Doubly Fed Induction Generators, Wei Qiao, Ganesh K. Venayagamoorthy, Ronald G. Harley

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

Voltage stability is a key issue to achieve the uninterrupted operation of wind farms equipped with doubly fed induction generators (DFIGs) during grid faults. This paper investigates the application of a static synchronous compensator (STATCOM) to assist with the uninterrupted operation of a wind turbine driving a DFIG, which is connected to a power network, during grid faults. The control schemes of the DFIG rotor- and grid-side converters and the STATCOM are suitably designed and coordinated. The system is implemented in real-time on a real time digital simulator. Results show that the STATCOM improves the transient voltage stability and therefore …

Notes On The Multiple Facets Of Immigration Federalism, Rick Su

Journal Articles

This symposium essay takes as its starting point the contestable position that some degree of immigration federalism is both constitutionally permissible and politically desirable. It suggests, however, that liberating the issue of immigration from the shadows of federal exclusivity does not necessarily tell us much about what a conceptual framework or legal jurisprudence of immigration federalism should or will actually be like. This is not solely a function of the difficulties inherent in incorporating principles of federalism into what is usually understood to be an exclusive federal field of immigration. Rather, it is also a consequence of the rifts and …

A Localist Reading Of Local Immigration Regulations, Rick Su

Journal Articles

The conventional account of immigration-related activity at the local level often assumes that the "local" is simply a new battleground in the national immigration debates. This article questions that presumption. Foregrounding the legal rules that define local governments and channels local action, this article argues that the local immigration "crisis" is much less a consequence of federal immigration policy than normally assumed. Rather, it can also be understood as a familiar byproduct of localism: the legal and cultural assumptions that shape how we structure and organize local communities, provide and allocate local services, and define the legal relationship of local, …

Section 524(G) Without Compromise: Voting Rights And The Asbestos Bankruptcy Paradox, S. Todd Brown

Journal Articles

Section 524(g) of the Bankruptcy Code was adopted to protect unknown future asbestos personal injury victims' rights and prospects for financial recovery. To serve these goals and satisfy the demands of due process, Section 524(g) provides two basic forms of virtual representation for future victims - requiring the appointment of an independent legal representative and aligning the interests of future victims with current claimants (75% of whom must approve any plan that invokes Section 524(g)). In recent years, however, the 75% super-majority vote requirement has been transformed into a veto power wielded by a small group of law firms, who …

Law And Economic Change During The Short Twentieth Century, John Henry Schlegel

Contributions to Books

Published as Chapter 16 in Cambridge History of Law in America, Volume 3: The Twentieth Century and After (1920–), Michael Grossberg & Christopher Tomlins, eds.

The brief recounting of the American economy in the twenties and thirties raises obvious questions about law and economic change. Economic change is the shift from one enacted, in both senses, understanding of economic life to another, in the case of the short twentieth century, from an associationalist economy to an impatient economy. This chapter explicates this economic change, and interrogates it in order to understand the role of law in its occurrence. Despite the …

Procedural Common Law, Amy Coney Barrett

Journal Articles

Debates about the common lawmaking power of the federal courts focus exclusively on substantive common law. But federal common law is not limited to matters of substance; it reaches matters of procedure as well. Federal law includes a robust body of what might be called procedural common law - common law primarily concerned with the regulation of internal court processes rather than substantive rights and obligations. This body of law includes many doctrines that are fixtures in the law of procedure and federal courts. For example, abstention, forum non conveniens, remittitur, stare decisis, and preclusion can all fairly be characterized …

Jail For Juvenile Child Pornographers?: A Reply To Professor Leary, Stephen F. Smith

Journal Articles

Even though Professor Leary and I are united in the goal of protecting children against sexual exploitation, we part company on the proper societal response to the problem of self-produced child pornography. In my view, children who produce and distribute pornographic images of themselves ordinarily should not be regarded as proper objects of punishment. In this context, child protective services, backed up if necessary by the threat of criminal prosecution, is a much more appropriate way of reforming minors and protecting them against the serious dangers to which they expose themselves by creating and distributing pornographic images of themselves. A …

The Supreme Court And The Politics Of Death, Stephen F. Smith

Journal Articles

This article explores the evolving role of the U.S. Supreme Court in the politics of death. By constitutionalizing the death penalty in the 1970s, the Supreme Court unintentionally set into motion political forces that have seriously undermined the Court's vision of a death penalty that is fairly administered and imposed only on the worst offenders. With the death penalty established as a highly salient political issue, politicians - legislators, prosecutors, and governors - have strong institutional incentives to make death sentences easier to achieve and carry out. The result of this vicious cycle is not only more executions, but less …

Estimation Of Earthquake Loss Due To Bridge Damage In The St. Louis Metropolitan Area: Part I - Direct Losses, Ronaldo Luna, David J. Hoffman, William T. Lawrence

Civil, Architectural and Environmental Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

The risk associated with earthquake hazards on highway systems is dependent on the complexity of a network and its redundancy in providing traffic flow. Earthquake loss estimation studies can provide decision makers with an appreciation of the importance of having a highway network resistant to earthquakes and information to make the network resistant to these events. The direct economic loss was estimated for a major metropolitan area, St. Louis, for a series of earthquake scenarios. The primary component of the study was damage to bridges within the highway system. The study zone covers the St. Louis metropolitan area and its …