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An Empirical Examination Of Access To Chapter 7 Relief By Pro Se Debtors, Rafael I. Pardo

Scholarship@WashULaw

The Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act of 2005 (BAPCPA) represents the most significant overhaul of federal bankruptcy law since the Bankruptcy Code’s enactment in 1978. The legislation expanded the grounds on which a debtor’s Chapter 7 case may be dismissed. Moreover, it increased the administrative requirements imposed upon debtors who file for bankruptcy (e.g., increased financial disclosures), which in turn has had the effect of increasing the direct costs of filing for bankruptcy (e.g., filing fees and attorneys’ fees). With this increased complexity in accessing Chapter 7 relief, the question arises whether BAPCPA has had a disproportionate impact …

Faculty Publications 2008, Lsu Health Sciences Center New Orleans

Historical Faculty Publications

This Faculty bibliography contains 629 publications.

Exploring Accounting Fraud In The Subsidiary Environment, Carmelita J. Troy, Madeline Ann Domino, Steven P. Landry

Faculty Publications

This research explores accounting fraud in the subsidiary environment. Utilizing institutional theory, we propose that the subsidiary environment provides an opportune setting and vehicle for individuals to commit accounting fraud. While a growing body of literature exists on accounting fraud, minimal work has focused on the role of the subsidiary in accounting fraud, as reported by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). We sample companies for which the SEC has documented accounting fraud in their enforcement releases. We then analyze the related SEC documents to determine to what extent, if any, a subsidiary is involved in the accounting fraud. Our …

Section 8(F) Prehire Agreements And The Exception To Majority Representation: Are Construction Workers Getting The Shaft?, Desiree Leclercq

Scholarly Works

Congress has neglected the federal labor rights of construction workers for half a century. Back in 1959, Congress addressed the needs of construction workers and attempted to ensure that those workers, who were hired by construction employers for erratic and short periods of time, retained the right to organize in unions. To that end, Congress added section 8(f) to the National Labor Relations Act ("NLRA"), authorizing construction employers and unions to enter voluntarily into prehire collective bargaining agreements covering construction workers. Additionally, Congress included a proviso permitting employers to require, as a condition of employment, that their employees join the …

Towards Achieving Lasting Healthcare Reform: Rethinking The American Social Contract, Fazal Khan

Scholarly Works

The famous preamble to the United States Declaration of Independence reflects a concise and eloquent understanding of the Lockean social contract theory that underpinned the foundation of the original American government: that free people will naturally find it in their self-interest to leave the state of nature (and the tyranny of foreign rule) and join a society where a legitimate sovereign power and the rule of law protect the citizens' fundamental rights. As of the writing of this essay, a new decade approaches and both the U.S. Senate and House have passed historic healthcare reform bills. The two legislative bodies, …

Paging King Solomon: Towards Allowing Parents To Donate Organs Of Anencephalic Infants, Fazal Khan, Brian Lea

Scholarly Works

In October of 1987, Canadian doctors artificially sustained the life of an anencephalic infant so that her organs could be transplanted into another child, touching off a fiery debate. At the request of her parents, doctors connected Baby Gabrielle, who was born missing most of her brain, to a respirator before flying her to Loma Linda, California, where her heart was transplanted into the world's youngest recipient of a heart transplant. While Baby Gabrielle's parents insisted that their daughter's organs be used in this manner and were presumably happy with the resulting transplant, one of Baby Gabrielle's doctors expressed qualms …

The Public’S Right To Health: When Patient Rights Threaten The Commons, Elizabeth Weeks Leonard

Scholarly Works

This Article offers a contemporary examination of traditional public health objectives to address social problems not amenable to individual resolution. Taking the tradition a step further, it defines a "public health right" that may justify certain government actions that otherwise appear to impair individual rights. For example, lawmakers are considering whether current regulations on prescription drugs should be loosened to allow terminally ill patients to access drugs before they have been tested and approved for the general public. This Article concludes that expanding access to experimental drugs would violate the public health right to scientific knowledge and new drug development. …

Litigating Groups, Elizabeth Chamblee Burch

Scholarly Works

Large-scale litigation, such as the Vioxx, Zyprexa, and asbestos cases, breeds conflict. Conflicts arise between attorneys and their clients (agency problems), plaintiffs and other plaintiffs (group problems), and plaintiffs' attorneys and other plaintiffs' attorneys (competition problems). Although these cases cannot be certified as class actions, they still proceed en masse to achieve economies of scale and present a credible threat to defendants. Assuming that coordinating and consolidating large-scale litigation is systemically desirable, this Article explores a new approach to removing the group and agency problems that increase aggregate litigation's costs and undermine its normative goals such as fairness, compensation, and …

Teaching Sicko, Elizabeth Weeks

Scholarly Works

This article provides insights in how to make up cancelled law classes to ensure compliance with American Bar Association accreditation instructional hours requirements. How to cover the missed course content. How to find mutually agreeable make-up class times and locations with a group of busy, upper-level law students. Faced with the prospect of having to make up two hours each of my Health Care Financing and Regulation course and my Public Health Law seminar, I turned to the teacher's little helper: the DVD player

Functions And Correlates Of Deliberate Self-Harm Among Adjudicated Male Adolescents, Jenna Silverman

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Deliberate self-harm (DSH) is self-inflicted physical injury without suicidal intent. Recent studies indicated that more adolescent males engage in DSH than previously identified. Research demonstrated that DSH is common in forensic settings and highly correlated with several mental health disorders. This study included 103 adjudicated male adolescents assessed for DSH and mental health concerns. Twenty-two participants with DSH history and 21 controls were interviewed about coping skills, mental health problems, and DSH functions. Results indicated that 66%, especially African American and Hispanic participants, reported DSH history. Participants with DSH history reported more aggression, emotional lability, alienation/boredom, and internalizing disorders but …

Recent High School Graduates Knowledge About Physical Activity Guidelines And Disease Related To Sedentary Lifestyle, Soojin Yoo

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

This study examined recent high school graduates' knowledge about physical activity (PA) guidelines and disease related to sedentary lifestyle. Using a cross-sectional descriptive design, focus was on assessing knowledge performance and relating it to gender, ethnicity, PA behavior, and conceptualizations about high school health education (HE) and physical education (PE). Study participants were 394 recent high school graduates between the ages of 18-20 years of age. Participants completed a questionnaire designed to measure knowledge about PA guidelines and disease associated with sedentary lifestyle. In addition, the questionnaire also comprised items designed to capture demographical information and provide some information about …

Diversity Issues In Recruitment And Retention Of Clients For Parenting Classes, Rachel Elizabeth Davis

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Parenting skills classes are an effective means of preventing and remediating juvenile delinquency, youth violence, and child maltreatment. In particular, juvenile delinquency and child maltreatment disproportionately affect low-income African American families. Unfortunately, data from most parenting classes suggest dismal attendance and participation rates for racial- and ethnic-minorities from low-income backgrounds. The lack of effective recruitment may be due, in part, to the level of cultural competency inherent in the design, content, and implementation of existing parenting classes. Using semi-structured interviews and the qualitative methodology of grounded theory, this study explored the self-reported parenting beliefs, values, and struggles of a sample …

A Multiple Case Study Of College First-Year Seminars, Karen Ruth Mills Reid

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

John N. Gardner in 1972 advocated a new concept called the first-year seminar to increase academic performance and retention for freshmen students. The term "first-year seminar" defined a fairly diverse instructional construct, but the goal was clear and focused. It was to improve student retention rates. Research trends indicated a positive and almost always statistically significant relationship between first-year seminar participation and college achievement and higher persistence rates. Existing studies reflected a variety of significant methodological issues. Also; few cross-institutional research studies were reported and far fewer considered the content of the construct called a first-year seminar. The purpose of …

Bending Of Woody Riparian Vegetation As A Function Of Hydraulic Flow Conditions, John O. Goreham

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Vegetation encroachment reduces channel conveyance capacity below design objectives and greatly increases the risk for loss of life and property damage in the case of large flood events. Given minimal knowledge of hydraulic roughness for shrubs and woody vegetation, accurate estimation of channel capacity and water surface elevation is difficult. The ability to predict a tree's bent, reduced height in the presence of flow permits more accurate prediction of hydraulic roughness and water surface elevation.

In this study, field tests were performed to elucidate tree bending properties, which in turn served as input parameters for a numerical algorithm designed to …

Posttraumatic Stress Disorder And Other Consequences Of A Picu Admission, Stephanie Ann Stowman

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Currently, there is a paucity of literature regarding children's experiences in a pediatric intensive care unit (PICU) relative to caregivers' experiences. Children admitted to a PICU and their caregivers are at risk for various psychopathology. Disorders commonly identified in seriously ill children include depression, anxiety, acute stress disorder, and posttraumatic stress disorder. Caregivers of seriously ill children are at increased risk of depression, generalized anxiety disorder, acute stress disorder, and posttraumatic stress disorder. Researchers often fail to examine all relevant psychopathology and contributing factors and stressors, such as family environment, in seriously ill children and their caregivers. This study assessed …

Spectral Analysis Of Pathological Acoustic Speech Waveforms, Priyanka Medida

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Biomedical engineering is the application of engineering principles and techniques to the medical field. The design and problem solving skills of engineering are combined with medical and biological science, which improves medical disorder diagnosis and treatment. The purpose of this study is to develop an automated procedure for detecting excessive jitter in speech signals, which is useful for differentiating normal from pathologic speech. The fundamental motivation for this research is that tools are needed by speech pathologists and laryngologists for use in the early detection and treatment of laryngeal disorders. Acoustical analysis of speech was performed to analyze various features …

Brothers Are Better Than Sisters: A Semiotic, Feminist Analysis Of Hbo's "Rome", Patricia Mamie Peers

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

In 2005, the Home Box Office and British Broadcasting Corporation partnered to produce Rome , a television series that retells the Roman histories of Julius Caesar, Marc Antony and Augustus through the lives of two centurion soldiers, Titus Pullo and Lucious Vorenus. The show's producers endeavored to bring Roman streets to life and included more storylines of women, men and children of all classes. At first considered a more egalitarian approach to history, Rome 's women are said to "challenge expectations" (Vu, 2005) and "forge a new path" (Ragalie, 2007, p. 2). But does this new representation challenge the old …

Soil Moisture And Water Stage Estimation Using Precipitation Radar, Sumit Puri

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

In south-western United States, soil moisture data is important for drought studies in the region which is experiencing a drought for many years, whereas in South Florida, water stage data is required by hydrologists to monitor the hydrological flow in wetlands. Soil moisture data and water stage data are not sufficiently available due to sparse monitoring stations. Installation of dense measuring stations over an extended area is costly and labor intensive. Therefore, there is a need to develop an alternative method of measuring soil moisture and water stage. Microwave remote sensing has proven to be a useful tool in the …

Disease In The Desert: Las Vegas As A Case Study Of How First Responders And Emergency Managers Understand Novel Threats To Human Health And Plan To Respond During Biological Emergencies, Monique Williamson

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Over recent years it has become clear that technological advancements, globalization, and ecological change, combined with the onset of increased terrorist incidents, are all currently working to create an extremely hazardous environment in terms of pathogenic invasion. Realizing that infectious diseases are both newly emerging and re-emerging in many parts of the world, the question of how prepared an expansive United States will be in the face of an oncoming global pandemic is easily raised. Using Las Vegas as an example of just how unequipped a largely visited U.S. city may be in the face of such a situation, this …

Adult Esl Student Perceptions On Computer Assisted Language Learning, Jillian Burrus

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

The purpose of this research study was to explore my adult English as a second language (ESL) student's experiences with technology as a method of improving English acquisition. The area of computer assisted language learning (CALL) is increasingly becoming important within the second language learning arena. As the expansion of available technology continues to increase, insight into opinions about the effectiveness of CALL and specifically those opinions of the actual users will be needed.

As an instructor of adult ESL students, my study focused on providing information about my student's use of technology for future personal classroom praxis. This research …

Design And Characterization Of A Shock And Vibration Mitigation Seat System, George Samaan Ladkany

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Extensive research has been conducted into the development of pneumatic seatbladder systems for shock and vibration mitigation for use in current U.S military vehicle envelopes. This research expands on the previous work through an elaborate experimental characterization of four prototype air bladder seat cushion systems. The experimental characterization conducted included shock testing, continuous vibration, and internal dynamic pressure measured during the shock event.

The shock testing was conducted both at the Army Research Lab as well at UNLV. The shock testing conducted at UNLV was performed on a drop tower designed and constructed during the time of this research. The …

Desert Varnish As An Indicator Of Modern-Day Air Pollution In Southern Nevada, Piotr Nowinski

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Rock varnish, often called desert varnish, is a slow-growing, manganese-rich coating that accumulates on exposed rock surfaces. The mechanism of varnish formation is not fully understood, however, most authors agree that varnishes derive their components from the atmosphere. The main goal of this study was to demonstrate the potential use of desert varnish as a passive environmental monitor of present and past atmospheric pollution. Analysis of varnishes is a new field that can potentially provide records of pre-anthropogenic levels of atmospheric metals and other environmental pollutants. To evaluate the potential of desert varnish as an environmental monitoring tool, the following …

Death Of The Role-Play, Nadja Alexander, Michelle Lebaron

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

Setting someone up to fail does indeed sound unfair. In fact it could be described as an ambush – outlaw facilitators lying in wait for unsuspecting students. Not only is this unsettling in a training environment, we can ask whether this lack of transparency runs counter to the behavior expected of negotiators and mediators. Far from being a figment of our fertile imaginations, this short vignette is drawn from a real life learning situation at which both authors were present. Participants were asked at the beginning of the postgraduate workshop about their learning preferences. While most replied enthusiastically about learning …

Wendell Berry And The Politics Of Homecoming: Place, Memory And Time In Jayber Crow, Drew Kennedy Thompson

LSU Master's Theses

This study examines the “politics of homecoming” appearing in author Wendell Berry’s novel Jayber Crow. The novel portrays the community of a small rural town, as narrated through the autobiography of its bachelor barber. The life-story of Jayber Crow is a journey of homecoming, progressing through three stages of nativity, estrangement, and restoration. These phases correspond and interact with philosophical motifs that can be traced throughout Berry’s corpus, but reaching their fullest expression in Jayber Crow. “Place” is the first motif, and facilitates a discussion of Berry’s contemporary agrarian vision of community. “Memory,” the second motif, becomes effective during the …

Promoting Parent Partnership In Head Start: A Qualitative Case Study Of Teacher Documents From A School Readiness Intervention Project., Carolyn P. Edwards, Tara Hart, Kelly Rasmussen, Y. M. Haw, Susan M. Sheridan

Department of Child, Youth, and Family Studies: Faculty Publications

To advance the field of children’s services, implementation and generalization studies are needed to help us reveal the inner workings of intervention projects and how they do (or do not) achieve their outcomes. This paper provides a case study of Head Start teachers’ uptake of the Getting Ready school readiness intervention, intended to strengthen professionals’ capacity to support parental engagement in young children’s development and learning. The qualitative method of document review was used in scrutinizing home visit reports and classroom newsletters as a source of authentic evidence about teachers’ implementation and generalization of an early intervention model. Home visits …

Effects Of Marital Quality On Children In Brazilian Families, Stephen V. Stutzman, Richard B. Miller, Cody S. Hollist, Olga G. Falceto

Department of Child, Youth, and Family Studies: Faculty Publications

Although there is a robust literature supporting the empirical generalization that parental conflict is related to childhood problems, the research has primarily studied European American populations in the U.S. There is minimal research that investigates the relationship between marital distress and child outcomes in other cultures (Bradford et al., 2004; Buehler et al., 1997; Krishnakumar & Buehler, 2000; Shek, 2001), including a specific lack of knowledge regarding Latino populations. This is a significant gap in the literature since Latino children make up the largest minority group in the U.S., accounting for 16% of children younger than 18 years of age …

Relation Of Caregiver Alcohol Use To Unintentional Childhood Injury, Amy Damashek, Natalie A. Williams, Kenneth Sher, Lizette Petterson

Department of Child, Youth, and Family Studies: Faculty Publications

Objective The present study used a case-crossover design to investigate the association of caregiver alcohol consumption and supervision to children's injury occurrence and severity.

Method A community sample of 170 mothers of toddlers was interviewed biweekly about their children's daily injuries for a period of 6 months.

Results Proximal caregiver-reported alcohol use predicted higher likelihood of injury occurrence and higher injury severity, whereas caregiver-reported supervision predicted lower likelihood of injury occurrence and lower injury severity.

Conclusion Even at low levels, proximal caregiver alcohol use may contribute to higher risk for childhood injuries and more severe injuries. The combined effect of …

Factors Influencing Familial Decision-Making Regarding Human Papillomavirus Vaccination, Heather L. Gamble, James L. Klosky, Gilbert R. Parra, Mary E. Randolph

Department of Child, Youth, and Family Studies: Faculty Publications

Objective The purpose of this review is to summarize the research regarding Human Papillomavirus (HPV) vaccination uptake among families with adolescent/preadolescent daughters.

Methods Literature searches (utilizing PubMed and PsychInfo databases) were conducted and research examining psychological and environmental factors which relate to HPV vaccine uptake and intentions was reviewed.

Results Factors such as physician recommendations, perceptions of the beliefs of peers and significant others, history of childhood immunizations, and communication with adolescents regarding sexual topics appear to influence HPV vaccination outcomes.

Conclusions Although primary prevention of cervical and other cancers is available for preadolescent and adolescent girls, rates of HPV …

Intellectual Property In The Twenty-First Century: Will The Developing Countries Lead Or Follow?, Jerome H. Reichman

Faculty Scholarship

This article continues the author's contributions on the subject of intellectual property protection in developing countries, and focuses on how those developing countries with growing technological prowess should accommodate their own national systems of innovation to the worldwide intellectual property regime emerging in the post-TRIPS period, with a view to maximizing global economic welfare in the foreseeable future.

Describing The Effect Of Adaptation On Settlement, John Bronsteen, Christopher Buccafusco, Jonathan Masur

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.