Digital Commons Network^™

Getting Real About Gideon: The Next Fifty Years Of Enforcing The Right To Counsel, Cara H. Drinan

Scholarly Articles

As we mark the fiftieth anniversary of Gideon, in this Article I argue that we can and should be more realistic in our efforts to enforce the right to counsel. Assuming, as many now do, that five decades of resource-starved indigent defense will likely continue in the future, where are our efforts most effectively deployed in the years to come? I address that question in three parts. Part II briefly acknowledges the entrenched crisis in indigent defense that is as old as the Gideon decision itself. Part III examines the most salient reform efforts of the last fifty years, highlighting …

Katz On A Hot Tin Roof: Saving The Fourth Amendment From Commercial Conditioning By Reviving Voluntariness In Disclosures To Third Parties, Mary Graw Leary

Scholarly Articles

In a world in which Americans are tracked on the Internet, tracked through their cell phones, tracked through the apps they purchase, and monitored by hundreds of traffic cameras, privacy is quickly becoming nothing more than a quaint vestige of the past.

In a previous article discussing the intersection of technology and the Fourth Amendment, I proposed reframing the issue away from conventional commentary. The Missed Opportunity of United States v. Jones: Commercial Erosion of Fourth Amendment Protection in a Post-Google Earth World, 15 PENN. J. CON. L. 331, 333 (2012). That article posits that society has reached the point …

Hawksbill Turtle Eretmochelys Imbricata Nesting Environment And Population Study In Cuero Y Salado Wildlife Refuge On The Coast Of Northern Honduras, Ariana Emily Cunningham

Honors Theses

This report outlines my contributions to ProTECTOR's Hawksbill turtle conservation project along the beachfront at Cuero y Salado Wildlife Refuge of Honduras. Observation-focused nightly beach patrols were conducted so as to census numbers of turtles nesting in this location presently and beach characteristic surveys were undertaken to create a map of environmental factors relevant to Hawksbill nesting along this beach. Resulting environmental maps were correlated with known factors contributing to Hawksbill nest site choice in order to assess the suitability of this beach for Hawksbill nesting, and thus determine its value for preservation efforts and ongoing funding. Of the 10 …

Analysis Of The Icelandic Oral Hymn Tradition As Seen In The Twentieth-Century Enthnographic Recordings Of "Stridsmenn Krist" ("Christ Bears His Cross"), Navina M. Dueck-Stefansson

Honors Theses

The Hymns of the passion are a collection of Icelandic poems (1656-1659) that have been important to Icelandic religious life since the seventeenth century. Until an organ was first brought to Iceland in 1840, hymns were unaccompanied both in church and in the home. Though the words of the hymns were reprinted several times, the musical notation seldom accompanied them, allowing for a strong oral tradition to form. I transcribed 31 field recordings of the hymn "Stridsmenn Krist" ("Christ bears his cross"). I then compared these transcriptions in order to identify rhythmic and melodic variations. The final stage of my …

On "Unease" And "Idealism": Reflections On Pope Benedict Xvi's Educating Young People In Justice And Peace And Its Message For Law Teachers, Lucia A. Silecchia

Scholarly Articles

Pope Benedict XVI recently wrote about the challenges facing those who have the responsibility for the education of the next generation. His insights, expressed last year, were addressed not simply to a Catholic audience but to all who look to the future and see the obligation to train young people "in justice and peace" to be a noble vocation and one solution to some of the difficulties that face the modern world. Although it was not directed to, or intended primarily for, law professors, the document has much to say to those whose vocation lies in legal education. This essay …

The Convention On The Rights Of Persons With Disabilities: Reflection On Four Flaws That Tarnish Its Promise, Lucia A. Silecchia

Scholarly Articles

On December 13, 2006, the United Nations adopted the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (“CRPD”). Widely touted as the “first comprehensive human rights treaty of the 21st century,” and effusively praised for its open negotiation process, the CRPD was opened for signature on March 30, 2007. The CRPD quickly entered into force on May 3, 2008. As it rapidly amassed signatories, the CRPD inspired great hope that its comprehensive approach would do much to overcome the consistent failure to promote the dignity of those with disabilities in meaningfully concrete ways.

The CRPD has garnered much recent and …

Unequal Treatment Of Religious Exercises Under Rfra: Explaining The Outliers In The Hhs Mandate Cases, Mark L. Rienzi

Scholarly Articles

Ongoing conflict over the contraceptive mandate promulgated by the Department of Health and Human Services ("HHS") has resulted in more than two dozen lawsuits by profit-making businesses and their owners seeking protection under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act ("RFRA"). To date, the businesses and their owners are winning handily, having obtained preliminary relief in seventeen of the cases, and being denied relief in only six. Last month, in fact, a panel of the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals took the extraordinary step of reconsidering and reversing its own prior ruling and granting a preliminary injunction to a business seeking RFRA's …

Peripheral T-Cell Lymphoma Presenting As Testicular Mass; A Diagnostic Challenge, Saroona Haroon, Arsalan Ahmed

Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine

Background: T-cell lymphomas involve the testis infrequently, which deserve special attention because of the poor prognosis and the need to make an appropriate diagnosis, which could lead to a better therapeutic strategy.
Case Presentation: A 40-year-old man presented with right testicular swelling for past three months. The swelling was painless, hard and rubbery. Testicular ultrasound showed diffuse increase in size of the testicle, with alteration in its echogenicity. The patient underwent orchidectomy, and based on histopathological and immunohistochemical tests, a peripheral T-cell lymphoma, not otherwise specified was diagnosed.
Conclusion: Testicular peripheral T-cell lymphomas are rare and aggressive cancers, with clinical …

Narrative Pluralism And The Doctrine Incoherence In Hosanna-Tabor, Frederick Mark Gedicks

Faculty Scholarship

In Hosanna-Tabor Church and School v. EEOC, the Supreme Court recognized for the first time that the Religion Clauses require a “ministerial exception” to federal antidiscrimination laws, holding that religious congregations have a broad and categorical immunity against government interference in ministerial employment decisions.

Hosanna-Tabor is filled with ironies. The case is as much about unjustified discrimination and administrative inconsistency as religious liberty. The Court’s endorsement of the exception as a feature of church autonomy overlooks that churches subvert autonomy as often as they protect it. The exception described by the Court is so broad, absolute, and inflexible that it …

Congressional Silence And The Statutory Interpretation Game, Paul Stancil

Faculty Scholarship

This Article explores the circumstances under which the federal legislative apparatus may be unable to respond to a politically objectionable statutory interpretation from the Supreme Court. The Article builds upon existing economic models of statutory interpretation, for the first time incorporating transaction costs into the analysis. The Article concludes by identifying recent real-world disputes in which transaction costs constrained Congress and the President from overriding the Court.

Copyright And Social Media: A Preliminary Case Study Of Pinterest, Elizabeth Townsend Gard, Bri Whetstone

MC Law Review

No abstract provided.

"Taxpayers As Victims: Taxpayer Harm & Criminalization", Brenner M. Fissell

Hofstra Law Faculty Scholarship

Criminal statutes are least objectionable when they are justified by the notion that the conduct being prohibited is harmful to others. Over the past few decades, a new argument has arisen that makes this very easy to do. This argument appeals to the reality that often when one’s conduct causes or risks physical injury to one’s self, governmental services (e.g. rescue, police, healthcare) will be provided, and that the cost of these services is an unfair burden imposed upon taxpayers. This argument understands the taxpayers to be victims, and the self-harming conduct to therefore be harmful to others, and justifiably …

The Dual Standard Of Review In Contracts Clause Jurisprudence, Brenner M. Fissell

Hofstra Law Faculty Scholarship

The article discusses American constitutional law, the U.S. Supreme Court's ruling in the 1977 case United States Trust Co. of New York v. New Jersey, and a reported dual standard of review in regards to Contracts Clause jurisprudence under the the nation's Constitution as of April 2013. Legislative repudiations of private agreements, government contracting, and public choice theory are addressed, along with trusteeship and police powers. A reasonableness analysis for contracts is mentioned.

Developing A Method For Enhanced Explosive Detection By Surface Enhanced Raman Scattering (Sers) And Metal Enhanced Fluorescence (Mef), Meredith A. Matoian

Open Access Master's Theses

The first manuscript, “Fabrication of SERS Substrates for Explosive Detection,” focuses on the development of a Surface Enhanced Raman Scattering (SERS) substrate for use in the area of explosive detection. The substrate was created by immersion plating of silver onto porous silicon, resulting in a Ag roughened surface with an average roughness of 135 nm as determined by AFM. When explosive solutions, such as trinitrotoluene (TNT) and dinitrotoluene (DNT) in ethanol, were applied directly to the substrate, detection of unique Raman bands was possible down to the 10^-9 – 10^-10 mol/cm² range. These results prove the technique …

Naxos Music Library Mobile Application [Review], Anne Shelley

Faculty and Staff Publications – Milner Library

This review evaluates a free mobile application provided by the streaming audio database Naxos Music Library.

Establishing Twenty-First-Century Information Fluency, Jennifer Sharkey

Faculty and Staff Publications – Milner Library

In an effort to infuse information fluency into programming and curriculum, consideration of the learning environment and methods for integrating technology is essential.

Surviving Slis: A Guide To Getting Through Library And Information Studies Graduate School, Eric Willey

Faculty and Staff Publications – Milner Library

This is a short book about getting into, getting through, and getting what you can out of library graduate school. Most of it is drawn from my experience in a library and information studies graduate program, some of it from a history graduate program, and the rest from conversations with fellow students, colleagues, and instructors.

Pre-Disclosure Accumulations By Activist Investors: Evidence And Policy, Lucian A. Bebchuk, Alon Brav, Robert J. Jackson Jr., Wei Jiang

Ira M. Millstein Center for Global Markets and Corporate Ownership

The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) is currently considering a rulemaking petition requesting that the Commission shorten the ten-day window, established by Section 13(d) of the Williams Act, within which investors must publicly disclose purchases of a five percent or greater stake in public companies. In this Article, we provide the first systematic empirical evidence on these disclosures and find that several of the petition's factual premises are not consistent with the evidence.

Our analysis is based on about 2,000 filings by activist hedge funds during the period of 1994-2007. We find that the data are inconsistent with the petition's …

Separating The Effects Of Temperature And Community Composition On The Magnitude Of Heterotrophic Protist Grazing Rates In Narragansett Bay, Samantha C. Decuollo

Open Access Master's Theses

Understanding the relative effects of phytoplankton assemblage and temperature on heterotrophic protist grazing rates remains underdeveloped due to seasonal constraints that result in concurrent changes in both variables. In order to separate effects of temperature and community composition on microherbivory, we used the dilution method to measure grazing rates at in-situ and cooled incubation temperatures conducted in parallel during summer/autumn 2012, in Narragansett Bay, Rhode Island, USA. Chain-forming diatoms dominated the microphytoplankton, whereas aloricate ciliates dominated the microzooplankton. Weekly environmental variability –not primarily characterized by temperature– had a significant effect on phytoplankton-species composition. Initial autotrophic biomass averaged 127 μg C …

Auras, Adele Ball

Scripps Senior Theses

Auras is a series of illustrations of Carlos Fuentes’s novella, Aura, a horror love story about memory, obsession, desire, corporeality and immortality. Defying narrative conventions, the story is told through second person. You are the protagonist, Felipe Montero, and are employed by a 109-year old widow to edit her husband's memoirs. Inside the pitchblack house, you fall in love with her beautiful and bizarre green-eyed niece, Aura. The gradual discovery of the true relationship between the young woman and her aunt propel the story to its extraordinary conclusion.

The story seems to take place within the confines of the …

The Last Rites Of Public Campaign Financing?, James Sample

Hofstra Law Faculty Scholarship

This Article asserts the current predicament of public campaign financing is this: options that are still on the table under the Court's First Amendment jurisprudence are, with only rare and idiosyncratic exceptions, fiscal and political non-starters. Conversely, options that would be, and indeed previously had been, fiscally and politically viable, are now, even after years of their routine practice in varied jurisdictions, no longer constitutional. It is, in short, simultaneously a legal and practical dilemma. Short of highly unlikely swings of the Supreme Court pendulum, and absent an even more unlikely constitutional amendment, cities, states, and federal government actors, who …

Hedonic Trademarks, Irina D. Manta

Hofstra Law Faculty Scholarship

A number of scholars have recently critiqued the traditional search-costs model of trademark infringement doctrine and have proposed alternatives driven by consumer decision-making theories and contractarian understandings of trademarks. While I agree that the search-costs model is problematic in parts, some of the other suggested frameworks suffer from difficulties of their own. For one, these alternative approaches draw up a dichotomy between “pure” experiences of trademarked goods as opposed to “altered” experiences, with the latter representing the mindsets of consumers after trademark owners have influenced them via advertising and other devices in an effort to build up goodwill. This Article …

Prosecution (Is) Complex, Alafair Burke

Hofstra Law Faculty Scholarship

Post-conviction DNA testing has led to the exoneration of nearly three hundred defendants. As the number of exonerations grows, we are in an era where the once unthinkable is now undeniable. We convict the innocent. We imprison the innocent. We place the innocent on death row. Daniel Medwed brings this reality to life in his captivating book, Prosecution Complex, which carefully documents the myriad ways that prosecutors can contribute to wrongful convictions at every stage of a criminal case. From the charging decision to plea bargaining to trial to post-conviction, Medwed argues, prosecutors face an “ongoing schizophrenia” as they seek …

Unprotected Sex: The Pregnancy Discrimination Act At 35, Deborah L. Brake, Joanna L. Grossman

Hofstra Law Faculty Scholarship

Thirty-five years ago, Congress passed the Pregnancy Discrimination Act to overturn a Supreme Court decision refusing to recognize pregnancy discrimination as a form of discrimination based on sex. Now, three and a half decades later, women whose work lives are impacted by pregnancy are again finding themselves unprotected from discrimination. Lower court rulings have eviscerated the Act’s protections at the same time that an expansion of worker rights under the Americans with Disabilities Act should redound to the benefit of pregnant women by expanding the pool of comparators who receive accommodations. By following trends in discrimination law generally - equating …

The Role Of Emotional Intelligence In Sympathizing With Rape Victims, Alexis Barab

Scripps Senior Theses

This study examined the relationships among participants’ emotional intelligence and participants’ sympathy for an alleged rape victim[1], sympathy for a defendant, and verdict in a mock rape case. Participants were 219 (127 female, 92 male) United States jury eligible individuals between the ages of 18 and 66. Participants were given a rape trial summary accompanied by a manipulated emotional facial expression of the alleged rape victim (angry, sad, afraid, or neutral), or no photograph. Participants were asked to render an individual case verdict and complete a questionnaire with measures to test sympathy for the alleged rape victim, sympathy …

Rotor Bar Fault Monitoring Method Based On Analysis Of Air-Gap Torques Of Induction Motors, Aderiano Da Silva, Nabeel Demerdash, Richard J. Povinelli

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Research and Publications

A robust method to monitor the operating conditions of induction motors is presented. This method utilizes the data analysis of the air-gap torque profile in conjunction with a Bayesian classifier to determine the operating condition of an induction motor as either healthy or faulty. This method is trained offline with datasets generated either from an induction motor modeled by a time-stepping finite-element (TSFE) method or experimental data. This method can effectively monitor the operating conditions of induction motors that are different in frame/class, ratings, or design from the motor used in the training stage. Such differences can include the level …

Effect Of Hydrodynamic Force On Microcantilever Vibrations: Applications To Liquid-Phase Chemical Sensing, I. Dufour, E. Lemaire, B. Caillard, H. Debeda, C. Lucat, Stephen M. Heinrich, Fabien Josse, O. Brand

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Research and Publications

At the microscale, cantilever vibrations depend not only on the microstructure’s properties and geometry but also on the properties of the surrounding medium. In fact, when a microcantilever vibrates in a fluid, the fluid offers resistance to the motion of the beam. The study of the influence of the hydrodynamic force on the microcantilever’s vibrational spectrum can be used to either (1) optimize the use of microcantilevers for chemical detection in liquid media or (2) extract the mechanical properties of the fluid. The classical method for application (1) in gas is to operate the microcantilever in the dynamic transverse bending …

Time Resolved Gain And Excess Noise Properties Of Ingaas/Inalas Avalanche Photodiodes With Cascaded Discrete Gain Layer Multiplication Regions, Georges M. Williams, David A. Ramirez, Majeed M. Hayat, Andrew S. Huntington

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Research and Publications

To predict pulse detection performance when implemented in high speed photoreceivers, temporally resolved measurements of a 10-stage InAlAs/InGaAs single carrier multiplication (SCM) avalanche photodiode (APD)'s avalanche response to short multi-photon laser pulses were explained using instantaneous (time resolved) pulse height statistics of the device's impulse response. Numeric models of the junction carrier populations as a function of the time following injection of a primary photo-electron were used to create the probability density functions (pdfs) of the instances of the avalanche buildup process. The numeric pdfs were used to generate low frequency gain and excess noise models, which were in good …

Interactive Concept Acquisition For Embodied Artificial Agents, Joachim De Greeff

School of Engineering, Computing and Mathematics Theses

An important capacity that is still lacking in intelligent systems such as robots, is the ability to use concepts in a human-like manner. Indeed, the use of concepts has been recognised as being fundamental to a wide range of cognitive skills, including classification, reasoning and memory. Intricately intertwined with language, concepts are at the core of human cognition; but despite a large body or research, their functioning is as of yet not well understood. Nevertheless it remains clear that if intelligent systems are to achieve a level of cognition comparable to humans, they will have to posses the ability to …

Antenna Designs For Wireless Medical Implants., Conor P. Conran

Masters

Active medical implants are devices that are surgically implanted inside the body. They have been developed to treat a wide range of ailments and many require some form of communications link with the outside world for maintenance and for remote medical diagnostics. Radio links promise a wide range of benefits over the traditional low frequency inductive coupling method.

Body tissue is a challenging environment, both for the device and for the radio signal that it transmits. Innovation in medical technology is creating a demand for high bandwidth links, and this in turn is driving the development of implantable antennas.

Many …