Digital Commons Network^™

The Corporate Preference For Trade Secret, Andrew A. Schwartz

Publications

Many inventions can be legally protected either by patent or by trade secrecy, and a conventional wisdom exists on how to select between them. This Article adds to that literature by showing that corporations should have an inherent preference for trade secret over patent for reasons relating to their legal form. Among them is the idea that corporations are perpetual entities and therefore perfectly suited to reap the perpetual returns that only a trade secret can offer. The Article also addresses the potential for a conflict between the inherent corporate preference for trade secret and the preferences of corporate managers, …

Panel Discussion Iii: Recognizing And Addressing Immigration Concerns In The Criminal Process, Violeta Chapin, Dan Kesselbrenner, Christina Kleiser

Publications

No abstract provided.

Lawyering For Groups: The Case Of American Indian Tribal Attorneys, Kristen A. Carpenter, Eli Wald

Publications

Lawyering for groups, broadly defined as the legal representation of a client who is not an individual, is a significant and booming phenomenon. Encompassing the representation of governments, corporations, institutions, peoples, classes, communities, and causes, lawyering for groups is what many, if not most, lawyers do. And yet, the dominant theory of law practice--the Standard Conception, with its principles of zealous advocacy, nonaccountability, and professional role-based morality--and the rules of professional conduct that codify it, continue to be premised on the basic antiquated assumption that the paradigmatic client-attorney relationship is between an individual client and an individual attorney. The result …

Water Transfers For A Changing Climate, Mark Squillace

Publications

The prior appropriation doctrine that dominates the water laws of the Western United States was perhaps the inevitable consequence of the need to manage water resources in a region where the demand for water often exceeds the supply. This doctrine has proved surprisingly clumsy at accommodating changing water needs during times of shortage. Economists have long viewed water markets as an attractive solution for reallocating water to meet the demands of an evolving community of water users. But most western states have been skeptical--sometimes even hostile--to proposed changes in historic water use patterns. This reluctance to encourage the transfer of …

The Exit Myth: Family Law, Gender Roles, And Changing Attitudes Toward Female Victims Of Domestic Violence, Carolyn B. Ramsey

Publications

This Article presents a hypothesis suggesting how and why the criminal justice response to domestic violence changed, over the course of the twentieth century, from sympathy for abused women and a surprising degree of state intervention in intimate relationships to the apathy and discrimination that the battered women' movement exposed. The riddle of declining public sympathy for female victims of intimate-partner violence can only be solved by looking beyond the criminal law to the social and legal changes that created the Exit Myth.

While the situation that gave rise to the battered women's movement in the 1970s is often presumed …

The U.N. Security Council's Duty To Decide, Anna Spain

Publications

When faced with a global crisis within the scope of its mandate, the United Nations Security Council (UNSC or Council) has no obligation to decide whether or not to take action. This Article argues that it should. The UNSC is the only governing body with the legal authority to authorize binding measures necessary to restore peace and security, yet neither the United Nations Charter nor the UNSC's own rules clarify the extent of its obligations. Unlike courts, the UNSC lacks a procedural rule establishing that it has a duty to decide. Unlike the United States Congress, which accepts its practical …

Settler Colonialism And Reclamation: Where American Indian Law And Natural Resources Law Meet, Sarah Krakoff

Publications

Three hours west of Phoenix, Arizona, the Colorado River Indian Tribes (“CRIT”), a federally recognized tribe that includes over 3,700 enrolled members of Mohave, Chemehuevi, Navajo, and Hopi descent, occupies a reservation nearly 300,000 acres in size. The CRIT was one of five tribes to have its water rights confirmed in the landmark case of Arizona v. California, and therefore has senior rights to 719,248 acre-feet of Colorado River water, nearly one-third of Arizona’s allocation. How the CRIT came to be a single federally recognized tribe composed of members from four indigenous peoples located on lands that were a fraction …

Imputation, The Adverse Interest Exception, And The Curious Case Of The Restatement (Third) Of Agency, Mark J. Loewenstein

Publications

The imputation doctrine in the common law of agency provides that knowledge of an agent acquired in the course of the agency relationship is imputed to the principal. An important exception to the imputation doctrine, known as the adverse interest exception, provides that knowledge is not imputed if it is acquired by the agent in a course of conduct that is entirely adverse to the principal. These doctrines play an important role in sorting out liability when senior management of a corporation engages in a financial fraud that harms the company. Typically, new management is brought in and it sues …

Never Construed To Their Prejudice: In Honor Of David Getches, Richard B. Collins

Publications

This article reviews and analyzes the judicial canons of construction for Native American treaties and statutes. It discusses their theoretical justifications and practical applications. It concludes that the treaty canon has ready support in contract law and the law of treaty interpretation. Justification of the statutory canon is more challenging and could be strengthened by attention to the democratic deficit when Congress imposes laws on Indian country. Applications of the canons have mattered in disputes between Indian nations and private or state interests. They have made much less difference, and have suffered major failings, in disputes with the federal government. …

Considering Class: College Access And Diversity, Matthew N. Gaertner, Melissa Hart

Publications

Each time that the continued legality of race-conscious affirmative action is threatened, colleges and universities must confront the possibility of dramatically changing their admissions policies. Fisher v. University of Texas, which the Supreme Court will hear this year, presents just such a moment. In previous years when affirmative action has been outlawed by ballot initiative in specific states or when the Court has seemed poised to reject it entirely, there have been calls for replacing race-conscious admissions with class-based affirmative action. Supporters of race-conscious affirmative action have typically criticized the class-based alternative as ineffective at maintaining racial diversity. This …

Private Copyright Reform, Kristelia A. García

Publications

The government is not the only player in copyright reform, and perhaps not even the most important. Left to free market negotiation, risk averse licensors and licensees are contracting around the statutory license for certain types of copyright-protected content, and achieving greater efficiency via private ordering. This emerging phenomenon, herein termed "private copyright reform," presents both adverse selection and distributive justice concerns: first, circumvention of the statutory license goes against legislative intent by allowing for the reduction, and even elimination, of statutorily mandated royalties owed to non-parties. In addition, when presented without full term disclosure, privately determined royalty rates can …

Reimagining Democratic Inclusion: Asian Americans And The Voting Rights Act, Ming Hsu Chen, Taeku Lee

Publications

The current legal framework for protecting voting rights in the United States has been dramatically destabilized by Supreme Court decisions re-interpreting the protections against minority vote dilution and requires rethinking to survive modern challenges. At the same time, the nation has itself undergone dramatic changes in the racial composition of its polity and in the complexity and salience of race as a factor in political life. In this paper, we focus on a relatively unexamined constituent of this complex reality of modern racial diversity that illustrates some of the core features that all minority groups face in continuing VRA challenges: …

Leniency As A Miscarriage Of Race And Gender Justice, Aya Gruber

Publications

No abstract provided.

Re-Problematizing Anger In Domestic Violence Advocacy, Deborah Cantrell

Publications

Feminist advocacy commits wholeheartedly to a woman’s autonomous choices about how to respond to domestic violence, prioritizing a woman’s own lived experiences and her own assessments of her needs and goals over other supposedly “objective” assessments. Feminists robustly privilege individual choices of women in part as a way of revealing anti-woman bias in the dominant, patriarchal legal system as well to reject male constructions of feminine behavior. In feminist domestic violence advocacy, scholars and advocates have argued that a woman’s autonomous choices include capacious choices about the kinds of emotions that a woman might express about being subjected to abuse. …

American Gangsters: Rico, Criminal Syndicates, And Conspiracy Law As Market Control, Benjamin Levin

Publications

In an effort to reexamine legal and political decisions about criminalization and the role of the criminal law in shaping American markets and social institutions, this Article explores the ways in which criminal conspiracy laws in the United States have historically been used to subdue nonstate actors and informal markets that threatened the hegemony of the state and formal market. To this end, the Article focuses primarily on the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO) as illustrative of broader trends in twentieth-century criminal policy. Enacted in 1970, RICO provides criminal sanctions for individuals engaged in unacceptable organized activities and …

De-Naturalizing Criminal Law: Of Public Perceptions And Procedural Protections, Benjamin Levin

Publications

Innocence, it turns out, is a complex concept. Yet the Innocence Movement has drawn power from the simplicity of the wrong-person story of innocence, as told most effectively by the DNA cases. The purity of that story continues to have power, but that story alone cannot sustain the Innocence Movement. It is too narrow. It fails to accommodate the vast majority of innocent people in our justice system. It fails to embrace innocence in its full complexity. . . . [I]n the end, for virtually all purposes, innocence must be understood under the objective rules that have long governed the …

Real Masks And Real Name Policies: Applying Anti-Mask Case Law To Anonymous Online Speech, Margot E. Kaminski

Publications

The First Amendment protects anonymous speech, but the scope of that protection has been the subject of much debate. This Article adds to the discussion of anonymous speech by examining anti-mask statutes and cases as an analogue for the regulation of anonymous speech online. Anti-mask case law answers a number of questions left open by the Supreme Court. It shows that courts have used the First Amendment to protect anonymity beyond core political speech, when mask-wearing is expressive conduct or shows a nexus with free expression. This Article explores what the anti-mask cases teach us about anonymity online, including proposed …

Coase Minus The Coase Theorem--Some Problems With Chicago Transaction Cost Analysis, Pierre Schlag

Publications

In law as well as economics, the most well-known aspect of Coase's "The Problem of Social Cost," is the Coase Theorem. Over the decades, that particular notion has morphed into a crucial component of Chicago law and economics--namely, transaction cost analysis.

In this Article, I deliberately bracket the Coase Theorem to show that "The Problem of Social Cost" contains far more interesting and unsettling lessons--both for law as well as for economics. Indeed, while Coase's arguments clearly target the Pigouvian attempts to "improve on the market" through government correctives, there is, lurking in those arguments, a much more profound critique …

Check Please: Using Legal Liability To Inform Food Safety Regulation, Alexia Brunet Marks

Publications

Food safety is a hotly debated issue. While food nourishes, sustains, and enriches our lives, it can also kill us. At any given meal, our menu comes from a dozen different sources. Without proper incentives to encourage food safety, microbial pathogens can, and do enter the food source--so much so that according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), each year roughly one in six Americans (or forty-eight million people) gets sick, 128,000 are hospitalized, and 3,000 die of foodborne diseases. What is the optimal way to prevent unsafe foods from entering the marketplace?

Safety in the food …

The Tragic Story Of The Federal Coal Leasing Program, Mark Squillace

Publications

No abstract provided.

9/11 And The War On Terror: Iraq War Narratives And The Sacrifice Model, Janette Galvan

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

What are Americans willing to sacrifice for war and during war? In the wake of the 9/11 attacks, American citizens weighed a trade-off between their security and their civil freedoms because of fear of another terrorist attack. The reasoning was that United States citizens were patriotic and in being so they were willing to sacrifice some civil liberties to win the war on terror to prevent future terrorist attacks, thereby ensuring their future safety and then, perhaps, recover the sacrificed civil freedoms. This thesis project focuses on the sacrifices Americans willingly made for and during the war on terror, sold …

Role Of Post-Translational Modifications In The Hiv Cofactor Activity Of Ledgf/P75, Denisse Adriana Gutierrez

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

see document.

Assessment Of Abaqus Capabilities For Crack Growth And Calculation Of Energy Release Rate, Luis Alonso Hernandez

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

The purpose of this study was to benchmark ABAQUS modeling capabilities for crack propagation and calculation of energy release rate against closed-form analytical solutions. The crack growth capability for this study was evaluated using the following techniques: virtual crack closure technique (VCCT), X-FEM coupled with VCCT, and X-FEM coupled with cohesive segments. The capability of calculating the energy release rate was assessed by using the J-integral routine. A Double Cantilever Beam (DCB) specimen was used to conduct the study for mode I propagation, and a mixed mode bending (MMB) specimen was used to study the propagation for mixed mode I/II …

Validation Of N-Myristoyltransferase As Potential Chemotherapeutic Target In Chagas Disease, Linda Herrera

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

The protozoan parasite Trypanosoma cruzi is the etiological agent of Chagas disease, a problem endemic to Central and South America. In recent years, this neglected infectious disease has become a global health concern. The only clinically available drugs for the chemotherapy of Chagas disease have important disadvantages such as, high toxicity, strain resistance and variable efficacy. Therefore, there is an urgent need for the development of new antichagasic agents. The enzyme N-myristoyltransferase (NMT) has been characterized in a range of eukaryotes, from Saccharomyces cerevisae to Homo sapiens. Moreover, NMT has been shown to be essential in protozoan parasites, including Leishmania …

Automatic Memory Management Policies For Low Power, Memory Limited, And Delay Intolerant Devices, Md Abu Jahid

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets are energy and memory limited, and implement graphical user interfaces that are intolerant of computational delays. Mobile device platforms supporting apps implemented in languages that require automatic memory man- agement, such as the Dalvik (Java) virtual machine within Google's Android, have become dominant. It is essential that automatic memory management avoid causing unacceptable interface delays while responsibly managing energy and memory resource usage. Dalvik's automatic memory management policies for heap growth and garbage collection scheduling utilize heuristics tuned to minimize memory footprint. These policies result in only marginally acceptable response times and garbage …

Traditionalism, Institutions, And Rational Bargaining In Sub-Saharan African Civil Conflict, Joseph Anthony Jastrzembski

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

When many speak of Africa, they convey a narrative that portrays a continent haunted by ethnic conflict. However many countries are both highly diverse and relatively stable, such as Botswana or Tanzania, and we find that inter-ethnic cooperation is far more common place than conflict. In this thesis I argue that cultural differences between ethnic groups are not the cause of ethnic civil war, rather, the mechanisms find their root in economics. To explain ethnic conflict on the continent, I examine the self-interested behavior of bargaining groups in society, where ethnic communities act more as an interest group and less …

Homelessness And Migration At The Edge Of America: Transnational Mobility And Survival On The Streets Of El Paso, Josue Gilberto Lachica

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

This study examined both homelessness and migration, as they pertain to border transnationalism, by addressing the social phenomena of homelessness as it is theoretically and fundamentally viewed in both the U.S., Mexico, and the border region between. This thesis simultaneously observes and compares the phenomena of homelessness within the cross-border shared experience of migration between Mexico and the United States. There is limited sociological research that combines homelessness with migration, but the interrelationship between migrants experiencing homelessness and homeless people migrating has often co-existed. This study attempts to address this limitation.

As with many things along the U.S. - Mexico …

El Paso Residential Electricity Demand, David Ronald Macias

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

This study utilizes a dynamic error correction model to analyze the demand for residential electricity in El Paso County, Texas. Annual data is provided by El Paso Electric Company covering the period from 1977 to 2011. This study reports negative income elasticities for residential electricity demand and indicates that electricity is treated as an inferior good in El Paso County. The negative income elasticity result runs counter to many earlier studies, although recent empirical evidence indicates that residential electricity is also treated as an inferior good in the Seattle service territory. Negative income elasticities are an interesting result, and may …

My Mother's Daughter, Monica Vanessa Martinez

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

In order to address the way the Chicano culture attempts to silence its women, My Mother's Daughter is a collection of short stories narrated by Chicanas. The collection uses the complicated relationship between mothers and daughters to highlight the conflicts that lead to the silencing of Chicanas. The collection attempts to challenge this silencing by utilizing the first person perspective to give a voice to these traditionally silenced women. Another literary technique employed is the use of dramatic irony. With multiple first person narrators in the same story the collection uses dramatic irony as a way of playing up the …

The False Promise Of Proffit, Stephen K. Harper

University of Miami Law Review

No abstract provided.