Digital Commons Network^™

Walt Kuhn: From Spotlight To Studio, The Art Of Show Business, Emily May Mcewan-Upright

Master's Theses

Walt Kuhn, an American artist born in New York, is often overlooked for his contribution to Modern American Art. Kuhn is typically recognized for his organizational and curatorial role in the 1913 Armory Show, but he was also internationally known in his time for his paintings of show people and as a creative director for several vaudeville and circus acts over his lifetime. During his career as a creative director, Kuhn’s artwork evolved from superficial renderings of theatre scenes to psychologically intense tronies of performers. Kuhn and other American artists, including the Ashcan group and Edward Hopper, examined the relationship …

"They Going To Throw You In Jackson Where You Belong": Depictions Of Mental Disability In The Works Of William Faulkner And Flannery O'Connor, Marie Elizabeth Lawson

Master's Theses

Mentally disabled characters in the works of William Faulkner and Flannery O’Connor are often subjected to mistreatment, neglect, and violence at the hands of their families and communities. In William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury (1929) and The Hamlet (1940) and Flannery O’Connor’s “The Life You Save May Be Your Own” (1955) and The Violent Bear it Away (1960), characters with mental disabilities are depicted in such a way as to evoke sympathy for the characters without the narratives overtly calling for sympathy. This is achieved through the juxtaposition of positive narrative portrayals with negative treatment by the characters’ …

Scaling And Splitting, New Approaches To Health Insurance, Christopher Robertson, Keith A. Joiner

Faculty Scholarship

In the United States, cost-sharing in health insurance coverage has become the primary mechanism for reducing insurance expenditures and, by extension, maintaining affordable coverage. Cost-sharing involves patients making various out-of-pocket (OOP) payments for their own health care aside from whatever the insurer pays. As a patient’s spending on health care grows month by month in any given year of coverage, she moves through three different “zones” of insurance, from no insurance, to partial insurance, and finally to full insurance.

A Problem Not Yet Manifest: Gaps In Insurance Coverage Of Medical Interventions After Genetic Testing, Sarah Malanga, Ryan Sprissler, Christopher Robertson, Keith Joiner

Faculty Scholarship

In the past decade, the field of genomics has rapidly changed and expanded.1 With these advancements also come new applications of genomics and genetics to clinical medicine. The information gathered from genetic testing and genome sequencing can reveal a great deal about not only an individual's current health, but his/her future health as well.2 This rapid expansion of scientific and medical capacity is accompanied by rapid changes for law and policy making thoughtful regulation essential. The human genome includes many variations, most of which have no known significance. However, some variants can be the cause of important medical conditions, and …

Caperton's Next Generation: Beyond The Bank, Jed Handelsman Shugerman, Debra Lyn Bassett, Gregory S. Parks, Dmitry Bam, Rex R. Perschbacher

Faculty Scholarship

Part of NYU Journal of Legislation & Public Policy Fall 2014 symposium: "Courts, Campaigns, and Corruption: Judicial Recusal Five Years after Caperton". The panels can be watched here.

Unfair And Deceptive Robots, Woodrow Hartzog

Faculty Scholarship

Robots, like household helpers, personal digital assistants, automated cars, and personal drones are or will soon be available to consumers. These robots raise common consumer protection issues, such as fraud, privacy, data security, and risks to health, physical safety and finances. Robots also raise new consumer protection issues, or at least call into question how existing consumer protection regimes might be applied to such emerging technologies. Yet it is unclear which legal regimes should govern these robots and what consumer protection rules for robots should look like.

The thesis of the Article is that the FTC’s grant of authority and …

The Scope And Potential Of Ftc Data Protection, Woodrow Hartzog, Daniel J. Solove

Faculty Scholarship

For more than fifteen years, the FTC has regulated privacy and data security through its authority to police deceptive and unfair trade practices as well as through powers conferred by specific statutes and international agreements. Recently, the FTC’s powers for data protection have been challenged by Wyndham Worldwide Corp. and LabMD. These recent cases raise a fundamental issue, and one that has surprisingly not been well explored: How broad are the FTC’s privacy and data security regulatory powers? How broad should they be?

In this Article, we address the issue of the scope of FTC authority in the areas of …

Surveillance As Loss Of Obscurity, Woodrow Hartzog, Evan Selinger

Faculty Scholarship

Everyone seems concerned about government surveillance, yet we have a hard time agreeing when and why it is a problem and what we should do about it. When is surveillance in public unjustified? Does metadata raise privacy concerns? Should encrypted devices have a backdoor for law enforcement officials? Despite increased attention, surveillance jurisprudence and theory still struggle for coherence. A common thread for modern surveillance problems has been difficult to find.

In this article we argue that the concept of ‘obscurity,’ which deals with the transaction costs involved in finding or understanding information, is the key to understanding and uniting …

Trafficked? Aids, Criminal Law And The Politics Of Measurement, Aziza Ahmed

Faculty Scholarship

Since early in the HIV epidemic, epidemiologists identified individuals who transact sex as a high-risk group for contracting HIV. Where the issue of transacting sex has been framed as sex work, harm-reduction advocates and scholars call for decriminalization as a primary legal solution to address HIV. Where the issue is defined as trafficking, advocates known as abolitionists argue instead for the criminalization of the purchase of sex.

Global health governance institutions are porous to these competing ideas and ideologies. This article first historicizes the contestation between harm-reduction and abolition in global governance on health. The paper then turns to a …

Medical Evidence And Expertise In Abortion Jurisprudence, Aziza Ahmed

Faculty Scholarship

Medical literature on abortion largely supports pro-choice legal claims. In turn, progressive lawyers often call for “evidence-based approaches” to lawmaking on the assumption that it will produce pro-choice legal and regulatory outcomes. This article argues that the evidence-based approach is no longer a reliable or stable strategy for pro-choice lawyering given transformations in judicial treatment of medical knowledge and a shifting evidentiary base.

Drawing on landmark cases from 1973 to 2012, this article demonstrates how the Supreme Court and lower courts selectively utilize medical expertise and evidence to liberalize or constrain abortion access. With Roe v. Wade, 4 the Supreme …

The Anti-Innovators: How Special Interests Undermine Entrepreneurship, James Bessen

Faculty Scholarship

For much of the last century, the United States led the world in technological innovation-a position it owed in part to well-designed procurement programs at the Defense Department and NASA. During the 1940s, for example, the Pentagon funded the construction of the first general-purpose computer, designed initially to calculate artillery-firing tables for the U.S. Army. Two decades later, it developed the data communications network known as the ARPANET, a precursor to the Internet. Yet not since the 1980s have government contracts helped generate any major new technologies, despite large increases in funding for defense-related R & D. One major culprit …

Class-Based Adjudication Of Title Vii Claims In The Age Of The Roberts Court, Michael C. Harper

Faculty Scholarship

This article considers two barriers to class-based adjudication of Title VII claims erected by the Roberts Court: (1) the Court's interpretation of Rule 23, primarily in Wal-Mart v. Dukes; and (2) the Court's interpretation of the Federal Arbitration Act (FAA) in a series of decisions, both employment-related and not. The article contends that it is the latter group of decisions that are the more significant for Title VII private aggregate litigation as well as for other types of private litigation. The Wal-Mart Court predictably did not expand an employer's obligations to avert discrimination by its agents, and its predictable interpretations …

Will Uncooperative Federalism Survive Nfib?, Abigail Moncrieff, Jonathan Dinerstein

Faculty Scholarship

In October Term 2012, the Supreme Court decided two cases that are fundamentally at odds: NFIB v. Sebelius and Douglas v. Independent Living Center of Southern California. In NFIB, the Court held that the federal government, at least under some circumstances, may not use the threat of reduced funding in cooperative federalism programs to require states to comply with federal statutory requirements. In Douglas, however, the Court indicated that private litigants should sue federal agencies under the Administrative Procedure Act if those agencies refuse to enforce federal statutory requirements against the states. The problem is that the withdrawal of funding …

From Outsider Status To Insider And Outsider Again: Interest Convergence Theory And Normalization Of Lgbt Identity, Alexander Nourafshan, Angela Onwuachi-Willig

Faculty Scholarship

After the Supreme Court’s decision in United States v. Windsor, which declared the federal Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) unconstitutional,and after the granting of certiorari in Obergell v. Hodges, where the Supreme Court will decide whether the Fourteenth Amendment requires states to provide a marriage license to same-sex couples, national marriage equality seems like a legal inevitability.However, Windsor and Obergell, along with other state-level advances toward marriage equality, are not equally promising for all members of the lesbian and gay community. Although Windsor and the revolution of cases that have led to Obergell hold significant promise for one privileged subset …

University Assessment Services, Beginning College Survey Of Student Engagement: Institutional Report, 2015, Illinois State University

Student Success

Beginning College Survey of Student Engagement (BCSSE) Institutional Report, University Assessment Services, Illinois State University, 2015.

Time Discounting In Strategic Contests, Cary Deck, Salar Jahedi

ESI Publications

In many contests, such as political campaigns or R&D expenditures, there is at least some trade-off between immediate money outlay and potential future benefits. This timing aspect has mostly been ignored by the contest literature. If contestants exhibit a strong present bias, such as that shown by past individual choice experiments, then benefits that are deferred to the future will lead to a significant drop in investment. This paper uses controlled laboratory experiments to explore how the timing of prize payment impacts behavior in a contest with a unique Nash equilibrium strategy. We find no evidence that people significantly discount …

An Experimental Investigation Of Time Discounting In Strategic Settings, Cary Deck, Salar Jahedi

ESI Publications

Several studies have shown that people greatly discount future benefits and costs, but few have examined how discounting is manifested in strategic settings. This paper investigates the degree to which the timing of payments affects behavior in four commonly studied strategic settings: a Prisoners’ Dilemma, a Stag-Hunt Game, a First Price Auction, and a Second Price Auction. In general, a two week delay in the date of payment has a comparable effect on outcomes as a substantial reduction in current payoffs. A follow-up study compares individual’s own discount rates with their beliefs of others’ discount rates and finds that people …

The Effect Of Cognitive Load On Economic Decision Making: A Survey And New Experiments, Cary Deck, Salar Jahedi

ESI Publications

Psychologists and economists have examined the effect of cognitive load in a variety of situations from risk taking to snack choice. We review previous experiments that have directly manipulated cognitive load and summarize their findings. We report the results of two new experiments where participants engage in a digit-memorization task while simultaneously performing a variety of economic tasks including: (1) choices involving risk, (2) choices involving intertemporal substitution, (3) choices with anchoring effects, (4) choices over healthy and unhealthy snacks, and (5) math problems. We find that higher cognitive load reduces numeracy as measured by performance in math problems. Moreover, …

Risky Business: An Analysis Of Teacher Risk Preferences, Daniel H. Bowen, Stuart Buck, Cary Deck, Jonathan N. Mills, James V. Shuls

ESI Publications

A range of proposals aim to reform teacher compensation, recruitment, and retention. Teachers have generally not embraced these policies. One potential explanation for their objections is that teachers are relatively risk averse. We examine this hypothesis using a risk-elicitation task common to experimental economics. By comparing preferences of new teachers with those entering other professions, we find that individuals choosing to teach are significantly more risk averse. This suggests that the teaching profession may attract individuals who are less amenable to certain reforms. Policy-makers should take into account teacher risk characteristics when considering reforms that may clash with preferences.

Humankind In Civilization’S Extended Order: A Tragedy, The First Part, Bart J. Wilson

ESI Publications

This article is a short, scientific story of the labyrinthian human career, of humankind’s place in the natural order of the world, and of the evolution of moral rules and rule following that make the extended order of civilization possible. Drawing upon work in anthropology, biology, and linguistics, I weave a science-based narrative of how Homo sapiens came to be the only primate to convert enemy aliens into trading friends. It is a Goethean story of the human condition that postulates the common origins of and modern tension between Pleistocene and Anthropocene morality. It is also a Hayekian story of …

Dynamic Optimization And Conformity In Health Behavior And Life Enjoyment Over The Life Cycle, Hernán D. Bejarano, Hillard Kaplan, Stephen Rassenti

ESI Publications

This article examines individual and social influences on investments in health and enjoyment from immediate consumption. Our lab experiment mimics the problem of health investment over a lifetime (Grossman, 1972a,b). Incentives to find the appropriate expenditures on life enjoyment and health are given by making in each period come period a function of previous health investments. In order to model social effects in the experiment, we randomly assigned individuals to chat/observation groups. Groups were permitted to freely chat between repeated lifetimes. Two treatments were employed: In the Independent-rewards treatment, an individual's rewards from investments in life enjoyment depend only on …

Phenomenological Study Of At-Risk Youth Attending An Alternative Education Residential Program, Valeria Meschelle Harris-Richard

Theses and Dissertations

At-risk youth are the population of students who cannot manage to conform to the traditional school expectations due to their behavior choices. However, their choices are reflections of both avoidable and unavoidable conditions and circumstances. The bottom line is that those conditions usually lead them to drop out of school. There are several factors that contribute to why youth drop out of school. While some factors are more obvious than others, the overall goal should be to minimize factors that are within the control of stakeholders and decision makers so that youth have opportunities to complete high school with a …

Building On Social Capital To Improve Health: The Interactional Approach To Community Development, Matthew Charles Tomlin Mr

Student Research – Stevenson Center

Since political scientist, Robert Putnam, (1995) brought the concept of social capital into popular discourse, there has been a surge in debate over its definition, causes, and consequences in a range of social science disciplines. While social capital has been found to support self-rated overall health at the state level (Kawachi et al, 1999), there is still a dearth of data and research on localities in different regions of the country. This study analyzes survey data collected in the United Way of McLean County’s 2014 Community Assessment to better understand the dynamic between social capital and health in one Central …

Conflict In The “Tranquil Gardens”: Banks V. Housing Authority Of San Francisco And The Definition Of Equality In Multi-Racial California, Reuel E. Schiller

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

The Future Of Polyamorous Marriage Lessons From The Marriage Equality Struggle, Hadar Aviram, Gwendolyn Leachman

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Are Private Prisons To Blame For Mass Incarceration And Its Evils? Prison Conditions, Neoliberalism, And Public Choice, Hadar Aviram

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Troubled Waters Diana Nyad And The Birth Of The Global Rules Of Marathon Swimming, Hadar Aviram

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Race In The Life Sciences: An Empirical Assessment, 1950 - 2000, Osagie K. Obasogie

Faculty Scholarship

The mainstream narrative regarding the evolution of race as an idea in the scientific community is that biological understandings of race dominated throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries up until World War II, after which a social constructionist approach is thought to have taken hold. Many believe that the horrific outcomes of the most notorious applications of biological race-eugenics and the Holocaust-moved scientists away from thinking that race reflects inherent differences and toward an understanding that race is a largely social, cultural, and political phenomenon. This understanding of the evolution of race as a scientific idea informed the way that …

Interdisciplinary Research And Environmental Law, Dave Owen, Caroline Noblet

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Multidimensional Advocacy As Applied: Marriage Equality And Reproductive Rights, Suzanne B. Goldberg

Faculty Scholarship

Talking about marriage equality and reproductive rights advocacy together presents an interesting, and sometimes puzzling, assortment of challenges and opportunities. Both involve efforts to secure legal protections and social recognition that are fundamentally important to those who need them yet also deeply provocative to their opponents. For both, too, advocacy takes place on a shifting terrain shaped by competing views of sexuality, autonomy, equality, personhood, and more.

Yet the two advocacy efforts have experienced very different receptions over time. Just over two decades ago, the Supreme Court expressly affirmed that women have a constitutional right to seek an abortion and …