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2015

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Effects Of Multiple Resource Additions On Community And Ecosystem Processes: Nutnet Seasonal Biomass And Seasonal And Annual Npp Data At The Sevilleta National Wildlife Refuge, New Mexico, Scott Collins Jan 2015

Effects Of Multiple Resource Additions On Community And Ecosystem Processes: Nutnet Seasonal Biomass And Seasonal And Annual Npp Data At The Sevilleta National Wildlife Refuge, New Mexico, Scott Collins

Sevilleta LTER Program Data

Two of the most pervasive human impacts on ecosystems are alteration of global nutrient budgets and changes in the abundance and identity of consumers. Fossil fuel combustion and agricultural fertilization have doubled and quintupled, respectively, global pools of nitrogen and phosphorus relative to pre-industrial levels. In spite of the global impacts of these human activities, there have been no globally coordinated experiments to quantify the general impacts on ecological systems. This experiment seeks to determine how nutrient availability controls plant biomass, diversity, and species composition in a desert grassland. This has important implications for understanding how future atmospheric deposition of …

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A Sentencing Commission For The Administrative State?, Max J. Minzner Jan 2015

A Sentencing Commission For The Administrative State?, Max J. Minzner

Faculty Scholarship

Since the 1980s, oversight of punishment in the federal criminal system has been centralized. A single body, the Sentencing Commission, regulates criminal punishment through the Sentencing Guidelines. The Guidelines are designed to bring consistency and transparency to criminal punishment, but come with the inevitable cost of a loss of case-by-case judicial discretion. In contrast, punishment in the federal administrative state is almost completely decentralized. No single body oversees agency punishment practices. The administrative model makes the opposite choice of the criminal model. It favors individualized punishment determinations over the benefits of consistency and transparency. In this Essay, I consider the …

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Beyond The Affordable Care Act's Premium Tax Credit: Ensuring Access To Safety Net Programs, Mary Leto Pareja Jan 2015

Beyond The Affordable Care Act's Premium Tax Credit: Ensuring Access To Safety Net Programs, Mary Leto Pareja

Faculty Scholarship

The United States took a gigantic step toward universal health care with the passage of the Affordable Care Act (ACA'). Under the ACA, nearly everyone is required to have coverage, and correspondingly, no one can be turned away. To ease the financial burden of the individual mandate, the ACA subsidizes coverage for lower-income people. The primary subsidy is a refundable tax credit called the Premium Tax Credit, first available in 2014. To claim the credit, a person must file a tax return--but not just any return. The ACA requires married individuals to file jointly. For many, this is problematic if …

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Should Agencies Enforce?, Max J. Minzner Jan 2015

Should Agencies Enforce?, Max J. Minzner

Faculty Scholarship

This Article explores an important but understudied structural choice: the decision to vest enforcement authority in administrative agencies. Each year, agencies routinely bring enforcement actions producing billions of dollars in civil penalties and industry-reshaping consent decrees. Where do they get this power? Congress grants enforcement authority to administrative agencies because it believes that agency subject matter expertise will generate appropriate enforcement choices. Similarly, the Supreme Court has strongly deferred to agency enforcement because it sees it as intimately intertwined with other agency regulatory decisions. Scholars have also generally taken for granted that specialist agencies will be enforcement experts because they …

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Spatial Terrorism, Dawinder S. Sidhu Jan 2015

Spatial Terrorism, Dawinder S. Sidhu

Faculty Scholarship

Terrorism, under federal law, generally means an act of politically- or socially-motivated violence perpetrated against innocents. Terrorism within the meaning of federal law, in other words, exists only if a cognizable motive is uncovered. This definition also sees the United States as an undifferentiated landscape—by its own terms, it fails to take into account any geographic nuance in acts of mass violence. This Article suggests that spatial considerations are relevant in determining whether an act of mass violence constitutes an act of terrorism for purposes of federal law. It points to cities—which are characterized by a highly concentrated, fluid population, …

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Moneyball Sentencing, Dawinder S. Sidhu Jan 2015

Moneyball Sentencing, Dawinder S. Sidhu

Faculty Scholarship

Sentencing is a backward- and forward-looking enterprise. That is, sen-tencing is informed by an individual’s past conduct as well as by the criminal jus-tice system’s prediction of the individual’s future criminal conduct. Increasingly, the criminal justice system is making these predictions on an actuarial basis, computing the individual’s risk of recidivism according to the rates of recidivism for people possessing the same group characteristics (e.g., race, sex, socio-economic status, education). The sentencing community is drawn to this statisti-cal technique because it purportedly distinguishes with greater accuracy the high-risk from the low-risk, and thereby allows for a more efficient allocation of …

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Protecting River Flows For Fun And Profit: Colorado's Unique Water Rights For Whitewater Parks, Reed D. Benson Jan 2015

Protecting River Flows For Fun And Profit: Colorado's Unique Water Rights For Whitewater Parks, Reed D. Benson

Faculty Scholarship

Since 2001, Colorado has recognized a special type of water right for whitewater parks, which are constructed within a river channel to provide play features for kayakers and other boaters. These water rights, called "recreational in-channel diversions, " are unique to Colorado, even though whitewater parks exist in several western states. This Article addresses some of the underlying reasons that recreational in-channel diversions were established in Colorado, and traces the controversy surrounding their recognition by that state's courts and legislature. Over the last decade, however, the controversy has largely died away, and whitewater park rights have now become an accepted …

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Meteorology Data From The Sevilleta National Wildlife Refuge, New Mexico (1988- Present), Douglas I. Moore Jan 2015

Meteorology Data From The Sevilleta National Wildlife Refuge, New Mexico (1988- Present), Douglas I. Moore

Sevilleta LTER Program Data

This file contains hourly meteorological data that were collected from a network of 10 permanent weather stations on the Sevilleta National Wildlife Refuge.

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