Digital Commons Network^™

Adjudicating Risk: Aids, Crime, And Culpability, Aziza Ahmed

Faculty Scholarship

The AIDS epidemic continues to pose significant public health challenges, especially given that the spread of the virus outpaces the AIDS response.¹ Importantly, HIV continues to disproportionately impact socially and economically marginalized communities. In countries with concentrated epidemics,² it is racial minorities, sex workers, men who have sex with men, and drug users who face the brunt of the epidemic.³ In the United States, the data is startling⁴ : 44% of new infections were among African-Americans, and among African-Americans contracting HIV, 57% were among gay and bisexual men.⁵ In 2016, the CDC found that one …

Criminal Laws On Sex Work And Hiv Transmission: Mapping The Laws, Considering The Consequence, Sienna Baskin, Aziza Ahmed, Anna Forbes

Faculty Scholarship

Lawmakers historically justify the mobilization of criminal laws on prostitution and HIV as a means of controlling the spread of disease. Over time, however, public health research has conclusively demonstrated that criminal laws on prostitution and HIV significantly impede the ability of sex workers to access services and to live without the stigma and blame associated with being a transmitter of HIV. In turn, mainstream public health approaches to sex work and HIV emphasize decriminalization as a way to improve the lives of sex workers in need of care, treatment, and services. Our current legal system, which criminalizes both prostitution …

Facebook’S Emotional Contagion Study And The Ethical Problem Of Co-Opted Identity In Mediated Environments Where Users Lack Control, Evan Selinger, Woodrow Hartzog

Faculty Scholarship

We argue a main but underappreciated reason why the Facebook emotional contagion experiment is ethically problematic is that it co-opted user data in a way that violated identity-based norms and exploited the vulnerability of those disclosing on social media who are unable to control how personal information is presented in this technologically mediated environment.

Reconsidering The Tax Treaty, Steven A. Dean, Rebecca M. Kysar

Faculty Scholarship

For nearly one hundred years, the international tax regime steadfastly pursued a single nemesis, double taxation. States armed themselves against this common enemy with their weapon of choice, the double tax treaty. Nearly uniform in language and approach, the treaties proliferated to more than three thousand in number,¹ resulting in a secure arrangement between and among states and taxpayers.

Yet in recent years, states have had to expand the war to multiple fronts in the face of globalization, technological changes, evolving taxpayer abuses, and shifts in both domestic and international political pressures. For instance, a growing recognition that the …

Africa's New Economic Partnerships And Dispute Settlement, Victoria Sahani

Faculty Scholarship

This panel was convened at 11:00 a.m., Thursday, March 31, 2016, by its moderator Uche Ewelukwa of the University of Arkansas School of Law, who introduced the panelists: Victoria Shannon Sahani of Washington and Lee University School of Law; David H. Shinn of George Washington University School of Law; and Thomas R. Snider of Greenberg Traurig LLP.

Recent Cases: Eeoc V. Abercrombie & Fitch Stores, Inc.: Religious Accommodation In The Workplace, Elizabeth King

Faculty Scholarship

In EEOC v. Abercrombie & Fitch Stores, Inc., the plaintiff, Samantha Elauf, was rejected from a sales clerk position because her headscarf clashed with Abercrombie & Fitch’s employee dress code.¹ This code, Abercrombie’s “Look Policy,” required all employees to dress in a “classic East Coast collegiate style” and prohibited “caps.”² However, Elauf, a practicing Muslim, wore a headscarf (or “hijab”) as a representation and obligation of her religion.³ After Abercrombie rejected her employment application, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (“EEOC”) sued the company on Elauf’s behalf, alleging a Title VII violation for failure to accommodate a …

Insights From Psychology: Teaching Behavioral Legal Ethics As A Core Element Of Professional Responsibility, Tigran W. Eldred

Faculty Scholarship

The field of behavioral legal ethics—which draws on a large body of empirical research to explore how subtle and often unconscious psychological factors influence ethical decision-making by lawyers—has gained significant attention recently, including by many scholars who have called for a pedagogy that incorporates behavioral lessons into the professional responsibility curriculum. This Article provides one of the first comprehensive accounts of how law teachers can meet this challenge. Based on an approach that employs a variety of experiential techniques to immerse students in the contextual and emotional aspects of legal practice, it provides a detailed model of how to teach …

Differentiating Deference, Anya Bernstein

Faculty Scholarship

There is now some consensus that the context of a statutory term plays a crucial part in its meaning.1 The argument continues, however, over what "kinds of context ... matter."2 Building on scholarship that addresses the wide range of contexts that contribute to legal meaning,3 this Article illuminates two factors crucial to interpreting legal language: the social nature of meaning-making and the practical nature of interpretive competence. I locate my inquiry in the judicial review of agency statutory interpretation, a particularly fruitful arena for analyzing statutory interpretation more generally.

To fill the gap, Part I of this Article first illuminates …

Anthony Amsterdam's Perspectives On The Fourth Amendment, And What It Teaches About The Good And Bad In Rodriguez V. United States, Tracey Maclin

Faculty Scholarship

Anthony Amsterdam’s article, Perspectives On The Fourth Amendment is one of the best, if not the best, law review article written on the Fourth Amendment. Thus, Minnesota Law Review on its hundredth anniversary fittingly recognizes and honors Professor Amsterdam’s article in its Symposium edition, “Standing on the Shoulders of Giants: Celebrating 100 Volumes of the Minnesota Law Review.” I am flattered that the Law Review invited me to participate in this Symposium.
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/="/">Specifically, my article connects two perspectives from Amsterdam’s article — the Fourth Amendment’s concern with discretionary police power and the Framers’ vision of the Fourth Amendment …

The Right To Silence V. The Fifth Amendment, Tracey Maclin

Faculty Scholarship

This paper concerns a well-known, but badly misunderstood, constitutional right. The Fifth Amendment to the Constitution guarantees, inter alia, that no person “shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself.” For the non-lawyer, the Fifth Amendment protects an individual’s right to silence. Many Americans believe that the Constitution protects their right to remain silent when questioned by police officers or governmental officials. Three rulings from the Supreme Court over the past twelve years, Chavez v. Martinez (2003), Berghuis v. Thomkpins (2010) and Salinas v. Texas (2013), however, demonstrate that the “right to remain silent” that …

After Tackett: Incomplete Contracts For Post-Employment Healthcare, Maria O'Brien

Faculty Scholarship

This paper examines the recent U.S. Supreme Court retiree health care decision in Tackett v. M & G Polymers and focuses, in particular, on the ostensibly odd silence with respect to a critical contract term — whether the parties in fact agreed that these benefits were vested. Although the union in Tackett insisted these welfare benefits were clearly intended to vest and the employer now asserts they can be modified at any time, the collective bargaining agreement and supporting documents are ambiguous on this question. This paper examines how and why this “silence” persisted for so many decades and concludes …

International Law Constraints As Executive Power, Rebecca Ingber

Faculty Scholarship

The use of international law to understand domestic authority has a long pedigree. It is also the subject of heated debate, which focuses predominantly on the extent to which international law can or should serve as a limit on political actors, in particular the President, and the extent to which it can be invoked to expand our understanding of domestic individual rights. Yet there is another significant dynamic at work in this interplay between international and domestic law. This is the invocation of international law not as a constraining force on government actors, but as an enabling force within the …

Clinical Legal Education's Contribution To Building Constitutionalism And Democracy In South Africa: Past, Present, And Future, Peggy Maisel, Shaheda Mahomed, Meetali Jain

Faculty Scholarship

Clinical Legal Education (“CLE”) courses were first introduced in South Africa nearly fifty years ago. Since then, their role has changed from addressing legal problems perpetrated by an oppressive system, to strengthening South Africa’s transition to democracy. The end of apartheid has been accompanied by a transition of focus from private law to public law. South Africa currently has seventeen public universities, each of which has a law faculty and a legal clinic. Many clinical programs’ missions are primarily dedicated to community service and providing access to justice.

Although CLE programs have undertaken some human rights and law reform work, …

The Way We Pay Now: Understanding And Evaluating Performance-Based Executive Pay, David I. Walker

Faculty Scholarship

Over the last ten years, performance-based equity pay, and particularly performance shares, have displaced stock options as the primary instrument for compensating executives of large, public companies in the U.S. This article examines that transformation, analyzing the structure and incentive properties of these newly important instruments and evaluating the benefits and risks from an investor’s perspective. Notable observations include the following: Although technically “stock” instruments, performance shares mimic the incentive characteristics of options. But performance shares avoid the tax, accounting, and other constraints that have led to uniform grants of non-indexed, at the money options. Performance share plans can be …

Calculating The Observable Properties Of Mass Accreting Black Holes, Heather Lee

Undergraduate Research Symposium Posters

My goal is to generalize Chandrasekhar’s formulas to include partial Rayleigh Scattering. In my summer research, I successfully recalculated key tables and solutions from his book and I am working in generalizing his results for use in an infinitely deep electron atmosphere. Here, I will summarize how Chandrasekhar derived his formulas and how to potentially generalize them to include absorption.

Geometric Algorithms For Modeling Protein Structures, Dan Zeng

Undergraduate Research Symposium Posters

Understanding the structures of macromolecular assemblies is necessary to describe the mechanics of a wide variety of cellular processes. Such assemblies often consist of hundreds of proteins and nucleic acid, each with a unique shape. Modern imaging techniques, including electron cryo-microscopy, create 3D density maps to portray the shapes of these assemblies. However, computational methods for deriving structural models from these images are not fully developed because structural geometry varies depending on the image resolution. To address this issue, we developed geometric algorithms in Gorgon, a molecular visualization software. First, we created an interface for Pathwalking. This algorithm determines protein …

Topological Transitions In A Superconducting Qubit, Arman Guerra

Undergraduate Research Symposium Posters

Topology, as it pertains to quantum objects, has become an important area of research because of recent discoveries of topological phases and insulators in condensed matter physics. It can be used as a tool to accurately describe phenomena in many different quantum systems. I present my study of topology as it relates to two level systems, and experiments to probe the topology of transmon qubits. These simple quantum circuits allow for a high level of control which makes them good candidates to study topological properties and to model more complicated systems. Specifically, topological transitions of the first Chern number arise …

Mu Opioid Receptor Desensitization In Inflammatory Pain, Matthew Bredder

Undergraduate Research Symposium Posters

Due to the epidemic level of opioid overdose deaths in the United States, improving the treatment of chronic pain has become a pressing concern. Opioid treatments such as fentanyl and morphine activate mu opioid receptors (MORs), causing an increase in dopamine release. Long term use of opioids, even as prescribed by a physician, can desensitize the MORs and lead to the appearance of withdrawal symptoms when the receptors are no longer stimulated. Since pain increases endogenous opioid release, we hypothesized that this increase may cause MOR desensitization and the appearance of withdrawal syndrome upon blockade of MORs, as seen in …

The Role Of Notch Signaling On Heart Rate And Atrial Conduction, Somya Bhatnagar

Undergraduate Research Symposium Posters

Heart disease is the leading cause of death worldwide and can result in arrhythmias, or dysregulation in the electrical activation of the heart. Sick Sinus Syndrome (SSS) is characterized by sinus bradycardia (slowed heart rate, HR), slowed conduction through atrial myocardium, and can predispose to the development of atrial fibrillation. A developmental signaling pathway, Notch, regulates cellular identity through differentiation of cardiomyocytes (CMs) into cardiac conduction system-like cells. Previous data show that Notch electrically remodels the right atrium, causing slowed conduction velocity (CV) and hallmarks of SSS including sinus pauses, sinus bradycardia and a predisposition to atrial fibrillation. However, the …

The Next Generation Of Wireless Cyber-Physical Simulator, Xinghan Wang, Kevin Xu

Undergraduate Research Symposium Posters

In order to make Wireless Cyber-Physical Simulator(WCPS) more accessible to people in the research community, and also to improve its accuracy of representing real industrial models, we worked on the dockerization of WCPS, and implemented the multi-rate feature for WCPS, enabling the simulator to have different network rate and plant rate when running a simulation. We created a new version of WCPS by dockerizing run-time libraries and the TOSSIM server and also embedding the multi-rate feature in the old version. This report includes the introduction and dockerization of WCPS, and shows the results of using the new generation of WCPS …

In Memoriam – Marvin A. Chirelstein, Barbara Aronstein Black, Stephen B. Cohen, Michael J. Graetz, Roberta Romano, Carol Sanger, Robert E. Scott

Faculty Scholarship

Marvin Chirelstein was my good friend long before he was my colleague, and Ellen is one of my closest friends-it's a friendship that's lasted through oh! so many ups and downs for all of us for oh! so many years. As a sign of how good a friend I considered Marvin, I will report that he is the only person I have ever permitted to call me Babs!

University Assessment Services, National Survey Of Student Engagement, 2016, Illinois State University

Student Success

National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE) administered by University Assessment Services, Illinois State University, to First Year Students. 2016.

A Case Study On Establishing A Community Advisory Board: What Are The Main Challenges?, Erika Perez

Student Research – Stevenson Center

As part of my professional practice for my master’s degree in Sociology-Applied Economic and Community Development, my main responsibility was to develop a community leadership group for a non-profit in Providence, Rhode Island. The agency, Dorcas International Institute of Rhode Island, offers a variety of services to immigrants and incoming refugees. My role as a Community Advisory Board Coordinator involved establishing a community group while giving opportunities for leadership and client input on services received from the agency. Community boards serve an important role in any organization as they offer valuable input in creating high-quality services. However, organizing community groups …

Religious Identity And The Provision Of Public Goods: Evidence From The Indian Princely States, Latika Chaudhary, Jared Rubin

ESI Publications

This paper describes a simple model of how a ruler’s religious identity affects public goods provision. Our primary insight is that rulers reduce public goods expenditures to a greater degree when there are privately-provided substitutes excludable by religion.The basic idea is that if the good is provided privately to the ruler’s co-religionists, the ruler faces weaker incentives to provide this public good because his co-religionists receive lower marginal utility from its provision. Testing such a conjecture is an empirical challenge, however, since the religious identity of rulers rarely varies over time and place. We address this problem by exploiting …

Exploring Consciousness Through The Qualitative Content Of Equations, Ashok Narasimhan, Menas C. Kafatos

Mathematics, Physics, and Computer Science Faculty Articles and Research

The majority of the focus on equations in physics has been on the mathematical and computational aspects. Here we focus on the qualitative content of what the relationships expressed in equations imply. In some sense, we are asking foundational questions about the ontology of equations.

Sensitivity Of Maize Yield Potential To Regional Climate In The Southwestern U.S., Seung Hee Kim, Boksoon Myoung, David Stack, Jinwon Kim, Menas Kafatos

Mathematics, Physics, and Computer Science Faculty Articles and Research

The sensitivity of maize yields to the regional climate in the Southwestern U.S. (SWUS) has been investigated by using the Agricultural Production Systems sIMulator (APSIM) model in conjunction with meteorological forcings [daily maximum and minimum temperature (Tmax and Tmin), precipitation, and radiation] from the North American Regional Reanalysis (NARR) dataset. Sensitivity experiments showed that potential crop production responded nonlinearly to variations in Tmax, Tmin, and downwelling solar radiation at the surface. Mean annual yield potential (Yp) was changed by -3.0 and 1.79 Mg ha-1 for the +1 and -1 standard deviations (σ) of Tmax variation for entire the SWUS. The …

Mathematical Frameworks For Consciousness, Menas C. Kafatos, Ashok Narasimhan

Mathematics, Physics, and Computer Science Faculty Articles and Research

If Awareness is fundamental in the universe, mathematical frameworks are better suited to reveal its fundamental aspects than physical models. Awareness operates through three fundamental laws which apply at all levels of reality and is characterized by three universal powers. We explore and summarize in general terms mathematical formalisms that may take us as close as possible to conscious awareness, beginning with the primary relationships between the observer with the observed, using a Hilbert space approach. We also examine insights from category theory, and the calculus of indications or laws of forms. Mathematical frameworks as fundamental languages of our interaction …

Trust And Trustworthiness Under Information Asymmetry And Ambiguity, Irma Clots-Figueras, Roberto Hernán-González, Praveen Kujal

ESI Working Papers

We introduce uncertainty and ambiguity in the standard investment game. In the uncertainty treatment, investors are informed that the return of the investment is drawn from a publicly known distribution function. In the ambiguity treatment, investors are not informed about the distribution function. We find that both trust and trustworthiness are robust to the introduction of these changes.

The Impact Of Taxes And Wasteful Government Spending On Giving, Roman M. Sheremeta, Neslihan Uler

ESI Working Papers

We examine the impact of taxes and wasteful government spending on charitable giving. In our model, the government collects a flat-rate tax on income net of donations and wastes part of the tax revenue before redistribution. The model provides theoretical predictions which we test in a framed field experiment. The results of the experiment show that the tax rate has a weak and insignificant effect on giving. The degree of waste, however, has a large, negative and significant effect on giving, with the relationship moderated by the curvature in the utility function.

Regional Variations Of Optimal Sowing Dates Of Maize For The Southwestern U.S., Boksoon Myoung, Seung Hee Kim, Jinwon Kim, Menas Kafatos

Mathematics, Physics, and Computer Science Faculty Articles and Research

Sowing date (SD) is sensitive to regional climate characteristics; thus, it is critical to systematically examine the effects of SD on crop yields for various temperature regimes. We performed a sensitivity study of SD for maize in the southwestern U.S. using the regionally extended version of the Agricultural Production Systems sIMulator (APSIM) model. The model was run utilizing North American Regional Reanalysis at a 32 km resolution from 1991 to 2011, with an irrigation threshold at 95% of the soil water-holding capacity. Two types of SD optimizations maximizing yield potential (Yp), varying spatially or interannually, revealed that the optimal SD …