Digital Commons Network^™

Egg Turning Behavior And Egg Temperature In Relation To Mercury Contamination Of Forster's Terns (Sterna Forsteri), Gregory T. Taylor

Master's Theses

Several avian species exhibit reduced hatching success as a result of mercury contamination, but the mechanism by which this occurs is unknown. We examined egg turning rates and egg temperatures, two important determinants of egg hatchability, in relation to egg mercury contamination of Forster’s terns (Sterna forsteri) in San Francisco Bay. Here, we used artificial eggs containing a data logger with a 3-D accelerometer, a magnetometer, and a temperature thermistor to monitor parental incubation behavior (sampled at 1 Hz) of 186 tern nests. Overall, adults turned their eggs an average of 3.8 ± 0.8 SD turns h^(-1), which is nearly …

Environmental Drivers Of Benthic-Interior Exchange Events Over The Continental Shelf Of Monterey Bay, California, Ben Yair Raanan

Master's Theses

This study presents a comprehensive analysis of oceanographic data collected by an automated profiling mooring and fixed instrumentation platforms deployed over the mud belt on the southern continental shelf of Monterey Bay, California at 70 m depth during the fall of 2012. Physical and optical measurements taken at the study site documented the frequent occurrence of suspended particulate matter (SPM) layers in the mid-water column, the majority of which were detached from the seafloor and overlaid clearer water. This study examines the temporal and spatial variations of these detached SPM layers using time series analysis and modeling methods, and investigates …

Structure, Construction, And Emplacement Of The Late Cretaceous Sonora Pass Intrusive Suite: Central Sierra Nevada Batholith, California, Monika B. Leopold

Master's Theses

The >1000 km2, ~95-88 Ma Sonora Pass intrusive suite is the oldest and most northern of the four voluminous, normally-zoned Late Cretaceous suites of the Sierra Nevada batholith. It consists of the older, marginal, equigranular Kinney Lakes hornblende-biotite granodiorite and the inner, porphyritic to megacrystic Topaz Lake biotite granodiorite. The suite intruded the ~109 Ma Bummers Flat biotite granodiorite, Jurassic diorites, and Pre-Cambrian to Cambrian metasedimentary rocks of the Snow Lake pendant. The Topaz Lake granodiorite records evidence of the development of a sizable magma chamber. The Bummers Flat and Kinney Lakes granodiorites were likely constructed by many increments, were …

A Framing Analysis Of Latinos In The Facebook Pages Of News Organizations, Juliana Zapata Acosta

Master's Theses

This study of the Facebook pages of six legacy media organizations extended framing theory to apply to social media. In the study of 557 articles, four new frames and 10 new subframes were identified. The immigration frame and its two subframes, deportation and undocumented, dominated the coverage of Latinos during the period of the study. The politics frame was the second most dominant frame. This study updated the old data and found that no progress has been made, with the exception of a lesser use of the criminal frame. This improvement could be because the study included six months of …

Structure And Volcanic Evolution Of The Northern Highland Range, Colorado River Extensional Corridor, Clark County, Nevada, Ryan A. Mckee

Master's Theses

A geologic map was drafted of the northern Highland Range (1:24,000 scale), rock units defined, and samples of the volcanic units were obtained and analyzed to produce a representative suite of chemical analyses to characterize the range of geochemical variability. The style, relative timing, and orientation of faults and dikes, and the magnitude and variability of stratal tilting was examined to evaluate the structural and magmatic evolution of the northern Highland Range in the context of models for the Colorado River Extensional Corridor and Black Mountains accommodation zone. Methods involved field mapping of the range scale structure and geometry of …

Studying Globular Clusters In The Dwarf Galaxy Ngc 247 Using Subaru Hyper Suprime-Cam Imaging, Vakini Santhanakrishnan

Master's Theses

While globular clusters (GCs) are among the most ancient stellar systems in the universe, there are still lingering questions about how and where they formed. There is relatively little known about GCs in spiral galaxies beyond the Milky Way. We analyzed confirmed GCs, examined putative GC candidates, and looked for new GCs around the nearby dwarf spiral galaxy NGC 247 at about 3.5 Mpc away in the Sculptor group, based on wide-field imaging data from the Subaru Hyper Suprime-Cam (HSC), with a 1.5 degree field of view. The extremely wide-area coverage, depth, and image quality of HSC provide great potential …

"Life Beyond Life": Reading Milton's Areopagitica Through Enlightenment Vitalism, Erik L. Johnson

Faculty Research, Scholarly, and Creative Activity

No abstract provided.

Current Issues In Patent Law And Policy, Michael J. Meurer

Faculty Scholarship

Patent law and policy have received a surprising amount of attention from courts and policymakers in recent years. This attention is warranted because innovation policy is critical in determining the pace of innovation and the rate of economic growth. The reform proposals pending before Congress are motivated by widespread reports of abusive patent assertions and fears that patents sometimes stifle innovation. I favor most of the pending reforms and worry that our patent system, on balance, discourages innovation. But I part company from most reform proponents who focus on harms caused by the frivolous patent litigation mounted by many "non-practicing …

Roger Blair And Intellectual Property, Keith N. Hylton

Faculty Scholarship

Although intellectual property is just a sidelight of Roger Blair's work, he has published at least seven articles and coauthored a book on this subject. Blair's work sets out robust economic models that address nearly all of the significant economic issues in intellectual property. Moreover, by using the property rules framework, he has offered a useful counterweight to the reward-to-loss theory that dominates the literature.

Big Legal History And The Hundred Year Test, David J. Seipp

Faculty Scholarship

The generation of legal historians working in the opening decades of the twenty-first century have an opportunity to use digital technology to bring the sources of legal history to a wider audience of scholars and to facilitate the research of future scholars for many generations to come. I say this because, commencing in 1999, I compiled a searchable database of identifying information about and content of the 22,318 reports in the Year Books, cases decided in England's courts of common law between 1268 and 1535. With the generous support and sponsorship of the Ames Foundation, my database has become an …

A More Fundamental Distinction For The Contemporary Economy Between Employee And Independent Contractor Status, Michael C. Harper

Faculty Scholarship

The common law remains an intellectual battle ground in Anglo-American legal systems, even in the current age of statutes. This is true in significant part because the common law provides legitimacy for arguments actually based on policy, ideology, and interest. It also is true because of the common law's malleability and related susceptibility to significantly varied interpretations.

Mere contention over the meaning of the common law to provide legitimacy for modern statutes is most often not productive of sensible policy, however. It generally produces no more than reified doctrine unsuited for problems the common law was not framed to solve. …

Reducing Wasteful Incarcerations, Christopher Robertson, Jamie Cox Robertson

Faculty Scholarship

Prisons are essential to a safe and civil society. Prisons are also costly for the taxpayers whose government houses, feeds, medicates, and supervises millions of people underlock and key.This expense is compounded by errors in the u.S. legal system that produces both false guilty verdicts and overly harsh penalties. It’stime forthe united States to take a closer look at these unnecessary incarcerations. By working to release prisoners who don’t belong in prison, we can lower the costs of the prison system—not to mention restore freedom to people who are wrongly being deprived of it. unfortunately, it is difficult to identify …

An Assessment Of The Human Subjects Protection Review Process For Exempt Research, Jonathan D. Loe, Alex Winkelman, Christopher Robertson

Faculty Scholarship

Medical and public health research includes surveys, interviews, and biospecimens - techniques that do not present substantial risks to subjects. Consequently, this research is exempt from regulation under the Federal Common Rule. Nevertheless, at many institutions, exempt research is frequently subject to the same regulatory process that is required for non-exempt research, requiring the consumption of time and resources for review by Institutional Review Board members or staff. The federal government has indicated an intention to reform and centralize this system, but has not yet specified the form that it will use instead. By examining the policies of the top …

The "Law" And "Spirit" Of The Accreditation Process In Legal Education, Maureen A. O'Rourke

Faculty Scholarship

In 1995, Dean Richard Matasar published an essay in the Journal of Legal Education entitled Perspectives on the Accreditation Process: Views from a Nontraditional School. With characteristic acuity, he focused on the question "whether the accreditation process promotes or discourages curricular experimentation and resource conservation," noting that "[a]s we enter an era of scarcity of resources and diminished demand for legal education, traditional well-endowed schools will continue to flourish. For the rest of us, however, only the fittest and most clever will survive. Accreditation must serve this end."

Introduction To Thinking About A Post-Aca World: Litigation, Cost Shifting And Enforcement Of Statutory Rights, Maria O'Brien

Faculty Scholarship

At its annual gathering in 2016, members of the Employee Benefits and Executive Compensation and Law, Medicine and Healthcare Sections of the Association of American Law Schools (AALS) jointly sponsored a discussion of the future of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) following the Supreme Court's decision in King v. Burwell.' What follows are the papers generated for the panel discussion. The panelists² were asked to evaluate the future of the ACA from a distinct perspective.

Foreword, Nancy J. Moore

Faculty Scholarship

In common parlance, the “regulatory state” refers to governance through specialized administrative agencies, such as the federal agencies that arose during the progressive era in the United States.1 Lawyering in the regulatory state takes a number of different forms, including the private representation of clients who are either litigating before agencies or facing compliance issues, as well as the public employment of lawyers within the agencies themselves. Both types of regulatory lawyering raise a wide range of unique ethical issues for lawyers and are the subject of the articles in this Fordham colloquium entitled Lawyering in the Regulatory State. These …

Litigation: Time To Revisit Chevron Difference, Jack M. Beermann, Charles J. Cooper, Thomas W. Merrill, Amy Wildermuth, Don R. Wildermouth

Faculty Scholarship

Article is a transcript from the 2014 National Lawyers Convention panel on Millennials, Equity, and the Rule of Law. A video recording of the panel can be viewed here.

JUSTICE DON WILLETT: ... because Chevron deference is kind of like bacon. Some people like their Chevron deference rigid and crisp. Other people like it a little squishy and a little bendable. A few people dislike it altogether, no matter how it's served. But Chevron' is now thirty years old, older than a number of people in the audience today, and a lot has changed. The regulatory state …

Race And Reform In Twenty-First Century America: Foreword, Trina Jones, Guy-Uriel Charles, Angela Onwuachi-Willig

Faculty Scholarship

In November 2015, approximately two hundred activists, academics, and students from across the United States convened at Duke University School of Law for a conference entitled The Present and Future of Civil Rights Movements: Race and Reform in 21st Century America. Planning for the conference had commenced a year earlier, in the fall of 2014. At that time, the nation was reeling from the deaths of Rekia Boyd, Eric Garner, John Crawford III, and Michael Brown, among others. In addition to the killing of these unarmed Black men and women by law enforcement personnel, many people, particularly within the civil …

Fda's Troubling Failures To Use Its Authority To Regulate Genetically Modified Foods, Leslie Francis, Robin Kundis Craig, Erika George

Faculty Scholarship

This Article concerns the particular regulatory responsibilities only of FDA. It sets to one side the possible regulatory authority of agencies such as the Environmental Protection Agency ("EPA") or the U.S. Department of Agriculture ("USDA"). This approach risks replicating the regulatory fracture introduced during the Reagan Administration and criticized by some scholars,¹⁵ but there is a great deal to say about current FDA practices. Out of similar considerations of space and focus, this Article also sets to one side many other important issues that surround GM foods: intellectual property rights; rights to free speech or commercial speech; fair trade …

Recent Developments In Bankruptcy Regulation: Mortgage Servicing Rules, The Fdcpa, And The Cfpb, Frederick Tung, Alane A. Becket, Sarah Bolling Mancini, Nick Wooten

Faculty Scholarship

MS. DEPPERT: Welcome back. Before we begin, I'd like to take this opportunity to introduce you to our second panel of the day, our Consumer Panel, which will discuss Recent Developments in Bankruptcy Regulation, including mortgage servicing rules, the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act (the "FDCPA"), and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (the "CFPB"). This afternoon we are privileged to have the following distinguished panelists join us. First we have Alane Becket, Managing Partner at Becket & Lee LLP, in Malvern, Pennsylvania, a law firm representing primarily consumer lenders in bankruptcy proceedings. Ms. Becket was elected to the Board of …

Dismantling Of Dissent: Militarization And The Right To Peaceably Assemble, Emmanuel Hiram Arnaud

Faculty Scholarship

This Note argues that the ritualized use of extreme police force on peacefully assembled groups is a violation of the Assembly Clause as it was originally intended to function. Part I gives a general account of the Assembly Clause, its creation, and its original intention to safeguard minority views. Part II recounts part of the history behind the militarization of police forces. Part III suggests a balancing test the courts should use when evaluating violations of the freedom to peaceably assemble in order to conform to the original meaning of the First Amendment.

From Outlaw To Outcast To In-Law? Contesting The Perils Of Marriage Equality, Linda C. Mcclain

Faculty Scholarship

I am pleased to offer the opening commentary in this BU Law Review Annex symposium on Professor Katherine Franke’s provocative new book, Wedlocked: The Perils of Marriage Equality. As previewed by the book’s additional subtitle, “How African Americans and Gays Mistakenly Thought the Right to Marry Would Set Them Free,” Franke aims to provide “cautionary tales” gleaned, or lessons learned, from juxtaposing post-Civil War regulation of the marriages of African Americans freed from slavery with today’s movement for marriage equality for gay men and lesbians.3 Long a skeptic about the gay community’s focus on the goal of marriage—its (in …

A Story Of Three Bank-Regulatory Legal Systems: Contract, Financial Management Regulation, And Fiduciary Law, Tamar Frankel

Faculty Scholarship

How should banks be regulated to avoid their failure? Banks must control the risks they take with depositors' money. If depositors lose their trust in their banks, and demand their money, the banks will fail. This article describes three legal bank regulatory systems: Contract with depositors (U.S.); a mix of contract and trust law, but going towards trust (Japan), and a full trust-fiduciary law regulating banks (Israel). The article concludes that bank regulation, which limits the banks' risks and conflicts of interest, helps create trustworthy banks that serve their country best.

The Internet Of Heirlooms And Disposable Things, Woodrow Hartzog, Evan Selinger

Faculty Scholarship

The Internet of Things (“IoT”) is here, and we seem to be going all in. We are trying to put a microchip in nearly every object that is not nailed down and even a few that are. Soon, your cars, toasters, toys, and even your underwear will be wired up to make your lives better. The general thought seems to be that “Internet connectivity makes good objects great.” While the IoT might be incredibly useful, we should proceed carefully. Objects are not necessarily better simply because they are connected to the Internet. Often, the Internet can make objects worse and …

Inefficiently Automated Law Enforcement, Woodrow Hartzog, Gregory Conti, John Nelson, Lisa A. Shay

Faculty Scholarship

For some crimes the entire law enforcement process can now be automated. No humans are needed to detect the crime, identify the perpetrator, or impose punishment. While automated systems are cheap and efficient, governments and citizens must look beyond these obvious savings as manual labor is replaced by robots and computers. Inefficiency and indeterminacy have significant value in automated law enforcement systems and should be preserved. Humans are inefficient, yet more capable of ethical and contextualized decision-making than automated systems. Inefficiency is also an effective safeguard against perfectly enforcing laws that were created with implicit assumptions of leniency and discretion. …

Anonymization And Risk, Ira S. Rubinstein, Woodrow Hartzog

Faculty Scholarship

Perfect anonymization of data sets that contain personal information has failed. But the process of protecting data subjects in shared information remains integral to privacy practice and policy. While the deidentification debate has been vigorous and productive, there is no clear direction for policy. As a result, the law has been slow to adapt a holistic approach to protecting data subjects when data sets are released to others. Currently, the law is focused on whether an individual can be identified within a given set. We argue that the best way to move data release policy past the alleged failures of …

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 …