Digital Commons Network^™

Police, Race, And The Production Of Capital Homicides, Jeffrey A. Fagan, Amanda Geller

Faculty Scholarship

Racial disparities in capital punishment have been well documented for decades. Over 50 studies have shown that Black defendants more likely than their white counterparts to be charged with capital-eligible crimes, to be convicted and sentenced to death. Racial disparities in charging and sentencing in capital-eligible homicides are the largest for the small number of cases where black defendants murder white victims compared to within-race killings, or where whites murder black or other ethnic minority victims. These patterns are robust to rich controls for non-racial characteristics and state sentencing guidelines. This article backs up the research on racial disparities to …

Tennessee Farm Bureau News - January 2018, Tennessee Farm Bureau Federation

Tennessee Farm Bureau News

No abstract provided.

Why Autonomy Must Be Contract's Ultimate Value, Hanoch Dagan, Michael A. Heller

Faculty Scholarship

In “The Choice Theory of Contracts”, we develop a liberal theory of contract law. One core task of the book was to persuade advocates of economic analysis that they must situate their enterprise within our liberal framework. Autonomy, rightly understood, is the telos of contract.

Oren Bar-Gill pushes back strongly in “Choice Theory and the Economic Analysis of Contracts”. He offers a penetrating – perhaps devastating – critique of our approach. Bar-Gill notes the substantial convergence between choice theory and a welfarist view. If he is right, then what does choice theory add?

Our task in Part I of this …

How To Foster Respect For Animals? Superiority, Dissimilarity, And Prejudice, Matteo Colombo

Animal Sentience

Chapman & Huffman (C & H) might be taken to argue as follows: Humans may treat animals however they want only if humans are superior to animals. But humans are not superior to animals. Therefore, humans may not treat animals however they want. Whatever its merit, this is not C & H’s actual argument. Their point, instead, is that humans often mistreat animals because they tend to perceive them as inferior. A remedy for animal mistreatment would then be acknowledging the deep similarities between us and animals. But is C & H’s suggested remedy likely to be effective to foster …

Vincentian Heritage 34:2

Vincentian Studies

No abstract provided.

America’S Relation To World Order: Two Indictments, Two Thought Experiments, And A Misquotation, Philip C. Bobbitt

Faculty Scholarship

The State is undergoing a crisis of legitimacy owing to its inability to cope with novel problems of weapons proliferation, transnational threats including climate change, a fragile global financial infrastructure, cultural influences carried by electronic communications, and an undemocratic regime of human rights law. These fatal inadequacies are summoning forth a new constitutional order, the latest in a series of century-spanning archetypal regimes that have arisen since the Renaissance and the collapse of feudalism. A backlash against the harbingers of this new order, however, is crippling the development of those modes of action that are required to deal with the …

The Spark In The Powder: Iroquois Freemen Trappers In The Rocky Mountain Fur Trade, Jay H. Buckley

Faculty Publications

This article challenges Iroquoian stereotypes portrayed in existing fur trade records by contrasting the failure of the Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC) to integrate Iroquois and Métis trappers as successfully as the North West Company (NWC) had. The article also compares that to the successful integration and positive portrayal of Iroquois and Métis (mixed-desent) trappers within the American Rocky Mountain fur trade. Racial and economic discrimination by the HBC toward the Iroquois caused a negative impact on the financial success of the Snake Country expeditions under HBC’s Alexander Ross. Additionally, behaviors resulting from such discrimination received negative portrayals in Peter Skene …

The Impact Of Circadian Misalignment On Cardiometabolic Health, Cynthia Marie Mills

Physician Assistant Scholarly Project Papers

The circadian system is important in all living organisms because it generates a 24-hour rhythm for physiological and behavioral processes enabling anticipation and adaptation to daily changes in the environment. The prevalence of cardiometabolic diseases, which are linked to lifestyle choices, has been rising at an alarming rate. Modernization and globalization are two of many factors to blame for lifestyle changes resulting in circadian disruption. The purpose of this literature review is to explore circadian misalignment with regards to its mechanism and impact on cardiometabolic health and to determine possible interventional measures. The primary focus is on lifestyle change, particularly …

Elementary Art Education, Innovation, And Darwin's Paradox, Mark Graham, Stephen Moore

Faculty Publications

Innovation and learning come together in a vibrant manner during dynamic arts education classes led by teachers who understand the importance of collaboration and student improvisation.

The Empirical Turn In Family Law, Clare Huntington

Faculty Scholarship

Historically, the legal system justified family law’s rules and policies through morality, common sense, and prevailing cultural norms. In a sharp departure, and consistent with a broader trend across the legal system, empirical evidence increasingly dominates the regulation of families.

There is much to celebrate in this empirical turn. Properly used, empirical evidence in family law can help the state act more effectively and efficiently, unmask prejudice, and depoliticize contentious battles. But the empirical turn also presents substantial concerns. Beyond perennial issues of the quality of empirical evidence and the ability of legal actors to use it, there are more …

Strontium Isotope Analysis In The Eastern Great Basin: Potential Challenges, Rewards, And A Fremont Case Study, David Yoder, Spencer Lambert, Michael T. Searcy

Faculty Publications

Over the last 20 years strontium (Sr) isotope analysis has become a powerful tool in the study of prehistoric human behavior; especially for patterns of movement, migration, and trade. While used in many other parts of the world to determine if an individual or animal was local or non-local to the area in which they were found, this technique has been under utilized in the Great Basin. In this presentation we will outline the regionally specific challenges researchers face in using Sr analysis in the eastern Great Basin; the potential insights we may gain in understanding prehistoric culture and behavior; …

Sequestering Carbon Dioxide Undersea In The Atlantic: Legal Problems And Solutions, Michael B. Gerrard, Romany M. Webb

Faculty Scholarship

Reducing the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is vital to mitigate climate change. To date, reduction efforts have primarily focused on minimizing the production of carbon dioxide during electricity generation, transport, and other activities. Going forward, to the extent that carbon dioxide continues to be produced, it will need to be captured before release. The captured carbon dioxide can then be utilized in some fashion or injected into underground geological formations (e.g., depleted oil and gas reserves, deep saline aquifers, or basalt rock reservoirs) where it will hopefully remain permanently sequestered. This injection process is referred to as …

Political Animals: Form And The Animal Fable In Langland’S Rodent Parliament And Chaucer’S Nun’S Priest’S Tale, Elizaveta Strakhov

English Faculty Research and Publications

Chaucer and Langland have generally been read independently of one another, in large part due to the profound formal differences of rhyme, metre, and lexical features within their poetry. However, a broader definition of form, that sees texts receiving their shape from an animating concept at their core, affords richer purchase on the potential convergences between the two poets. I take as my paradigmatic example of this phenomenon Chaucer’s and Langland’s mutual choice to couch their rare topical references in retellings of well-known animal fables (Langland’s Rodent Parliament and Chaucer’s Nun’s Priest’s Tale). Animal fables, I argue, are governed by …

Utopia, Gerry Canavan

English Faculty Research and Publications

No abstract provided.

Stichomythia, Tyler Farrell

English Faculty Research and Publications

No abstract provided.

Denialism And Muddying The Water Or Organized Skepticism And Clarity? That Is The Question, Ben Diggles, Howard I. Browman

Animal Sentience

The research being commented on here has been criticized and defended in journals. Sneddon et al. (2018) add nothing substantive. We have nothing further to add. Readers are referred to Diggles (2018) and to Browman et al. (2018) for a detailed assessment.

Fish Are Smart And Feel Pain: What About Joy?, Becca Franks, Jeff Sebo, Alexandra Horowitz

Animal Sentience

Sneddon et al. rightly point out that the evidence of fish pain is now so strong and comprehensive that arguments against it have become increasingly difficult to defend in balanced academic discourse. But sentience involves more than just pain. Recent research indicates that fish have an impressive range of cognitive capacities, including the capacity for pleasure, in the form of play and other behaviors likely to involve positively valenced experience. Having made the case for pain, research can now focus on other aspects of fish sentience. Doing so will not only provide a more complete picture of the mental lives …

Comprehensive Assessment Of Restoration Seedings To Improve Restoration Success, Kari E. Veblen, Thomas Monaco, Jason Vernon, Danny Summers, Kevin Gunnell, Eric Thacker, Joe Robins, Lacey Wilder, Corinna Riginos

Wildland Resources Faculty Publications

Restoration projects rely on seedling establishment and persistence to foster invasion resistance and improve resilience to environmental stress and disturbance (James et al. 2010; Chambers et al. 2014). However, few studies have comprehensively evaluated the landscape-level performance of seeded species or the factors that control their short-term establishment and long-term persistence (Hardegree et al. 2011; Knutson et al. 2014). Assessing the role of these factors across physiographic regions that experience high temporal and spatial variability in environmental conditions will reveal the effectiveness of various pre-seeding land treatments and enhance our capacity to select appropriate restoration species for specific ecological sites …

Interpreting An Unamendable Text, Thomas W. Merrill

Faculty Scholarship

Many of the most important legal texts in the United States are highly unamendable. This applies not only to the Constitution, which has not been amended in over forty years, but also to many framework statutes, like the Administrative Procedure Act and the Sherman Antitrust Act. The problem is becoming increasingly severe, as political polarization makes amendment of these texts even more unlikely. This Article considers how interpreters should respond to highly unamendable texts. Unamendable texts have a number of pathologies, such as excluding the people and their representatives from any direct participation in legal change. They also pose an …

Whose Lands? Which Public? The Shape Of Public-Lands Law And Trump's National Monument Proclamations, Jedediah S. Purdy

Faculty Scholarship

President Trump issued a proclamation in December 2017 purporting to remove two million acres in southern Utah from national monument status, radically shrinking the Grand-Staircase Escalante National Monument and splitting the Bears Ears National Monument into two residual protected areas. Whether the President has the power to revise or revoke existing monuments under the Antiquities Act, which creates the national monument system, is a new question of law for a 112-year-old statute that has been used by Presidents from Theodore Roosevelt to Barack Obama to protect roughly fifteen million acres of federal land and hundreds of millions of marine acres. …

Informed Trading And Its Regulation, Merritt B. Fox, Lawrence R. Glosten, Gabriel Rauterberg

Faculty Scholarship

Informed trading – trading on information not yet reflected in a stock’s price – drives the stock market. Such informational advantages can arise from astute analysis of varied pieces of public news, from just released public information, or from confidential information from inside a firm. We argue that these disparate types of trading are all better regulated as part of the broader phenomenon of informed trading. Informed trading makes share prices more accurate, enhancing the allocation of capital, but also makes markets less liquid, which is costly to the efficiency of trade. Informed trading thus poses a fundamental trade-off in …

Microscale Gene Expression Analysis Of Tumor-Associated Macrophages, Kuldeep S. Attri, Kamiya Mehla, Surendra K. Shukla, Pankaj K. Singh

Journal Articles: Eppley Institute

Macrophages, apart from being the key effector cells of the innate immune system, also play critical roles during the development and progression of various complex diseases, including cancer. Tumor-associated macrophages, infiltrate tumors during different stages of cancer progression to regulate motility, invasion, and intravasation to metastatic sites. Macrophages can exist in different polarization states associated with unique function in tumors. Since tumor-associated macrophages constitute a very small proportion of tumor cells, analysis of gene expression pattern using normal extraction buffer-based methods remains a challenging task. Therefore, it is imperative to develop low-throughput strategies to investigate transcriptional regulations from a small …

Early Proceedings Of The Association Of Professors Of Mission. Vol 1, Robert A. Danielson, David E. Fenrick

Academic Books

No abstract provided.

Hannah Whitall Smith : The Feminist Connections Of A Holiness Icon, Robert Alden Danielson

Academic Books

No abstract provided.

Microrna Cluster Mir199a/214 Are Differentially Expressed In Female And Male Rats Following Nicotine Self-Administration, Steven T. Pittenger, Victoria L. Schaal, Dalia Moore, Rahul S. Guda, Sneh Koul, Sowmya V. Yelamanchili, Rick A. Bevins, Gurudutt Pendyala

Journal Articles: Pharmacology & Experimental Neuroscience

Previous research has established sex differences associated with nicotine intake, however a significant gap in knowledge remains regarding the molecular mechanisms that govern these differences at the transcriptional level. One critical regulator of transcription are microRNAs (miRNAs). miRNAs are a family of non-coding RNAs that regulate an array of important biological functions altered in several disease states, including neuroadaptive changes within the brain associated with drug dependence. We examined the prefrontal cortex (PFC) from male and female Sprague-Dawley rats following self-administration (22 days) of nicotine or yoked saline controls using next generation RNA-Sequencing (RNA-Seq) technology and found an array of …

Mir-133a Mimic Alleviates T1dm-Induced Systolic Dysfunction In Akita: An Mri-Based Study, Shyam S. Nandi, Hamid R. Shahshahan, Quanliang Shang, Shelby Kutty, Michael D. Boska, Paras K. Mishra

Journal Articles: Pediatrics

Diabetic cardiomyopathy is a leading cause of heart failure. Developing a novel therapeutic strategy for diabetic cardiomyopathy and characterizing animal models used for diabetes mellitus (DM) are important. Insulin 2 mutant (Ins2^+/-) Akita is a spontaneous, genetic, mouse model for T1DM, which is relevant to humans. There are contrasting reports on systolic dysfunction and pathological remodeling (hypertrophy and fibrosis) in Akita heart. Here, we used magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) approach, a gold standard reference for evaluating cardiac function, to measure ejection fraction (indicator of systolic dysfunction) in Akita. Moreover, we performed Wheat Germ Agglutinin (WGA) and hematoxylin and …

Selective Infarct Zone Imaging With Intravenous Acoustically Activated Droplets, Songita A. Choudhury, Feng Xie, Shelby Kutty, John Lof, Elizabeth Stolze, Thomas R. Porter

Journal Articles: Pediatrics

BACKGROUND: Microbubbles (MB) can be compressed to nanometer-sized droplets and reactivated with diagnostic ultrasound; these reactivated MB possess unique imaging characteristics.

OBJECTIVE: We hypothesized that droplets formed from compressing Definity MB may be used for infarct-enhancement imaging.

METHODS: Fourteen rats underwent ligation of their left anterior descending (LAD) artery, and five pigs underwent 90 minute balloon occlusions of their mid LAD. At 48 hours in rats, transthoracic ultrasound was performed at two and four minutes following 200 μL intravenous injections (IVI) of Definity droplets (DD), at which point the MI was increased from 0.5 to 1.5 to assess for a …

Identity And Social Bonds, Joseph Raz

Faculty Scholarship

I first argue that there is no problem about how to justify partialities (though there is a difficulty in justifying impartialities). Then I consider the role of consent in justifying rights and duties, using voluntary associations as a case in which consent has an important but limited role in doing so, a role determined and circumscribed by evaluative considerations. The values explain why consent can bind and bind one to act as one does not wish to do and even as one judges to be ill advised. That opens the way to an explanation of how value considerations relate to …

Leveraging Social Science Expertise In Immigration Policy, Ming Hsu Chen

Faculty Scholarship

The longstanding uncertainty about how policymakers should grapple with social science demonstrating racism persists in the modern administrative state. This Essay examines the uses and misuses of social science and expertise in immigration policymaking. More specifically, it highlights three immigration policies that dismiss social scientific findings and expertise as part of presidential and agency decision- making: border control, crime control, and extreme vetting of refugees to prevent terrorism. The Essay claims that these rejections of expertise undermine both substantive and procedural protections for immigrants and undermine important functions of the administrative state as a curb on irrationality in policymaking. It …

Change & Maintaining Change In School Cafeterias: Economic And Behavioral-Economic Approaches To Increasing Fruit And Vegetable Consumption, Gregory J. Madden, Joseph Price, Heidi Wengreen

Psychology Faculty Publications

Developing a daily habit of consuming fruits and vegetables (FV) in children is an important public-health goal. Eating habits acquired in childhood are predictive of adolescent and adult dietary patterns. Thus, healthy eating patterns developed early in life can protect the individual against a number of costly health deficits and may reduce the prevalence of obesity. At present, children in the United States (US) under-consume FV despite having access to them through the National School Lunch Program. Because access is an obstacle to developing healthy eating habits, particularly in low-income households, targeting children’s FV consumption in schools has the advantage …