Digital Commons Network^™

Fish Sentience Denial: Muddy Moral Water, Robert C. Jones

Animal Sentience

Sneddon et al. (2018) authoritatively summarize the compelling and overwhelming evidence for fish sentience, while methodically dismantling one rather emblematic research paper (Diggles et al. 2017) intended to discount solid evidence of fish sentience (Lopez-Luna et al. 2017a, 2017b, 2017c, & 2017d). I explore the larger practical moral contexts within which these debates take place and argue that denials of animal sentience are really moral canards.

Fish And Plant Sentience: Anesthetized Plants And Fishes Cannot Respond To Stimuli, Ken Yokawa, František Baluška

Animal Sentience

Recent denial of fish sentience is at variance with the fact that all living organisms need environmental awareness in order to survive in a continuously fluctuating environment. Moreover, fish sentience – like plant sentience – is also strongly supported by the sensitivity of fishes and plants to diverse anesthetics.

If It Looks Like A Duck: Fish Fit The Criteria For Pain Perception, Julia E. Meyers-Manor

Animal Sentience

Whereas we have denied the experience of pain to animals, including human babies, the evidence is becoming clearer that animals across a variety of species have the capacity to feel pain (Bellieni, 2012). As converging findings are collected from pain studies and the study of cognition, it is becoming harder to deny that fish are among the species that do feel pain.

Defining Denial And Sentient Seafood, Jennifer Jacquet

Animal Sentience

Sneddon et al. address the scientists who reject the empirical evidence on fish sentience, calling them “sceptics” and their work “denial”. This is the first article to frame the question of fish sentience in these terms, and it provides an obvious opening for social science and humanities research in the science of fish sentience. It is also worth asking what practical changes in the lives of fish might arise from the mounting evidence of their sentience. I suggest that the relationship between sentience and our sense of moral obligation is not as clear as we often assume.

Sentience: All Or None Or Matter Of Degree?, Loren Martin, Robert Gerlai

Animal Sentience

The question of whether fish feel pain is muddied by anthropomorphic thinking. Comparing biological phenomena in two species should be informed by the criteria for good animal models: face validity, construct validity and predictive validity. Viewed through this lens, we argue that fish do feel pain and may possess some level of sentience. Evolutionary relatedness, hence similarities and differences between species (fish and humans in this case), are not about black vs. white but about shades of grey.

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.

Degrees Of Sentience?, Jonathan Birch

Animal Sentience

I focus on the possibility of sentience in zebrafish larvae. The evidence here prompts two intuitive reactions that are difficult to reconcile: the reaction that larvae, if sentient, should be protected in some way, and the reaction that larvae, if capable of nociception, should be used as replacements for adults. Both reactions are reasonable, but they can be reconciled only by constructing a framework for assigning degrees of protection in proportion to degrees of sentience.

The Human Nervous System Is Not The Gold Standard For Pain, Riccardo Manzotti

Animal Sentience

The basis of pain could be the causal nexus between one’s phylogenetic/ontogenetic history and one’s behavior. It might turn out that the neural implementation is immaterial to the instantiation of pain. Widely different neural structures may token the same pain-type, and nearly identical neural structures may token different types.

Defining Pain And Painful Sentience In Animals, Edgar T. Walters

Animal Sentience

Sentience is essential to most definitions of pain, including a detailed definition invoked by Sneddon et al. to argue that adult and perhaps larval fish feel pain. Because proving painful sentience in non-human animals is not feasible, multiple lines of indirect evidence are needed to implicate pain. This commentary examines the list of 17 criteria used by Sneddon et al. to conclude that fish have conscious pain. The criteria include tests of nociceptive, motivational, and cognitive properties useful for revealing pain-like states that can be understood biologically and be related evolutionarily to human pain. However, additional research is needed to …

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 …

Ample Evidence For Fish Sentience And Pain, Lynne U. Sneddon, David C.C. Wolfenden, Matthew C. Leach, Ana M. Valentim, Peter J. Steenbergen, Nabila Bardine, Donald M. Broom, Culum Brown

Animal Sentience

The majority of commentaries are supportive of our position on the scepticism that muddies the waters surrounding fish pain and sentience. There is substantial empirical evidence for pain in fish. Animals’ experience of pain cannot be compared to artificial intelligence (AI) because AI can only mimic responses to nociceptive input on the basis of human observations and programming. Accepting that fish are sentient would not be detrimental to the industries reliant on fish. A more proactive discussion between scientists and stakeholders is needed to improve fish welfare for the benefit of all.

Countering Untouchability: The Stories Of Mātaṅga, Chandrabhan P. Yadav

Articles

Excerpt:

"In the Jātakas we get description of the Caṇḍālas which is rare as far as traces about this class from the early Indian past is concerned. In around eight stories we get description of the Caṇḍālas.1 Amongst those the Mātaṅ gaJātaka (No.497) is the most important story because of its sheer description which is comparatively more elaborate than the other stories. In this essay I shall not only be examining this particular story to see the everyday lives of the Caṇḍālas in the early historic period, but most importantly, I shall also be exploring those processes through which these …

State Of Metropolitan Housing Report: Involuntary Displacement ..., Kelly Kinahan, Lauren Heberle, Danielle Rohret, Steven Sizemore, Shelly Isaacs, Jamar Wheeler, Adam Sizemore

Faculty and Staff Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Review Of South Sudan: A Slow Liberation, Laura Nyantung Beny

Reviews

This is a remarkable book. It offers a complex and nuanced analysis of South Sudan's prolonged and troubled march to political liberation—first from Anglo‐Egyptian colonialism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, then from hegemonic Arab rule in post‐independence Sudan [1956‐2011], and now from South Sudan's internal political and economic contradictions.

Assessing Access-To-Justice Outreach Strategies, J. J. Prescott

Articles

The need for prospective beneficiaries to “take up” new programs is a common stumbling block for otherwise well-designed legal and policy innovations. I examine the take-up problem in the context of publicly provided court services and test the effectiveness of various outreach strategies that announce a newly available online court access platform. I study individuals with minor arrest warrants whose distrust of courts may dampen any take-up response. I partnered with a court to quasi-randomly assign outreach approaches to a cohort of individuals and find that outreach improves take-up, that the type of outreach matters, and that online platform access …

Powell And Section 2036: Our Reply, Mitchell M. Gans, Jonathan G. Blattmachr

Hofstra Law Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Security For Expense Statutes: Easing Shareholder Hopelessness?, Miriam R. Albert

Hofstra Law Faculty Scholarship

The quintessential derivative suit is a suit by a shareholder to force the corporation to sue a manager for fraud, which is admittedly an awkward and likely unpleasant endeavor and, according to the Supreme Court, a "remedy born of stockholder helplessness."* 1 Where ownership and control of an enterprise are vested in the same population, the need for a corrective mechanism like a derivative suit is greatly lessened because the owner/managers' self-interests will arguably guide managerial conduct. But where ownership and control are in separate hands, the incentives change, and managerial conduct may not conform to the owners' views of …

An Antitrust Approach To Corporate Free Exercise Claims, Ronald J. Colombo

Hofstra Law Faculty Scholarship

In Burwell v. Hobby Lobby, 573 U.S. ___, 124 S. Ct. 2751 (2014), the United States Supreme Court held that the religious liberty protections contained in the Religious Freedom Restoration Act apply to for-profit business corporations. Although many laud the decision as a hard-fought victory for religious freedom, others fear the consequences of the decision. Two consequences in particular have been most commonly identified by the decision’s detractors.

First, Burwell may give businesses a “license to discriminate,” by allowing them to opt out of laws that protect minorities and other groups on religious grounds. This threatens to undo decades of …

The Agnostic’S Guide To Judicial Selection, James Sample

Hofstra Law Faculty Scholarship

The vast majority of judicial selection discussions, whether in academia, on the bench, or in the bar, portray an unintended erudition. Although dressed down in the sartorial language of pragmatics, judicial selection debates are, albeit unintentionally, actually abstract philosophical discussions of competing Platonic Forms. The debates exist in an ethereal realm entirely separate from the earthly grime of the manner in which judges are actually selected. This Article asserts that, while the Forms debate has its place, its high temperatures, infinite circularity, and the chasm of separation from the actual day-to-day grind of administering justice for the rule of law’s …

Immunohistochemical Analysis Of Il-1 Receptor 1 In The Discs Of Patients With Temporomandibular Joint Dysfunction, Luis Eduardo Almeida, Adam Sorenson, Kyle Hresko, Seth Butcher, Rosalia Leonardi, Carla Lorento, Jose A. Bosio, Lobat Tayebi, Andrea Doetzer

School of Dentistry Faculty Research and Publications

Objective

Temporomandibular joint dysfunction (TMD) may affect a patient’s quality of life, and one of the etiologies can be anterior disc displacement with reduction (ADDwR) and anterior disc displacement without reduction (ADDWoR). Interleukin 1 Receptor 1 (IL-1R1) is a membrane receptor that plays an important role on initiating immune and inflammatory response by binding the agonists ligands of IL-1 alpha and IL-1 beta. Therefore, the aim of this study was to evaluate, through immunohistochemical analysis, the association of IL-1R1 with TMD.

Methods

Thirty-nine human disc samples were collected and composed three different groups: ADDwR (n = 19), ADDwoR ( …

Effect Of Membrane Exposure On Guided Bone Regeneration: A Systematic Review And Meta‐Analysis, Jeffrey Garcia, Austin Dodge, Paul Luepke, Hom-Lay Wang, Yvonne Kapila, Guo-Hao Lin

School of Dentistry Faculty Research and Publications

Aims: This review aimed at investigating the effect of membrane exposure on guided bone regeneration (GBR) outcomes at peri-implant sites and edentulous ridges.

Material and Methods: Electronic and manual literature searches were conducted by two independent reviewers using four databases, including MEDLINE, EMBASE, Web of Science, and Cochrane Central Register of Controlled Trials, for articles up to February 2017. Articles were included if they were human clinical trials or case series reporting outcomes of GBR procedures with and without membrane exposure. A random-effects meta-analysis was conducted, and the weighted mean difference (WMD) between the two groups and 95% confidence interval …

Unusual: The Death Penalty For Inadvertent Killing, Guyora Binder, Brenner M. Fissell, Robert Weisberg

Hofstra Law Faculty Scholarship

Can a burglar who frightens the occupant of a house, causing a fatal heart attack, be executed? More generally, does the Eighth Amendment permit capital punishment of one who causes death inadvertently? This scenario is possible in the significant minority of American jurisdictions that permit capital punishment for felony murder without requiring a mental state of intent to kill or reckless indifference to human life. Thus far, Eighth Amendment death penalty jurisprudence has required a culpable mental state of recklessness for execution of accomplices in a fatal felony but has not yet addressed the culpability required for execution of the …

If We Build It, They Might Come: Bridging The Implementation Gap Between Adr Services And Separating And Divorcing Families, Andrew Shepard, Marsha Kline Pruett, Rebecca Love Kourlis

Hofstra Law Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Layer-By-Layer Assembly Of Graphene Oxide On Thermosensitive Liposomes For Photo-Chemotherapy, Mohadeseh Hashemi, Meisam Omidi, Bharadwaj Muralidharan, Lobat Tayebi, Matthew J. Herpin, Mohammad Ali Mohagheghi, Javad Mohammadi, Hugh D.C. Smyth, Thomas E. Milner

School of Dentistry Faculty Research and Publications

Stimuli responsive polyelectrolyte nanoparticles have been developed for chemo-photothermal destruction of breast cancer cells. This novel system, called layer by layer Lipo-graph (LBL Lipo-graph), is composed of alternate layers of graphene oxide (GO) and graphene oxide conjugated poly (l-lysine) (GO-PLL) deposited on cationic liposomesencapsulating doxorubicin. Various concentrations of GO and GO-PLL were examined and the optimal LBL Lipo-graph was found to have a particle size of 267.9 ± 13 nm, zeta potentialof +43.9 ± 6.9 mV and encapsulation efficiency of 86.4 ± 4.7%. The morphology of LBL Lipo-graph was examined by cryogenic-transmission electron microscopy (Cryo-TEM), atomic …

Development Of Chitosan/Gelatin/Keratin Composite Containing Hydrocortisone Sodium Succinate As A Buccal Mucoadhesive Patch To Treat Desquamative Gingivitis, Zahra Davoudi, Mohammad Rabiee, Behzad Houshmand, Niloofar Eslahi, Kimia Khoshroo, Morteza Rasoulianboroujeni, Mohammadreza Tahriri, Lobat Tayebi

School of Dentistry Faculty Research and Publications

The aim of this research was to develop chitosan/gelatin/keratin composite containing hydrocortisone sodium succinate as a buccal mucoadhesive patch to treat desquamative gingivitis, which was fabricated through an environmental friendly process. Mucoadhesive films increase the advantage of higher efficiency and drug localization in the affected region. In this research, mucoadhesive films, for the release of hydrocortisone sodium succinate, were prepared using different ratios of chitosan, gelatin and keratin. In the first step, chitosan and gelatin proportions were optimized after evaluating the mechanical properties, swelling capacity, water uptake, stability, and biodegradation of the films. Then, keratin was added at different percentages …

Gawking Legally, Irina D. Manta

Hofstra Law Faculty Scholarship

This symposium contribution applies an institutional choice analysis, looking at whether legislatively-driven regulation or judicially-derived common law is better suited at addressing possible privacy violations that result from the disclosure of sensitive information by websites engaged in publishing or aggregating news. The piece proposes using as a measure of effectiveness the level of individual choice that different legal frameworks provide. Taking the litigation in Bollea v. Gawker as a focal point--where Hulk Hogan sued a news site that disclosed an excerpt of a sex tape of which he was unwittingly the subject--the paper shows that the law must balance the …

Blunting The Later-Mover Advantage: Intellectual Property And Knowledge Transfer, Irina D. Manta, Mattias Ottervik

Hofstra Law Faculty Scholarship

The United States followed a path of initially giving little protection to intellectual property (IP) so that the country could benefit from the IP of nations we term earlier-movers on the world stage of economic development. This symposium piece argues that Japan and China have been following a similar trajectory in their intellectual property laws while progressing on their own economic climb. Widespread international outsourcing of manufacturing has made intellectual property a key asset for private companies, which has strengthened the tendencies of earlier-movers to formulate and enforce strict intellectual property laws. This suggests that countries like China respond not …

Square Pegs And Round Holes: Shoehorning Modern Family Dynamics Into Antiquated Laws, Gail A. Prudenti

Hofstra Law Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Making Habeas Work: A Legal History, Eric M. Freedman

Hofstra Law Faculty Scholarship

A reconsideration of the writ of habeas corpus casts new light on a range of current issues

Habeas corpus, the storied Great Writ of Liberty, is a judicial order that requires government officials to produce a prisoner in court, persuade an independent judge of the correctness of their claimed factual and legal justifications for the individual’s imprisonment, or else release the captive. Frequently the officials resist being called to account. Much of the history of the rule of law, including the history being made today, has emerged from the resulting clashes.

This book, heavily based on primary sources from the …

Living With No: Political Polarization And Transformative Dialogue, Erik Cleven, Robert A. Baruch Bush, Judith A. Saul

Hofstra Law Faculty Scholarship

We argue that dispute resolution processes should not be seen as a substitute for the political process, but rather a complement that can help strengthen it. Based on this view, and on the authors’ experience with dialogue work in the former Yugoslavia, as well as in urban and rural settings in the United States, we argue that transformative processes, specifically an approach we call Transformative Dialogue, are best suited to addressing the challenges of political polarization both in the United States and internationally. This is because the primary goal of transformative processes is not to reach agreement or find common …