Digital Commons Network^™

Public Lands, Conservation, And The Possibility Of Justice, Sarah Krakoff

Publications

On December 28, 2016, President Obama issued a proclamation designating the Bears Ears National Monument pursuant to his authority under the Antiquities Act of 1906, which allows the President to create monuments on federal public lands. Bears Ears, which is located in the heart of Utah’s dramatic red rock country, contains a surfeit of ancient Puebloan cliff-dwellings, petroglyphs, pictographs, and archeological artifacts. The area is also famous for its paleontological finds and its desert biodiversity. Like other national monuments, Bears Ears therefore readily meets the statutory objective of preserving “historic and prehistoric structures, and other objects of historic or scientific …

Bloomberg’S Points Of Law: Can They Compete With Headnotes?, Jill Sturgeon

Publications

No abstract provided.

To Sue And Be Sued: Capacity And Immunity Of American Indian Nations, Richard B. Collins

Publications

Can American Indian nations sue and be sued in federal and state courts? Specific issues are whether tribes have corporate capacity to sue, whether a Native group has recognized status as a tribe, and whether and to what extent tribes and their officers have governmental immunity from suit. Tribal capacity to sue is now well established, and federal law has well-defined procedures and rules for tribal recognition. But tribal sovereign immunity is actively disputed.

This Article reviews retained tribal sovereignty in general and summarizes past contests over tribal capacity to sue and their resolution into today’s settled rule. Next is …

Criminal Employment Law, Benjamin Levin

Publications

This Article diagnoses a phenomenon, “criminal employment law,” which exists at the nexus of employment law and the criminal justice system. Courts and legislatures discourage employers from hiring workers with criminal records and encourage employers to discipline workers for non-work-related criminal misconduct. In analyzing this phenomenon, my goals are threefold: (1) to examine how criminal employment law works; (2) to hypothesize why criminal employment law has proliferated; and (3) to assess what is wrong with criminal employment law. This Article examines the ways in which the laws that govern the workplace create incentives for employers not to hire individuals with …

(At Least) Thirteen Ways Of Looking At Election Lies, Helen Norton

Publications

Lies take many forms. Because lies vary so greatly in their motivations and consequences (among many other qualities), philosophers have long sought to catalog them to help make sense of their diversity and complexity. Legal scholars too have classified lies in various ways to explain why we punish some and protect others. This symposium essay offers yet another taxonomy of lies, focusing specifically on election lies — that is, lies told during or about elections. We can divide and describe election lies in a wide variety of ways: by speaker, by motive, by subject matter, by audience, by means of …

The Government's Manufacture Of Doubt, Helen Norton

Publications

“The manufacture of doubt” refers to a speaker’s strategic efforts to undermine factual assertions that threaten its self-interest. This strategy was perhaps most famously employed by the tobacco industry in its longstanding campaign to contest mounting medical evidence linking cigarettes to a wide range of health risks. At its best, the government’s speech can counter such efforts and protect the public interest, as exemplified by the Surgeon General’s groundbreaking 1964 report on the dangers of tobacco, a report that challenged the industry’s preferred narrative. But the government’s speech is not always so heroic, and governments themselves sometimes seek to manufacture …

That Was Close! Reward Reporting Of Cybersecurity “Near Misses”, Jonathan Bair, Steven M. Bellovin, Andrew Manley, Blake Reid, Adam Shostak

Publications

Building, deploying, and maintaining systems with sufficient cybersecurity is challenging. Faster improvement would be valuable to society as a whole. Are we doing as much as we can to improve? We examine robust and long-standing systems for learning from near misses in aviation, and propose the creation of a Cyber Safety Reporting System (CSRS).

To support this argument, we examine the liability concerns which inhibit learning, including both civil and regulatory liability. We look to the way in which cybersecurity engineering and science is done today, and propose that a small amount of ‘policy entrepreneurship’ could have substantial positive impact. …

Beyond Brooke Group: Bringing Reality To The Law Of Predatory Pricing, C. Scott Hemphill, Philip J. Weiser

Publications

This Feature offers a roadmap for bringing and deciding predatory pricing cases under the Supreme Court’s restrictive Brooke Group decision. Brooke Group requires a plaintiff to show that the defendant set a price below cost and had a sufficient likelihood of recouping its investment in predation. This framework, which was adopted without any contested presentation of its merits, has endured despite its flaws. Beyond this framework, the Court opined in dicta that predation is implausible.

We identify points of flexibility within the Court’s framework that permit an empirically grounded evaluation of the predation claim. Under the price-cost test, a plaintiff …

Tracking Colorado Legislation, Robert Linz

Publications

No abstract provided.

Arguing With The Building Inspector About Gender-Neutral Bathrooms, Jennifer S. Hendricks

Publications

Conventional interpretations of building codes are among the greatest barriers to building the gender-neutral bathrooms of the future. Focusing on the example of schools, this Essay argues for a reinterpretation of the International Building Code in light of its policy goals: safe, private, and equitable access to public bathrooms. Under this reinterpretation, the Code allows all public bathrooms to be gender-neutral.

The Consensus Myth In Criminal Justice Reform, Benjamin Levin

Publications

It has become popular to identify a “consensus” on criminal justice reform, but how deep is that consensus, actually? This Article argues that the purported consensus is much more limited than it initially appears. Despite shared reformist vocabulary, the consensus rests on distinct critiques that identify different flaws and justify distinct policy solutions. The underlying disagreements transcend traditional left/right political divides and speak to deeper disputes about the state and the role of criminal law in society.

The Article maps two prevailing, but fundamentally distinct, critiques of criminal law: (1) the quantitative approach (what I call the “over” frame); and …

Thinking Fast And Slow About The Concept Of Materiality, Mark J. Loewenstein

Publications

Determining whether, for securities law purposes, a misrepresentation or omission is material raises interesting questions. The Court of Appeals in SEC v. Texas Gulf Sulphur Co. provided some guidance on materiality, and the U.S. Supreme Court has weighed in several times in the past 50 years. This article first discusses what Texas Gulf Sulphur contributed to the doctrine of materiality, then briefly considers other dimensions of the doctrine, and finally moves to its thesis: The doctrine of materiality should take into account important psychological insights and heuristics that may affect the way that a fact finder decides whether a misrepresentation …

The Disruptive Neuroscience Of Judicial Choice, Anna Spain Bradley

Publications

Scholars of judicial behavior overwhelmingly substantiate the historical presumption that most judges act impartially and independent most of the time. The reality of human behavior, however, says otherwise. Drawing upon untapped evidence from neuroscience, this Article provides a comprehensive evaluation of how bias, emotion, and empathy—all central to human decision-making—are inevitable in judicial choice. The Article offers three novel neuroscientific insights that explain why this inevitability is so. First, because human cognition associated with decision-making involves multiple, and often intersecting, neural regions and circuits, logic and reason are not separate from bias and emotion in the brain. Second, bias, emotion, …

Sanctuary Networks And Integrative Enforcement, Ming Hsu Chen

Publications

My intended focus is on the widespread response--in cities, churches, campuses, and corporations that together comprise "sanctuary networks"--to the Trump Administration's Executive Order 13768 Enhancing Public Safety in the Interior of the United States as an instance of the changing relationship between federal, local, and private organizations in the regulation of immigration. After briefly covering the legal background of the Trump Interior E.O., the focus of the Article shifts to the institutional dynamics arising in communities. These institutional dynamics exemplify the beginnings of a reimagined immigration enforcement policy with a more integrative flavor.

Market Pbl: A Cross-Curricular Exploration Of Technological Innovation In Pre-Modern Civilizations, Elizabeth Muire, M. Melendy Jacobie, Kay Newsome, Lisa Stuckey, Blake Keeling

Understanding by Design: Complete Collection

This project-based learning unit incorporates knowledge from history, English, math and science courses. Students explore how geography and available resources, coupled with technological advancements, shape a civilization’s industry and therefore the quality of life of the inhabitants. Students design a product that could be made from the natural resources of their civilization and attempt to sell their product in a simulated market.

Generating Adversarial Attacks For Sparse Neural Networks, Jack H. Chen, Walt Woods

Maseeh Summer Undergraduate Research Experience

Neural networks provide state-of-the-art accuracy for image classification tasks. However traditional networks are highly susceptible to imperceivable perturbations to their inputs known as adversarial attacks that drastically change the resulting output. The magnitude of these perturbations can be measured as Mean Squared Error (MSE). We use genetic algorithms to produce black-box adversarial attacks and examine MSE on state-of-the-art networks. This method generates an attack that converts 90% confidence on a correct class to 50% confidence of a targeted, incorrect class after 2000 epochs. We will generate and examine attacks and their MSE against several sparse neural networks. We theorize that …

Early Emerging Pathogen Detection, Mackenzie Wangenstein

Maseeh Summer Undergraduate Research Experience

A supervised learning technique was employed to identify emerging pathogen species. Portland State University has partnered with the University of New Mexico to take encodings of unknown pathogen molecular structures to determine emerging species.

Celebrating Mundane Conflict, Deborah J. Cantrell

Publications

This Article interrogates the dominant conception of conflict and challenges the narrative of conflict as hard, difficult and painful to engage. The Article reveals two primary framing errors that cause one to misperceive how ubiquitous and ordinary is conflict. The first error is to misperceive conflict as categorical — something either is a conflict or it is not. People make that error as a way of trying to avoid conflict. People falsely hope that there might be a category of “not conflict,” like disagreements, that will be easier to navigate. The second error is to misperceive the world and individuals …

Osi2018 Summary Report On The 1st Summit Meeting Of The Global Open Scholarship Initiative, March 12-14, 2018, The Open Scholarship Initiative, Glenn Hampson

Copyright, Fair Use, Scholarly Communication, etc.

When the roadmap for OSI was first being developed in 2015, our original intent was to hold a series of 10 annual meetings beginning in 2016. After the first two meetings, however, it became apparent that the next step in this process should be to pause and have just the summit group meet to formally discuss and plan out what comes next instead of having this complex conversation online (which we had been doing since mid-2017) or amongst a group of several hundred participants. This decision was also necessitated by the lack of a large enough budget to put together …

The African Open Science Platform: The Future Of Science And Science For The Future, African Academy Of Sciences, Academy Of Science Of South Africa, Committee On Data For Science And Technology, International Council For Science, National Research And Education Networks, Research Data Alliance, South African Department Of Science & Technology, National Research Foundation, Square Kilometre Array, Unesco

Copyright, Fair Use, Scholarly Communication, etc.

This document presents a draft strategy and makes the scientific case for the African Open Science Platform (AOSP). It is based on an expert group meeting held in Pretoria on 27-28 March 2018. Its purpose is to act as a framework for detailed, work on the creation of the Platform and as a basis for discussion at a stakeholder meeting to be held on 3-4 September 2018, which will lead to a definitive strategy for implementation from 2019. Expert group members at the March meeting were drawn from the following organisations: African Academy of Sciences (AAS), Academy of Science of …

The Myth Of Platform Neutrality, Vivek Krishnamurthy, Anupam Chander

Publications

No abstract provided.

Minimizing And Addressing Implicit Bias In The Workplace: Be Proactive, Part One, Shamika Dalton, Michele A. L. Villagran

Publications

No abstract provided.

Publishing Basics: How To Get Started & Where To Begin: Tips For First-Time Writers Looking To Get Published, Shamika Dalton, Michele A. L. Villagran

Publications

No abstract provided.

The Revanchist Explorer, Osvaldo Veloz

Undergraduate Student Research Awards

No abstract provided.

Evaluating The Legality Of Age-Based Criteria In Health Care: From Nondiscrimination And Discretion To Distributive Justice, Govind Persad

Publications

Recent disputes over whether older people should pay more for health insurance, or receive lower priority for transplantable organs, highlight broader disagreements regarding the legality of using age-based criteria in health care. These debates will likely intensify given the changing age structure of the American population and the turmoil surrounding the financing of American health care. This Article provides a comprehensive examination of the legality and normative desirability of age-based criteria. In the Article, I defend a distributive justice approach to age-based criteria. Rather than viewing age as a personal characteristic akin to race or religion, the distributive justice approach …

Paying Patients: Legal And Ethical Dimensions, Govind Persad

Publications

This Article explores the implications for medical care of a debate that is more familiar in the law and ethics of human subjects research: whether people should be paid to receive or decline medical interventions, or to reach certain health objectives. It examines the legal and ethical issues such payments raise, and considers various actors who might make such payments, including governments, employers, insurers, care providers, and private parties. It argues for two interrelated conclusions: first, that these payments should not be subject to blanket normative condemnation, and, second, that payments made in different settings and contexts frequently share underlying …

Toxoplasma Gondii And Substance Use - Project Data, Andrew Berrett

ScholarsArchive Data

The data utilized in this project originated from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) data sets. Specifically, we utilized data from the NHANES III and 2009-2014 continuous NHANES data sets. Data files pertinent to our project were downloaded from the NHANES website (NHANES.com) and merged into two master data files, one for the NHANES III and one for the continuous NHANES. Following the merges, some variables were modified or recoded for the purposes of the project. Therefore, the data files associated with this entry include both the original NHANES data as well …

Abscisic Acid Seed Coating Delay Data, William Richardson

ScholarsArchive Data

This data is from a study which determined the effect different application rates of abscisic acid have on the total germinability and germination time of seeds. Germination count data, calculated germination indices, and field germination predictions are all included within the data set.

Youtube Ted Talk Comment Sentiment Data, Royce Kimmons

ScholarsArchive Data

This dataset includes comments to all available TED Talk videos on YouTube. Videos are coded for presenter gender and format, and comments are coded for sentiment using SentiStrength.

For Most Of Humanity's Existence, We Walked: An Interview With Pennie Opal Plant Of Idle No More Sf Bay, Amber Hickey Ph.D. Candidate

Hemisphere: Visual Cultures of the Americas

No abstract provided.