Digital Commons Network^™

Restructuring Immigration Enforcement Federalism, Pratheepan Gulasekaram

Publications

No abstract provided.

Race-Conscious Jury Selection, Anna Offit

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

Among the central issues in scholarship on the American jury is the effect of Batson v. Kentucky (1986) on discriminatory empanelment. Empirical legal research has confirmed that despite the promise of the Batson doctrine, both peremptory strikes and challenges for cause remain tools of racial exclusion. But these studies, based on post facto interviews, transcript analysis, and quantitative methods offer little insight into Batson’s critical impact on real-time decision-making and strategy in voir dire. If we increasingly know what kinds of juries are produced in the post-Batson world, we know very little about how they are produced.

This Article addresses …

Investigating The Rationale Of Registered Dietitians In Selection Of Predictive Equations For Estimation Of Resting Metabolic Rate, Anastasija Avdeyeva,, Yi-Ying Lin

Loma Linda University Research Reports

Background: Resting metabolic rate (RMR) is a critical component of appropriate nutrition plans for Registered Dietitians (RDs) in clinical and outpatient care. Many RMR equations can address some variances. The “clinical judgement” is recommended by the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics (AND) to decide the best RMR equation. With the discernment of the RD in mind, it was pertinent to delve into the thought-process behind why dietitians used specific energy formulas over other choices.

Objective: To determine which RMR formulas were chosen when calculating caloric needs for patients and assess any trends in rationale for RDs when selecting specific predictive …

Benevolent Exclusion, Anna Offit

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

The American jury system holds the promise of bringing commonsense ideas about justice to the enforcement of the law. But its democratizing effect cannot be realized if a segment of the population faces systematic exclusion based on income or wealth. The problem of unequal access to jury service based on socio-economic disparities is a longstanding yet under-studied problem—and one which the uneven fallout of the COVID-19 pandemic only exacerbated. Like race- and sex-based jury discrimination during the peremptory challenge phase of jury selection, the routine dismissal of citizens who face economic hardship excludes not only people but also the diversity …

Framing Individualized Sentencing For Politics And The Constitution, Meghan J. Ryan

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

For decades, there was not much growth in the U.S. Supreme Court’s interpretation and application of the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition on cruel and unusual punishments. In recent years, though, the Court has expanded the Amendment’s scope to prohibit executing intellectually disabled and juvenile offenders, to ban capital punishment for all non-homicide offenses against individuals, and to for-bid life-without-parole sentences for juveniles when that punishment was mandatorily imposed or imposed on non-homicide offenders. With changing politics and a changing Court, any further expansion of Eighth Amendment protections will likely be difficult for years to come. With the recent confirmation of Amy …

An Evaluation Of The Effectiveness Of The National Diabetes Education Program From The Perspective Of Registered Dietitians, Anne Atkinson, Baylee Wilhelmson

Loma Linda University Research Reports

Background: Diabetes is currently the seventh leading cause of death in the United States. While knowledge and awareness of T2DM remains high, the perception of risk is still quite low despite education programs such as the National Diabetes Education Program (NDEP). Diabetes treatment centers incorporate this education program into their patient care to address exercise, diabetes management, emotional issues, and healthy eating and cooking.

Objective: To evaluate the effectiveness of the National Diabetes Education Program for T2DM populations from the perspective of registered dietitians in the United States.

Design: An anonymous online survey of 24 questions was designed to collect …

The Effectiveness Of A Preoperative Lifestyle-Based Weight Loss Program On Postoperative Outcomes In Bariatric Patients: A Secondary Data Analysis, Jasmine Westerdahl, Samantha Peebles

Loma Linda University Research Reports

Background: Obesity is a multifactorial and largely preventable chronic disease. There are many interventional methods that can be used in treating obesity, such as diet and lifestyle interventions. Surgical intervention is also an effective treatment option that is utilized for those that are severely obese. Bariatric surgery helps to achieve weight loss, as well as reduce the risk and/or manage comorbidities. In the U.S., many insurance companies and certain bariatric centers require patients to lose weight prior to surgery. The explanation for preoperative weight loss stems from its potential correlation with reduction in surgical complications, improved adherence to stringent …

A Unified Theory Of Code Connected Contracts, Carla L. Reyes

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

Smart contracts and their promise of automatic performance capture legal and entrepreneurial imaginations. But the excitement around the technology led to some confusing legal responses. Several legal scholars use chronology to help reduce the confusion and place smart contracts within what is already familiar about computational contracting. According to this line of thinking, blockchain-based smart contracts simply represent the next technological advancement in a long history of computable contracting technologies. However, other scholarly work suggests that such a chronological explanation under-simplifies the nature of the linkages between smart contracts and other forms of code-connected contracts. This Article offers a unified …

Autonomous Business Reality, Carla L. Reyes

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

Society tends to expect technology to do more than it can actually achieve, at a faster pace than it can actually move. The resulting hype cycle infects all forms of discourse around technology. Unfortunately, the discourse on law and technology is no exception to this rule. The resulting discussion is often characterized by two or more positions at opposite ends of the spectrum, such that participants in the discussion speak past each other, rather than to each other. The rich context that sits in the middle ground goes disregarded altogether. This dynamic most recently surfaced in the legal literature regarding …

Facilitating Capital Raising: The Sec’S 2020 Amendments To The Exempt Offering Framework, Marc I. Steinberg, Taylor E. Santori

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

No abstract provided.

Law Of The Gun: Unrepresentative Cases And Distorted Doctrine, Eric Ruben

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

There is a familiar saying, “If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.” The so-called Law of the Hammer takes a distinctive form in adjudication. If all judges see is one repeating fact pattern for a given area of law, they might perceive it as archetypical and build the law around it. If that fact pattern does not accurately reflect the field, however, the result can be analytical distortion in terms of both the choice of doctrine and its implementation.

This Article uses Second Amendment jurisprudence to illustrate this phenomenon. It reveals how District of Columbia …

The Problem Of Gender Inequity: The Legacy Of Deborah Rhode, Joanna Grossman

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

No abstract provided.

Causation In Civil Rights Legislation, Hillel J. Bavli

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

Employees are often left unprotected from discrimination because they are unable to satisfy the requirement of causation. Courts have made clear that to obtain legal redress for discrimination, it is generally insufficient to show that a protected characteristic such as race or sex was a “motivating factor” of an adverse employment decision. Rather, under Supreme Court precedent—including the Court’s Comcast and Babb decisions in the 2020 term—the antidiscrimination statutes generally require a showing of “but-for” causation. Consequently, many victims of discrimination will be unable to prevail because an employer can readily refute allegations of discrimination by asserting a legitimate purpose—true …

Covid-19 And Law Teaching: Guidance On Developing An Asynchronous Online Course For Law Students, Yvonne Dutton, Seema Mohapatra

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

Most law schools suspended their live classroom teaching in March 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic and quickly transitioned to online programming. Although professors can be commended for rapidly adapting to an emergency situation, some commentators have nevertheless suggested that the emergency online product delivered to students was substandard. Based on our own experiences in designing and delivering online courses, we caution against embracing a broad-reaching, negative conclusion about the efficacy of online education. Indeed, much of this emergency online programming would be more properly defined as “emergency remote teaching,” as opposed to “online education.” Delivering online education to students …

Creating Cryptolaw For The Uniform Commercial Code, Carla L. Reyes

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

A contract generally only binds its parties. Security agreements, which create a security interest in specific personal property, stand out as a glaring exception to this rule. Under certain conditions, security interests not only bind the creditor and debtor, but also third-party creditors seeking to lend against the same collateral. To receive this extraordinary benefit, creditors must put the world on notice, usually by filing a financing statement with the state in which the debtor is located. Unfortunately, the Uniform Commercial Code (U.C.C.) Article 9 filing system fails to provide actual notice to interested parties and introduces risk of heavy …

State Energy Cartels, James W. Coleman

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

Fracking has made America the center of global oil production and the engine of the world’s economy. But haste makes waste. America’s new oil wells are releasing natural gas as well, which is prized as a clean and reliable fuel around the world, but must be simply burned off or “flared” if there are no pipelines to bring it to the customers that need it. The pace of the oil boom, and the challenges of building new pipe-lines have forced oil companies to flare staggering quantities of natural gas. Texas and North Dakota are now flaring—that is, wasting—more gas than …

Exploring The Implications Of Artificial Intelligence, Kristin N. Johnson, Carla L. Reyes

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

Emerging technologies promise to play a transformative role in our society, enabling driverless cars, enhanced accuracy and efficiency in disease mapping, greater and less expensive access to certain consumer services, including consumer financial services. Discussions regarding the role of emerging technologies increasingly center on the development and integration of artificial intelligence technologies or AI-an assemblage of technologies that rely on a variety of computational techniques. This Essay offers a modest primer outlining a general understanding of the contours and contributions of Al, as well as introducing the articulated benefits and limits

of these technologies.

This Essay examines the increasingly pervasive …

The Perfect Storm: Coronavirus And The Elder Catch, Jessica Dixon Weaver

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

The global COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated an already growing phenomenon: the Elder Catch. This term defines the caregiving dilemma faced by adults who are simultaneously working, caring for elder parents or relatives, and in some cases, raising children at the same time. Few scholars have explored how the state uses the traditional family framework to resist providing comprehensive government support for elder care. Women typically bear the brunt of caregiving costs within the family and become physically and mentally vulnerable in the process. COVID-19 has pushed women caught in the Elder Catch to the brink while sheltering at home, and …

Autonomous Corporate Personhood, Carla L. Reyes

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

Several states have recently changed their business organization law to accommodate autonomous businesses—businesses operated entirely through computer code. A variety of international civil society groups are also actively developing new frameworks— and a model law—for enabling decentralized, autonomous businesses to achieve a corporate or corporate-like status that bestows legal personhood. Meanwhile, various jurisdictions, including the European Union, have considered whether and to what extent artificial intelligence (AI) more broadly should be endowed with personhood to respond to AI’s increasing presence in society. Despite the fairly obvious overlap between the two sets of inquiries, the legal and policy discussions between the …

Predicting College Students’ Future Intentions To Engage In Public-Sphere Water Conservation Behaviors, Austin Wise, Donald Johnson, George Wardlow, Kathi Jogan

Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences: Faculty Publications

The purpose of this study was to describe selected college students’ (N = 252) perceptions of and future intentions (FI) to engage in public-sphere water conservation behaviors, and to determine if FI could be predicted by a single or linear combination of student demographic characteristics and latent variables. A majority of respondents agreed a growing population will negatively affect water quantity (90.5%) and there is a need for water resource management (85.6%). A majority disagreed or strongly disagreed that they (53.4%), their family (57.1%), or their friends (67.5%) practiced water conservation, or that people in their hometowns were concerned about …

Concerning A Manuscript From A Moravian Immigrant’S Trunk: Postil By Johann Spangenberg (1557), Hana Waisserova

Department of Modern Languages and Literatures: Faculty Publications

In Nebraska, a family of Czech ancestry possesses a precious and unusual family artifact—an antique early-modern book, which was passed down in the family from generation to generation as their most precious treasure, a book that is much older than most carefully investigated family genealogies. The book has neat calligraphy and prints, leather binding, and comprises more than a thousand pages, though the first batch of pages is missing. The inside of the cover bears a pencil-written date: 1542. There are no title pages, no forewords, and no introductory chapter(s). The family lore tells that they kept it hidden in …

Eda Kriseová And Her Prophecy Of The Velvet Revolution: “The Gates Opened” (1984), Hana Waisserova, Eda Kriseová

Department of Modern Languages and Literatures: Faculty Publications

This is an introduction to a story, “The Gates Opened,” which serves as a memento of a restrictive regime that banned freedom. It also shares a hope and vision that the gates would open someday—and all would be liberated (despite the chaos and lack of natural order). The story was written in 1984 (sharing a strong symbolic value with George Orwell’s masterpiece). Eda Kriseová shares this anecdote: Around 1984, she wanted to stop writing about the mental institution where she was working, while regularly providing a story to the underground monthly Obsah, and many of her stories were set in …

Lydie Salvayre, Écrivain Baroque’N’Roll, Bernard Wallet

French Language and Literature Papers

Dès sa petite enfance, Lydie Salvayre parle deux langues. À la maison, elle parle l’espagnol qui est la langue de ses parents, réfugiés politiques dans le sud de la France suite à la prise de pouvoir de Franco. À l’extérieur, elle parle le français. L’espagnol va devenir la langue du dedans, la langue de l’intime, des ripostes intérieures, la langue qui prend en charge tout ce que ne peut porter la langue du dehors, tout ce qui par elle est laissé de côté, tout ce qui est excessif, tout ce qui déborde, tout ce qui ne peut se rendre public, …

[Lydie Salvayre,] Dans Le Vif Du Vivant, Warren Motte

French Language and Literature Papers

Les livres de Lydie Salvayre sont implacables, obsessionnels, insistants. Ils débordent de gens qui hurlent, qui fustigent, qui accusent, des gens qui estiment qu’il y a quelque chose qui ne va pas dans l’ordre accepté des choses, et qui ne relâcheront pas. Salvayre dit « Non ! » de manière superbement éloquente ; elle refuse d’approuver la sagesse reçue ; elle pense que tout mérite d’être interrogé. À notre époque si houleuse et incertaine, ces livres sont vivifiants, des vaccins puissants contre les foutaises outrageuses qui nous bombardent de façon quotidienne, constante. Son écriture se situe dans le vif du …

Transparency In Plea Bargaining, Jenia I. Turner

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

lea bargaining is the dominant method by which our criminal justice system resolves cases. More than 95% of state and federal convictions today are the product of guilty pleas. Yet the practice continues to draw widespread criticism. Critics charge that it is too coercive and leads innocent defendants to plead guilty, that it obscures the true facts in criminal cases and produces overly lenient sentences, and that it enables disparate treatment of similarly situated defendants.

Another feature of plea bargaining — its lack of transparency — has received less attention, but is also concerning. In contrast to the trials it …

Remote Criminal Justice, Jenia I. Turner

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

The coronavirus pandemic has forced courts to innovate to provide criminal justice while protecting public health. Many have turned to online platforms in order to conduct criminal proceedings without undue delay. The convenience of remote proceedings has led some to advocate for their expanded use after the pandemic is over. To assess the promise and peril of online criminal justice, I surveyed state and federal judges, prosecutors, and defense attorneys across Texas, where virtual proceedings have been employed for a range of criminal proceedings, starting in March 2020. The survey responses were supplemented with direct observations of remote plea hearings …

Playing By The Rule: How Aba Model Rule 8.4(G) Can Regulate Jury Exclusion, Anna Offit

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

Discrimination during voir dire remains a critical impediment to empaneling juries that reflect the diversity of the United States. While various solutions have been proposed, scholars have largely overlooked ethics rules as an instrument for preventing discriminatory behavior during jury selection. Focusing on the ABA Model Rule 8.4(g), which regulates professional misconduct, this article argues that ethics rules can, under certain conditions, offer an effective deterrent to exclusionary practices among legal actors. Part I examines the specific history, evolution, and application of revised ABA Model Rule 8.4(g). Part II delves into the ways that ethics rules in general, despite their …

Mapping Collaborations And Partnerships In Sdg Research, Jane Payumo, Guangming He, Anusha Chintamani Manjunatha, Devin Higgins, Scout Calvert

University of Nebraska-Lincoln Libraries: Faculty Publications

Collaboration has become an essential paradigmin sustainable development research and in strategies for meeting the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). This study uses bibliometric methods and network analysis to examine research output and collaboration supporting the SDGs and explores means to detect and analyze research collaboration beyond the traditional definition of multiple, one-time co-authorship. We employed two additional lenses of collaboration: repeat collaboration and collaboration time point to quantify and visualize co-authorship data sourced from Microsoft Academic Graph. Our results show an increased collaboration rate over time at the author and institutional levels; however they also indicate that the …

Mapping The Current Landscape Of Research Library Engagement With Emerging Technologies In Research And Learning: Final Report, Sarah Lippincott, Mary Lee Kennedy, Clifford Lynch, Scout Calvert, Jocelyn Cozzo

University of Nebraska-Lincoln Libraries: Faculty Publications

The generation, dissemination, and analysis of digital information is a significant driver, and consequence, of technological change. As data and information stewards in physical and virtual space, research libraries are thoroughly entangled in the challenges presented by the Fourth Industrial Revolution:1 a societal shift powered not by steam or electricity, but by data, and characterized by a fusion of the physical and digital worlds.2 Organizing, structuring, preserving, and providing access to growing volumes of the digital data generated and required by research and industry will become a critically important function. As partners with the community of researchers and scholars, research …

Selling Out: An Instrumentalist Theory Of Legal Ethics, Keith N. Hylton

Faculty Scholarship

Legal ethics has received attention mostly from scholars who view it as a field for the application of moral philosophy. However, economic analysis is also useful in the study of legal ethics, because it can illuminate the incentives that generate ethical dilemmas and controversies. This is especially true in the subfield this paper devotes its attention to, lawyer conflict of interest rules. The problem I focus on is the incentive of the lawyer to "sell out" his client-for example, by providing confidential information to a potential adversary or by providing legal misinformation to the client in order to aid the …