Digital Commons Network^™

Additive And Interface Engineering Of Lead-Tin Mixed Low-Bandgap Perovskite Solar Cells For Higher Efficiency And Improved Stability, Nabin Ghimire

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Lead (Pb) -Tin (Sn) mixed perovskites suffer from large open-circuit voltage (VOC) loss due to the rapid crystallization of perovskite film, creating Sn and Pb vacancies. Such vacancies act as defect sites expediting charge carrier recombination, thus hampering the charge carrier dynamics and optoelectronic properties of perovskite films. In the first project, we focused on the passivation of perovskite surface defects to increase the opencircuit voltage of the 1.25 eV low-bandgap perovskite solar cells by utilizing a trace amount of Phenethylammonium iodide (PEAI) in the perovskite precursor solution as a doping agent. The incorporation of PEAI in perovskite precursors improved …

Advanced Analytical Techniques For The Analysis Of Therapeutics Of Toxic Inhalation Agents And Pharmacokinetic Investigation, Subrata Bhadra

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Toxic inhalation agents (TIAs), (i.e., cyanide (CN) and reduced sulfur compounds (RSCs)), including hydrogen sulfide (H2S) and methanethiol (MT)) are extremely poisonous upon exposure. Many TIAs act by inhibiting mitochondrial cytochrome c oxidase, resulting in cellular hypoxia, cytotoxic anoxia, apnea, respiratory failure, cardiovascular collapse, seizure and potentially death. CN is generated in structural fires and cigarette smoke as well as in mining, electroplating and polymer processing, whereas H2S and MT are found in petroleum, oil and natural gas, waste treatment facilities and decaying organic matter. All are common occupational gas exposure hazards in chemical industries and for first responders, including …

Changes In Pregnancy - Associated Glycoproteins Associated With Fetal Age, Postpartum Interval And Evaluation Of A Chute-Side Lateral Flow Assay, Adalaide C. Kline

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Transrectal ultrasonography is known as the gold standard for pregnancy detection but requires costly equipment and technical skill. Access to a cheaper and more user-friendly method with similar accuracy to transrectal ultrasonography would be beneficial to individual cattle producers and to the cattle industry as a whole. Pregnancy diagnosis by detection of pregnancy-associated glycoproteins (PAGs) has the ability to accurately determine pregnancy in ruminants, however, usually requires specialized equipment for the assay. Pregnancy-associated glycoprotein pregnancy tests are gaining in popularity due to their ease of use and the unique feature of not requiring specialized training. Recently, a new lateral flow …

The Empirical Journey On The Roads Less Traveled To Explore The Concept Of Medication Competence And Address Nursing Students’ Pharmacology Self-Efficacy, Melynda Thelen

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Medication competence is a priority within the academic setting, as it allows nurses to provide sound knowledge-based care and ensure safe medication delivery. Nevertheless, there is a dearth of theoretical or conceptual basis and definition of medication competence to guide assessment, analysis, and development of informed empirical evidence. Literature has also suggested current curricula do not support the complex and in-depth nature of nursing pharmacology. This dissertation paper presents three seminal manuscripts which provides the researcher’s pathway in discovering and analyzing an innovative nursing pharmacology educational strategy. The first manuscript focused on a concept analysis on medication competence, which provided …

Estimating The Impacts Of Acculturation On The Health Of Immigrants In The United States, Tingting He

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The growth in the immigration population in the U.S. has transformed American demographic profile and has led to magnification in health disparities in the United States. The main purpose of this dissertation is to examine the relationship between acculturation and health behavior, mental health outcomes, and access to health care service among immigrants in the U.S. Relying on the acculturation framework, the dissertation intends to increase the understanding of health disparities and health patterns among immigrants. The dissertation utilizes the secondary data from National Health Interview Survey (NHIS) data to examine the effects of acculturation on health of immigrants. Measures …

Seismic Performance Of Mechanically Spliced Precast Bridge Columns With New Couplers, Evan Greeneway

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Lap splicing is not always the most economical or practical approach to achieve reinforcement bar continuity. Mechanical bar splices, or bar couplers, are one alternative that may be far more practical. Currently, the US codes do not allow for the use of bar couplers in the plastic hinge region for RC members in areas of high seismic activity. There has not been enough research into the couplers behavior when subjected to significant inelastic lateral deformations. The Lohr Structures Laboratory was used to conduct an experimental study on campus of South Dakota State University to evaluate the seismic performance of mechanically …

Removing Carbon Dioxide Through Ocean Alkalinity Enhancement: Legal Challenges And Opportunities, Romany M. Webb, Korey Silverman-Roati, Michael B. Gerrard

Faculty Scholarship

Many scientists now agree that achieving the 2015 Paris Agreement’s goal of limiting global warming to “well below” 2°C, and ideally to 1.5°C, above pre-industrial levels will require both major reductions in greenhouse gas emissions and the removal of massive amounts of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Various terrestrial and ocean-based carbon dioxide removal techniques have been proposed, but further research is needed to evaluate their relative benefits and drawbacks. Initial studies suggest that terrestrial carbon dioxide removal techniques, such as bioenergy with carbon capture and storage, may require large amounts of land, which could lead to conflicts with other …

Banning The Full-Face Veil: Freedom Of Religion And Non-Discrimination In The Human Rights Committee And The European Court Of Human Rights, Sarah H. Cleveland

Faculty Scholarship

What is, or should be, the relationship between claims of violations of the right to manifest one’s religion as a result of a generally applicable law or policy, and claims of indirect discrimination on grounds of religion?

The interrelationship of human rights protections is not a new question. Just as rights may conflict, rights may also overlap. The arrest of a human rights activist for expressing her views could violate both the prohibition against arbitrary detention and her freedom of expression. Excessive use of force against peaceful demonstrators could violate their rights to freedom of assembly, freedom of expression, and …

Design Justice In Municipal Criminal Regulation, Amber Baylor

Faculty Scholarship

This article explores design justice as a framework for deeper inclusion in municipal criminal court reform. Section I provides a brief summary of a typical litigant’s path through modern municipal courts. Then, section I explores the historic role of municipal courts, the insider/outsider dichotomy of municipal criminal regulation, and the limitations of past reform efforts. Section II shifts into an overview of participatory design and discusses the new emergence of design justice. Within the discussion of design justice, the article focuses on three precepts of design justice: excavating the history and impact of the courts, creating tools for participation, and …

The Compensation Constraint And The Scope Of The Takings Clause, Thomas W. Merrill

Faculty Scholarship

The idea I wish to explore in this Essay is whether the established methods for determining just compensation can shed light on the meaning of other issues that arise in litigation under the Takings Clause. Specifically, is it possible to “reverse engineer” the Takings Clause by reasoning from settled understandings about how to determine just compensation in order to reach certain conclusions about when the Clause applies, what interests in private property are covered by the Clause, and what does it mean to take such property?

The proposed exercise is positive or descriptive in nature rather than normative. The hypothesis …

The Market As Negotiation, Rebecca E. Hollander-Blumoff, Matthew T. Bodie

Scholarship@WashULaw

Our economic system counts on markets to allocate most of our societal resources. The law often treats markets as discrete entities, with a native intelligence and structure that provides clear answers to questions about prices and terms. In reality, of course, markets are much messier—they are agglomerations of negotiations by individual parties. Despite theoretical and empirical work on markets and on negotiation, legal scholars have largely overlooked the connection between the two areas in considering how markets are constructed and regulated.

This Article brings together scholarship in law, economics, sociology, and psychology to better understand the role that negotiation plays …

Cleaning Corporate Governance, Jens Frankenreiter, Cathy Hwang, Yaron Nili, Eric Talley

Scholarship@WashULaw

Although empirical scholarship dominates the field of law and finance, much of it shares a common vulnerability: an abiding faith in the accuracy and integrity of a small, specialized collection of corporate governance data. In this paper, we unveil a novel collection of three decades’ worth of corporate charters for thousands of public companies, which shows that this faith is misplaced.

We make three principal contributions to the literature. First, we label our corpus for a variety of firm- and state-level governance features. Doing so reveals significant infirmities within the most well-known corporate governance datasets, including an error rate exceeding …

M&A Advisor Misconduct: A Wrong Without A Remedy?, Andrew F. Tuch

Scholarship@WashULaw

Merger and acquisition ("M&A") transactions are among the most high profile of corporate transactions. They are also among the most contentious, with around eighty percent of all completed deals litigated in recent years. And yet investment banks—essential advisors on these deals—have generally succeeded spectacularly in avoiding liability, an anomaly considering the routine nature of deal litigation and the frequency with which they face lawsuits in their other activities. This article examines this anomaly, explaining the doctrinal and practical reasons why it arises. In doing so, it puts in context aiding and abetting liability, a recently-successful shareholder strategy to bring M&A …

A General Defense Of Information Fiduciaries, Andrew F. Tuch

Scholarship@WashULaw

Countless high-profile abuses of user data by leading technology companies have raised a basic question: should firms that traffic in user data be held legally responsible to their users as “information fiduciaries”? Privacy legislation to impose fiduciary-like duties of care, confidentiality, and loyalty on data collectors enjoys bipartisan support but faces strong opposition from scholars. First, critics argue that the information fiduciary concept flies in the face of fundamental corporate law principles that require firms to prioritize shareholder interests over those of users. Second, it is said that the overwhelming self-interest of digital companies makes fiduciary loyalty impossible as a …

Managing Management Buyouts: A Us-Uk Comparative Analysis, Andrew F. Tuch

Scholarship@WashULaw

This chapter comparatively assesses U.S. and U.K. law governing management buyouts (MBOs), focusing on the duties of directors and officers in these systems. The analysis casts doubt on persistent but mistaken perceptions about U.S. and U.K. corporate fiduciary duties for self-dealing. The U.K. no-conflict rule is seen as strict, the U.S. fairness rule as flexible and pragmatic. As the analysis for MBOs demonstrates, these fiduciary rules operate similarly, tasking neutral or disinterested directors with policing self-dealing, enabling commercially sensitive responses to conflicts of interest. The analysis also reveals stronger formal private enforcement of corporate law and more robust disclosure rules …

How Cheap Speech Underserves And Overheats Democracy, Gregory P. Magarian

Scholarship@WashULaw

A quarter century ago, Eugene Volokh’s article Cheap Speech and What It Will Do foretold a new regime of technologically driven “cheap speech” that would fundamentally change how people communicated with one another and navigated the information ecosystem. Professor Volokh’s vision was mainly descriptive, and his normative assessment of cheap speech sounded some circumspect notes of warning. Fundamentally, though, he painted an optimistic picture. In particular, he made the important claim that emerging technologies would democratize and diversify our society by giving many more speakers access to the tools of mass communication and audiences access to many more ideas.

Kent State And The Failure Of First Amendment Law, Gregory P. Magarian

Scholarship@WashULaw

Since the U.S. Supreme Court decided its first free speech case 100 years ago, two very different eras have defined First Amendment law. For a half century, before 1970, the Supreme Court focused on protecting the expressive freedom of political dissidents and social reformers. In 1970, amid protests against the Vietnam War, the Ohio National Guard senselessly gunned down four students at Kent State University. The Kent State massacre exposed the fragility in our country of political protest, free speech, and democracy itself. That atrocity should have inspired First Amendment law to affirm and enhance its protection of dissenters and …

Ethical Duty To Investigate Your Client?, Peter A. Joy

Scholarship@WashULaw

Lawyers have been implicated in corporate scandals and other client crimes or frauds all too often, and the complicity of some lawyers is troubling both to the public and to members of the legal profession. This is especially true when the crime involved is money laundering. As a response to attorney involvement in crimes or frauds, some legal commentators have called for changes to the ethics rules to require lawyers to investigate their clients and client transactions under some circumstances rather than remaining “consciously” or “willfully” blind to what may be illegal or fraudulent conduct. The commentators argue that such …

Encouraging Interagency Collaboration: Learning From Covid-19, Rachel Sachs

Scholarship@WashULaw

In the health innovation context, federal regulatory authority is sharply fragmented among different agencies. The National Institutes of Health, Food and Drug Administration, Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, and other agencies all share responsibilities in the development and dissemination of new healthcare technologies. Scholars have previously written about the importance of interagency collaboration both in the healthcare area and more generally, and about strategies for encouraging collaborative efforts to promote various policy goals. Under these accounts, a failure to collaborate between federal agencies may be unfortunate, but it does not typically result in or exacerbate a crisis. In the …

Recent Trends In Medicaid Spending And Use Of Drugs With Us Food And Drug Administration Accelerated Approval, Rachel Sachs, Kyle A. Gavulic, Julie M. Donohue, Stacie B. Dusestzina

Scholarship@WashULaw

State Medicaid programs have reported concerns about rising drug prices and spending, particularly regarding drugs entering the market through the accelerated approval program under the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA). The accelerated approval program enables the FDA to approve drugs on the basis of unverified surrogate end points, meaning that clinical benefits for these products are uncertain at the time of approval. However, state Medicaid programs are legally required to cover these drugs. Little is known about the set of products with accelerated approval over time, their use among Medicaid beneficiaries, or the magnitude of their financial influence on …

The Rhetorical Transformations And Policy Failures Of Prescription Drug Pricing Reform Under The Trump Administration, Rachel Sachs

Scholarship@WashULaw

Throughout his four years in office, President Trump made prescription drug pricing a focus of his policy agenda. President Trump not only used strong language to criticize the pharmaceutical industry and its practices but also introduced ambitious reform policies that had previously lacked acceptance among Republican policy makers. President Trump appears to have been successful in developing a new populist form of rhetoric that Republicans can use in support of novel drug pricing reforms such as the ones his administration considered. From a policy perspective, however, the Trump administration failed to implement any of their more ambitious reform ideas. This …

The Important Contributions Of The Special Court For Sierra Leone On Amnesties And Immunities: Reinforcing Foundational Principles Of International Criminal Law, Leila Nadya Sadat

Scholarship@WashULaw

The book that is the centerpiece of this Micro-Symposium, The Legal Legacy of the Special Court for Sierra Leone, is an important contribution to international law and practice. Authored by Charles Jalloh, a distinguished practitioner of international criminal law, the book is essential reading for anyone who wishes to understand the legal ramifications of the Special Court and its work. It is comprehensive, without being overwhelming, and analyzes many of the most important elements of the Court’s legal work. It is a perfect companion to his equally excellent edited book on the subject, The Sierra Leone Special Court and Its …

Pandemic Nationalism, Covid-19, And International Law, Leila Nadya Sadat

Scholarship@WashULaw

This Essay explores possible reforms to the World Health Organization (WHO) considering its response to the COVID-19 pandemic. It also suggests using existing mechanisms to enforce the WHO Constitution and the International Health Regulations (IHR). The Essay focuses on three aspects of global health governance: (1) how nationalism of powerful States renders pandemic control difficult given the “weakest-link public goods” character of global health emergencies; (2) how legal and practice reforms might nonetheless strengthen and fortify the WHO’s response; and (3) how existing provisions of the WHO Constitution and the IHR might be enforced through the dispute resolution clauses in …

Justice Without Fear Or Favour? The Uncertain Future Of The International Criminal Court, Leila Nadya Sadat

Scholarship@WashULaw

This essay traces the history of the International Criminal Court from its establishment in 1998 until the current day. It briefly surveys the history of the Court’s founding and evokes many of its current challenges and innovative aspects of its jurisprudence, particularly regarding jurisdiction, immunities, and admissibility, including decisions relating to the Situations in Afghanistan, Bangladesh/Myanmar, Libya, Palestine, and Sudan. As the essay notes, although many challenges have emerged from internal difficulties the Court has faced or design elements of the Statute, external challenges arising from the geopolitical environment within which it operates exist as well. Despite these problems, which …

Payment For Order Flow And The Great Missed Opportunity, Joel Seligman

Scholarship@WashULaw

In late January and early February 2021, an astounding story of stock market price volatility captivated the nation. GameStop, a corporation that in recent years had prodigiously lost money – $492 million two years earlier, $296 million the last year for which it reported data – rose from a low of $2.57 to a high of $483. In January 2021 alone, GameStop had risen from a closing price of $17.25 on January 4 to a close of $347.61 on January 27 before falling 44 percent to a close of $193.60 on January 28, rising 68 percent to a close of …

Functions Of The Rule Of Law, Brian Z. Tamanaha

Scholarship@WashULaw

This concise essay examines multiple manifest and latent functions of the rule of law. The rule of law is characterized as a society in which government officials and the populace are generally bound by and abide law. The functions covered include: personal and collective security and trust; integration of society; legal restrictions on officials; liberty and guiding conduct; economic development; a pivotal place for legal professionals; entrenching power structures; normative commitment and critical standard; and rhetoric. The discussion raises core issues about each function.

Disruptive Implications Of Legal Positivism’S Social Efficacy Thesis, Brian Z. Tamanaha

Scholarship@WashULaw

The social efficacy thesis holds that for law to exist it must be generally obeyed by the populace. Accepted by virtually all legal positivists, this is the most neglected thesis of legal positivism. Despite its nigh universal acceptance by theorists, however, the efficacy thesis is surrounded with unanswered questions with significant implications. Several questions immediately come to mind: How widespread must conformity to law be? What must people conform to (all areas of law)? Who must conform (legal officials, government officials, the entire populace, significant groups)? What does conformity entail (normatively, knowingly, behaviorally)? This essay explores these issues and a …

A Reconstruction Of Transnational Legal Pluralism And Law’S Foundations, Brian Z. Tamanaha

Scholarship@WashULaw

This essay addresses core theoretical issues surrounding global/transnational legal pluralism, taking up the work of leading theorists. First, I demonstrate that global legal pluralism is very different from earlier versions of legal pluralism (postcolonial and sociological). Next, I expose the flaw of over-inclusive conceptions of legal pluralism, which appears in the global legal pluralism of Paul Berman, and I explain why theoretical concepts of law cannot solve this flaw. I then address the profusion of private and hybrid regulatory forms on the domestic and transnational levels, and I mark the line between theory and practice. Thereafter, I expose problems with …

Pragmatic Reconstruction In Jurisprudence: Features Of A Realistic Theory, Brian Z. Tamanaha

Scholarship@WashULaw

A century ago the pragmatists called for reconstruction in philosophy. Philosophy at the time was occupied with conceptual analysis, abstractions, a priori analysis, and the pursuit of necessary, universal truths. Pragmatists argued that philosophy instead should center on the pressing problems of the day, which requires theorists to pay attention to social complexity, variation, change, power, consequences, and other concrete aspects of social life. The parallels between philosophy then and jurisprudence today are striking, as I show, calling for a pragmatism-informed theory of law within contemporary jurisprudence. The realistic theory outlined in this essay focuses on what law does, what …

Asian Land Conflicts And The Great Transformation, Brian Z. Tamanaha

Scholarship@WashULaw

In The Great Transformation (1944), Karl Polanyi described the modern era in terms of the transformation of labor, land, and money into commodities, and the expansion of the market as the basic organizing principle of society—a transformation championed by liberal economic theory. This transformation brought enormous social dislocation and mass poverty, while the wealthy benefited the most. Polanyi opposed the nigh total destruction of traditional communities that had previously given meaning to peoples’ lives, and the dismal living conditions and economic insecurity of laboring masses that resulted. Central elements of Polanyi’s account are playing out today across the terrain of …