Digital Commons Network^™

Hidden Agendas In Shareholder Voting, Scott Hirst, Adriana Z. Robertson

Faculty Scholarship

Nothing in either corporate or securities law requires companies to notify investors what they will be voting on before the record date for a shareholder meeting. We show that, overwhelmingly, they do not. The result is “hidden agendas”: for 88% of shareholder votes, investors cannot find out what they will be voting on before the record date. This poses an especially serious problem for investors who engage in securities lending: they must decide whether the expected benefit of voting exceeds the expected benefit of continuing to lend their shares (or making them available for lending) without knowing what they will …

“Cancel Culture” And Criminal Justice, Steven Arrigg Koh

Faculty Scholarship

This Article explores the relationship between two normative systems in modern society: “cancel culture” and criminal justice. It argues that cancel culture—a ubiquitous phenomenon in contemporary life—may rectify deficiencies of over- and under-enforcement in the U.S. criminal justice system. However, the downsides of cancel culture’s structure—imprecise factfinding, potentially disproportionate sanctions leading to collateral consequences, a “thin” conception of the wrongdoer as beyond rehabilitation, and a broader cultural anxiety that “chills” certain human conduct—reflect problematic U.S. punitive impulses that characterize our era of mass incarceration. This Article thus argues that social media reform proposals obscure a deeper necessity: transcendence of blame …

Restructuring Support Agreements: An Empirical Analysis, Anthony J. Casey, Frederick Tung, Katherine Waldock

Faculty Scholarship

Restructuring support agreements (RSAs), or contracts that commit bankruptcy parties to supporting a plan of reorganization that will conform to certain requirements, are now a common feature of Chapter 11. Parties utilize these agreements in nearly half of all large cases. While prior literature has debated the normative value of RSAs, we take an empirical approach to look at what provisions the parties include in these agreements and how those provisions have changed over time.

Our analysis looks at all RSAs associated with large bankruptcies through the end of 2020. We characterize the types of firms with RSAs, the parties …

Trust, Brutality, And Human Dignity: How “Partial Birth Abortion” Helps Shape American Biopolitics, George J. Annas

Faculty Scholarship

In this Article, I explore how nearly continuous public rhetorical challenges to abortion in the political realm first led the public and the courts to turn away from a particular abortion procedure (intact dilation and extraction, also known as partial-birth abortion) which political agitators labeled as “barbaric” and then to view physicians who performed abortions not as legitimate professionals, but simply as “abortionists,” and sometimes as evil “Frankensteins.” “Abortionists” use no “medical judgment” and are unworthy of deference by state legislatures, Congress, or the courts when deciding how or when to perform an abortion. The concentration on the welfare of …

The Bi-Partisan Enabling Of Presidential Power: A Review Of David Driesen's The Specter Of Dictatorship: Judicial Enabling Of Presidential Power (2021), Jed Handelsman Shugerman

Faculty Scholarship

In "The Specter of Dictatorship: Judicial Enabling of Presidential Power," David Driesen questions the unitary executive theory and other doctrines of unchecked executive power. He offers primarily a critique of purposivism, a mix of original public meaning and more recent history illuminating those purposes: the Founders’ anti-tyranny purpose and then the rise of European tyranny from Nazi Germany to contemporary Hungary, Turkey, and Poland.
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/="/">This review first focuses on Driesen’s approach to Congress: He identifies the broad congressional delegation of powers to the president as a source of expansive executive power, but he does not entertain that doctrines …

Systemically Important Platforms, Caleb N. Griffin

Faculty Publications

Regulating Big Tech is now a matter of intense public debate. We ask how well Big Tech companies fulfill their role as gatekeepers of the public square. We ponder whether their dominant market positions merit an antitrust response. We assess their culpability and complicity in spreading online misinformation and hate. However, in the many normative debates over how Big Tech should use its power, the source of that power remains largely unexamined.

Big Tech, like Big Tobacco before it, is an industry founded on addiction. Although typically “free” to use, the world’s largest digital platforms exploit users’ dopamine pathways to …

Saying What The Law Should Be, F. Andrew Hessick

Faculty Publications

Recent years have seen a resurgence of the view that the role of the federal courts is to declare what the law is, not what the law should be. Scholars and judges, including a majority of the current U.S. Supreme Court justices, have expressed this view that the law is fixed at its creation and the function of courts is to declare its meaning. But this view is inaccurate. Descriptively, federal courts often say what the law should be. Judges fashion common law, inject their views into interpretations, and issue opinions that do not merely describe the law but have …

Defunding Police Agencies, Rick Su, Anthony O'Rourke, Guyora Binder

Faculty Publications

This Article contextualizes the police defunding movement and the backlash it has generated. The defunding movement emerged from the work of Black-led activists to reassert democratic control over policing and shift resources to social service agencies and other institutions serving community needs. In reaction, states have enacted anti-defunding bills checking local government reduction of law enforcement budgets. These anti-defunding measures continue a long tradition of state and federal control over local police spending, subverting local democratic control over police agencies. These limits include direct legal constraints on local police spending and indirect constraints through grants and authorization to collect fines, …

Preemption Of Police Reform: A Roadblock To Racial Justice, Rick Su, Marissa Roy, Nestor Davidson

Faculty Publications

In 2020, nearly half of the largest U.S. cities reoriented municipal spending priorities by directing money from their police budgets to social services; for many cities, these budgetary changes reversed decades of increases. Cities began implementing additional police reforms as well: New York City became the first municipality to end qualified immunity for police officers while San Francisco shifted to deploying crisis response teams, rather than police officers, to respond to mental health calls.

Instead of supporting these critical reforms, some states targeted cities that prioritized racial justice by preempting those cities’ ability to engage in meaningful change. In the …

Precautionary Ratemaking, Jonas J. Monast

Faculty Publications

For more than one hundred years, states have relied on ratemaking to ensure that electric utilities deliver affordable and reliable power to their customers. This process helped keep costs down, but it also produced an electricity system that is a cause of, and vulnerable to, some of the most pressing challenges now facing society: climate change, catastrophic wildfires, extreme storms, and air and water pollution.

This Article argues that risk regulation is an alternate legal foundation for interpreting bedrock principles of ratemaking, such as prudency, reasonableness, least cost, and the public interest. The traditional economic regulator view of ratemaking evaluates …

In Defense Of Chapter 11 For Mass Torts, Anthony J. Casey, Joshua C. Macey

Coase-Sandor Institute for Law & Economics Research Paper Series

This Essay argues that bankruptcy proceedings are well-suited to resolving mass tort claims. Mass tort cases create a collective action problem that encourages claimants who are worried about available recoveries to race to the courthouse to collect ahead of others. This race can destroy going concern value and lead to the dismemberment of valuable firms. Coordination among them is difficult as each claimant seeks to maximize its own recoveries. These are the very collective action and hold-out problems that bankruptcy proceedings are designed to solve. As such, bankruptcy proceedings are appropriate means of resolving mass torts as long as they …

Impacting Website Visitor Engagement Through Information Provision, Will Buntin

Theses and Dissertations--Educational Leadership Studies

Enrollment in library science programs has been on a downward trend for several years (Association for Library and Information Science Education, n.d.). At the School of Information Science in the College of Communication and Information at the University of Kentucky, enrollment in the online library science master's program dropped 28% from 2012 to 2018. With a student population in fall 2018 of 177 and a targeted enrollment (set by program faculty) of 240, the program administration has been exploring ways to recruit more students without further stressing the resources available to the School. The Director and Assistant Director of the …

The Power Of Connections: An Online Doctoral Program's Use Of Strategic Onboarding To Enhance The Doctoral Experience, Jeri Heileman

Theses and Dissertations--Educational Leadership Studies

A positive doctoral experience is rooted in an understanding of the expectations and reality of doctoral–level work. Students need specific knowledge, skills, and mindsets to complete coursework, critically analyze research, and write and defend a research dissertation. Despite a mutual commitment to academic achievement and graduation by faculty and students, attrition in doctoral programs remains high. This rate is even higher for those in online programs. Additionally, there are many challenges doctoral students experience outside of the core curriculum. The challenges facing students vary depending on the phase of the doctoral journey and the individual development of each student.

This …

Meeting Transfer Students Where They Are: A New Organizational Approach To Transfer Student Communication, Support, And Recruitment, Daniel Wright

Theses and Dissertations--Educational Leadership Studies

Transfer students have long played a significant role in the growth and diversity of colleges and universities. Recent research points to a continuous decline in enrollment over the coming decade (Kelderman, Gardner, & Conley, 2019), and as tuition costs continue to increase and enrollment numbers decrease, institutions of higher education have begun turning to transfer students to fill their lecture halls and football stadiums. A key variable in higher education’s transfer recruitment blind spot is a fundamental lack of understanding of the structural and organizational changes needed to both attract and retain these non-traditional students (Tobolowsky & Cox, 2012). For …

How Does Exposure To An Authentic English-Speaking Environment Contribute To Chinese International Students’ Academic Reading Comprehension?, Na Liu

Theses and Dissertations--Education Sciences

Chinese international students comprise the largest group of international students in U.S. universities. To better support international students to be successful in international higher education, Chinese students’ reading comprehension in English deserves attention. Using a qualitative research design, this study analyzed Chinese international students’ perceptions about their English reading comprehension in academic literacy, and how exposure to an English-speaking environment contributed to their reading comprehension development. There were 8 participants involved who have different genders (males and females), education levels (undergraduates and graduates), exposure time (less than one year and more than one year), and majors (chemistry, engineering, arts, etc.). …

Knitting Code: Examining The Relationship Between Knitting And Computational Thinking Skills Using The Nexus Of Practice, Emily Rose Dodson-Snowden

Theses and Dissertations--Education Sciences

Due to the rise of careers in STEM-related fields, there is a growing need for schools to produce people to fill these positions. One area of STEM that is growing is computer science/coding. Due to this demand, schools need to be intentional about exposing students to computer science/coding. There are a variety of new tools to introduce students to this field. One growing belief is that knitting can teach computer science/coding to students.

The goal of this study was to see if knitting can serve as an introduction to teach students computation skills. Kitting has historically been used to code …

An Investigation Into The Relationship Between Teacher Grit, Technology Self-Efficacy, And Technology Integration, Joshua Jeremiah Shiloh Marsh

Theses and Dissertations--Education Sciences

The use of educational technology applications has grown tremendously in the last decade. Instructors are now equipped with hardware and software applications previously unavailable, such as mobile and interactive technologies. These tools can have tremendous impact on students’ learning and teacher practices. Teachers can improve their assessment capabilities through technology integration, provide better learning opportunities for students with learning disabilities, and promote deeper learning practices. Due to these benefits, budgets at the federal, state, and local levels of the United States now have specific allocations regarding technology-related purchases. Nevertheless, barriers remain regarding the effective integration of technologies in public schools. …

A Survey Of Elementary Educators' Self-Efficacy Related To Stem Education, Elizabeth Mckenzie Johnson

Theses and Dissertations--Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) Education

While the call for STEM and engineering design has increased since the release of the Next Generation Science Standards, the implementation of STEM in elementary grades has been slow. A variety of factors play a role in why educators, schools, or districts make the informed decisions they do regarding curriculum and instruction. Identifying strengths and challenges elementary educators face in implementing STEM into the curriculum can guide schools and districts in creating supports for increasing STEM in the elementary grades. This study sought to create and test a survey instrument for use with elementary educators in a large urban district …

The Federal Response To Covid-19: Lessons From The Pandemic, Nancy J. Knauer

UC Law Journal

When the first suspected human-to-human transmission of the novel coronavirus was reported in January 2020, the United States had in place an elaborate set of pandemic disaster and response plans that spanned hundreds of pages. The George W. Bush administration spearheaded national pandemic planning in 2005 as part of the post-September 11 efforts to modernize the country’s disaster response capabilities. Subsequent administrations revisited and revised the various pandemic plans, including the Trump administration as recently as 2017 and 2018.

Despite these detailed plans, the Trump administration was slow to respond to the emerging public health crisis or implement any of …

How Can I Ever Repay You? The Borrower’S Dilemma And A Tax-Based Solution To The Student Debt Problem, Kate Souza

UC Law Journal

The growing cost of higher education relative to wage growth means that college is no longer the sure path to financial security it once was. While the cost of tuition ballooned over the past several decades, government funding for higher education diminished. Students have made up the difference by borrowing more. For many borrowers, large student loans result in unmanageable debt that makes their financial futures less secure. Student debt also harms society and the economy. If the government wants Americans to continue to have access to higher education, it must find ways to make higher education more affordable.

Politicians …

Evaluation Of Posted Speed Limits Reductions On Urban Roads With A High Percentage Of Cyclists, Jaclyn S. Schaefer, Miguel Figliozzi, Avinash Unnikrishnan

Civil and Environmental Engineering Faculty Publications and Presentations

This paper presents a before and after analysis of the impact of posted speed limit (PSL) changes on passenger car (FHWA class two vehicles) speeds in Portland, OR. The study focuses on urban roads, comparing sites that underwent a PSL 5-mph reduction (treatment sites) and sites where the PSL did not change (control sites). Sites with a high percentage of and priority for cyclists (neighborhood greenways) and sites with a more standard traffic composition were compared. Differences in speed characteristics such as mean and 85th percentile speeds, the speed variance, and the proportion of vehicles exceeding a speed threshold (relative …

Uveitis-Mediated Immune Cell Invasion Through The Extracellular Matrix Of The Lens Capsule, Jodirae Dedreu, Sonali Pal-Ghosh, Mary J Mattapallil, Rachel R Caspi, Mary Ann Stepp, A Sue Menko

Department of Pathology, Anatomy, and Cell Biology Faculty Papers

While the eye is considered an immune privileged site, its privilege is abrogated when immune cells are recruited from the surrounding vasculature in response to trauma, infection, aging, and autoimmune diseases like uveitis. Here, we investigate whether in uveitis immune cells become associated with the lens capsule and compromise its privilege in studies of C57BL/6J mice with experimental autoimmune uveitis. These studies show that at D14, the peak of uveitis in these mice, T cells, macrophages, and Ly6G/Ly6C+ immune cells associate with the lens basement membrane capsule, burrow into the capsule matrix, and remain integrated with the capsule as immune …

Abuse Just Out Of Frame: The Impact Of Online Dispute Resolution On Domestic Violence, Haley Benson

Journal of Dispute Resolution

“This is a[n] issue we didn’t have when we had live court.” It was a chilling day for prosecutor Deborah Davis when she discovered a victim of domestic violence was in the same apartment as her abuser during a session of Zoom court. In this case, the survivor had done the hardest part; she had made the decision to prosecute her abuser. As court began, Davis saw that her client had a similar virtual background to the alleged abuser and noticed that her client was looking away from the camera while answering questions. This prompted Davis to request that police …

Questions Of Arbitrability In The World: Comparing The Jurisprudence Of The United States And India, Henry Sivils

Journal of Dispute Resolution

If a matter is not arbitrable, then it may not be arbitrated.2 Arbitrability, generally, refers to the authority that an arbitrator possesses to decide a matter.3 A challenge to that authority is considered a “question of arbitrability.”4 There are three types of questions of arbitrability: (1) substantive challenges that a dispute is not arbitrable under the terms of an arbitration clause; (2) the contention that, despite substantive arbitrability, procedural circumstances exist that prevent arbitration; and (3) “post-award attacks on an arbitrator’s decision.”5 Of those three, “whether a matter is arbitrable under a given arbitration clause” has had recent developments in …

Restorative Justice: An Alternative Dispute Resolution Approach To Criminal Behavior, Kayla Welch

Journal of Dispute Resolution

Beginning with the end of the Mass Prison Era in the late 1800s, Americans have looked for a better way to respond to crime and those who commit it. Since the Reformatory Era, the United States has swayed between punitive models based on either the Reformatory or Retributive theories. Despite the changes we have made, our criminal justice system suffers from long waiting periods for a trial, overburdened public defenders, overcrowded jails and prisons that often lead to unsafe conditions for the inmates and corrections officers, and many other problems.

Glacial Deposits, Vol. 47, 2022, Department Of Geography, Geology, And The Environment

Glacial Deposits

Newsletter of the Department of Geography, Geology, and the Environment

Life In Mossville, Louisiana: Policy Implications Of Toxic Waste Exposure And Environmental Racism, Clare Kelsey

Theses

Environmental damage disproportionately affects communities of color. Understanding how environmental racism uniquely affects marginalized communities is crucial to effectively develop public policies that will address the systematic racism that is rooted in many existing policies and practices. The town of Mossville, Louisiana provides a case study of a Black town that experienced devastating environmental pollution as well as displacement from the oil and petrochemical industries in the region (Rogers, 2015), with few residents still in the area. This thesis presents a qualitative study utilizing peer-reviewed literature, secondary sources, and life narratives of Mossville residents. These oral histories serve to amplify …

The Role Of Experts In Policymaking: An Assessment Of Witness Educational Backgrounds In Congressional Testimony, Benedicte Adair

Theses

This thesis provides a first-of-its kind benchmark on the extent to which academically-trained professionals in the United States are availed of opportunities to directly deliver evidence to the United States Congress, as well as how contemporary party politics shapes this system. We randomly sample and manually code the educational backgrounds of 2,147 witnesses from 32 Congressional Committee Hearings that occurred between 2001 and 2020. This study reveals three key findings. The first is that academically-trained professionals have extensive access to the halls of Congress. Second, that all types of degrees have at least some representation amongst witness calls. The third …

Predicting Students' Mental Disorders Using Machine Learning, Maryam Sadiq

Theses

The mental health issues among students are prevailing due to predictions of low mood, anxiety, depression, and academic difficulties. Late diagnosis of these mental health issues takes prolonged measures to minimise its impact. Nowadays, machine learning is used to assess mental health by detecting signals that provide information about mental health through brain scans and questionnaires. Early detection of mental health issues in students possible to control them effectively. Colleges and universities are trying to improve student care by assessing their mental health and reducing mental health problems through psychological therapies. Machine learning techniques, including Multiclass Classifier, LAD Tree, and …

The Role Of Digital Channels In Predicting Objective And Subjective Negotiation Outcomes, Roshni Raveendhran, Tami Kim, Ji Woon Ryu

Business Faculty Publications and Presentations

Today’s hiring and workplace communications are increasingly occurring in the digital space, a trend accelerated by the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic. In two preregistered experiments and an internal meta-analysis, we test the subjective and objective impact of two digital channels—video and synchronous text—that are popularly used in today’s workplace contexts. In doing so, we isolate the role that richness of digital channels plays in influencing negotiation outcomes while holding synchrony constant. Specifically, we predicted that negotiating via video (vs. synchronous text) will foster better integrative outcomes and improve negotiators’ subjective outcomes. Results indicated that negotiating via video, compared to synchronous …