Digital Commons Network^™

Characterizing Language Use In Online Accessibility Discussion Forums, Nithiya Venkatraman, Anand Ravi Aiyer, Yash Prakash, Sampath Jayarathna, Hae-Na Lee, Vikas Ashok

Computer Science Faculty Publications

Discussion forums are one of the favored platforms for knowledge sharing. Given their popularity, copious research exists on understanding the linguistic and behavioral characteristics of forum conversations, so as to inform the design of many downstream applications including discourse visualization, sentiment analysis, and question answering. However, prior investigations have mainly focused on general forums designed primarily for sighted users, and as such the applicability of their findings to dedicated accessibility discussion forums frequented by blind screen reader users remains unanswered. To bridge this knowledge gap and facilitate the development of better-informed assistive technologies for blind people, we investigated language use …

Keynote Address For The 2025 University Of The Pacific Law Review Symposium: The Crime Victims' Rights Movement: Historical Foundations, Modern Ascendancy, And Future Aspirations, Paul Cassell

Utah Law Faculty Scholarship

This article, which serves as the keynote address for the 2025 University of Pacific Law Review Symposium, explores the past, present, and future of America's crime victims' rights movement-one of the most successful social movements in modern history.

Historically, crime victims played a central role in criminal justice processes through private prosecutions-i.e., the ability of victims to initiate or participate in criminal prosecutions. Today, while private prosecutions have been largely supplanted by public prosecutions, the victims' rights movement has successfully restored the victims' voice in criminal processes. The movement has reformed contemporary American criminal justice so that criminal processes now …

Loper Bright’S Deregulatory Synergies, Renee Farmer, Daniel G. Aaron

Utah Law Faculty Scholarship

For over 40 years, Chevron U.S.A. v. National Resources Defense Council stood as a keystone of administrative law. It infused agencies with the discretion to leverage the edges of statutory language and granted them the security that day-to-day agency actions would survive judicial review. Although Chevron’s demise in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo elicited rebuke from many legal scholars, it struck some as unsurprising, unimportant, or unconcerning, whether due to the narrowing of Chevron over time, the Supreme Court’s disuse of it in recent years, or the belief that its holding flew in the face of the Administrative Procedure Act. …

Future Giving Intention As Related To An Individual's Donor And Volunteer Status Within A Charitable Nonprofit Organization, Adrienne Darrah

Iowa Journal of Communication

Charitable nonprofit organizations have a responsibility not only to the communities they serve but also to the individuals who support them. When nonprofits fail to act as good stewards of raised monies, they may find themselves caught in a scandal that not only holds legal ramifications but financial and ethical implications as well. Drawing on resource dependence and stewardship theories, manipulated stimuli related the American Red Cross’ response to the 2010 Haitian earthquake was utilized to analyze the relationship between future giving intention and current monetary donor, blood donor, and volunteer status. This paper also considers crisis communication in examining …

Breaking Barriers: Designing An Effective Early Intervention Process For Enhanced Developmental Outcomes In Private Schools, Breanne Kristen Cox

Graduate Student Dissertations, Theses, Capstones, and Portfolios

The challenge of ensuring inclusive and equitable support for students with disabilities is increasingly prominent in education, particularly in private school settings. This dissertation explored the implementation and effectiveness of an early literacy intervention process, the “Bright Beginnings Boost Initiative,” in a small Montessori preschool in South Florida. The study addresses the gap in support services for students with disabilities in private schools, which often lack the comprehensive frameworks mandated by public education systems under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA).

Through a qualitative two-phase action research design, this study gathered insights from preschool teachers, the preschool director, the …

Discriminatory Censorship Laws, Jonathan Feingold, Joshua Weishart

Faculty Scholarship

The summer of 2020 ignited global protests for racial justice. Across the United States, millions marched with a modest plea: that America reckon with its racism. For K-12 schools, this moment pushed local communities and district leaders to create more inclusive classrooms and curricula. Yet before the summer had ended, America's antiracist turn provoked a backlash campaign that has proven far more impactful and enduring.

This campaign has featured the rise and spread of "discriminatory censorship laws"-a term we apply to government action designed to demean inclusionary values and to deny students access to critical knowledge, inquiry, and thinking. As …

Law As A Lamp Post, Janet Freilich

Faculty Scholarship

Law produces all manner of public information: court documents, securities filings, patents, property records, and much more. This information is used in a multitude of ways—it teaches readers about individual cases, transactions, or entities, and is also aggregated to inform policymaking, set priorities, and drive predictive analytics and artificial intelligence.

But choices about the information produced (or hidden) by law are often unintentional. Doctrines and institutions that appear facially unrelated to information production—like subject matter jurisdiction—nonetheless affect the shape and quantity of data produced. And even doctrines focused on information— like property recordation—create data used for purposes never envisioned by …

Gig Work At What Cost? Exploring Privacy Risks Of Gig Work Platform Participation In The U.S., Amogh Pradeep, Johanna Gunawan, Álvaro Feal, Woodrow Hartzog, David Choffnes

Faculty Scholarship

In recent years, "gig work" platforms have gained popularity as a way for individuals to earn money; as of 2021, 16% of Americans have at some point earned money from such platforms. Despite their popularity and their history of unfair data collection practices and worker safety, little is known about the data collected from workers (and users) by gig platforms and about the privacy dark pattern designs present in their apps.

This paper presents an empirical measurement of 16 gig work platforms' data practices in the U.S. We analyze what data is collected by these platforms, and how it is …

How Theories Of Art Can Inform Debates About Ai, Jessica Silbey

Faculty Scholarship

Debates about artificial intelligence (AI) tend to swing between the optimistic and the apocalyptic. I propose a less binary approach that frames conversations about AI from the perspectives of theories of art and creativity. Whether we agree that AI is artificial or intelligent, whether it should be constrained or liberated, we cannot deny its influence on literary, artistic, and innovative production. AI may be described as simply a new tool to produce art and science, like the camera or the microscope, or it may transform art and science, the way the internet transformed global communication. Either way, these debates about …

Unequal Ownership, Ofer Eldar, Rory Van Loo

Faculty Scholarship

Market concentration and weak competition do not just lead to lower efficiency but also result in corporate profits flowing primarily to wealthy households that own a disproportionate share of public corporations. We demonstrate that this is a growing distributional problem not only due to familiar reasons in the literature, most notably shifts in market power, but also due to changes in the socio-economic makeup of ownership. Over the past twenty years, households in the bottom 90 percent of wealth have seen their share of stock ownership decline by half. That is, the ownership of corporations has become increasingly concentrated among …

Consumer Agents, Rory Van Loo

Faculty Scholarship

In the twenty-first century economy, individuals need market help that they are not getting. The technology has long existed for a browser plug-in that would filter out toxic social media content or a virtual shopping assistant that would find and even purchase the best deals online without having to go to many different websites and product pages. Yet tech platforms have used lawsuits and data control to stifle such tools. The lack of digital helpers has potentially profound consequences. Social media use is linked to alarming increases in teenage depression and anxiety. Businesses’ ability to manipulate consumers into paying higher …

Corporate Scenarios: Drawing Lessons From History, Madison Condon

Faculty Scholarship

As corporations are increasingly pressed to reveal information about their exposure to climate-related risks, they are often asked to undertake and disclose the outcome of “scenario analysis.” In this exercise, corporations, including financial institutions, examine how their business would fare under different pathways the future may take. One oft-used scenario, for example, is the International Energy Agency’s “Net-Zero by 2050: A Roadmap for the Energy Sector.” This Essay presents a history of the use of scenarios as a corporate planning tool, particularly in the oil industry, arguing that it is key for understanding our present moment and the role of …

Book Review: Biglaw's Race Problem, Angela Onwuachi-Willig, Anthony V. Alfieri

Faculty Scholarship

Ever since the 1970s when BigLaw firms began to hire Black lawyers into their associate ranks, these firms have wrestled with problems in both recruiting and retaining Black associates. During the ensuing decades, BigLaw firms have minimally increased the low numbers of Black attorneys who have become partners, particularly equity partners, within their organizations. Numerous scholars have explored how racial bias and discrimination, both within BigLaw firms and greater society, have contributed to such failures in the recruitment, retention, and promotion of Black lawyers. In his new book The Black Ceiling: How Race Still Matters in the Elite Workplace, …

Foundations For Platform Liability, Kathryn E. Spier, Rory Van Loo

Faculty Scholarship

From spreading misinformation to selling deadly products, bad actors use technology platforms to their advantage while causing devastating harms to privacy, health, and even democracy. Despite their central role in enabling these bad actors, the platforms almost entirely escape liability. This legal immunity is purportedly grounded in economics. From the beginning, courts and legislatures feared that liability would chill innovation, growth, and user access. They also speculated that platforms have sufficient market incentives to voluntarily police bad actors, making liability unnecessary.

Whereas many scholars have argued that platform immunity is blind to justice, this Article shows that it is also …

Normalizing Facial Recognition Technology And The End Of Obscurity, Woodrow Hartzog, Evan Selinger, Judy Hyojoo Rhee

Faculty Scholarship

This article argues that facial recognition technology is the most dangerous surveillance tool ever invented. Given the unique threats this morally suspect tool poses to privacy, civil liberties, human flourishing, and democracy, the only appropriate response is a ban. To justify our position, we explain why facial recognition is distinctive among biometrics, clarify how even seemingly benign and positive uses of the technology can trigger dangerous normalization dynamics, and pinpoint why current United States laws (with reverberations in the EU’s AI Act) are designed to accelerate a slippery slope that makes mass surveillance nearly inevitable. Our most fundamental contribution lies …

Copyright Law And Property Law, Keith N. Hylton

Faculty Scholarship

Property is at the core of state law since it is the exclusive power of the individual state governments to define and protect property rights within their jurisdiction. In this paper I will discuss the general connection between copyright and property generally. I will argue that property law sheds important light on copyright law and can help us cut through modern controversies in copyright law. If I am correct in this view, any judge sufficiently familiar with property law doctrines could do better than the Supreme Court of the United States in resolving a new copyright controversy. Specifically, property law …

Digital Servitude, Julie A. Dahlstrom

Faculty Scholarship

This Article addresses the phenomenon of digital servitude—forced labor practices facilitated by information and communications technology (ICT). With advances in technology and the internet, scholars and advocates have observed the rise of technology-facilitated human trafficking. Yet, disproportionate focus has remained on online sex trafficking, including commercial sex websites and online recruitment, despite ample research on work, technology, and digital surveillance. This Article seeks to fill this gap by shedding light on how technology intersects with involuntary servitude and forced labor claims in the United States. By analyzing federal pleadings in civil and criminal labor trafficking cases, it provides new insights …

The Major Questions Doctrine, Post-Chevron?: Skidmore, Loper-Bright, And A Good-Faith Emergency Question Doctrine, Jed Handelsman Shugerman

Faculty Scholarship

When my students and colleagues fretted about Chevron's fate, I have said, "Worry less. Skid-more." Just as old Skidmore "weight" or "respect" returns post-Chevron, the new (and newer) major questions doctrine(s) survive as a reason to give less weight to an agency interpretation. This symposium essay suggests a special role for the post-Chevron major questions doctrine: an Emergency Questions Doctrine. When the executive asserts an emergency power, when the statutory basis is open-ended (often for very good reasons), majorness means less deference to simple and fast textualism, and more time for courts to engage in deeper purposivism to …

Why Did Prosecution Strengthen President Trump In The 2024 Election?, Steven Arrigg Koh

Faculty Scholarship

Why did criminal prosecution strengthen President Donald Trump's electoral prospects in the 2024 federal election? It was not supposed to be this way: after President Trump's 2024 New York state conviction, many speculated that President Trump's "felon" status would imperil his political career. In fact, the opposite occurred: federal and state criminal prosecutions reenergized President Trump's 2024 presidential candidacy. Contemporary criminal law theories-traditional individualist, expressivist, and critical-struggle to explain why. 

This Article advances a theory of criminal coalescence to explain why the Trump prosecutions led the former President to political victory. Criminal coalescence is the intensification of mass support for …

Panel Discussion: Mindfulness In The Law School Environment, Erika George, Nicky Boothe, Kellyn O. Mcgee

Faculty Scholarship

A 2016 study of 13,000 lawyers conducted by American Bar Association Commission on Lawyer Assistance Programs and the Hazelden Betty Ford Foundation found that approximately 28 percent struggle with depression, 19 percent anxiety and 23 percent stress.¹² The study found “younger lawyers in the first ten years of practice and those working in private firms experience the highest rates of problem drinking and depression.”¹³ At least one study suggests that 40-70 percent of disciplinary proceedings and malpractice claims against lawyers involve substance abuse or depression.

According to a 2016 Survey of Law Student Well-Being including over 3,300 law …

Challenging The Law, Steven Arrigg Koh

Faculty Scholarship

Frédéric Mégret’s engaging contribution, A Look Back at The Women’s Hague Peace Conference: What Contribution To International Law Today?, exposes a legal duality. On one hand, the legalist perspective: law is a closed system. From this perspective, law is objective, hard, universal, and bounded. On the other hand, the sociocultural perspective: law is a human practice. From this perspective, law is subjective, organic, particular, and porous. This Essay reads Mégret’s analysis of the 1915 International Congress of Women in The Hague as a “sociocultural challenge,” disrupting the legalist perspective on international law, war, and peace during World War I. …

What We Should Know About The Reliability Of Empirical Legal Studies, Kathryn Zeiler

Faculty Scholarship

The findings of replication studies conducted in the early 2010s led many to declare that science was in the midst of a “replication crisis.” Since then, a growing number of reforms have been proposed and tested. The field of empirical legal studies seems behind other fields such as psychology, economics, political science, medicine, biology, and others that have taken significant steps toward uncovering the general reliability of the field’s empirical work, investigating the causes of observed unreliability, and instituting and testing the effects of various reforms. The purpose of this Article is to summarize what we know about the reliability …

The Purpose And Value Of A Summer Camp For Visually Impaired Young People, Anthony J. Maher, Justin A. Haegele, David Swanston

Human Movement Studies & Special Education Faculty Publications

Empirical research documents the benefits of summer camps for young people, including disability-specific or medical-speciality residential camps. Using an ethnographic approach which utilized observation and individual and group discussions with the visually impaired young people who attended a summer camp, their parents, and school teachers who staffed the summer camp, we build on the extant research here by exploring, for the first time, the purpose and value of a summer camp for visually impaired young people. The qualitative data generated from our research were subjected to thematic analysis. We discuss the summer camp in relation to the following themes: (1) …

Differences In Prescription Drug Misuse Among U.S. Adults With And Without Disabilities, Jeanette M. Garcia, Samantha M. Ross-Cypcar, Justin A. Haegele

Human Movement Studies & Special Education Faculty Publications

Introduction

Increasing evidence suggests that adults with disabilities have higher rates of drug misuse compared to adults without disabilities, however; there is limited information on rates of commonly misused prescription drugs (e.g., stimulants, opioids, tranquilizers) to quantify the magnitude of this disparity. Thus, the purpose of this cross-sectional study is to examine and compare prevalence rates of prescription drug misuse by disability status and age group in a national sample of U.S. adults.

Methods

Data (n=47,100 adults) from the 2021 National Survey on Drug Use and Health was stratified by age group: 1) 18-29 years; 2) 30-49 years; 3) 50 …

The Complex And Marginalized Experiences Of Bipoc Trafficked Women: An Examination Of Disabilities, Aces, Discrimination, And Racism, Jacquelyn C. A. Meshelemiah, Fabian Arroyo Rojas, Hannah Ruth Steinke, Marlene Carson, Justin A. Haegele

Human Movement Studies & Special Education Faculty Publications

The purpose of this study was to examine the lived experiences and multiple identities of disabled BIPOC trafficked women. The findings from this study help to identify a carousel of victimization experienced by disabled BIPOC trafficked women, starting with adverse childhood experiences, onto trafficking victimization that differed between Black and White women, and later while seeking services. These findings highlight the need for providers and researchers to think beyond monolithic identities and consider the intersecting ways in which various forms of oppression (ableism and racism) influence the experiences of disabled trafficked BIPOC women.

Our Reflections And Concluding Thoughts, Justin A. Haegele, Wesley J. Wilson

Human Movement Studies & Special Education Faculty Publications

In this chapter, the editors provide concluding thoughts and reflections about the process of constructing this case-based learning book, and encouragement for readers to further consider ways to reflect about the stories of the authors. We reiterate the five broad reflective prompts from Chapter 2 to guide this reflection. We also share concepts related to ableism, and examples of how ableism may look and how it may inform practice. We conclude with, again, encouraging authors to think about and reflect on the stories included throughout the book, and to be mindful of ways ableism may (or may not) influence this …

Conceptualizing And Problematizing Inclusion Porn In Education Scholarship And Practice, Justin A. Haegele, Anthony J. Maher

Human Movement Studies & Special Education Faculty Publications

Discourses of inclusion are currently used without clear and consistent meaning and multiple and varied interpretations exist, therefore stunting our ability to enhance or utilize the concept in social justice and education scholarship and practice. In this article, we argue that the ambiguous, conflicting, and contested features of inclusion have opened a door for nondisabled policy makers, academics, practitioners, and other stakeholders to exploit the concept of inclusion by crafting the logics and taken-for-granted assumptions that become associated with it. Accordingly, these nondisabled stakeholders gain social, cultural, and symbolic capital in the fields that they operate, while (some) disabled students …

Development Of A Personalized Conversational Health Agent To Enhance Physical Activity For Blind And Low-Vision Individuals, Soyoung Choi, Jooyoung Seo, Ashwath Krishnan, Sanchita Kamath, Justin Haegele

Human Movement Studies & Special Education Faculty Publications

Background: With the advancements in mobile health (mHealth) technologies, sighted individuals can benefit from mobile apps and wearable devices to more easily manage their physical activity (PA) and wellness data through intuitive touch gestures and effective data visualizations. However, for blind and low-vision (BLV) individuals, these conventional interaction methods are often challenging, not only limiting their ability to use these technologies but also potentially diminishing their motivation to adopt them to support health-promoting behaviors. We aimed to develop a health monitoring application called Personalized and Conversational Health Agent (PCHA) that supports BLV individuals with self-monitoring and management of their PA …

Autistic Young Adults' Experiences And Recommendations For Strength Training, Ashlyn Barry, Justin A. Haegele, Daniel Schaefer, Kristen A. Pickett, Luis Columna

Human Movement Studies & Special Education Faculty Publications

Strength training can be a beneficial form of physical activity (PA), but little research has examined how autistic individuals experience it or what makes programs accessible and supportive. Therefore, the purpose of this study was twofold: (1) to explore autistic young adults’ experiences with strength training, and (2) examine their recommendations for designing programs that meet their needs. Thirteen autistic young adults (ages 22–25) participated in semi-structured interviews about their strength training experiences and preferences for program design. A qualitative descriptive approach with a constructivist lens guided reflexive analysis. Participants described key factors that influenced their participation in strength training, …

Green Regionalism In World Trade Law, Pasha L. Hsieh

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

Multifaceted geopolitical conflicts have led to disruptions in the trade regime and multilateral negotiations. As a paradigm shift, green regionalism has emerged as a new normative process for regional economic frameworks to integrate and operationalize environmental sustainability. The article offers the first interdisciplinary analysis of green regionalism in world trade law. It argues that green regionalism, which has evolved amid various waves of global regionalism, constructs the normative foundation for 'Trade and Sustainability 2.0'. The article employs the concept of recognition in international relations to unveil the motivations and actions of major states in catalyzing green regionalism. Legal and political …