Digital Commons Network^™

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 …

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. …

Presuming Justice For Temp Workers, Andrew Elmore, Kati Griffith, Sachin S. Pandya

Faculty Scholarship

Workers need to know who their employers are. Who is responsible for remedying workplace dangers? Who can they sue for restitution when they are discriminated against at work, or do not get paid for all of the hours they work? Temp agency contracts complicate these seemingly simple questions. In workers’ rights cases involving “temps,” courts and administrative agencies often engage in protracted, resource-intensive joint employer inquiries to decide whether the temp agency clients share in employer obligations and liabilities with the agencies. This is the case even when the temp agency client has the key markers of an “employer,” such …

Under What Circumstances Is "Caste" Likely To Be Useful As An Analytic Concept (And Should We Care)?, Sanford V. Levinson, Robert L. Tsai

Faculty Scholarship

This Essay is the product of the 2025 “Constitutional Law Schmooze,” where academics from a variety of disciplines and from all over the country meet to discuss a common topic of constitutional law chosen by the moderator. This year’s topic was “caste.” The two of us, having written independent “tickets” of admission for the schmooze—i.e., short essays setting out our tentative thoughts about “caste”—turned out to be relative skeptics about the value of the term for lawyers. We are certainly not hostile to those who differ with us. This should be regarded as a “friendly dissent,” as distinguished, say, from …

How Not To Democratize Algorithms, Ngozi Okidegbe

Faculty Scholarship

A growing set of jurisdictions has embraced “consultative algorithmic governance,” the idea that community members, particularly racially and otherwise politically marginalized ones, should be involved in the processes by which state institutions procure, construct, implement, and oversee artificially intelligent algorithms employed in public sector decision-making. Consultative processes range from public hearings that provide communities with an opportunity to comment about anticipated algorithmic use to community advisory boards that help public officials evaluate the impact of current or future algorithmic use.

This Article argues that consultative algorithmic governance is critically flawed and then builds upon this critique to point toward a …

Response: Work And Home, Katharine B. Silbaugh

Faculty Scholarship

The idea of work, as it pertains to a place called home, as distinct from the market, has engaged and perplexed scholars for generations. Work in the home raises complicated issues that have accordingly drawn the focus of generations of scholars, from Charlotte Perkins Gilman and the material feminists of the late nineteenth century¹ to historians of labor such as Eileen Boris² and of law like Reva Siegel,³ from legal scholars like Fran Olson, Dorothy Roberts, and Robert Ellickson⁴ to social theorists like Friedrick Engels⁵ and architectural historians like Dolores Hayden,⁶ to name just …

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 …

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, …

Self-Regulated Strategy Development (Srsd) In Timed And Untimed Writing Tasks For Primary Learners, Candice Miller

Theses: Doctorates and Masters

This PhD dissertation describes an action research study focused on implementing the Self Regulated Strategy Development (SRSD) model to teach writing to address the challenges faced by Year 5 students in persuasive writing, particularly under timed conditions, and decreasing motivation aligned with national trends and school performance data. The aim of the current study was to enhance students' persuasive writing skills, writing attitudes, and self-efficacy and to examine the social validity of SRSD in an Australian classroom. The study specifically focused on timed and untimed writing conditions to examine the efficacy of the implemented SRSD model. The research employed a …

Using Selective Lip Repositioning Surgery To Correct Gummy Smile And Improve Facial Asymmetry, Ting-Shao Lee, Chun-Ming Chen, Pao-Chang Chiang, Yen-Wen Huang

Journal of Dental Sciences

No abstract provided.

Contemporary Approaches To Orthodontic Treatment In Complex Mixed Dentition Cases: A Comparison Of Clear Aligners And Traditional Fixed Appliances, Hsin-Chung Cheng, Daniel Chen, Pyi Win

Journal of Dental Sciences

Abstract This study examined orthodontic treatment strategies for patients in the mixed dentition phase, with a focus on the advantages and limitations of clear aligners and traditional fixed appliances in addressing complex tooth movements. Herein, three cases were reported to illustrate the complementary strengths of these treatment modalities. In Case 1, presurgical orthodontics for a patient with a cleft lip and palate was performed using clear aligners, resulting in successful rotation correction and optimal alignment. In Case 2, a noninvasive approach involving a transpalatal arch and fixed appliances was used to manage a high labially impacted central incisor without the …

Analyzing The Performance Of Multimodal Large Language Models On Visually-Based Questions In The Japanese National Examination For Dental Technicians, Yuichi Mine, Tsuyoshi Taji, Shota Okazaki, Saori Takeda, Tzu-Yu Peng, Saiji Shimoe, Masato Kaku, Hiroki Nikawa, Naoya Kakimoto, Takeshi Murayama

Journal of Dental Sciences

Abstract Background/purpose Large language models (LLMs) offer promising applications in dentistry, but their performance in specialized, image-rich contexts such as dental technology examinations remains uncertain. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the accuracy of three multimodal LLMs, ChatGPT-4o (4o), OpenAI o1 (o1), and Claude 3.5 Sonnet (Sonnet), when presented with questions from the Japanese National Examination for Dental Technicians. Materials and methods A total of 240 multiple-choice questions from 2022 to 2024 theory sections of the exam were used. Each question, including its accompanying figures or images where applicable, was presented to the three LLMs in a zero-shot …

Performance Of Chatgpt-4, Gemini, And Deepseek-V3 On Answering The Multiple Choice Questions From Taiwan National Dental Technician Licensing Examinations And Their Self-Learning Abilities Over A Three-Week Period, Chung-Pin Chiang, Ching-Yi Huang, Yi-Pang Lee, Andy Sun

Journal of Dental Sciences

Abstract Background/purpose Large language models (LLMs) can help the students to learn specific dental subjects and thus can be used as educational support tools for dental students. This study evaluated whether LLMs could correctly answer the multiple-choice questions (MCQs) selected from the 2023 Taiwan national dental technician licensing examination (TNDTLE) and whether the LLMs had the self-learning ability to improve their performance on correctly answering the exam questions over a three-week period. Materials and methods Three different LLMs, ChatGPT-4, Gemini, and DeepSeek-V3, were used to answer the 194 text-based MCQs selected from the 2023 TNDTLE and the initial accuracy rates …

Benchmarking Multimodal Large Language Models On The Dental Licensing Examination: Challenges With Clinical Image Interpretation, Yuichi Mine, Shota Okazaki, Tsuyoshi Taji, Hiroyuki Kawaguchi, Naoya Kakimoto, Takeshi Murayama

Journal of Dental Sciences

Abstract Background /purpose: Large language models (LLMs) have been studied in text-based healthcare tasks, but their performance in multimodal dental applications has not yet been fully explored. This study evaluated the performance of four multimodal LLMs on dental licensing examination questions with both text-only and visually-based components. Materials and methods Four multimodal LLMs, ChatGPT-4o (4o), OpenAI o1 (o1), Claude 3.5 Sonnet (Sonnet), and Gemini 2.0 Flash Thinking Experimental (Gemini), were tested on 353 questions from the 2024 Japanese National Dental Examination, including 204 text-only and 149 visually-based questions spanning 17 dental specialties. A zero-shot approach was used without prompt engineering. …

Artificial Intelligence & Criminal Justice: Cases And Commentary, Benjamin Perrin

All Faculty Publications

When I was given the chance to develop a seminar this year at UBC’s Peter A. Allard School of Law, I jumped at the opportunity to develop something new and engaging. After brainstorming ideas with students, it quickly became evident that there was substantial interest and enthusiasm for a seminar on the growing integration of artificial intelligence and the criminal justice system.

Embarking on this journey has been a steep learning curve for me as my students and I worked together to shape the course along with input from generative AI tools like ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity, along with open-source …

Nutritional Management Of Low Birth Weight And Preterm Infants In Low- And Low Middle-Income Countries, Maha Azhar, Rahima Yasin, Sawera Hanif, Sharib Afzal Bughio, Jai K. Das, Zulfiqar Ahmed Bhutta

Institute for Global Health and Development

Introduction: Preterm and low birth weight (LBW) infants are at an increased risk of morbidity and mortality compared with their term counterparts, with more than 20 million LBW infants born each year, the majority in lower middle-income countries (LMICs). Given the increased vulnerability and higher nutritional needs of these infants, optimizing feeding strategies may play a crucial role in improving their health outcomes.
Methods: We updated evidence of Every Newborn Series published in The Lancet 2014 by identifying relevant systematic reviews, extracting low-income country (LIC) and LMIC data, and conducting revised meta-analysis for these contexts.
Results: We found 15 reviews; …

Sharing The Tuna Platter: A Uniform System Of Assessment For Clinical Education, Melina Healey

Scholarly Works

Legal education’s current methods for the measurement of student achievement in clinics, and the measurement of a clinic course’s effectiveness, are often unsatisfying, unreliable, and incomplete. This article presents a methodology for uniform and integrated systems of assessment across clinical programs that can provide more reliable evaluation of student progress and achievement, and better feedback to clinical programs on their effectiveness. It also shares how Touro University Jacob D. Fuchsberg Law Center’s Clinical Program applied these strategies with both success and challenges.

You Get The Jury You Get And You Don’T Throw A Fit, Taurus Myhand

Scholarly Works

The proliferation of deepfake videos has resulted in rapid improvements in the technology used to create them. Although the use of fake videos and images is not new, advances in artificial intelligence have made deepfakes easier to make and harder to detect. Basic human perception is no longer sufficient to detect deepfakes. Yet, under the current construction of the Federal Rules of Evidence, trials judges are expected to do just that. Trial judges face a daunting challenge when applying the current evidence authentication standards to video evidence in this new reality of widely available deepfake videos. This article examines the …

A Conservative Attack On Urbanism - And Why It Fails, Michael Lewyn

Scholarly Works

No abstract provided.

The Influence Of Maternal Size/Age Effects On The Physiological Responses Of Adult Female Gopher Rockfish (Sebastes Carnatus) To Ocean Acidification And Hypoxia, Dylan H. Sarish

Master's Theses

Climate change is rapidly reshaping the chemistry of the ocean. Fishes living in California coastal waters are experiencing increased ocean acidification and hypoxia (OAH) due to more frequent and intense upwelling. Nearshore rockfish may be particularly threatened by these conditions due to their long generational times. However, it is unknown how OAH may impact maternal physiology and reproduction in these viviparous fish. To understand the physiological effects of OAH during gestation, adult female gopher rockfish, Sebastes carnatus, were exposed to a variety of combined OAH stress treatments during different gestational stages. Routine metabolic rate (RMR), maximum metabolic rate (MMR), blood …

Essays On Robust Inference Under Multiway Clustering, Jiahao Lin

Electronic Theses & Dissertations (2024 - present)

The first chapter studies wild bootstrap-based inference for regression models with multiway clustering. Our proposed methods are multiway counterparts to the (one-way) wild cluster bootstrap approach introduced by Cameron et al. (2008). We establish the validity of our methods for studentized statistics. Theoretical results are provided, accommodating arbitrary serial dependence in the common time effects – an aspect excluded by existing two-way bootstrap-based approaches. Simulation experiments document the potential for enhanced inference with our novel approaches. We illustrate the effectiveness of the methods by revisiting an empirical study involving multiway clustered and serially correlated data.

The second chapter studies jackknife …

Calibration Of A Low-Cost Air Quality Sensor Package Integrated Into The New York State Mesonet, Ellie Hojeily

Electronic Theses & Dissertations (2024 - present)

The University at Albany designed and manufactured 59 low-cost air quality sensor packages to continuously measure PM₂.₅, CO, O₃, NO₂, and NO at 38 New York State Mesonet (NYSM) sites located in the New York City Metropolitan Area. Prior to use for monitoring, low-cost sensors require calibration to correct for environmental sensitivities. Calibration models can be developed using data collected from co-location periods in which low-cost sensors are installed at sites with Federal Reference Methods and/or Federal Equivalent Methods instruments. In this study, packages were periodically co-located (calibrated) for 18 to 162 days at the New York State Department of …

Sauce For The Gander: The False Symmetry Of Myths And Stereotypes Against The Accused In Sexual Assault Trials, Janine Benedet

All Faculty Publications

As sexual assault laws evolved to be expressed in sex-neutral language, so too have arguments relating to myths and stereotypes in the context of sexual offences. This article evaluates the argument that myths and stereotypes, traditionally a reflection of systemic discrimination against female complainants in rape trials, also operate against male accused. Understood correctly, this trend repackages anti-feminist backlash to early equality reform efforts, ultimately working to revive the belief that women’s accusations of sexual assault are often false. The Supreme Court of Canada’s decision in R v Kruk affirms that this historical context matters when it comes to claims …

The Future We Imagine Together: The Role Of Collaborative Imagination In Our Social, Emotional, And Creative Lives, Zoë Fowler

Electronic Theses & Dissertations (2024 - present)

Humans are profoundly social: we play together, solve problems together, and work towards goals together. In doing so, we also imagine together. Yet cognitive research on imagination has largely remained focused on how an individual imagines the future, with little consideration of whether imagination could take place beyond the individual. This dissertation introduces a novel framework through which imagination is understood as a collaborative, interpersonally distributed process in which individuals co-create hypothetical events outside the present moment. Across six studies, this work investigates both the features of co-imagined events, and the potential functions co-imagination may have in social cognition. To …

The Chironian 2025, New York Medical College

The Chironian

The Chironian is distributed to a readership of 16,000 faculty, alumni and employees of New York Medical College, government and community leaders, affiliated hospitals and selected media. Each issue is carefully crafted to provide a balance of articles on cutting-edge research, personality profiles, student accomplishments and alumni news from all five schools on the NYMC campus. Inquiries can be sent to [email protected].

Thermal Regimes Of Beaver-Impacted Stream Reaches In The Tualatin River Basin, Oregon, United States, Miles Mayer, Heejun Chang

Geography Faculty Publications and Presentations

As beavers are increasingly used in stream restoration, interest in their potential to mitigate stream degradation has grown. However, the impacts of beaver dams on stream temperature remain inconsistent across studies, often due to differences in spatial scale and methodology. We investigated summer thermal regimes at multiple spatial scales in three beaver-impacted streams within the Tualatin River Basin, Oregon, using fiber-optic distributed temperature sensing. Substantial variability in thermal regimes was observed among the three stream reaches and around individual beaver dams within each reach. This variability was primarily influenced by geomorphic changes in stream depth associated with beaver dams and …

Originalisms' Indifferences?: Friendly Amendments To Sherif Girgis's "Originalism's Difference?", Jed Handelsman Shugerman

Faculty Scholarship

Sherif Girgis’s Lecture Originalism’s Differences? reflects on what had differentiated originalism from other methods and why those differences are eroding. The differences are (or were): (1) avoiding “ostentatious moral reasoning”; (2) relatedly, constraining judges by requiring originalist historical evidence (i.e., tying judges’ hands); and (3) engaging historical research with more “intensity.” Girgis rightly criticizes the Court for engaging in the same kind of flexibility and creativity that originalists had long rejected.

In this commentary, I highlight our areas of agreement and offer friendly amendments. My title takes Girgis’s title two or three steps further: I use an “s-apostrophe” because I …

Scrutinizing Transgender Healthcare Bans Through Intersex Exceptions, Holning Lau, Barbara A. Fedders

Faculty Publications

Major professional medical organizations—for example, the American Academy of Pediatrics, American Medical Association, and Endocrine Society—consider gender-affirming care to be safe and, at times, essential for vulnerable transgender youth. Despite these benefits, 26 states have banned gender-affirming care for minors. Proponents of these bans raise concerns about potential medical harms, the irreversibility of treatments, and the adequacy of informed consent.

Every state ban includes an exception for so-called gender-normalizing surgeries, which are performed on intersex infants to conform their bodies to socially constructed expectations about the male/female binary. The procedures are rarely medically necessary, but proponents of the surgeries contend …

The Art Belongs To The Artists, Deborah M. Weissman, Louis A. Pérez

Faculty Publications

This Article examines the rights of detainees interned at the Guantánamo Bay Naval Station to claim ownership of cultural work produced during their imprisonment. Through a series of arbitrary policies, the U.S. government alternately punished detainees for creating works of art, confiscated paintings and drawings, and otherwise denied detainees’ rights to control their creative works. This Article suggests the need to understand these policies as acts akin to plunder—that is, as a practice long associated with colonialism as a means through which the artifacts of the material culture of conquered peoples were expropriated and claimed as “trophies” of conquest. It …

The Nuances Of Prosecutorial Nonenforcement, Meighan R. Parsh, Carissa Byrne Hessick

Faculty Publications

The academic literature on prosecutors is divided: Some commentors believe that prosecutors should more aggressively use their ability to decline to bring charges, decreasing the overall number of criminal cases and helping to address the problem of mass incarceration. Others believe that broad prosecutorial nonenforcement poses significant risks to our constitutional order and public safety. While the visibility of this debate has increased—spilling over from the pages of law reviews into political campaigns and headlines—the terms of this debate are at times unclear. Prosecutorial nonenforcement is a multifaceted phenomenon, and discussions about its costs and benefits can obscure necessary tradeoffs …