Digital Commons Network^™

The Relevance Of Natural Language Versus Terms And Connectors Searching In Westlaw And Lexis, Amy Taylor

Scholarly Works

Thirty years have passed since a published comparison of natural language and terms and connectors searching in legal databases, and that analysis included only Westlaw. The current study compares natural language and terms and connectors searching in both Westlaw and Lexis for two hypothetical scenarios. Searchers ran four searches for each hypothetical: Lexis natural language, Westlaw natural language, Lexis terms and connectors, and Westlaw terms and connectors. The results showed no statistically significant difference between natural language and terms and connectors for either hypothetical. This suggests it may be appropriate to reduce the time and energy spent teaching law students …

Numerus Clausus No More: A Fundamental Shift In Delaware Corporate Law, Usha Rodrigues

Scholarly Works

This Essay applies Thomas Merrill and Henry Smith’s theory of numerus clausus—the idea that a limited menu of legal forms reduces transaction costs—to the world of business entities. Historically, investors had a straightforward choice: the decentralized general partnership or the centralized corporation, each with predictable governance and liability rules. Even innovations like the LLC, benefit corporation, and L3C merely expanded the list of standard options, preserving a clear, finite set of organizational forms.

But recent changes in Delaware corporate law have shattered this standardization norm. The addition of Section 122(18) to the Delaware General Corporation Law, combined with increasing reliance …

Transunion, Vermont Agency, And Statutory Damages Under Article Iii, Randy Beck

Scholarly Works

The Supreme Court concluded in TransUnion LLC v. Ramirez that a plaintiff may not sue to collect statutory damages under a statute like the Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA) simply because the defendant violated a right Congress conferred on the plaintiff. Instead, Article III requires the plaintiff to show that the statutory violation resulted in a “concrete” injury with “a ‘close relationship’ to a harm ‘traditionally’ recognized as providing a basis for a lawsuit in American courts.” The TransUnion Court made no effort to explain how its conclusion could be reconciled with Vermont Agency of Natural Resources v. United States …

Intestinal Oxygen Utilisation And Cellular Adaptation During Intestinal Ischaemia-Reperfusion Injury, Paraschos Archontakis-Barakakis, Theodoros Mavridis, David-Dimitris Chlorogiannis, Georgios Barakakis, Eleni Laou, Daniel I Sessler, George Gkiokas, Athanasios Chalkias

Faculty, Staff and Student Publications

The gastrointestinal tract can be deranged by ailments including sepsis, trauma and haemorrhage. Ischaemic injury provokes a common constellation of microscopic and macroscopic changes that, together with the paradoxical exacerbation of cellular dysfunction and death following restoration of blood flow, are collectively known as ischaemia-reperfusion injury (IRI). Although much of the gastrointestinal tract is normally hypoxemic, intestinal IRI results when there is inadequate oxygen availability due to poor supply (pathological hypoxia) or abnormal tissue oxygen use and metabolism (dysoxia). Intestinal oxygen uptake usually remains constant over a wide range of blood flows and pressures, with cellular function being substantively compromised …

Parental Sources Of Nutrition Information And Their Knowledge, Attitudes, And Behaviors: Impact On Children's Dietary Intake In Ages 2-5 – A Cross-Sectional Study, Mara O. Fiorio

UNF Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Objectives: Nutrition in early childhood is critical to long-term health outcomes and parents play a key role in shaping children’s eating habits. This study examined where U.S. parents of children aged 2–5 obtain nutrition information, source credibility, and how parental nutrition knowledge, attitudes, and behaviors (KAB) relate to children’s dietary intake.

Methods: A cross-sectional online survey was completed by 126 parents, recruited via social media and community networks using convenience sampling. The survey assessed parental sources of nutrition information, perceived trustworthiness, nutrition knowledge, feeding attitudes and behaviors, and child dietary intake. Descriptive statistics summarized demographic characteristics and source utilization. Chi-square …

What’S For Dinner? A Multi-Pronged Approach Investigating The Foraging Habits And Diet Of St. Johns River Bottlenose Dolphins (Tursiops Erebennus), Andrea Leigh Swinehart

UNF Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Wildlife population management depends on knowledge of the population’s foraging ecology. A community of resident Tamanend’s bottlenose dolphins (Tursiops erebennus) utilizes the St. Johns River (SJR) in Jacksonville, Florida, and members of the community are regularly sighted emaciated or with skin lesions. Anthropogenic disturbances may contribute to further health decline, therefore Chapter One analyzed SJR foraging dolphin group habitat use before, during, and after a large-scale dredging event known as the Jacksonville Harbor Deepening Project (JHDP). Kernel density estimates (KDEs) of foraging dolphin group sightings were generated to estimate 95% utilization distributions (i.e., foraging home ranges) for three …

The Limits Of Strategic Adaptation: Continuity And Change In German And Russian Strategic Culture, Andrew W. Rios

UNF Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This thesis paper adopts a comparative historical analytical approach to German and Russian strategic culture. It examines numerous historical, cultural, and ideational variables that have guided German and Russian strategic initiatives, particularly since the end of the Cold War. It illuminates the ways in which these factors have contributed to the diverging paths of strategic adaptation adopted by Germany and Russia since the 2022 invasion of Ukraine. Utilizing theoretical concepts from strategic culture theory, historical and sociological institutionalism, and critical juncture theory, this paper argues that the Russian invasion precipitated a fundamental shift in Germany's strategic orientation vis a vis …

The End(S) Of Bankruptcy Exceptionalism: Purdue Pharma And The Problem Of Social Debt, Pamela Foohey, Jonathan C. Lipson

Scholarly Works

The Supreme Court’s recent 5-4 decision in the controversial chapter 11 bankruptcy reorganization of opioid-maker Purdue Pharma ends the use of nonconsensual third-party “releases,” which discharge (eliminate) liabilities of non-debtors who may share liability with a corporate debtor. Although the majority opinion is correct that the Bankruptcy Code does not permit this, it failed to recognize the problematic exceptionalism of the lower courts which approved those releases or the “social” qualities of Purdue Pharma’s mass tort liability.

Bankruptcy exceptionalism has been a contested concept since it emerged over fifteen years ago, and reflects a willingness to bend the rule of …

What's In A Name? Policing, Juliet., Shanée Brown

Scholarly Works

Child welfare" and "child protection" are misnomers. These terms do not accurately depict the investigatory nature of the system purported to help families, or at the very least, save endangered children. Contrary to public opinion, the "child welfare system" comprises of state actors who police parents and children. It is the naming of this system that convinces the public that these agencies are excised from the category of law enforcement, persuading many that the agencies engage in social work and not police work. Calling the system what it really is-family policing-is a step toward achieving justice for families adversely impacted …

The Regulation Of Presidential Elections, Lori A. Ringhand

Scholarly Works

There is an unresolved dispute lingering just beneath the surface of a host of laws regulating our elections: does Congress have power under Articles I and II of the Constitution to legislate the nuts-and-bolts rules governing presidential elections? The issue exists because of a textual gap in congressional authority. Article 1 section 4 of the Constitution gives Congress the power to override a state's choices about the "times, places, and manner" of congressional elections held in the state. Article II section 1 gives the legislature of each state power to determine the “manner” in which its presidential electors are appointed, …

Global Tax Wars In The Digital Era, Assaf Harpaz

Scholarly Works

The digital economy fundamentally disrupts international tax principles that rely on physical presence. When a business earns income abroad, the country of residence (where the taxpayer resides) and the country of source (where income is generated) both have legitimate, competing claims to tax that income. The international tax system tends to favor residence-based taxation. The source country has the right to tax business profits only if the enterprise carries on a permanent establishment within its borders, which typically requires physical presence. The permanent establishment standard becomes flawed in a digital economy where profit shifting practices are abundant and businesses no …

The Law Of Digital Resurrection, Victoria J. Haneman

Scholarly Works

The digital right to be dead has yet to be recognized as an important legal right. Artificial intelligence, augmented reality, and nanotechnology have progressed to the point that personal data can be used to resurrect the deceased in digital form with appearance, voice, emotion, and memory recreated to allow interaction with a digital app, chat bot, or avatar that may be indistinguishable from that with a living person. Users may now have a completely immersive experience simply by loading the personal data of the deceased into a neural network to create a chatbot that inherits features and idiosyncrasies of the …

Charting New Frontiers: A Legal Literature Review Of Social Entrepreneurship And Impact Investing 2018–2023, Anne M. Tucker

Scholarly Works

This Article surveys 177 articles published in U.S. law reviews and journals between 2018–2023 that contribute to the fields of social enterprise, social finance and impact investing. The Article extends our earlier legal literature review of the same fields from 2007-2017.Our collective 17-year review of this span of legal literature documents the legal issues examined by scholars with respect to the development of sophisticated alternative business forms, like the Delaware Public Benefit Corporation; the growth in impact investing; the enduring academic interest in corporate purpose; and the effects that developments related to ESG and corporate sustainability are having on the …

Ai Artists On The Stand: Bias Against Artificial Intelligence-Generated Works In Copyright Law, W. Michael Schuster, Joseph J. Avery

Scholarly Works

Generative artificial intelligence (AI) is revolutionizing the creation of art, literature, and music, challenging the boundaries of intellectual property law. To date, scholars have primarily focused on AI's authorship/entity status and the regulation of its use, overshadowing a critical issue: how AI's involvement in creative processes influences legal judgments in copyright disputes. Our empirical research reveals systemic bias against AI-generated works in such legal matters. In our studies, participants read about a company that had hired either a human designer (condition one) or a generative AI art system (condition two) to produce works of art, and those works of art …

Absolutely Unnecessary Immunity, Eileen R. Prescott

Scholarly Works

Prosecutors, like judges, cannot be sued for their professional misconduct in most jurisdictions. As long as their actions are sufficiently tied to their job duties, their actual malice does not matter, even if they had demonstrable malice-a prosecutor could bring baseless charges against an ex-spouse specifically to harass them, with absolute immunity from suit. This immunity allows prosecutors to abuse the power of their office without civil recourse. In theory, absolute immunity aims to protect the office by resolving cases simply and quickly, but in reality, courts get bogged down litigating whether a prosecutor's specific action was sufficiently tied to …

Cliff Running, William Ortman, Dov Fox

Scholarly Works

Professionals must at times make snap judgments that have profound consequences. Does a doctor perform an otherwise forbidden abortion to preserve a patient’s failing health? Does a police officer fire at a suspect pointing an unidentified metal object? The criminal law tells these professionals: Don’t intervene unless the danger is serious and the risk is imminent. But it offers little to guide that determination beyond: Be reasonable. Yet the “right” choice—the one that’s legally safe—often resembles the “wrong” one: a felony punishable by decades in prison. These ambiguous regimes operate as liability cliffs that professionals are forced to traverse at …

Being There: Perils Of Disembodied Mediation, Robert Mcniff

Scholarly Works

The article examines the rise of online mediation, particularly accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic, and critiques its limitations compared to in-person mediation. Drawing on 20th-century philosophical, psychological, and sociological thought, the analysis argues that online mediation diminishes the embodied, emotional, and intersubjective dimensions of human interaction, which are critical for empathy, moral agency, and meaningful dispute resolution. While online mediation offers convenience, it risks dehumanizing the process by reducing participants to disembodied images, thereby undermining the unique strengths of mediation as a holistic and empathetic alternative to legal adjudication.

Law School Veterans Clinics: Helping Veterans, Training Students, Improving The System, Alexander W. Scherr

Scholarly Works

This essay makes the case for law schools to create clinics and externship courses that address the needs of veterans. Veterans legal work offers excellent opportunities to represent individual veterans to obtain the benefits they earned through service to our country. At the same time, veterans clinic work can enlist students in systemic advocacy that changes how institutions address veterans' needs through appellate, administrative, and class action advocacy. Law students who work in veterans clinics develop skills they can readily transfer to other practice areas while working closely with clients and developing their professional identities. Finally, veterans clinics help law …

Business Risk, Capital Markets, And Sustainable Companies, Christopher Bruner

Scholarly Works

Corporate sustainability is inherently bound up with corporate risk, and particularly with risk-taking incentives of various corporate actors – including directors and officers who manage the business, and shareholders who can exert pressure upon corporate governance in various ways. This article sets out a framework for thinking about corporate risk-taking incentives and how they might be reformed to curb excessive risk and externalization of costs, thereby improving corporate sustainability.

Corporate Personhood, Corporate Rights, And The Contingency Of Corporate Law, Christopher Bruner

Scholarly Works

Corporate personhood and corporate rights are co-constitutive in nature, meaning that they are mutually constructed – there is no singular, one-way causal path between a conception of corporate personhood and a conception of corporate rights. Consequently, modes of reasoning that purport to deduce the substance and extent of corporate rights from the mere fact of corporate personhood are logically circular. Although the relationship between corporate personhood and corporate rights is real and significant, this relationship cannot, in and of itself, comprehensively specify the content of corporate rights; their substance can only be specified by reference to external normative criteria. The …

Resisting Federal Preemption, Desiree Leclercq

Scholarly Works

One of the most pressing issues in constitutional law is how states may—and should—resist federal preempting laws and policies with which they disagree. It’s a problem faced by red and blue states alike in an age of extreme political polarization. Despite having legitimate reasons to resist the federal government on matters that affect local citizens and interests, states seem to have few options. Conventional wisdom is that they engage in either direct resistance through litigation that challenges the constitutionality of preempting laws, or evasion by quietly enacting arguably non-compliant laws hoping to avoid enforcement. Both strategies adopt a belligerent stance …

Perfecting Our Submission? Mann And Trump, Ruffin And Roberts, Joseph S. Miller

Scholarly Works

Presidential power is vast, both under law and in practice. Who holds presidents accountable, and by what means? Courts wrestle with these intertwined questions of power and accountability. The majority opinion in the 2024 presidential immunity case, Trump v. United States, is eerily resonant, rhetorically, with a notorious judgment enhancing one person’s power over others by shielding that power utterly from criminal-law accountability. That judgment, from 1829, is Judge Thomas Ruffin’s infamous slavery-law opinion for the North Carolina Supreme Court in State v. Mann. I juxtapose the two opinions, which share jarringly similar claims about the nature of power, rule, …

International Arbitration And Conflicts Of Law: Three Hard Questions For Symeon, Peter B. Rutledge

Scholarly Works

The presence of a foreign element in a legal relationship inevitably introduces intricate choice-of-law issues. This postulate holds especially true in the context of international arbitration. Arbitration involves an exceptional degree of procedural freedom (including over the choice of the applicable law) and a distinctive conflict-of-laws regime that may be unbound from a particular national legal system. This article examines several choice-of-law issues arising in the context of international arbitration. In particular, Section I of this article addresses whether the United Nations Convention on Recognition and Enforcement of Foreign Arbitral Awards, otherwise known as the New York Convention, is selfexecuting …

Copyright And Artificial Intelligence, Part 2: Copyrightability

Copyright, Fair Use, Scholarly Communication, etc.

This report by the United States Copyright Office addresses the legal and policy issues related to artificial intelligence (AI) and copyright as outlined in the Office’s August 2023 Notice of Inquiry (NOI).

The report will be published in several parts each one addressing a different topic. This part addresses the copyrightability of works created using generative AI. The first part, published in 2024, addresses the topic of digital replicas—the use of digital technology to realistically replicate an individual’s voice or appearance. A subsequent part will turn to the training of AI models on copyrighted works, licensing considerations, and allocation of …

After Courts: Democratizing Statutory Law, Ryan D. Doerfler, Samuel Moyn

Michigan Law Review

In Federalist No. 78, Alexander Hamilton argued for locating interpretive authority over law separately from those institutions tasked with formulating it. Hamilton’s vision, never accurate as a description of American practice, has not been credible for a long time. To the extent enormous power is still allocated to judges, our legal institutions have been out of step with our legal theory, which has long regarded them as political actors and policymakers. More practically, every term it is clearer and clearer that the role of the Supreme Court in statutory cases (including checking administrative rulemaking and other processes) is, if anything, …

As The Rainstorm Continues, Must We Throw Out The Raincoat Too? Private Enforcement Of Section 2 Of The Voting Rights Act, Derek A. Zeigler

Michigan Law Review

For almost six decades, the Voting Rights Act (VRA) has been a bulwark against the worst impulses of government actors who would rather manipulate the rules to stay in power than vigorously compete on the battleground of ideas. In the modern era, the U.S. Supreme Court has routinely weakened the Act’s protections, including its core remaining enforcement provision, Section 2, which protects voters from racially discriminatory policies. Today, Section 2’s continued vitality is at risk. In November 2023, the Eighth Circuit held that Section 2 lacks an implied private right of action—a decision at odds with three of its sister …

Standalone Municipal Liability, Avery Figo Comar

Michigan Law Review

Under Monell v. Department of Social Services, municipalities may not be held liable for constitutional violations attributable to an errant employee’s actions. Instead, Monell dictates that municipal liability is appropriate only when the municipality itself is “the moving force” behind the constitutional violation. The Fourth and Fifth Circuits, based on a flawed reading of the Supreme Court case City of Los Angeles v. Heller, adopt an inapposite approach to the relationship between municipal and individual liability. Although every other circuit allows municipal claims to proceed absent any individual claim arising from the same underlying facts, the Fourth and …

Front Matter

Michigan Law Review

Front Matter for Volume 123, Issue 6 of Michigan Law Review

Younger And Older Abstention, Fred O. Smith Jr.

Michigan Law Review

When victims of systemic rights violations in state criminal proceedings seek federal court relief, governmental defendants often ask federal courts to abstain for reasons of federalism. These arguments frequently disregard the Supreme Court’s emphasis that abstention is a narrow exception to federal courts’ duty to exercise jurisdiction. Lower federal courts are increasingly employing a form of “free-floating federalism,” diverging from the Supreme Court’s careful balance between comity and individual rights. This has led to lower courts’ significant expansion of criminal abstention doctrine, leaving severe irreparable harm unaddressed in an increasingly broad range of settings, such as pretrial detention and child …

Spending Clause Standing, Edward Webre Plaut

Michigan Law Review

The Biden Administration’s American Rescue Plan Act allotted almost $220 billion to state, local, and tribal governments to help combat the COVID-19 pandemic. This money, the Coronavirus State and Local Fiscal Recovery Fund, gave recipients wide spending discretion to address their struggling economies. But the legislation had one key limitation: Recipients could not use the money to “directly or indirectly” cut their taxes. If a recipient violated this “Offset Provision,” the Department of the Treasury might recoup the funds.

Nearly two-dozen states alleged that the Offset Provision was unduly coercive and ambiguous, violating the Spending Clause. However, with no threatened …