Digital Commons Network^™

Reframing Narratives: Remedies For Improved Human Trafficking Coverage, Stefanie Henriques

The Pegasus Review: UCF Undergraduate Research Journal

The global rise in human trafficking is not receiving adequate media attention. While newspaper coverage of the topic has increased, current research argues that the issue is framed with a lack of diversity, limiting audience understanding of its complexity. Some researchers also note that coverage disproportionately focuses on sex trafficking, with minimal attention directed to other forms of trafficking such as the labor or organ trade. This paper conducts a narrative literature analysis of media research on human trafficking, drawing on framing theory to identify dominant frames in media messaging and synthesize cross-cultural factors that impact how the issue is …

A Fission Decision: The Case For Extending Diablo Canyon’S Nuclear Operation, Isabelle Tyler

San Diego Journal of Climate & Energy Law

This Article examines the regulatory decisions and policy debates surrounding Diablo Canyon in the wake of recent legislation aimed at extending the plant’s operational timeline. Presenting a balanced analysis of the arguments both for and against the closure, this Article explores how the new bill reshapes the conversation around the plant’s future. While proponents of the shutdown emphasize safety concerns and the goal of an all-renewable grid, this Article argues that closing Diablo Canyon would hinder California’s decarbonization efforts and jeopardize energy reliability amid increasing power shortages and extreme weather events. By analyzing legal precedents, energy data, and environmental impacts, …

International Commitments Of Japan’S Prefectures With Foreign States: Empirical Patterns, Authority, And Legal Nature, Yuhei Matsuyama

Brooklyn Journal of International Law

Under international law, sovereign states are the primary subjects of rights and obligations and possess the authority to conclude treaties. Domestic constitutions typically allocate foreign affairs powers to national governments. Nonetheless, subnational governments—including prefectures—regularly engage in international activities. In some federal systems, constituent units are expressly authorized by their constitutions to conclude international agreements. By contrast, the Constitution of Japan vests foreign affairs authority exclusively in the national executive and is silent on the authority of prefectural governments. This Article uncovers and analyzes approximately 180 previously unexamined international commitments concluded by Japanese prefectural governments with foreign states, identified through information …

A Systematic Review Of Restorative Justice In Criminal Contexts, Sigifredo Castell Britton

Journal of Social, Behavioral, and Health Sciences

Restorative justice has gained growing attention within criminal justice reform as a practical alternative to approaches centered only on punishment. It emphasizes accountability, dialogue, and community reintegration, offering a different way to understand how change in behavior takes place. This systematic review examined quantitative evidence from 34 studies, selected from an initial pool of 112 records identified through databases such as Google Scholar, ProQuest, JSTOR, and institutional repositories. The studies assessed a range of interventions, including victim-offender mediation, diversion programs, community conferencing, and in-prison initiatives, which allowed comparison across different settings and populations. Across these studies, 79.4% reported statistically significant …

Aid And Assist Cases In Multnomah County: An Exploration Of Ors 161.370, Savannah Jurasek

Dissertations and Theses

Individuals with severe mental illness (SMI) are highly overrepresented in jails. In Oregon, these individuals can be eligible for what is referred to as the aid and assist process (ORS 161.370) which is designed to facilitate restorative care in efforts to ensure that vulnerable individuals can rationally participate in their criminal proceedings. However, continuous escalation in aid and assist orders (109.3% between 2011-2025) has led to strain on the Oregon State Hospital, the primary care facility for this population. As a consequence, defendants with SMI are spending unnecessary time in custody, despite hospitalization admission guidelines governed by previously decided case …

Swift Injustice: How Government Proffers Compromise Pretrial Liberty, Lori Whitlock

Tulsa Law Review

No abstract provided.

Scaffolded Reflection And Research Assignment For Sociology 101, Sara Martucci

Open Educational Resources

Dr. Sara Martucci created these assignments as part of a funded project focused on converting more sections of high-enrollment foundational courses to use Open Educational Resources and Pedagogy.

Controversy Associated With Red-Light Traffic Cameras, Alan D. Smith, Anna Abdulmanova

Atlantic Marketing Association Proceedings

No abstract provided.

High Altitude Lora Networking (Halon) For Crisis Communications, Sahana Prasanna Chandramohan, Vikram Rakesh Jangid

Interdisciplinary Design Senior Theses

Natural disasters, infrastructure failure, and politically motivated internet shutdowns can severely disrupt communication systems, preventing affected populations from coordinating emergency response, accessing information, and contacting others. Existing communication infrastructure relies heavily on centralized networks, fixed power availability, and costly deployments, making such systems vulnerable during periods of crisis. To alleviate these problems we propose High Altitude Long Range Networking (HALoN) for Crisis Communications, a rapidly deployable decentralized wireless mesh network designed for operation in infrastructure-denied environments. HALoN utilizes low-power long range (LoRa) communication and high-altitude deployment platforms such as balloons, drones and tall structures, among others, to create temporary communication …

How Do Peer Support Officers Perceive Support Provided To Officers Involved In Critical Incidents, Jodi Vanderwier

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

No abstract provided.

New American Women (Immigrants And Refugees) In Utah, Robyn C. Blackburn, Vanessa Tuttle, Yvette Young, Susan R. Madsen

Marketing and Strategy Faculty Publications

Year after year, the topic of immigration features centrally in US public policy discussions and debates. This focus is not surprising, given that the US is home to more immigrants than any other country in the world. While policy discussions often focus on immigrants who lack legal authorization to be in the US, most immigrants are legal residents (77.0%).¹ An immigrant is any person who lives in a country that is not their country of usual residence or nationality.² The US immigrant population includes naturalized citizens (i.e., those who entered the US legally and became citizens), lawful permanent …

Data-Driven Predictive Control For Uav Interception Via Koopman-Based Lifting, Sanjay Maharjan, Darren Johnson, Animesh Bangal, Yousuf Atteia, Tariq Hlayel, Adrian Stein

2026 LSU Symposium on Control, Learning, and Intelligent Systems

No abstract provided.

Designing Cost-Effective Quadrupedal Service Robots For Disability Aid, Kieran Pazmino, Akira Zone, Ryan Toy, Cyrus Wong

Interdisciplinary Design Senior Theses

With aging populations and the increased rate of disability diagnosis in the United States, the economy has taken on an elevated toll, as fewer are able to work, including caretakers. Give the rise in unpaid time put in by the average caretaker, it is necessary to determine ways of reducing this burden, for the caretaker and also for elderly and disabled people. Individuals who service dogs for their daily lives face substantial financial and personal responsibilities, on top of their own medical and living costs. This project proposed a wheeled quadrupedal robotic service dog, designed primarily for mobility assistance. In …

Neal Miller V. Joseph Wolk

2026 Decisions

USDC for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania

Holistic Strategies For Optimizing Municipal It Operations And Cost Efficiency, Joseph Yazdanpanahi

Certified Public Manager® Applied Research

Municipalities work to deliver secure and impactful IT (information technology) services while often working within tight budget constraints. To address this problem, this article offers an experience-based and comprehensive framework to optimize municipal IT operations. It emphasizes leveraging automation, streamlining hardware and software management, and forging strategic partnerships to drive cost savings and efficiency gains. Designed to equip municipal IT leaders with practical tools and insights, this article aims to help modernize IT processes.

Bridgeide, Maya Srimal, Jeshwin Prince, Arnav Gupta, Will Zumbolo

Computer Science and Engineering Senior Theses

Anyone who has done a group project knows the pattern: the first meeting burns an hour on logistics—which document to use, who has access, why the formatting broke on one laptop—before real work begins. In computer science courses that gap is worse. Students must install the right compiler, runtime, and libraries on their own machines; a four-person team on four different laptops can lose the first week to setup alone. Instructors who want to review submissions often download every zip from the learning management system and run each one locally. Existing tools solve pieces of this puzzle—real-time document editing, browser-based …

Blurred Lines: Did Booker Change Federal Sentencing Outcomes?, Hugh M. Mundy

Pace Law Review

This article considers whether United States v. Booker, the 2005 Supreme Court decision that replaced the then-mandatory federal sentencing guidelines system with an advisory scheme, had any enduring impact on sentencing outcomes. Commemorating Booker’s recent twentieth anniversary requires a balancing act: at once, recognizing the decision’s watershed impact while avoiding claims of lasting change where little exists. The criminal defense community hailed the ruling as a kind of liberation from the guidelines’ dispassionate rigidity. Today, while most lawyers and defendants would still prefer the current system, a legitimate question exists about Booker’s actual effect on federal sentencing. I propose that …

Covid-19 Student Litigation & The Risk To Higher Education, Kiera R. Flannery

Widener Commonwealth Law Review

No abstract provided.

Law Enforcement Officers' Perception Of Human Trafficking And The Efficacy Of The Training They Receive, Christian Jones

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

No abstract provided.

The Federal Trust ​​​Responsibility ​And Special Domestic Violence Criminal Jurisdiction: Restoring Justice In Tribal Nations​​​ ​, Sofia Sallas

American Indian Law Journal

Special Domestic Violence Criminal Jurisdiction (SDVCJ), enacted through the Violence Against Women Act, was designed to address jurisdictional gaps that long allowed non-Indian perpetrators of domestic violence in Indian Country to evade accountability. Yet despite restoring Tribal authority, SDVCJ remains significantly under-implemented. This Note argues that this failure is not merely a policy shortcoming, but a legal one. Congress restored Tribal criminal jurisdiction while conditioning its exercise on federal funding, coordination, and institutional support. Federal agencies, however, have failed to provide the consistent infrastructure necessary for SDVCJ to function in practice. These failures breach the federal trust responsibility, which imposes …

Tribal Nations As Lords Of The Fee: A Common Law Argument For Tribal Discretion In Spending Federal Forfeiture Funds, Kent A. Anderson

American Indian Law Journal

Federal criminal forfeiture is a powerful tool meeting at the nexus of criminal law and property law. Courts justify its use based on its English common law history. After seizing and selling assets, the federal government doles out payments from its Assets Forfeiture Fund to cooperating law enforcement agencies through equitable sharing agreements that bind recipients to use funds for law enforcement purposes. Tribal Nations have compelling legal and policy arguments for their entitlement to greater access to and discretion over forfeiture funds obtained through seizures in Indian country. These legal arguments are grounded in: (1) federal criminal forfeiture’s failure …

After Advisory Votes: Exploring Alternatives For Voter Engagement In Washington Tax Policy, Emma Morse

Washington Law Review

In 2023, the Washington State legislature repealed the state’s advisory vote system, which allowed taxpayers to express their opinions on enacted tax measures. This system was the first of its kind in the United States, a novel concept that no other state had implemented. Although the advisory votes were non-binding, they provided a platform for public input on tax policy decisions. The repeal of this system raises important questions about voter participation in tax policy, particularly in a state already known for its regressive tax structure. This presents an opportunity to consider whether Washington voters should have input on tax …

Real Promise For False Claims: A Whistleblower Litigation Strategy To Reward Investigative Journalism, Frank D. Lomonte

Washington Law Review

Every year, investigative reporters uncover stories of waste, fraud, and corruption, alerting the government to taxpayer ripoffs that had previously gone undiscovered or ignored. For decades, non-journalists have been reaping windfall rewards—sometimes in the millions—by using false-claims statutes to bring whistleblower actions on the government’s behalf. With news organizations struggling for their economic survival, and efforts to secure alternative financial support through government bailouts faltering, is it time for journalists to seek a share of the money they recoup for taxpayers by becoming plaintiffs?

This Article explores the possibilities, and downside risks, of using the federal False Claims Act, and …

Vlsi Spike Encoder For Spiking Neural Networks With 4-Bit Sar Adc, Jack Marshall, Wyatt Tack, Cameron Young, Ryken Thompson

Electrical Engineering

A spike encoder forms the interface between sampled data, such as image data or a sensor signal, and a spiking neural network by converting numerical input samples into discrete spike events. Unlike conventional artificial neural networks, spiking neural networks use spare, even-driven computation instead of continuous-valued activations. This makes them attractive for low-power embedded systems, biomedical electronics, and other edge applications where energy consumption, physical area, and thermal limits are important design constraints.

This project develops a modular spike encoder architecture for spiking neural networks with selectable support for temporal, rate, multi-spike, and delta encoding. Prior work has shown that …

Usa V. Richardson Dangleben, Jr.

2026 Decisions

USDC for the District Court of the Virgin Islands

The Specter Of Future Blight: State Approaches To Speculative Takings, Julianna G. Bass

University of Chicago Law Review

This Comment creates the first comprehensive taxonomy of state eminent domain regimes’ treatment of private-to-private takings for the purpose of preventing future blight. Following the Supreme Court’s expansion of the Public Use Clause in Kelo v. City of New London, many states moved to limit takings justified solely by economic development yet maintained broad blight statutes that continued to authorize the condemnation of property to eliminate or prevent blight. This Comment exposes the indeterminate contours of the future-blight takings landscape and ultimately urges state legislatures and courts seeking to cabin sweeping public use determinations to find the prevention of future …

Anti-Allyship And The Indirect Subordination Of Queer People, Richard Luedeman

Washington Law Review

This Article theorizes and interrogates anti-allyship as a central mechanism of modern subordination of queer people. While not new, anti-allyship is expanding rapidly under the second Trump administration. Defined as the deliberate imposition of legal, financial, and reputational costs on those who support queer individuals or institutions, anti-allyship is a strategy of indirect oppression. It targets not queer people directly, but the infrastructure of support on which queer communities rely: clinicians, educators, family members, researchers, and organizations. In doing so, it often evades the formal protections of civil rights law, which remain tethered to anticlassification models and status-based protections that …

Disability And Constitutional Legitimacy, Katherine A. Macfarlane

Washington Law Review

Disability classifications can take one of two forms. The more familiar form targets people with disabilities on account of their disability and harms them. This type of government classification receives deferential rational basis review and is therefore difficult to challenge. But government action that benefits people with disabilities also classifies on the basis of disability and receives rational basis review. This Article focuses on classifications that provide preferential treatment to disabled people precisely because of their disability—through disability affirmative action programs—and argues that their legitimacy is bolstered, not weakened, by the rational basis standard. It does so by distinguishing the …

Presidential Noncompliance And Judicial Response: A Two-Branch Dialectic, Seth Waxman

Washington Law Review

No abstract provided.

"Speech Swept Up"—The Constitutionality Of State Prohibitions Of Conversion Therapy For Lgbtq+ Youth, Lauren A. Chivers

Washington Law Review

Since 2012, individual states have passed laws prohibiting state-licensed mental health professionals from engaging in conversion therapy with minor clients. Despite the breadth of research undermining its efficacy and documenting harms, the practice of conversion therapy persists. State regulation of conversion therapy—and thereby licensed professionals’ conduct with their clients—has emerged as a contentious issue for the judiciary. Most significantly, the U.S. Supreme Court weighed in on the matter for the first time in 2026. In Chiles v. Salazar, the Court addressed a challenge to Colorado’s conversion therapy ban, confronting fundamental questions about this unsettled area of First Amendment law. …