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The New European Union Regulation On Geographical Indications For Craft And Industrial Products And The Protection Of "Lace Of Cantù": A Work In Progress, Barbara Pozzo

FIU Law Review

Regulation (EU) 2023/2411 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 18 October 2023 has introduced the protection of geographical indications for craft and industrial products. The contribution aims at investigating how the Regulation may have implications in the fashion world. In particular, it will focus on a particular case study undertaken in Northern Italy, concerning the possibility of protecting the “Lace of Cantù” through a geographical indications for craft.

Geographical Indications For Agricultural Products: Inconsistencies And Conflicts In Europe And The Global Arena, Lorenzo Bairati

FIU Law Review

Food systems are regulated by a global and hybrid legal framework. In fact, while supranational and international sources play an increasingly important role, private regulators are also becoming more and more involved alongside traditional public policy-makers. Within this context, Geographical Indications (GIs) serve as the main tool in the European Union and beyond to protect quality agri-food products.

This Article aims to explore these instruments in depth in order to analyze several critical aspects from the perspective of global governance, i.e., the networked, hybrid, and diffuse legal space that develops through the participation, negotiation, and strategic interaction between public and …

Virtual Harm, Real Consequences: Constitutional Justifications For Criminalizing Ai-Generated Child Pornography, Adam Abdin

FIU Law Review

Advances in artificial intelligence (AI) have enabled the creation of hyper-realistic child sexual abuse images without any real child involved. These AI-generated depictions pose a unique challenge: they replicate the most pernicious form of pornography—child pornography—while potentially being claimed as “speech” immune from regulation. This paper argues that it is both constitutionally permissible and morally imperative to criminalize AI-generated child pornography. This article presents two doctrinal pathways to justify a ban. First, such content can be treated as unprotected speech under existing First Amendment exceptions. Courts have long held that child pornography and obscenity lie outside First Amendment protection, and …

Silenced By Fear: Undocumented Immigrant Victims Of Sexual Assault, Adriana Isabel Herrera

FIU Law Review

Imagine being sexually assaulted and then having to choose between justice or deportation. In today’s climate of heightened immigration enforcement, many undocumented immigrant victims of sexual assault understandably remain silent. After all, who would risk everything just to report a crime that might get them deported? The fear of being separated from their families, ripped from the lives they have built, and sent back to dangerous conditions in their home countries prevents these victims from coming forward and seeking justice. Additionally, the current protections available to them are flawed and insufficient—primarily due to the U visa cap and prolonged processing …

Private Equity In Healthcare: The Case For Stricter Regulations, Ryan Scivally

FIU Law Review

Private equity has become an increasingly influential force in American healthcare. Hundreds of billions of dollars have flown into healthcare acquisitions over the last decade, and a growing share of physician practices and health services are coming under investor control. This Comment argues that the current regulatory framework has not kept pace with that expansion. Existing federal tools, primarily antitrust and fraud enforcement, leave most transactions unreviewed because many deals fall below reporting thresholds. At the state level, doctrines such as the corporate practice of medicine are unevenly enforced and often avoided through management services’ organization structures. These structures preserve …

The Resilient Educator: Examining The Role Of Resilience On A First-Year Rural Music Educator’S Job Satisfaction, Isaac Price

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

The future of music education in schools is largely determined by educators' resilience in their positions. Resilience is the process of adapting to adversity by accessing and utilizing intrinsic and extrinsic resources available (Gu & Day, 2007; Squires et al., 2023). Resilience affects various aspects of an educator’s personal and professional life, including job satisfaction (Li, 2023). Job satisfaction can affect teacher health, teacher performance, and teacher retention, which in turn may affect student performance (Huysman, 2008; Lu et al., 2024; Robison & Russell, 2022). The circumstances and events that occur during a teacher’s first year in the profession can …

The Differential Impacts Of Internal And External Corporate Social Responsibility Activities On Consumer Trust After Covid-19, Kennadi C. Mccoy

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

This dissertation explores the strategic role of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) in helping small businesses recover from crises, with a specific focus on the COVID-19 pandemic. Different from many traditional studies that highlight the ethical or reputational aspects of CSR, this research will examine its practical effects: how CSR initiatives during crises influence business success by enhancing consumer trust, particularly by examining the differential impact of Internal CSR versus External CSR. The study suggests that, compared with internally focused CSR, external CSR activities will have a greater impact on consumer trust. In addition, the dissertation suggests that this effect is …

Disaster Exposure, The Perception Of Physiological Pain, And Psychological Distress Across Adulthood, Esha Azhar

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

Climate change brings with it an increase in the occurrence of natural disasters, such as hurricanes, wildfires, severe storms, etc. In the aftermath, afflicted individuals may suffer adversely, especially in their physical and mental health. Previous research has found older adults to be faring better after experiencing a disaster compared to younger adults, which has been attributed to their better mental health associated with aging and gaining experience with adversities (Strough et al., 2023; 2025). The current study examined the psychological distress and physiological pain of individuals across the adult lifespan after experiencing a disaster. Participants were part of the …

Posttraumatic Growth In Appalachian Youth: Findings From An Outpatient Pediatric Trauma Specialty Clinic, Marinne M. Morgan

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

Childhood traumatic event exposure (CTE) involves exposure to extreme events that overwhelm one’s ability to cope. Childhood traumatic event exposure has been linked to a wide range of adverse mental and physical health consequences, including posttraumatic stress symptoms (PTSS). Fewer studies have examined positive trajectories following childhood traumatic event exposure, such as posttraumatic growth (PTG), especially in understudied regions such as Appalachia. The current study used a cross-sectional design to examine posttraumatic growth in 14 youths aged 9 to 15 years seeking trauma-focused therapeutic services at an outpatient pediatric trauma specialty clinic in West Virginia. In line with previous research, …

Empowered Choices: A Quality Improvement Women’S Health Initiative In Faith-Based Nursing For Women Recovering From Substance Use Disorder, Jennifer Mewshaw

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

Introduction: Women with substance use disorder (SUD) face higher rates of unplanned pregnancy, reproductive infections, and delayed prenatal care. Faith community nurses (FCNs) often already serve within this community and have a long history of promoting public health interventions. However, they lack the knowledge and confidence in sexual and reproductive health (SRH) education.

Evidence Review: A literature review identified barriers to SRH care for women with SUD and the role of FCNs in community and public health interventions. Evidence supports providing FCNs with the knowledge and skills to deliver SRH education and support for women with SUD using trauma-informed and …

Improving Access To Treatment For Alcohol Use Disorder For Veterans: An Evidence-Based Practice Policy Analysis, Mary Rizzo

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

Introduction: Alcohol use disorder (AUD) is common among veterans and is associated with poor health outcomes. Although extended-release naltrexone (XR-NTX) is an effective treatment, maintenance injections at the VA Pittsburgh Healthcare System are only available at the main medical center, requiring many veterans to travel long distances each month.

Purpose: The purpose of this evidence-based practice policy analysis was to evaluate the feasibility of offering XR-NTX injections at Community-Based Outpatient Clinics (CBOC) and develop a policy recommendation to improve access to care.

Intervention: This project examined the current XR-NTX administration process and compared it with alternative approaches used within the …

Fairness Without Demographic Attributes In Medical Vision–Language Models, Ahsan Habib Akash

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

Vision–language models (VLMs) and the embedding models that underlie them have become the default representation layer for multimodal artificial intelligence. Trained by contrastive alignment over enormous, loosely curated image–text corpora, they inherit the demographic skew of that data, and they encode it in the geometry of the shared embedding space itself. The consequence is a model that performs unevenly across demographic groups even when no protected attribute is ever supplied as an input. In consumer applications this is an equity problem; in medicine it is a safety problem, because an embedding that is systematically less discriminative for one subpopulation translates …

Effect Of Yoga On Non-Invasive Measures Of Cardiovascular Functioning And Health, Alexis Nicole Thrower

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

Introduction: Cardiovascular disease (CVD) has been the number one cause of death worldwide and within the United States (US) for decades. Effective and practical prevention modalities are needed to reduce the burden of this often-preventable condition. Physical activity is an effective and modifiable behavior for CVD risk management; however, only one in four adults meet current physical activity guidelines. Some types of yoga, including vinyasa yoga, are a form of physical activity, and vinyasa yoga efficiently incorporates moderate-intensity aerobic activity, muscular-strengthening movements, and flexibility components. Yet, minimal rigorous research evaluates yoga’s effects on health. The purpose of this dissertation is …

Dielectrophoretic Biomarkers For Cancer Detection And Cell Analysis: Integrating Microfluidics And Ai, Raphael Olumide Oladokun

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

Pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC) carries a five-year survival rate of 13%, driven largely by late-stage diagnosis and the absence of sensitive noninvasive screening tools. Current diagnostic methods lack the sensitivity to detect disease-associated systemic changes at early and precancerous stages, representing a critical clinical gap. This dissertation addresses the central hypothesis that PDAC and its pathological subtypes induce measurable, disease-associated electrophysiological changes in circulating PBMCs that can serve as correlative liquid-biopsy biomarkers. To test this hypothesis, this work asks: can dielectrophoresis (DEP), impedance and zeta potential analysis with AI-assisted classification distinguish benign pancreatic conditions (non-malignant control), precancerous lesions (primarily IPMNs), …

Landscape As Expo: Reimagining Desert Landscapes As Climate-Adaptive Cultural Infrastructure In Las Vegas, Parinaz Baradaran Anaraki

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

Contemporary desert cities face increasing environmental and social challenges driven by climate change, including extreme heat, water scarcity, fragmented ecological systems, and limited access to high-quality public open space. In many rapidly urbanizing regions, conventional urban development has marginalized desert landscapes, treating them as vacant land rather than valuable ecological and cultural assets. This thesis proposes Landscape as Expo as a new framework for transforming desert landscapes into climate-adaptive cultural infrastructure, where ecological processes become both functional systems and public experiences.

The project focuses on a 140-acre site within the Tule Springs Planning District in North Las Vegas, Nevada, identified …

The Histamine-3 Receptor In Cardiac Fibrosis: A Novel Role In Fibroblast Function, Heather Linsky

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

In the United States, heart failure affects approximately 6.7 million individuals. Despite a number of available therapies, heart failure prevalence continues to grow, suggesting the need for a broader range of effective therapies. More specifically, heart failure with preserved ejection fraction comprises approximately 50% of all heart failure cases and, as the name suggests, is a disease of diastolic dysfunction as opposed to systolic dysfunction. A hallmark of heart failure with preserved ejection fraction is myocardial fibrosis, which is a key contributor to diastolic dysfunction, and is the major focus of this dissertation work. In the heart, histamine-3 receptor activation …

Macroinvertebrate Response To Two Highway Construction Projects In West Virginia, Brenden Nauman

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

Highway development and construction are frequently required to provide efficient transportation for an increasing human population. Specific to the Appalachian region, highway development has been a major goal since the mid 1900’s, with the aim of promoting economic growth and ease of travel. While highways provide necessary services to humans, their construction and presence often impact nearby waterways through multiple mechanisms including sedimentation and urbanization. To understand the degree of impact, streams are often monitored using biological data, which can be used to quantify effects. In this work I used freshwater macroinvertebrate communities to monitor changes in stream health surrounding …

Valuing Future Lives, Daniel J. Hemel, Jonathan S. Masur

Coase-Sandor Institute for Law & Economics Research Paper Series

Federal regulation often involves a tradeoff between monetary costs in the present and life-saving benefits in the future. A central question in regulatory cost-benefit analysis is how to assign a present dollar value to future lives so that future lives and present dollars can be compared. For regulations that are projected to prevent deaths years or decades down the road, agencies make two key analytical moves. First, they adjust the value of a statistical life upward to reflect the fact that society’s willingness to pay to save lives will rise as people become wealthier in the future. Second, they discount …

Biological Dental Hygiene: Principles, Educational Pathways, And Clinical Practice Considerations, Tara Newcomb

Dental Hygiene Faculty Publications

Dental hygiene practice is rapidly evolving in response to emerging evidence on the oral–systemic health connection, advances in preventive technologies, and increased emphasis on individualized, minimally invasive care. A commitment to lifelong learning and continuing professional development is essential for maintaining clinical competence and integrating new scientific knowledge into practice. Biological dental hygiene has emerged as a complementary framework that emphasizes whole-body health, biocompatibility, reduction of toxic exposures, and prevention-centered care. This approach expands traditional dental hygiene practice by incorporating enhanced risk assessment, salivary diagnostics, targeted preventive strategies, as well as patient education focused on nutrition, inflammation reduction, and systemic …

Impact Of An Educational Video Intervention On Word Recognition And Vocabulary Knowledge Of Paediatric Dental Terms Among Low-Income Caregivers Of Youth Children, Melissa L. Sullivan, Denise C. Mckinney, Abdullah Al-Taiar, Deanne Shuman

Dental Hygiene Faculty Publications

Objective

To evaluate the impact of an educational intervention on paediatric dental term recognition and vocabulary knowledge among low-income caregivers of young children.

Methods

A randomized two-group pretest-posttest trial was used to analyze the impact of an educational intervention on caregivers' word recognition and vocabulary knowledge of paediatric dental terms. The study included 60 pregnant women and caregivers with children enrolled in a Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) in the Southeastern United States. Both groups received an educational pamphlet on children's oral health. The experimental group also received an educational video with common paediatric dental …

Seeds Of Sovereignty: Critical Public Health, Radical Sisterhood, And The Fight For Agricultural Justice, Andrew L. Carter

Faculty Research, Scholarly, and Creative Activity

This book explores the historical and contemporary influence of African, Caribbean, and Black (ACB) women farmers in the fight for food justice. ACB foodways have been dismantled over time due to centuries of settler colonialism, discriminatory agricultural policies, land and knowledge theft, cultural erasure, and direct forms of violence and intimidation—creating vast inequities in today’s food system. At the same time, mainstream public health responses to food insecurity and access in ACB communities often focus on short-term solutions that do not empower local communities and keep the status quo intact. These approaches overlook the broader structural constraints that maintain and …

Leaning Into Absence: Lessons From Kony, Mark A. Drumbl

Scholarly Articles

This article begins with the confirmation of charges decisions undertaken by the International Criminal Court in the Kony case. These proceedings struggled with the reality of in absentia. This article addresses the high absentee rate among individuals against whom the International Criminal Court (ICC) has issued arrest warrants and notes the stark presence of absence in the ICC’s work as well as within the enforcement of international criminal law at large. This article suggests that international criminal lawyers lean into the prevalence of absence and reboot predominant collective thinking. One path forward is to truly and warmly embrace transitional …

Spiritual And Religious Lay Community Support For Informal Caregivers Of Adults At The End Of Life: A Literature Review, Rachel Lenko

University Faculty Publications and Creative Works

• Informal caregivers of adults at the end of life often experience significant physical, psychological, and economic burden because of their caregiving and bereavement (Schulz et al., 2003; Skantharajah et al., 2022) 
• Prior evidence suggests that spirituality and/or religiosity contribute to positive religious coping and improved adjustment to bereavement (Damianakis et al., 2012; Stelzer et al., 2020) 
• Spiritual and religious communities often provide practical and social, in additional to spiritual/religious, support to their members 
• There is limited evidence describing practical and social support from spiritual/religious lay communities for informal caregivers of patients in the terminal phase of a disease

The Roadhouse And Mindful Alienation: On Fearlessly Losing Hope In Twin Peaks’ House Away From Home, Matthew C. Halteman

University Faculty Publications and Creative Works

The Roadhouse scenes in Twin Peaks: The Return resolutely defy the conventions of serial television drama. From showcasing interminable bouts of floor-sweeping, to featuring lengthy music videos by little-known acts, to lavishing attention on the trivial conversations of seemingly random people, these scenes give significant time and space to stuff you just don’t usually see in a tightly plotted series. I suggest that these unconventional scenes are a feature rather than a bug. I argue that the Roadhouse scenes in The Return offer a therapeutic opportunity for viewers to become well-practiced at coping mindfully with feelings of alienation that arise …

A Long, Deep, And Unbreakable Friendship, Henry Ramer

Touro Law Review

No abstract provided.

Reflections On An Exemplary Life: Professor Dan Subotnik, Eva E. Subotnik

Touro Law Review

No abstract provided.

If I Only Had The Words (To Tell You): Billy Joel Lyrics In Legal And Medical Scholarship, Seuli Bose Brill, Christian H. Brill

Touro Law Review

Law and medicine are often considered to be among the least accessible professions, partly because of the heavy use of non colloquial jargon. This article examines more than 150 instances in which Billy Joel’s lyrics have been used to improve the accessibility of legal and medical scholarship. Legal and medical professionals have used the words of the “Piano Man” to discuss a variety of topics—everything from civil procedure to property rights and the COVID-19 pandemic to colorectal surgery. Nontraditional communications techniques of this type do not just contribute to the body of legal and medical scholarship; they also help professionals …

The Proportionality Trap: Why Death Tolls In War Need Not Add Up Equally, Thane Rosenbaum

Touro Law Review

Imagine a war without battlefields. There are no uniforms. Civilians and combatants are indistinguishable. Homes, schools, hospitals, and religious buildings are used as command and communication centers, and for the warehousing of weapons. Apartment rooftops are launching pads; the civilians who live inside . . . human shields. There are over 300 miles of reinforced tunnels, all outfitted with weapons and passageways for terrorists to take hostages and travel freely. Beyond Proportionality examines Israel’s battles against Hamas and Hezbollah under the laws of war and concludes that its war time conduct was based on military necessity and fought justly. The …

Anatomy Of A Successful College Closure, Kevin P. Mcdonough

Touro Law Review

Alarming forecasts of mass closures of colleges and universities in the United States have been part of the higher education landscape for many years now. Unfortunately, such prognosticators have been proven largely correct as college closures have been occurring with increasing regularity. The closure process has been carried out with varying degrees of success. At one end of the spectrum lies the poorly planned, precipitous closure, which often garners the most attention because of its devastating impact on students and their families. This Article examines certain actions and strategies that the leadership of a college compelled to cease operations can …

Unprecedented Leadership For Unprecedented Times: The Ethical Imperative For Transformational Change In American Higher Education, Andrés Acebo

Touro Law Review

Many eras quietly yield to another while its institutions continue speaking the language of a world that no longer exists. Such moments expose the widening distance between inherited assumptions and emerging realities, between institutional memory and societal need, between what once served the public well and what the future now requires. American higher education has arrived at such a moment. For more than a decade, its challenges have been described through the language of crisis. The prevailing literature has documented enrollment decline, demographic transformation, fiscal instability, technological disruption, political polarization, declining public confidence, and institutional fragility with increasing sophistication. Yet …