Digital Commons Network^™

Parallel Inquiries: Investigation Of Social Resource Use In Early Career Stem Teachers And Impacts Of Metal Pollution On Fingernail Clam Microbiome, Emily Hamada

EWU Masters Thesis Collection

No abstract provided.

Lex Ex Machina: Forging A New Ethical Framework For Ai And Technology In The Law, Joseph Regalia

Scholarly Works

The rise of generative artificial intelligence (GAI) offers the legal profession a chance to reevaluate and reshape its ethical standards. This article argues that GAI's potential demands a more detailed approach to legal ethics, especially concerning technology use. While current ethics rules provide a general foundation, they do not fully address the unique challenges and opportunities of GAI and similar advanced technologies.

By reviewing historical contexts of legal technology ethics and recent GAI regulations, this article suggests a new model for technology ethics in law. It calls for the inclusion of detailed, flexible standards in ethical guidelines, moving beyond the …

A Faster Way To Yes: Re-Balancing American Asylum Procedures, Michael Kagan

Scholarly Works

The United States asylum system, like many other asylum systems, is under immense pressure to process asylum applications faster. The primary response to this pressure is negative, namely to deny asylum claims quickly by categorizing them as manifestly unfounded. In the United States, this is done through the “credible fear” process. This negative orientation leads to a structural imbalance in which denials can be fast and easy for the system, but approvals take time and extensive effort. Using domestic and international comparative examples, this Article proposes re-balancing the asylum system by establishing a process for expedited approvals of clearly eligible …

Presumed Guilt: Epistemic Closure In Pregnancy Prosecutions, M. Eve Hanan

Scholarly Works

Criminal law and reproductive justice scholars are calling attention to the increase in prosecutions for pregnancy outcomes in the United States. Trace amounts of controlled substances in newborns are prosecuted as child abuse. Miscarriages are prosecuted as illegal abortions or homicides. This area of criminal law existed side-by-side with Roe v. Wade for late-term pregnancy outcomes. The Dobbs decision has further emboldened these prosecutions by removing the protections of the Due Process Clause from the pre-viability phase of the pregnancy.

Using a case study of a woman who was pressured to plead guilty to manslaughter and sentenced to eight years …

Interoperable Legal Ai For Access To Justice, Drew Simshaw

Scholarly Works

The access-to-justice gap is growing, affecting individuals with both civil and criminal needs in the United States. Though these challenges are multifaceted, procedural barriers in the U.S. legal system can often inhibit access-to-justice efforts. The resulting inequities undermine fairness for those interacting with courts and jeopardize the legitimacy of the broader legal system. Legal technology driven by artificial intelligence (Al) has been heralded for its potential to combat these challenges on three access-to-justice fronts that are often conceptualized in isolation: a consumer (i.e., self-help) front, a legal-service-provider front, and a court front. Progress on each of these fronts is apparent, …

Copyright, Ebooks, And The Future Of Digital Lending, Mary Lafrance

Scholarly Works

Public libraries face a digital lending crisis. Even as library patrons demand greater access to digital materials, eBook publishers have subjected libraries to onerous licensing terms. These include prices substantially higher than those charged to the general public, as well as stringent constraints on license duration and/or loan volume, forcing many libraries to repurchase their eBooks every one or two years. Some publishers are releasing new books only in digital formats, making it even more costly for libraries to maintain robust collections. eBook publishers also compel libraries to use specific digital lending platforms which pose risks to patron privacy. At …

Ecarrots: Prison Control And Profits From Correctional Tablets, Justin Iverson

Scholarly Works

In recent years, tablets have gained tremendous popularity behind bars for their ability to expand access to educational and rehabilitative services for people in prison. However, there are downsides to tablet implementation, including high costs at the expense of a captive population and shifting power dynamics resulting in possible volatility. This Article examines the use of correctional tablets in jails and prisons as mechanisms for administrative control and profit-making in an era of beleaguered correctional budgets. It also considers legal and policy implications related to the disproportionately negative impact of the introduction of tablets on people in poverty, increased dependency …

Keynote Address: Envisioning Wage Justice, Ruben J. Garcia

Scholarly Works

In this Keynote address for the Minnesota Journal of Law & Inequality’s Symposium, “Not Just Wages,” held at the University of Minnesota Law School on April 11, 2025, I discuss the evolving concept of wage justice, using the lens of Critical Wage Theory and its origins in pioneering theories of race, labor and justice. The Article outlines the legal frameworks that have defined the content of wage justice in the twenty-first century, particularly for marginal workers. This Article raises the alarm about the impact of political change on low-wage workers, using case studies and analysis of administrative agency enforcement of …

Ai And Higher Education, Chris A. Kiesling

The Asbury Journal

No abstract provided.

Journal In Entirety

The Asbury Journal

No abstract provided.

The Giants Cry “Halt”: Incongruencies Between Classical Virtue Ethics And Generative Artificial Intelligence, Aaron J. Lewis

The Asbury Journal

No abstract provided.

Data: Amplifying Extremism: Small Town Politicians, Media Storms, And American Journalism, Nik Usher, Jess Hagman

Communication: Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Policing After Slavery: Race, Crime, And Resistance In Atlanta, Jonathon J. Booth

University of Colorado Law Review

No abstract provided.

Manufacturing False Convictions: Lies And The Corrupt Use Of Jailhouse Informants, Russell D. Covey

University of Colorado Law Review

No abstract provided.

“Behavior Modeling And Creative Confidence In The High School Visual Arts Classroom”, Jessica A. Novak

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Artistic behavior modeling is essential for the development of creative confidence in both the teacher and students. In this study, I adopted a mixed methods approach incorporating both qualitative and quantitative data to determine the impact of artistic behavior modeling on creativity and independence in high school visual arts. The impact of behavior modeling was studied in a student-led, studio-style approach in the classroom. Utilizing writing prompts, observational data, self-reflections, artwork development, and letter grades, I determined that when educators create and reflect on their personal art alongside their students, students become more creatively independent. Students took more creative risks, …

Bcaas Newsletter Winter 2025, Bcaas

BCAAS Newsletter

No abstract provided.

Can Ai Hold Office Hours?, Lisa Larrimore Ouellette, Amy R. Motomura, Jason Reinecke, Jonathan S. Masur

Public Law and Legal Theory Working Papers

Rapid improvements in AI tools offer transformative opportunities in legal education, including the possibility of students using AI tools to answer questions that students might otherwise ask during office hours. But a critical challenge is the accuracy of these tools’ responses. Both general-purpose and law-specific AI models have been shown to “hallucinate” incorrect responses to a range of legal questions. Here, we evaluate the current capabilities of AI models when given the more constrained task of answering questions about a specific legal text. We provided three AI tools—OpenAI’s GPT-4o, Anthropic’s Claude 3.5 Sonnet, and Google’s NotebookLM—with the text of Masur …

The Society Cases, Adam A. Davidson

Public Law and Legal Theory Working Papers

No abstract provided.

Pillar Two: Much Ado About Next To Nothing?, Julie Roin

Public Law and Legal Theory Working Papers

The OECD has spent the last fifteen years working on the design and implementation of rules for the taxation of the income derived from international transactions, rules that its members hope will both increase corporate tax revenues and minimize “destructive” tax competition. In 2021, it released its two-part “Inclusive Framework.” Although Pillar One of this Framework still languishes, legislation necessary for the implementation of Pillar Two, which is designed to force all countries to impose a minimum tax on income derived by large multinational enterprises, has been enacted by most of the countries in the European Union, Japan, South Korea …

Structural Logics Of Presidential Immunity, Aziz Z. Huq

Public Law and Legal Theory Working Papers

In Trump v. United States, the Supreme Court wrought two new presidential immunities from criminal prosecution. Supplemented by a pair of penumbral evidentiary rules, these inhibit criminal indictment or conviction of the president, and indeed many subordinate officials, across many imaginable fact-patterns. The Court justified this result on consequentialist, not originalist or precedential, grounds. But its analysis of immunity’s effects was radically incomplete. It focused narrowly on the person of the president, eschewing any attempt to situate or relate that individual’s incentives and behavior to the wider institutional contexts of the executive branch at large or the partisan-political environment of …

Islands Of Algorithmic Integrity: Imagining A Democratic Digital Public Sphere, Aziz Z. Huq

Public Law and Legal Theory Working Papers

This essay offers a new analytic lens for evaluating the design of digital platforms from the perspective of democratic values. It develops a model of desirable platform design, and them ask present legal interventions move is toward that aspiration. The aspirational model is not draws on an idea found in the scholarly literatures in political science and sociology about economic development . This is the notion that development policy should aim to seed “islands of integrity,” into patrimonial or nepotistic state structures as a way of building foundations for a more robust and hence public-regarding state apparatus. This literature explores …

Family, Faith And Nation: The Roberts Court And The Global Pivot Against Legal Liberalism, Aziz Z. Huq, Tom Ginsburg

Public Law and Legal Theory Working Papers

The Roberts Court has veered sharply in a culturally conservative direction. Traditional solidarities of faith, family, and nation have been elevated above the individual autonomy interests that motivated the justices in the twentieth century. The Supreme Court’s jurisprudence in this vein complements and is reinforced by changes in public law more generally—for example, in recent executive orders that amplify the same values. In legal scholarship, this jurisprudential shift is pervasively framed in terms of domestic electoral politics, in particular as a product of Republican dominance of the presidency and the Senate at key moments.

But expand the analytic lens outward, …

Constitutional Drafting Processes And Constitutional Success, Adam Chilton, Murat C. Mungan, Mila Versteeg

Public Law and Legal Theory Working Papers

Several recent constitution-making processes have been celebrated for being participatory, inclusive, and representative. However, many of these processes also failed. We theorize that aspects of these kinds of constitutional drafting processes could reduce the probability of constitutional success. To show why, we construct a “Constitution Drafting game” (CD game) in which representatives from different interest groups must draft a constitution. We consider the case where the probability of constitutional success is single peaked, but the value from successful adoption is increasing in the degree of issue protection chosen. The drafting process then leads to protection choices that are above those …

Bypassing Agency Adjudication, Brian Lipshutz

Public Law and Legal Theory Working Papers

This Article examines the contested practice of bypassing agency adjudication to accelerate judicial review of non-final executive action. Parties typically challenge final action under the Administrative Procedure Act (APA). But parties may also seek an injunction or declaratory judgment with respect to a non-final action that violates a statute or the Constitution. Traditionally, such “ultra vires” review required a clearly unlawful action and an inadequate administrative remedy. But modern courts further limit it by applying three judicially developed timing doctrines—exhaustion, ripeness, and Thunder Basin.

This Article explains why the traditional ultra vires model— without the timing doctrines—should govern the bypassing …

The American Attack On Academic Freedom In Comparative Perspective, Tom Ginsburg

Public Law and Legal Theory Working Papers

Academic freedom is under threat in many countries, and the United States is no exception. This chapter places the American framework for academic freedom in comparative perspective, and describes the techniques being deployed against it. A common threat is to leverage the use of government funds as a way to change internal university governance. Less common, however, is something that we have seen in the United States, which is a threat to academic freedom from civil society itself. The trend is accelerating through social media, and is structurally similar to that of the fascist period in Europe in which there …

Pretrial Detention Without Counsel, Alison M. Siegler, Jaden M. Lessnick

Public Law and Legal Theory Working Papers

In federal courts across the country, judges are locking defendants in jail before trial without first giving them a lawyer. This deprivation-of-counsel crisis not only violates the statutory, regulatory, and administrative right to counsel at initial appearance hearings, but may even contravene the Sixth Amendment. This article builds on our Freedom Denied report—the first nationwide study of federal pretrial detention—and new data collected since. It makes three primary contributions. First, we explain the sources and nature of the right to counsel at federal initial appearance hearings (the first bail hearing in federal court). Second, we provide a data-driven illustration of …

Review Of Two Books: Sunset Colonies: A Visual Elegy To South Florida's Mobile Home Communities And Dry Tortugas: Stronghold Of Nature, Michelle Sonnenberg

Florida Geographer

A multitude of Floridas exist in the collective, cultural imagination. Our relationships with each are complex and varied. From hikers wading waist deep with gators in the Fakahatchee Strand to suburban yards dotted with plastic pink flamingos, the people of Florida possess myriad, ever-evolving relationships to place. Nowhere is this more apparent than in South Florida, where high rises tower above Biscayne Bay and the Wall Street of the South while the land sinks below the weight of climate change and king tides. Imagine the multicultural tango that is the Magic City juxtaposed with the outflow of the River of …

Falsifying Tradition, Darrell A.H. Miller

Public Law and Legal Theory Working Papers

From cases spanning gun rights, reproductive freedom, religious liberty, and personal jurisdiction; to separation of powers and other structural features of the Constitution, courts increasingly rely on tradition to guide their decisions. Often, judges appeal to tradition in a vaguely empirical way, as “facts to study, not convictions to demonstrate about,” in the words of Justice Antonin Scalia. Yet, for a claim that purports to be factual, there’s very little agreement, or even analysis, about what renders this factual assertion—tradition—true or false. This Article tackles that foundational issue.

Part I surveys the ways in which courts use tradition in different …

The Constitution And The War On Dei, Sonja A. Starr, Genevieve Lakier

Public Law and Legal Theory Working Papers

his Article examines how the second Trump Administration’s aggressive attacks on programs, policies, and speech loosely associated with diversity, equity, and inclusion [DEI] intersect with the constitutional guarantees of equal protection and freedom of speech. We argue first that there is little doctrinal support for the administration’s pervasive efforts to justify its war on DEI by invoking the Equal Protection Clause and parallel statutory law. Instead, the administration is stretching existing colorblindness doctrine beyond recognition, into a radical vision that we label “anti-antisubordination.” On this view, vindicating equality values does not only require restricting practices that treat individuals differently based …

The Tom Sawyer Effect: Invisible Work And Labor Market Power, Eric A. Posner

Public Law and Legal Theory Working Papers

No abstract provided.