Digital Commons Network^™

2020-2021 Annual Report, Tennessee Public Utility Commission

Annual Reports

No abstract provided.

2020-2021 Annual Report, Tennessee Public Utility Commission

Annual Reports

No abstract provided.

Vaccine Passports And The Right To Exclude: How The Court’S Holding In Cedar Point Nursery V. Hassid Could Light Fire To The Debate On The Constitutionality Of Vaccine Passport Requirements And Bans, John A. Kuzora

Campbell Law Review

The COVID-19 pandemic gave America its biggest health crisis in the last one hundred years. In efforts to resolve this crisis, several state governments have issued various types of public health measures. Three of these measures are Vaccine Mandates, Vaccine Passport Requirements, and Vaccine Passport Bans. This Comment explores the legality of these three public health measures through the unique lens of the Fifth Amendment Takings Clause. Specifically, this Comment focuses on how both Vaccine Passport Requirements and Bans infringe on property owners’ rights to include and exclude unvaccinated patrons. This, in turn, results in a physical taking under the …

Annual Comprehensive Financial Report, For The Fiscal Year Ended June 30, 2022, Tennessee Consolidated Retirement System

Annual Financial Reports

This document is the annual comprehensive financial report for the Tennessee Consolidated Retirement System during the fiscal year.

Overview Of Encampments Across Canada: A Right To Housing Approach, Alexandra Flynn, Joe Herner, Caroline Leblanc, Sue-Ann Macdonald, Kaitlin Schwan, Estair Van Wagner

Commissioned Reports, Studies and Public Policy Documents

Homeless encampments constitute one of the most serious right-to-housing issues in Canada today. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the number of shelter spaces decreased, indoor congregate settings became increasingly unsafe, and individuals lost their livelihoods. This has led to a rise in homeless encampments across the country. The lack of comprehensive data on this urgent crisis is distressing. Even so, we know that many individuals had little choice but to turn to living in tents or informal shelters to survive the confluence of historic crises in health, housing, climate change, colonial violence, and unemployment. As articulated by the UN Special Rapporteur …

Skating Past Liability Under The Tcpa: Robocalls And Unsolicited Texts And E-Mails, Julissa R. Rachor

Seattle University Law Review

This Note argues that the applicability of Telephone Consumer Protection Act's (TCPA) autodialer provision should be interpreted broadly to include calls made on many types of dialing equipment.

Part I of this Note offers a brief history of the TCPA and autodialers. Part II examines the FCC’s Orders that interpret the TCPA’s autodialer provision, and Part III assesses the varying interpretations of the provision by the circuit courts. Part IV reviews the general facts and procedural history of Duguid, and the Court’s interpretation of the autodialers provision. Last, Part V examines current efforts offered by Congress and potential next …

Turning The Tides: An Inoculation Theory And Theory Of Planned Behavior Approach To Developing Mental Health Help-Seeking Interventions For Gen Z, Sarah Ann Geegan

Theses and Dissertations--Communication

Extensive research, predating and during the COVID-19 pandemic, demonstrates the rising prevalence of anxiety and depression among Gen Z college students in the United States—findings which are accompanied by rising rates of suicide, the second leading cause of death among people aged 15-24. Although college campuses often offer mental health resources, the number of college students utilizing them is significantly less than the number of students reporting mental health challenges. A dearth of empirical evidence, focused on Gen Z specifically, exists as a basis for developing interventions to address this issue. This investigation addressed this gap through two component studies. …

Assessing Dialogic Communication Elements In Online Emergency Communication, Lauren Bailey Cain

Theses and Dissertations--Communication

Social media have been identified as powerful tools for two-way crisis communication, allowing officials to reach, inform, and motivate at-risk publics during emergencies. However, government use of social media during emergencies is a relatively new area of study and is thus understudied and undertheorized, with little evidence-based guidance for online messaging strategies during emergencies. Dialogic communication theory has recently been used as a framework to investigate the utility of social media as channels for facilitating two-way, cocreational communication. This study assesses the use and impact of dialogic communication elements at each stage of the crisis and emergency risk communication model …

The Community School Initiative In Toronto: Mitigating Opportunity Gaps In The Jane And Finch Community In The Wake Of Covid-19, Ardavan Eizadirad, Sally Abudiab, Brice Baartman

Education Faculty Publications

COVID-19 significantly impacted the delivery of education with widespread disruptions, particularly disadvantaging racialized and low-income families. Our research project explored how community-based programming can be adapted and mobilized to mitigate opportunity and achievement gaps for Black, Indigenous, people of colour (BIPOC), and those from lower socio-economic backgrounds. The project as a case study examined an afternoon and weekend supplementary academic program called the Community School Initiative (CSI), offered from September 2020 to May 2021 to members of the Jane and Finch community in Toronto, Canada at a subsidized cost. CSI is a partnership between the non-profit organization Youth Association for …

Countermajoritarian Criminal Law, Michael L. Smith

Faculty Articles

Criminal law pervades American society, subjecting millions to criminal enforcement, prosecution, and punishment every year. All too often, culpability is a minimal or nonexistent aspect of this phenomenon. Criminal law prohibits a wide range of common behaviors and practices, especially when one considers the various federal, state, and municipal levels of law restricting people's actions. Recent scholarship has criticized not only the scope and impact of these laws but has also critiqued these laws out to the extent that they fail to live up to supermajoritarian ideals that underlie criminal justice.

This Article adds to and amplifies this criticism by …

Distracted Walking, Michael L. Smith

Faculty Articles

Throughout the United States and across the world, cities are enacting bans on "distracted walking." These bans target cell phone users who cross the street while using a telephone. Doing so in certain cities may result in a fine, community service, or even jail. Drawing inspiration from municipalities, lawmakers in several states have proposed similar statewide legislation. Pushback against these measures is rare-as many people have either directly, or indirectly, experienced the slow and oblivious behavior of "smartphone zombies."

This Article surveys these laws and demonstrates that the science is, at best, mixed on whether device usage results in distraction …

Missing Link: League Punishments Of Team Executives, Michael A. Mccann

Saint Louis University Law Journal

Is it lawful for a professional sports league to punish an executive of a team when that executive isn’t employed by the league and, unlike a player, isn’t a member of a union that collectively bargains with the league?

The answer to this question has long been presumed as “yes,” despite the non-employing league lacking a contractual link to the executive—a third party—it fines, suspends, or even bans from employment with businesses owned by others.

This Article challenges that presumption. It does so by applying employment law, franchise law, and private association law to the unique relationship between sports leagues …

Legislative Push Towards Supersession In Missouri: Why The State Attorney General Should Not Be Statutorily Granted Concurrent Jurisdiction With Locally Elected Prosecutors, Josef Nilhas

Saint Louis University Law Journal

There is a current trend of electing progressive or “reform-minded” prosecutors over “tough-on-crime” prosecutors in local elections across the country. Traditionally, prosecutors have possessed wide discretion over which cases to prosecute or not, and the law presumes that “prosecutors make discretionary decisions disinterestedly, unaffected by their own self-interest or the interest of others.” However, recently in Missouri, state officials have pushed for providing the state attorney general with concurrent jurisdiction over certain cases. In particular, the Missouri Senate passed a provision through an amendment to House Bill 2 (“HB2”) that would allow the State Attorney General to take over homicide …

Biking In Indianapolis: An Ethnographic Analysis Of Obstacles And Solutions, Emory Lietz

Undergraduate Honors Thesis Collection

Indiana is known as the ""Crossroads of America"" for its historic investment in vehicle infrastructure. This focus on automobiles has shaped Indianapolis's urban landscape, to the dismay of many cyclists. Based on semi-structured interviews with a range of stakeholders in the Indianapolis cycling community, including urban planners, bike commuters, IndyGo employees, city government officials, and bike advocates, this project identifies and evaluates the current barriers that prevent Indianapolis residents from riding their bikes. These obstacles, which include infrastructural, safety, and social factors, make it more difficult than it ought to be to bike in Indy.

For my thesis project, I …

Mala Prohibita, The Wrongfulness Constraint, And The Problem Of Overcriminalization, Youngjae Lee

Faculty Scholarship

The wrongfulness constraint, as a principle of criminalization, is supposed to preclude criminalization in the absence of wrongfulness. Crimes that look especially problematic from the perspective of the wrongfulness constraint are mala prohibita offenses. The aim of this Essay is to consider the question whether the wrongfulness constraint can serve as an effective tool to curb overcriminalization by looking at the case of mala prohibita offenses. This Essay defends the following propositions. First, because of the availability of an array of tools to defend various mala prohibita offenses as satisfying the wrongfulness constraint, it is often not a straightforward matter …

Barriers To Charitable Nonprofit Access And Advocacy Amid A Pandemic: A Case Study Of The Louisiana State Legislature, Stephanie M. Riegel, Steven W. Mumford

Political Science Faculty Publications

Research has long established nonprofit organizations’ vital role advocating for the needs of vulnerable populations before legislative policymakers. In the best of times, it is difficult for 501(c)(3) charitable nonprofits employing grassroots advocacy to mobilize vulnerable constituencies to compete with 501(c)(4) and 501(c)(6) advocacy and special interest groups. The latter organizations inherently have greater flexibility and resources to lobby lawmakers directly, permitting greater access to influencing the policy agenda. Through a multi-method case study of the 2020 regular session of the Louisiana State Legislature, this article demonstrates how the COVID-19 pandemic’s unique contextual conditions made legislative advocacy more difficult than …

Prison Systems In Northern Europe Versus The United States: Differences In Treatment And Success Rates, Ava Kovacevic, Emma Settle

Research Days Posters 2022

The United States prison system is notorious for neglecting the basic needs of prisoners. In contrast, Northern European countries (e.g., Denmark, Norway, Netherlands) tend to have reputations for more humane prison systems. This comes from a difference of philosophy in the purpose of prisons, punishment versus rehabilitation. We are exploring the connection between policies and conditions to the recidivism rates of prisoners, as well as the effectiveness of their reintegration into society through comparison of both approaches. Some services we investigate are education, counseling, and drug related rehabilitation. We hypothesize that practices in the correctional systems impact rates of reoffending …

Addressing The Inevitability Of Race In The Doj’S Enforcement Of The Pattern-Or-Practice Initiative, Joshua Chanin

Loyola University Chicago Law Journal

Section 14141 of the 1994 Crime Act empowers the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) to investigate and drive reform of local law enforcement agencies found to have engaged in a pattern or practice of misconduct. During the Trump administration, the DOJ willfully allowed its powers under this section to lie dormant, despite a number of high-profile incidents of police violence against Black Americans. Active enforcement of Section 14141 affords the federal executive branch significant opportunities to promote lawful policing. Using its pattern-or-practice authority, the DOJ has guided dozens of law enforcement agencies through a process designed to remedy systemic unlawful …

The Pandemic And The Public Nuisance: Judicial Intervention In The Era Of Covid-19 And The Collective Right To Public Health, Kyra Ziesk-Socolov

Washington and Lee Journal of Civil Rights and Social Justice

Amidst the unprecedented disruption caused by COVID-19, workplace lawsuits around the country began to apply a longstanding common law theory in a novel way: employee plaintiffs argued that their employers’ noncompliance with state and federal public health guidance designed to curb the spread of the virus should be enjoined as a public nuisance. Although some of these initial public nuisance suits were dismissed, others successfully forced defendant businesses to either alter their COVID safety practices or temporarily close. This Article explores the first pandemic-era public nuisance suit, Rural Community Workers Alliance v. Smithfield Foods, brought by meatpacking plant workers …

As Fires Blaze Through California, Could They Blaze A New Path For Incarcerated Individuals: A Model For Back-End Abolition, Jacquelyn Kelsey Arnold

Washington and Lee Journal of Civil Rights and Social Justice

This Note provides a critique on the current system of prison labor through the lens of the California wildfires and the lack of inmate labor due to early release in the wake of COVID-19. This Note provides an overview of the relevant history of the Thirteenth Amendment, contextualizes mass incarceration as a product of the “War on Drugs” in the United States, and consequently, discusses the significant and dramatic expansion of the prison industrial complex and the use of prison labor as a growing source of production labor. It concludes with a recommendation for a provisional back-end abolition model that …

An Image Processing Based Classifier To Support Safe Dropping For Delivery-By-Drone, Assem A. Abdelhak, Alan Hicks, Dan Moss, Susan Mckeever

Articles

Autonomous delivery-by-drone of packages is an active area of research and commercial development. However, the assessment of safe dropping/ delivery zones has received limited attention. Ensuring that the dropping zone is a safe area for dropping, and continues to stay safe during the dropping process is key to safe delivery. This paper proposes a simple and fast classifier to assess the safety of a designated dropping zone before and during the dropping operation, using a single onboard camera. This classifier is, as far as we can tell, the first to address the problem of safety assessment at the point of …

Criminal Procedure: Confessions, Searches, And Seizures, Honorable Barbara Parker Hervey, Carson Guy, Alexander R. Comsudi

SMU Annual Texas Survey

No abstract provided.

Optimizing Commercial Vehicle Enforcement Investments And Activities To Improve Safety And Increase Revenue Collections, Brian Howell, Jennifer Walton, Andrew Martin

Kentucky Transportation Center Research Report

The Kentucky Transportation Cabinet (KYTC) owns and maintains 14 fixed weigh stations for commercial vehicle enforcement. The Kentucky State Police (KSP) is responsible for staffing these facilities to conduct enforcement, while KYTC is responsible for constructing and maintaining these facilities. Like many states, Kentucky has experienced a decline of enforcement personnel to operate weigh stations limiting its ability to conduct inspections for safety enforcement and revenue collection. This study analyzes three CMV facilities for their impact on safety enforcement and revenue collection and determines their viability for potential replacement. All three existing weigh stations in Hardin, Fulton, and Henderson counties …

Job Satisfaction, Personality Traits, Resilience, And Education Level Among Rural Police Officers, Chellie Newman-Noon

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

Police agencies struggle with police officer attrition, resulting in agencies needing to hire new officers. This process is costly and results in unwise decision-making by police officers due to inexperience, excessive use of force, and ultimate distrust of police by civilians. Job satisfaction can diminish attrition and excessive use of force and increases both prudent decision-making and civilian trust. The characteristics of personality traits, education level, and resilience contributing to job satisfaction were addressed in the current study using a nonexperimental predictive correlational design. An online assessment of the Big Five traits, resilience, and job satisfaction, in addition to a …

No-One Receives Psychiatric Treatment In A Squad Car, Judy Ann Clausen, Joanmarie I. Davoli

UF Law Faculty Publications

This Article explores tragedies caused by our current system for responding to mental health emergencies: homelessness, institutionalization, criminalization, harm to self, harm to others, and harm by police. In the wake of the George Floyd murder, there has been increased attention on our response to mental health emergencies and an outcry to reduce the role of police. This Article analyzes reforms from California, Colorado, Eugene, Oregon, the federal government, Dallas, and Nebraska. This Article posits that any reform that focuses only on first responders will not fix our system. Harm by police is only one of the tragedies suffered by …

Fee Retrenchment In Immigration Habeas, Seth Katsuya Endo

UF Law Faculty Publications

For noncitizens facing removal, habeas corpus provides one of very few avenues for Article III review. For decades, habeas proceedings have been interpreted as falling under the ambit of the Equal Access to Justice Act (EAJA), which provides for the award of attorneys’ fees to prevailing parties in suits against the federal government. But this understanding is being challenged, threatening the judicial backstop to executive and legislative overreach in immigration. Reducing the ability of lawyers to recover their fees in these circumstances will reduce the number and quality of habeas challenges by individuals being detained while they await removal—a particularly …

Psychosis, Heat Of Passion, And Diminished Responsibility, E. Lea Johnston, Vincent T. Leahy

UF Law Faculty Publications

This Article calls for the creation of a generic partial excuse for diminished rationality from mental disability. Currently, most jurisdictions recognize only one partial excuse: the common law heat-of-passion defense. Empirical research demonstrates that populations with delusions experience similar impairments to decision-making capacities as people confronted with sudden, objectively adequate provocation. Yet, current law affords significant mitigation only to the latter group, which only applies in murder cases. Adoption of the Model Penal Code’s “extreme mental or emotional disturbance” (EMED) defense could extend mitigation to other forms of diminished responsibility. However, examination of jurisdictions’ adoption and utilization of the EMED …

Policing The College Campus: History, Race, And Law, Katheryn Russell-Brown, Vanessa Miller

UF Law Faculty Publications

The structure, impact, and historical roots of campus policing on the American college campus receives little academic attention. In fact, campus policing is often overlooked in legal analyses and research studies, including its relationship to race. Campus policing and race deserves a critical assessment from legal scholars because race is fixed to the ways the criminal-legal system presents itself on campus. The racialized implications of policing on campus are rooted in historical social and legal contexts that still exist today. However, the lack of research on campus policing is not surprising. American colleges and universities have successfully marketed themselves as …

Re-Envisioning Child Well-Being: Dismantling The Inequitable Intersections Among Child Welfare, Juvenile Justice, And Education, Kele Stewart

Articles

Twenty years after Shattered Bonds, Dorothy Roberts' indictment that the family regulation system polices, disrupts, and restructures Black families and communities remains urgent. Black families remain overrepresented in foster care with enshrined disparate treatment and outcomes. Black children are more likely to be removed from their homes, and their longer stays in foster care are characterized by placement instability, overly restrictive placements, the risk of abuse and exploitation, and inadequate mental health and other services. Black children also have worse educational outcomes than even other children in foster care, are over-referred to the juvenile justice system, and are more …

The Unexpected Consequences Of Automation In Policing, Elizabeth E. Joh

SMU Law Review

This Article has two aims. First, it explains how automated decision-making can produce unexpected results. This is a problem long understood in the field of industrial organization, but identifying its effects in policing is no easy task. The police are a notoriously difficult institution to study. They are insular, dislike outsiders, and especially dislike critical outsiders. Fortunately, we have the benefit of a decade’s worth of experimentation in police use of automated decision-making and the resulting political backlash against some of these uses. As a result, some large urban police departments have undergone external investigations to see whether tools like …