Digital Commons Network^™

Impeachment And Its Discontents, Brian C. Kalt

Missouri Law Review

What purpose do presidential impeachments serve if the Senate does not convict? Should impeachment be attempted at all if there is no chance of conviction? These questions remind me of the old joke in which someone is asked whether he believes in infant baptism. He replies, “Believe in it? Heck, I’ve actually seen it done.”

Impeachment And Trial After Officials Leave Office, Michael W. Mcconnell

Missouri Law Review

The second impeachment of President Donald J. Trump raised an important and unresolved question: May Presidents and other federal officers be impeached or tried on impeachments after they have left office? Most Democrats argued that former officers can be both impeached and tried; most Republicans argued that former officers can neither be impeached nor tried. Trump himself was impeached while still in office and tried – and acquitted – after he left office. This is the sort of question that could easily arise again, in connection with presidents and other officers of either party, and it needs an answer that …

The Constitutional (And Political) Safeguards Against Impeachment, Victoria Nourse

Missouri Law Review

Will the Trump impeachments inspire a flurry of future presidential impeachments? Will the second Trump impeachment, which occurred after the President left office, spur impeachments of lesser, former government officials? These and other questions emerged during the 2022 Missouri Law Review Symposium and on the Senate floor during the Trump impeachment trials. I have argued that we can make an educated prognosis about these possibilities based on constitutional structure. I called this argument the “political safeguards” of impeachment in my recent book, The Impeachments of Donald Trump: An Introduction to Constitutional Argument. What I called political safeguards, invoking the great …

Impeachment In A System Of Checks And Balances, Keith E. Whittington

Missouri Law Review

Measured by any yardstick, it is hard to think that the first impeachment of President Donald Trump was particularly successful. But there are important broader questions raised particularly by the first Trump impeachment that have significance for how we think about the impeachment power moving forward. If future impeachment efforts are to be more successful, or even useful, Congress will have to understand the nature of the constitutional task that it is undertaking.

Waste-D Chance: The Risk Of Ignoring Judicial Federalism In Local Controversies, Betsy Smith

Missouri Law Review

The Manhattan Project caused death and destruction in Hiroshima and Nagasaki and sparked a nuclear arms race around the world. The Project’s legacy is most closely associated with Los Alamos, New Mexico, the site of the primary research laboratory. But, the primary research site, smaller project sites, and disposal sites throughout the country have been plagued by environmental consequences. Its effects are still being felt today, even in the world of civil procedure. One landfill in St. Louis, in particular, holds significant amounts of nuclear waste from the program and has recently sparked major class-action litigation.

"I Just Had To Do Most Everything": Gender, Settlement And American Empire In The Far West, Hannah Alexandra Reynolds

Dissertations and Theses

The field of settler colonial studies has made huge strides in recent years toward problematizing the establishment of the United States on stolen land and the nation's steady, violent expansion across the continent. Settler colonial framework provides a rich opportunity for historians of the American West to reframe white settlement on the frontier, especially that which was made possible through land grant legislation such as the Homestead Act of 1862. As the families who took up land grant property sought new opportunities for themselves, they also acted as drivers of U.S. territorial acquisition. This process was inherently gendered, in terms …

Mutation Spectrum Of Congenital Heart Disease In A Consanguineous Turkish Population, Weilai Dong, Hande Kaymakcalan, Sheng Chih Jin, Nicholas S Diab, Cansaran Tanıdır, Ali Seyfi Yalim Yalcin, A Gulhan Ercan-Sencicek, Shrikant Mane, Murat Gunel, Richard P Lifton, Kaya Bilguvar, Martina Brueckner

2020-Current year OA Pubs

BACKGROUNDS: While many studies agree that consanguinity increases the rate of congenital heart disease (CHD), few genome analyses have been conducted with consanguineous CHD cohorts.

METHODS: We recruited 73 CHD probands from consanguineous families in Turkey and used whole-exome sequencing (WES) to identify genetic lesions in these patients.

RESULTS: On average, each patient had 6.95 rare damaging homozygous variants, 0.68 of which are loss-of-function (LoF) variants. Seven patients (9.6%) carried damaging homozygous variants in five causal CHD genes. Six of those patients exhibited laterality defects (six HTX and one D-TGA). Three additional patients (4.1%) harbored other types of CHD-associated genomic …

Separated At Baptism: What The Mortara Case Can Teach Us About The Rejection Of Natural Justice By Integralists And Progressives, Francis J. Beckwith

BYU Law Review

No abstract provided.

Political Trust, Kevin Vallier

BYU Law Review

No abstract provided.

Political Partisanship And Sincere Religious Conviction, Mark Satta

BYU Law Review

In order for a religious conviction to receive protection under the First Amendment or the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA), it must be a sincere religious conviction. Some critics of the Supreme Court’s ruling in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby have suggested that the plaintiffs in that case and in related cases were motivated more by political ideology than by sincere religious conviction. The remedy, they argue, is for courts to be quicker to scrutinize claims of religious sincerity. In this Article, I consider another possibility—namely, that current sociopolitical partisanship in the United States has eroded a clear distinction between political …

Determination Of The Electronic Portal Imaging Device Pixel-Sensitivity-Map For Quality Assurance Applications. Part 1: Comparison Of Methods, Michael Paul Barnes, Baozhou Sun, Brad Michael Oborn, Bishnu Lamichhane, Stuart Szwec, Matthew Schmidt, Bin Cai, Frederick Menk, Peter Greer

2020-Current year OA Pubs

PURPOSE: Calibration of a radiotherapy electronic portal imaging device (EPID) using the pixel-sensitivity-map (PSM) in place of the flood field correction improves the utility of the EPID for quality assurance applications. Multiple methods are available for determining the PSM and this study provides an evaluation to inform on which is superior.

METHODS: Three different empirical methods ("Calvary Mater Newcastle" [CMN], "Varian," and "WashU") and a Monte Carlo-based method of PSM determination were investigated on a single Varian TrueBeam STx linear accelerator (linac) with an aS1200 EPID panel. PSM measurements were performed for each empirical method three successive times using the …

Association Of Molecular Senescence Markers In Late-Life Depression With Clinical Characteristics And Treatment Outcome, Breno S Diniz, Benoit H Mulsant, Charles F Reynolds, Daniel M Blumberger, Jordan F Karp, Meryl A Butters, Ana Paula Mendes-Silva, Erica L Vieira, George Tseng, Eric J Lenze

2020-Current year OA Pubs

Importance: Many older adults with depression do not experience remission with antidepressant treatment, and markers of cellular senescence in late-life depression (LLD) are associated with greater severity of depression, greater executive dysfunction, and higher medical illness burden. Since these clinical characteristics are associated with remission in LLD, molecular and cellular senescence abnormalities could be a possible biological mechanism underlying poor treatment response in this population.

Objective: To examine whether the senescence-associated secretory phenotype (SASP) index was associated with the likelihood of remission from a depressive episode in older adults.

Design, Setting, and Participants: A nonrandomized, open-label clinical trial was conducted …

Co-Transmitting Neurons In The Lateral Septal Nucleus Exhibit Features Of Neurotransmitter Switching, Patrick J Hunt, Mikhail Kochukov, Brandon T Pekarek, Benjamin D W Belfort, Juan M Romero, Jessica L Swanson, Benjamin R Arenkiel

Faculty, Staff and Students Publications

The lateral septal nucleus (LSN) is a highly interconnected region of the central brain whose activity regulates widespread circuitry. As such, the mechanisms that govern neuronal activity within the LSN have far-reaching implications on numerous brain-wide nuclei, circuits, and behaviors. We found that GABAergic neurons within the LSN express markers that mediate the release of acetylcholine (ACh). Moreover, we show that these vGATLSN neurons release both GABA and ACh onto local glutamatergic LSN neurons. Using both short-term and long-term neuronal labeling techniques we observed expression of the cholinergic neuron marker Choline Acetyltransferase (ChAT) in vGATLSN neurons. These findings provide evidence …

Influence Of The Human Lipidome On Epicardial Fat Volume In Mexican American Individuals, Ana C. Leandro, Laura F. Michael, Marcio Almeida, Mikko Kuokkanen, Kevin Huynh, Corey Giles, Thy Duong, Vincent P. Diego, Ravindranath Duggirala, Geoffrey D. Clarke, John Blangero, Joanne E. Curran

School of Medicine Publications

Introduction: Cardiovascular disease (CVD) is the leading cause of mortality worldwide and is the leading cause of death in the US. Lipid dysregulation is a well-known precursor to metabolic diseases, including CVD. There is a growing body of literature that suggests MRI-derived epicardial fat volume, or epicardial adipose tissue (EAT) volume, is linked to the development of coronary artery disease. Interestingly, epicardial fat is also actively involved in lipid and energy homeostasis, with epicardial adipose tissue having a greater capacity for release and uptake of free fatty acids. However, there is a scarcity of knowledge on the influence of plasma …

Everything To Lose: Extraction, Racism, And Survival On Wet'suwet'en Land, Anne Spice

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This work critically analyzes the role of extractive industry in the continued colonization of Indigenous peoples and occupation of Indigenous lands, and examines how Indigenous resistance to oil and gas projects augments the damaging effects of fossil fuel extraction and create alternative possibilities for life in the face of catastrophic environmental crises. In Wet’suwet’en territory, in Northern British Columbia, Canada, construction has begun on the fracked gas Coastal GasLink pipeline, despite the opposition of local Indigenous leaders and chiefs. Several Indigenous land reoccupation camps have been set up by Wet’suwet’en people to resist the pipeline’s construction, and the resulting conflict …

Streets Of Grievance: Everyday Poetics And Postcolonial Politics In Urban Algeria, Stephanie Victoria Love

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation analyzes the intersections of language, settler-colonial and postcolonial politics, and urbanism in North Africa (Algeria). It is an urban and linguistic ethnography of Oran, Algeria’s second-largest city, based on sixteen months of ethnographic, linguistic anthropological, and archival research conducted in Arabic and French. I show how contemporary Oranis mobilize language as a key resource in contemporary urban politics, which are inextricably tied to French colonialism’s material remnants, rubble, and legacies. In contemporary Oran, the connection between the colonial past and the postcolonial present remains palpable, even sixty years after independence; however, while the postcolonial Algerian state has long …

Sunbelt Schooling: Publics And Politics Of Education Advocacy In Phoenix, Arizona, Matthew Chrisler

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

For the past forty years, public education in the United States has been the target of both neoliberal and conservative education reforms that have imposed austerity and privatization, set limits on racial, gendered, and sexual citizenship, increased school responsibility for social reproduction, and winnowed visions of public education as both a universal social entitlement and site of participatory democracy. These reforms emerged from, and remain powerfully anchored in, the United States Sunbelt, a crescent of metropolitan suburbs spanning southern California to Florida. This region propelled the conservative revolution in American politics but is also the site of progressive organizing that, …

The Effects Of Education And Cognitive Skills On Employability And Earnings For Labor Market Entrants: Evidence From Large-Scale Worldwide Survey Data, Yongchao Zhao

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

People’s stock of knowledge, abilities, and other personal characteristics, namely human capital, has been widely regarded as a fundamental input to both individuals' ability to earn a living and to fuel economic growth. Traditionally, formal education has been widely considered as a good investment in human capital and an extensive literature has shown that it has a positive and strong association with labor market success. However, considering the global knowledge economy, which emphasizes skills and knowledge, the economic benefits of formal education are being questioned, as findings from recent research reviews revealed that the overall rate of return to education …

American Intervention In The "New World Order", Julie N. Benson

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The decision to intervene in another state's affairs is one of the most controversial foreign policy decisions an American president can make during his or her administration. From calls for isolationism during World War II to protests against the 2003 invasion of Iraq, intervention policies are often contentious and debated both inside and outside the White House. What explains this decision? How do leaders decide to intervene, or not intervene? I argue that, following the end of the Cold War, the decision to intervene militarily was no longer constrained by anti-Soviet or anticommunist doctrine, but instead heavily influenced by the …

Falling Forward: The Governance Of School Reform, Race, And The Contest For A Dignified Future In Newark, N.J., Claire Cahen

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Following the Great Recession, a two-pronged policy agenda of charter school creation and public school austerity was implemented in many impoverished, multiracial urban school districts in the U.S. The reforms have yet to meet durably effective resistance. The three articles that comprise this dissertation address questions about how school reforms, austerity, and privatization have been made governable, specifically in relation to the: preservation of local Black political machine power, creation of a labor market for charter school teachers, ongoing contestation attempts by public educators in inert unions. These questions correspond to theoretical debates about contemporary forms of racism and the …

Phase Transitions, Critical Phenomena, And Correlation Functions In The 2d Ising Model And Its Applications To Quantum Dynamics: A Tensor Network Approach, Sankhya Basu

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis explores several aspects of the 2D Ising Model at both real and complex temperatures utilizing tensor network algorithms. We briefly discuss the importance of tensor networks in the context of forming efficient representations of wavefunctions and partition functions for quantum and classical many-body systems respectively, followed by a brief review of the tensor network renormalization algorithms to compute the one point and two point correlation functions. We use the Tensor Renormalization Group (TRG) to study critical phenomena and examine feasibility of accurate estimations of universal critical data for three critical points for three critical points in two dimensions …

Staging Retro-Perspectives: Performing Age, Memory/Loss, And Queer Desire In The Later Works Of Split Britches (2009–2020), Benjamin Gillespie

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This project investigates the later works of the celebrated New York–based lesbian-feminist performance troupe Split Britches made up of founding members Peggy Shaw (b. 1944) and Lois Weaver (b. 1949). Revealing how the duo consciously interlaces aspects of aging and age-based identity into the very fabric of their later performances in both form and content, this project analyzes how Shaw and Weaver integrate an explicitly anti-ageist and overtly queer representation of aging on the experimental stage. Their later performances serve to challenge narratives of decline and debilitation that come with (hetero)normative representations of old age and the life course in …

The Beehive, The Favela, The Castle, And The Ministry: Race And Modern Architecture In Rio De Janeiro, 1811–1945, Luisa Valle

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation deploys a multidisciplinary and decolonial framework to investigate the architecture of cortiços, the Favela Hill, the Castelo Hill, and the Ministry of Education and Public Health (MES) building as constitutive of the history of modernization and modernity in the Centro (city center) of Rio de Janeiro, 1811-1945. The first three chapters investigate the distinct geographies, formal and material qualities, and populations of cortiços, the Favela Hill, and the Castelo Hill, as well as their racialization and essentialization by the “unsanitary” and “degenerate” labels bestowed upon these landscapes by the state. Traditional narratives and practices of modern architecture and …

The Cop In Your Head: Criminal Justice Education, Liberalism, And The Carceral State, Nicole Haiber

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis centers policing ideology in higher education and the way it is constructed and fortified through criminal justice programs. In 1968, the Law Enforcement Education Program (LEEP) made funds available to police officers to attend college and awarded grants to universities to create criminal justice programs. The program effectively funneled federal money into the project of professionalizing the police and developed criminal justice as a field devoted to conducting crime research, as defined by the federal government. Criminal justice programs exploded across the country with the availability of LEEP funding, and the City University of New York’s (CUNY) John …

Testing An Overtraining Protocol For Fear Learning In Humans, Gordon M. Haskell

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Successful regulation of fear memories is a fundamental tenet to the exposure-based therapies often employed by mental health professionals for individuals with PTSD, phobias, and other anxiety disorders. Consequently, the efficacy of these treatment methodologies is largely dependent on the strength of the fear memory, as stronger memories are often characterized by an increased resistance to extinction and heightened fear recovery. However, there is little consensus within the scientific community regarding how to effectively maximize fear memory strength in human studies, and the literature exploring the impact of variability in acquisition parameters on memory strength is sparse. Here, we tested …

Nunc Pauperis Agri: Rural Fantasy And Economic Reality In The Elegies Of Tibullus, Victoria Elizabeth Jansson

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation argues that attention to economic anxieties in Tibullus’ elegies is crucial to understanding his corpus. Concerns about agricultural production, globalized trade, and institutional power recur throughout the elegies. An appreciation of economic desire may not only produce a fruitful reading of Tibullus’ poetry, but also help to answer some of the questions suggested by elegy’s socio-historical framework. This project relies methodologically on both economic analysis and a Lacanian psychoanalytic framework. Additionally, each chapter explores a different facet of religious experience in the elegies: the myth of the Golden Age, prayers to the goddess Ceres, and references to the …

Examining The Buffering Effect Of Mindfulness On The Relationship Between Stress And Ethical Decision Making, Irina Kuzmich

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Poor ethical decision making is an issue in many modern-day organizations. Academic research and the popular press have shown that failures in ethical decision making have resulted in harm to organizations, their employees, and the societies in which they exist. While there is much research into what may impact ethical decision making, this paper examined the effects of two understudied factors, stress and mindfulness, within a self-regulatory framework. A 2x2 experimental design with undergraduate student participants was used in which each participant was randomly assigned to a mindfulness training condition and a stress condition. Trait mindfulness was also measured as …

Fragmentation And Fabulation: Reflexivity And The New Black Documentary, Joanna Lehan

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis concerns the photographic representation of Black bodies in new, reflexive documentary forms that have been increasingly produced and exhibited in the midst of America’s renewed discourse on race. Approaching this argument categorically, focused on the themes of fabulation and fragmentation, my task here is to uncover the gaps and overlaps between earlier critiques of the documentary image and more recent discourse on photography and race by exploring the specific methods through which select recent documentary projects embed and expand these critiques.

Fragmentation is a category of production I use to frame a movement of Black photographic artists …

Practicing Abolition: A Digital Roundtable On Abolitionist Pedagogy, Samantha Lilienfeld

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This capstone project explores education and pedagogy as sites for abolitionist practice, and approaches abolitionism as a method by building on the idea of abolition democracy. Using the framework of abolition as a pedagogical practice, I see teaching and learning as urgent tasks of contemporary abolitionism. My project integrates research and scholarship on the abolition of prisons and policing with practices of pedagogy, in part by thinking interdisciplinarily with students and scholars working within CUNY. Practicing Abolition: A Digital Roundtable on Abolitionist Pedagogy incorporates voices from students and scholars about how they practice abolitionist pedagogy in higher education by presenting …

Optical Studies Of Wide Bandgap Photonic Materials, Nikesh Maharjan

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In this dissertation work, optical properties of wide bandgap materials such as hexagonal Boron Nitride (h-BN) and Zinc Oxide (ZnO) have been studied. Deep UV photoluminescence spectroscopy was employed to study the optical properties of bulk h-BN and powder crystals using a laser of wavelength 200 nm, which is the fourth harmonic of Ti:Sapphire laser as excitation source. The properties and chemical compositions of annealed and unannealed bulk h-BN were investigated. The PL spectra from h-BN samples annealed at 900 ºC in ambient air, had strong phonon assisted band edge emissions along with a sharp atomic-like emission line at 4.09 …