Digital Commons Network^™

From Endowment To Extraction: Critical Mineral Governance And Supply-Chain Integration In The Arctic, Charles Bollwerk

CMC Senior Theses

Annexing Greenland, making Canada the 51st State – what’s it all about? Critical minerals are often treated as a geological and national security problem that can be fixed through strength and coercion. This thesis argues that, in the Arctic, governance structures are what determine whether critical mineral wealth becomes strategically useful. Through a comparative qualitative analysis of Greenland, Canada, Alaska, Russia, and the Nordic countries, it examines what drives variation in critical mineral extraction and supply-chain integration across Arctic states, an especially relevant topic as Western states seek to reduce dependence on Chinese-controlled supply chains. The analysis applies four variables …

Revenge Of The Interceptors? The Dod, Congress, And The Return Of Space-Based Missile Defense During Trump 45, Chad Mcelroy

CMC Senior Theses

The initiation of the Golden Dome for America program has brought space-based missile defense (SBMD) to the forefront of American national security policy and rekindled debates that had laid dormant since the administration of President Ronald Reagan. How, forty-two years after President Reagan first proposed the Strategic Defense Initiative, did SBMD return as a national priority? In lieu of public information about the ongoing Golden Dome initiative, this thesis explores the first Trump administration, otherwise known as Trump 45, in order to analyze the development of SBMD proposals by its proponents in Congress and the Department of Defense. I used …

From Reconstruction To The Carceral State: Law, Labor, And Punishment In Black America, Nicolas S. Changbencharoen

CMC Senior Theses

This thesis examines the reconfiguration of racial and labor subordination in the United States from Reconstruction to the present, arguing that the legal abolition of slavery did not dismantle the economic and institutional structures on which it rested. It traces a continuous trajectory through which law and the criminal justice system were systematically weaponized to reconstitute slavery's essential functions under successive institutional forms, each serving as a deliberate mechanism for the extraction of Black labor in service of private and state interests. The analysis culminates in an examination of the modern carceral state, concluding that contemporary prison labor programs continue …

Goods, Practices, Excellence, And The Law: Steps To An Internal Theory Of Value, Rowan Gray

CMC Senior Theses

Practices are the coherent and complex social activities we spend much of our lives engaging in. This category encompasses everything from figure skating to wine-tasting to friend relationships. We gain immense value from participating in practices, and philosophers have articulated a number of accounts for where the value emerges from and how we can best experience it. Many of these theories are ‘externalist’, because they posit that value is incidental to practices and emerges from outside of them.

In contrast, this thesis will argue that the value in practices is internal to each practice. The value comes from each practice’s …

Interpretable Sample Uncertainty Measures For Ranked-Choice Election Polls, Jason Liang

CMC Senior Theses

Polling results from traditional single-choice plurality elections are readily interpretable. Simple frequentist population parameters are estimated, including each candidate’s total support and the size of the front runner's lead. If the point estimate for the size of the front runner's lead exceeds the margin of error of the lead, we can conclude that the poll shows a statistically significant front runner. However, the interpretability of these population statistics disappears when applied to ranked-choice voting elections. Because ballots rank multiple candidates and candidates are eliminated in rounds, simple population-wide parameters are not well-defined. In RCV elections, a candidate’s ability to win …

Parks Under Pressure: Policy Threats And Advocacy Coalition Resistance In 2025, Rachel Supnick

CMC Senior Theses

This thesis examines the 2025 policy changes affecting the National Park Service (NPS) and their implications for the agency’s mission and advocacy coalition. Historically a bipartisan and widely trusted agency, the NPS has evolved from a conservation-focused mandate into a complex institution balancing environmental protection, recreation, scientific research, and cultural interpretation. Recent policy actions represent not only operational disruption but an unprecedented politicization of the Park Service, reflecting a shift toward centralized executive control. These changes have constrained the agency’s ability to fulfill its mission and placed it within broader ideological conflicts over land use, historical interpretation, and federal authority. …

Authoritarian Development & Political Economy Of East Asia: The Making Of South Korea’S Developmental Regime, Christopher J. Chung

CMC Senior Theses

This thesis investigates the historical evolution of South Korea's developmental trajectory during the Park Chung-hee era (1961-1979), a period that left an indelible mark on the country's political economy and industrial landscape. Rather than treating Park's regime as its own starting point, this thesis situates it within a longer historical arc beginning with Japanese colonial rule and continuing through Syngman Rhee's aid-dependent republic, arguing that Korea's developmental success was neither institutionally inevitable nor externally engineered, but the product of a historically specific and ideologically driven state-building project. Four primary questions guide this research: what historical conditions shaped the institutional landscape …

Revisionist Political Coalitions, Queering, And The Transmission Of Violence, Tom Y. Inouye

CMC Senior Theses

This thesis examines the ways in which violent non-state actors (VNSAs), specifically revisionist political coalitions (RPCs), emerge from a state-centric international system that denies them access to formal avenues of political advocacy, legitimacy, and recognition. Challenging dominant portraits in international security that cast non-state-perpetrated violence as irrational or deviant, I argue that RPCs turn to brutality as a strategic response to exclusion produced by the Westphalian paradigm. Queer theory, particularly the concepts of legibility and strategic disidentification, is central to the reconceptualization of RPCs as “queered” political objects whose existence falls outside the normative boundaries of sovereignty and legitimacy.

To …

Balancing The Scales Of Justice: The Unconstitutionality Of Marital Rape In India, Pallavi Raju

CMC Senior Theses

Marital rape remains an unpunished crime in India, despite decades of dispute and litigation. This thesis explores the question of why the state continues to retain the marital rape exception within the Indian criminal code, even though it commits to combat gender based violence in other areas of justice. The research begins with a broader understanding of privatization of women’s rights in the international sphere and culturally sanctioned violence to protect the institution of marriage. With a focus on the legal justifications and language of Indian court cases, this thesis determines that judges adjudicate on gender justice inconsistently. Attempting to …

No Coup, No Conscience: Coup-Proofing In The Armenian Genocide, Rachel Svoyskiy

CMC Senior Theses

The Armenian Genocide functioned as a form of coup-proofing under the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP). Existing scholarship emphasizes nationalism, wartime radicalization, and security dilemmas, but does not fully account for why the military complied, why dissenters were removed, or how Armenian property became tied to political loyalty. Applying Hicham Bou Nassif’s framework of coup-proofing, this study examines four tactics the CUP used to secure military obedience while carrying out mass violence. First, the regime framed Armenians as an existential threat to align the officer corps ideologically with the state. Second, it promoted the material interests of military and …

A Reevaluation Of South Korea’S Economic Rise: The Defense Industrial Base, Timothy Lee

CMC Senior Theses

This paper seeks to reexamine how the Republic of Korea (ROK) was able to rise from one of the world's poorest economies after the Korean War to a leading international defense exporter today. Existing development theories—such as dependency theory, export-led industrialization, and world-systems theory—each offer partial explanations but none fully accounts for the ROK's rapid economic growth. To address this gap, the paper analyzes U.S. foreign aid data, U.S. national security documents, and the economic data of the ROK’s chaebols, family-owned business conglomerates, to reevaluate two key variables: the United States' strategic imperative to contain communism during the Cold War, …

The Vestiges Of The German Democratic Republic: Memory Politics And Xenophobia In Former East Germany, Diana Zhou

CMC Senior Theses

From the 2015 migration influx onward, xenophobic and nationalist sentiments permeated Germany’s national political discourse. The former socialist territories in eastern Germany have proven particularly susceptible to far-right, anti-immigration, and anti-integration rhetoric. This thesis explores the mnemonic foundations of xenophobic sentiments in former East German states, tracing the development of an antifascist yet ethnically nationalist mnemonic framework to the state-sanctioned myths and invented traditions of the German Democratic Republic (GDR). As the loss of a collective GDR identity produced a reactionary rehabilitation of this framework post-unification, the racial and ethnic “other” — migrants, asylum seekers, and refugees — became constructed …

Lessons Unlearned: Cultural Competence And The Limits Of U.S. Army Doctrine In Iraq And Afghanistan, Kylie W. Ha

CMC Senior Theses

This thesis examines how the absence of comprehensive cultural and linguistic competence within U.S. Army doctrine contributed to operational and ethical failures during the wars in Iraq (2003–2011) and Afghanistan (2001–2021). It focuses on the gap between doctrinal recognition of culture and language and the failure to institutionalize these elements as measurable, force-wide competencies. The thesis analyzes doctrinal publications spanning the period from 2001 to 2014 and finds that, while these publications increasingly acknowledged the importance of cultural awareness, language, and local context—particularly in counterinsurgency operations—these elements were not embedded as standardized requirements across training, planning, or evaluation. Iraq and …

The Jamaica That Dreams: A Normative Application Of Developmental Theory, Tamoy Pitt

CMC Senior Theses

This thesis examines Jamaica’s persistent underdevelopment through Martha Nussbaum's normative application of the capabilities approach as per her conception in Creating Capabilities. Through this approach, the paper will argue that Jamaica’s underdevelopment is a result of the failure of its domestic institutions to provide all citizens with the substantive freedoms and capabilities necessary to live lives of dignity. Originally detailed by Amartya Sen in his book Development as Freedom, the capabilities approach posits freedom as both the means and ends to development while rejecting contemporary approaches to development such as GDP, Utilitarianism, or Rawlsian resource-based approaches as insufficient frameworks for …

Measuring Effective Labour Regulation In The Less Developed World: Recent Advances And Challenges Ahead, Lucas Ronconi, Steven Raphael

Comparative Labor Law & Policy Journal

This article critically reviews the literature on labour enforcement with a focus on less developed countries. Despite measurement limitations, the evidence indicates that enforcement is quite low in poorer countries; there are fewer inspectors and inspections, lower penalties, and less trust in the judiciary compared to richer countries. The lower level of enforcement contributes to higher rates of violations of workers’ rights. More controversial are the effects of enforcement on employment. Moreover, it is unclear how to prompt less developed countries to increase enforcement. This article discusses the scant evidence about the role of trade agreements, labour unions, international organizations, …

Collective Labour Dispute Resolution In Vietnam: The Evolution Of Rules And Institutions And Workers’ Strategic Deployment Of State Regulation, Trang T.K. Tran

Comparative Labor Law & Policy Journal

While Vietnam has established a legal system for labour disputes that largely mirrors those in developed countries, empirical evidence reveals these formal mechanisms are rarely, if ever, used to resolve collective disputes. The persistent failures of the formal mechanisms have, paradoxically, created an environment where workers and trade unions have developed innovative, informal strategies to leverage the state’s legal framework. Workers in Vietnam mobilize around the very existence of labour laws to exert pressure on employers and state institutions to intervene on their behalf, even if not directly following each labour laws’ procedure. This strategic deployment of state regulation, often …

Transnational Labour Law And Governance: Advancing Workers’ Rights In Global Value Chains, Judy Fudge, Guy Mundlak

Comparative Labor Law & Policy Journal

TRANSNATIONAL LABOUR GOVERNANCE is a multiscalar assemblage of agents, institutions, instruments, and legal concepts that has emerged to address the governance gap caused by the mismatch between the global nature of production and the territorial format of labour law (Blackett & Trebilcock, 2015; Hepple, 2005; Kolben, 2011; Mundlak, 2024). This special issue investigates some of the key components in this assemblage and identifies features that make a transnational labour law approach distinctive. In this introduction to the special issue, we begin in Section II by describing the governance gap and its impact on the wages and working conditions of supply …

The Problem Of Digital Trade Regulation: Silences Regarding Labour And Their Potential Disruption By A Sustainability Agenda, Tonia Novitz

Comparative Labor Law & Policy Journal

The growing impact of digital trade on work in global supply chains is readily detectable but there are curious regulatory silences on labour-related issues. The key problem identified in digital trade law is national obstruction to the free flow of data needed to promote online ordering and delivery of goods and services. In comparison, the concerns of those whose work is constitutive of digital trade, such as platform workers, are largely overlooked. Arguably, provisions often found in trade agreements relating to digital privacy and the effects of algorithmic management could be utilised by those at work. However, there remain uncertainties …

Weaponizing Religion Against The Human Emotion Of Empathy: A Call To Fight Coercive Settlement Attempts On The Merits, Jeffrey Dodge

Faculty Scholarship

In March 2023, America First Legal filed a lawsuit against West Shore School District in Camp Hill, Pennsylvania. In the complaint, the plaintiffs argued that empathy related instruction from the district’s social emotional learning curriculum violated their parental and religious rights. Nearly every headline about the lawsuit included a quote from a plaintiff parent asserting that “Not every human is deserving of my child’s empathy.” At the time of filing, America First Legal and counsel, Wally Zimolong, argued that students in this school district were illegally being subjected to a radical and invasive curriculum.

School officials denied wrongdoing in receiving …

A Conceptual Map Of The Right To Repair: Where Upcycling Fits In, Anthony D. Rosborough

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

The chapter maps contemporary approaches to the Right to Repair along a spectrum from decentralised freedoms to centralised standard setting and product design. Decentralised approaches propose a Right to Repair that resembles a 'negative right' in that it protects user autonomy through dismantling legal and market barriers. Centralised repairability models, on the other hand, align more with a positive right that is built through stringent product design standards, obligations on manufacturers to repair products directly, and situate repair within larger circular economy governance models.

Using the US and EU approaches to Right to Repair policy as illustrative poles, the chapter …

The Reception Of International Human Rights Law In Charter Litigation: "Not A Box Of Chocolates" But You Still "Never Know What You're Gonna Get", Karinne Lantz

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

This article explores the reception of international human rights law(IHRL)in Canada. Focusing on the Charter context, it demonstrates that how IHRL applies in Canada continues to lack clarity despite repeated (and recent) efforts by the Supreme Court of Canada to provide it. This article argues that this lack of clarity is an important matter for the Court to address, particularly as IHRL is increasingly being invoked before courts and other tribunals around the world. It argues that the Court should adopt a methodology that: (i) endorses the “Dickson Doctrine,”according to which the “minimum protection approach”is robustly applied for international human …

Revisiting Law Society Disciplinary Powers Over The Attorney General: Professional Discipline For Policy Decisions?, Andrew Flavelle Martin

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

In this article, I assess whether the law society can, and should, discipline the attorney general for their policy decisions and those of the cabinet. In addition to a parallel to policy immunity in tort law, I also consider other potential restrictions applicable to policy decisions, including the scope of parliamentary privilege—and related concepts—as apparently broadened in more recent decisions by the Supreme Court of Canada.

This article consists of five parts after this introduction. I begin in Part II by revisiting the statutory jurisdiction of the law society and the impact of the rule of law considerations embodied in …

Statutory Immunity Of The Attorney General From Law Society Discipline In Alberta: A Comment In Justice Statutes Amendment Act, 2025, Andrew Flavelle Martin

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

In December 2025, Alberta became the second Canadian province to grant its Attorney General statutory immunity from law society discipline. This comment analyzes this amendment to the Legal Profession Act and the rationales and critiques that emerged during the legislative process. It argues that, while some of the critiques were misplaced, the rationales given by the government are problematic in themselves and insufficient to justify the tension between the immunity of the Attorney General to law society discipline and the constitutional principle of the rule of law. In the absence of a more clearly articulated and justified rationale for adopting …

Voter Information Pamphlet, 2026, Montana. Secretary Of State

The Montana Constitution Collection

Voter information pamphlet for the election, November 3, 2026.

Languages Of Marginalization: Educational Inequality And Identity Formation Among Rohingya Refugees In Bangladesh, Md Khalid Rahman

Sustainability and Social Justice

This research paper investigates how language-of-instruction policies shape educational inequality and identity formation among Rohingya refugee children living in protracted displacement in Cox’ Bazar, Bangladesh. Analyzed from a human right–based framework, the study examines whether existing educational policies align with international legal standards on the right to education, including the UDHR, ICESCR, Child Convention and SDG 4. While these frameworks guarantee non-discriminatory and inclusive access to education, the reality in Cox’s Bazar reveals a persistent gap between normative commitments and policy implementation. Moreover, the study explores how the exclusion of both the host language (Bangla) and the native Rohingya language …

Collective Bargaining Agreements As Non-Judicial Grievance Mechanisms, Sahiba Gill

Comparative Labor Law & Policy Journal

Do collective bargaining agreements (CBAs) in global value chains meet the United Nations Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights’ (UN Guiding Principles, or Guiding Principles) benchmark for effective access to remedy through non-judicial grievance mechanisms? The literature on access to remedy in the business and human rights framework has not considered whether they do, despite growing attention to contestation between rightsholders and companies via these mechanisms. This article contributes to filling this gap through empirical analysis of a dataset of 216 CBAs in manufacturing sectors in the Global South with grievance mechanisms. Findings indicate that grievance mechanisms in CBAs …

Supply Chain Bargaining And Worker Voice: Reflections On The Bangladesh Accord And The Dindigul Agreement, Marlese Von Broembsen

Comparative Labor Law & Policy Journal

Both private governance and transnational labour law scholars are concerned with the participation of supply chain workers in “enforceable brand agreements.” Much of the private governance literature is concerned with improving workers’ participation in the negotiation and implementation of enforceable brand agreements. Some transnational labour law scholars are concerned with whether transnational labour law should depart from prescripts typical of national labour law — which generally recognises trade unions as the only legitimate representatives of workers — to recognise civil society organisations as bargaining agents. This article analyses the Bangladesh Accord on Fire and Building Safety and the Dindigul Agreement …

Community Resources For Older Adults With Age-Related Disabilities And Chronic Conditions: A Scoping Review, Oejin Shin, Sojung Park, Soobin Park, Sarah Sunghye Kang, Sunghei Han, Eunsun Kwon, Seoyeon Ahn, Borin Kim

Faculty Publications - Social Work

Community resources are essential for supporting older adults with disabilities and chronic conditions, yet how these resources are conceptualized and evaluated across the empirical literature remains unclear. This scoping review synthesizes U.S.-based research on community resources for older adults with age-related disabilities and chronic conditions, guided by the PAGER framework. Following PRISMA-ScR guidelines, we searched MEDLINE, PsycINFO, CINAHL, and Web of Science, ultimately including 21 peer-reviewed studies. Findings reveal four primary resource domains: healthcare-based services, home- and community-based services (HCBS), behavioral health supports, and environmental or structural resources. Accessibility and utilization emerged as the most consistently examined dimensions, while quality …

The Crisis Of Appropriations Law, Samuel R. Bagenstos

Articles

Appropriations law is a unique body of federal law.  Appropriations law imposes its own somewhat baroque set of statutory interpretation principles, approves of very broad delegations to the Executive Branch without meaningful limiting principles, and is often exempt from judicial review.  But perhaps that is all about to change.  Donald Trump’s historically aggressive challenge to Congress’s power of the purse has spurred an unusually large volume of exceptionally high-stakes appropriations law litigation. 

The potential implications go beyond the high-profile issues such as enforcement of the Impoundment Control Act.  In general, the unusual features of appropriations law are built on a …

Corporatism For The Informal Economy: Democratising The Potential Of The Mathadi Tripartite Board Model, Shelley Marshall, Hila Shamir, Babu P. Remesh, Anjali Sharma

Comparative Labor Law & Policy Journal

This article examines the Mathadi Boards in Pune, India, as a pioneering example of corporatist regulation adapted to the informal economy. These tripartite institutions — comprising workers, employers, and the state — negotiate legally binding agreements on wages and working conditions for informal labourers, offering social protections and formalization without relying on traditional employment contracts. Drawing on extensive fieldwork and interviews, the study explores the Boards’ structure, governance, and impact, highlighting their potential as scalable models for informal labour regulation globally. It also identifies challenges related to representation, enforcement, and social exclusion, offering insights into how corporatist frameworks can be …