Digital Commons Network^™

Some Caution About Novel State Constitutional Rights, Nick Brod

Campbell Law Review

No abstract provided.

One Post Too Few: Doxing As A True Threat And North Carolina's Repeated Action Requirement, Abigail C. Akins

Campbell Law Review

The purpose of this Comment is to argue for the removal of the repeated action and direct targeting requirements for cyberstalking crimes under N.C. Gen. Stat. § 14-196.3. The recent influx of “doxing”1 behavior on the internet has necessitated statutory change for the protection of North Carolinians. This Comment describes the origins and different types of doxing on the internet, as well as the potential mental and physical impacts that doxing has on individuals who have been doxed. Further, this Comment analyzes the legal doctrines at work with doxing, specifically the First Amendment’s free speech protections and the right to …

A Sample Too Small To Sue Over: A De Minimis Approach To Music Sampling In The Fourth Circuit, Jana S. Flowers

Campbell Law Review

Have you ever listened to a song and gotten the sense that it sounds familiar without knowing why? In copyright law, that recognition (or lack thereof) can determine whether a musician is liable for copyright infringement. Federal courts are sharply divided over whether the unlicensed sampling of sound recordings should give rise to liability when the borrowed sound is trivial or unrecognizable. The Sixth Circuit’s bright-line rule treats any unauthorized sampling as infringement, while the Ninth Circuit preserves the traditional de minimis doctrine. This Comment argues that the Fourth Circuit should adopt the Ninth Circuit’s de minimis standard when faced …

Beyond Digital Pessimism: How A Focus On Trust Can Enhance Eu Digital Law, Neil M. Richards, Woodrow Hartzog, Claire Boine, Lea Despotis

Scholarship@WashULaw

Lawmakers looking to foster technological innovation on the European market are adopting laws they hope will promote consumer trust in digital products. Their strategy can be broken down into three components. First, they aim to empower consumers to choose how much data they want to share with companies through an express consent framework. Second, they seek to avoid harms from digital products through product safety law such as adapting the Product Safety Regulation to digital products or adopting the AI Act. Third, they endeavor to prevent manipulation of consumers through digital means.

In this essay, we argue that while laudable, …

Apportioned Direct Taxes, Conor Clarke, Ari Glogower

Scholarship@WashULaw

The Constitution requires that Congress apportion any “direct” tax among the states by population. This once-dormant provision is now the most important constitutional limitation on Congress’s taxing power. Last year, in Moore v. United States, the Supreme Court seriously considered, for the first time in decades, whether to invalidate an Act of Congress as an unapportioned direct tax. While the law survived, Moore has opened a new era in which scholars and policymakers must again take apportionment seriously. Yet the apportionment requirement remains poorly understood.

This Article provides a new perspective on apportionment by examining how Congress and Treasury …

Space Enterprises As International Lawmakers: Nudges, Pledges, And Other Bottom-Up Modalities, Melissa (M.J.) Durkee

Scholarship@WashULaw

Private entities are influencing the development of international space law. Space enterprises need regulatory certainty and consistent standards to attract capital and develop their plans for space. Yet, states have lagged in their capacity to make multilateral international space law in traditional public fora. Private entities have responded to this legal lag by attempting to create, develop, and nudge international space law in commerce-friendly ways. This chapter surveys a variety of modalities by which commercial actors can affect the development of international law, offers several examples of how commercial lawmaking efforts

How International Organizations Regulate Lobbyist Access, Melissa (M.J.) Durkee

Scholarship@WashULaw

This chapter explores how international organizations (IOs) regulate lobbyist access through participation frameworks rather than traditional lobbying laws. While no unified international lobbying regime exists, IOs use rules on NGO 'consultation' and 'engagement' to structure access. These rules, rooted in historical practices like the UN's Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) accreditation system, prioritize representativeness and legitimacy over transparency and accountability. As lobbying increasingly targets international forums, concerns about undue influence (the 'lobbying critique') and insufficient stakeholder inclusion (the 'access critique') have driven divergent reforms: some IOs, like the World Health Organization, have adopted stricter controls; others, such as the GAVI …

Taking Legality Seriously: What The Major Questions Doctrine Is — And Isn't, Andrea Scoseria Katz, Ofra Bloch

Scholarship@WashULaw

The Major Questions Doctrine (MQD), a controversial recent innovation of the Roberts Court that applies stricter scrutiny to “major” actions taken by federal agencies, has faced criticism for being atextual, unprincipled, and nakedly ideological. But this critique misses the fact that the doctrine has near-exact analogues in many other legal systems, where it is an established tool for reining in executive overreach. This Article argues that, while the MQD reflects valid rule-of-law concerns, as applied, it lacks theoretical clarity, consistency and limits. More importantly, the Court itself lacks a theory of what the MQD is. We provide an answer grounded …

Privatising International (Organizations) Law, Melissa (M.J.) Durkee

Scholarship@WashULaw

This essay explores the increasing role of private commercial actors within international organizations (IOs) and the implications for international law. Once conceived as state-centred institutions, IOs now routinely involve corporations, trade associations, and philanthropic foundations in lawmaking, policy-setting, financing, and implementation. These actors participate through multiple channels: as observers, delegates, stakeholders, funders, and partners. While private involvement has historical precedents, its contemporary scale and formalization mark a significant transformation in global governance. International law, however, offers little guidance on the boundary between public and private authority, leaving legitimacy concerns unresolved. To evaluate privatization, the article identifies two competing logics: a …

Abolishing The Family, Susan Frelich Appleton, Albertina Antognini

Scholarship@WashULaw

Family law scholarship is replete with calls for reform. Yet gender-, race-, and class-based inequalities within and across families remain intractable. So what if, instead of reforming the family, we abolish it?

Abolishing the family might sound like a startling idea for a family-law analysis, especially after decades of efforts to expand the legal understanding of “family.” But the proposal is hardly new. In this Article, we lay the groundwork for integrating family abolitionist ideas, which have until now mostly taken place outside of law, into family law scholarship.

While family abolition is in many ways a radical departure from …

Justifying The Fourth Amendment, Daniel Epps

Scholarship@WashULaw

Why does the Fourth Amendment belong in the Constitution? This question is not whether society should impose some legal restraints on government searches and seizures. Rather, why should such protections reside in our national charter, superior to other forms of law and insulated from change via ordinary majoritarian political processes? Despite major disputes about the Fourth Amendment’s content, Fourth Amendment theorists rarely ask this question. Almost all agree that the Fourth Amendment’s constitutional protections are critically important—even if no one can agree exactly what those protections are.

This Article seeks a justification for the Fourth Amendment—the reason why search-and-seizure protections …

Teaching Constitutional Law: Politics, Democracy And History, Andrea Scoseria Katz

Scholarship@WashULaw

Teaching Constitutional Law in the present era presents unique pedagogical challenges. My students arrive skeptical of the field, doubtful of the Supreme Court’s authority, questioning the relevance of legal methods in determining case outcomes, and perceiving constitutional adjudication as irreducibly political. Rather than dismiss these concerns, I argue that constitutional law professors must acknowledge them directly. Our task is not to restore naïve faith in judicial neutrality (an impossible ideal), but to present students with a vision of constitutional meaning-making—one grounded in politics, history, and democratic politics—in which they can recognize themselves as engaged participants in the future of our …

Seeing International Organizations In A Shifting Landscape: Law, Practice, And Authority, Melissa (M.J.) Durkee

Scholarship@WashULaw

This book review symposium comes at a moment of visible strain in the postwar legal order. As of this writing, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney has described a "rupture" in the rules-based world order, warning that multilateral institutions and the architecture of collective problem-solving are under threat. Notably, Carney issued that warning at the World Economic Forum in Davos, before an audience of "companies and countries." The setting underscores a broader shift in global governance, in which states, firms, and philanthropic actors increasingly occupy shared institutional spaces, unsettling assumptions about law and power at the international level. The books under …

Specialization And The Permanence Of Federal Bankruptcy Law, Rafael I. Pardo

Scholarship@WashULaw

Traditional historical accounts posit that federal bankruptcy specialization in the United States first developed under the system established by the Bankruptcy Act of 1898. That view assumes that the structural and temporal conditions necessary to foster specialization did not exist under the nation’s earlier federal bankruptcy systems—those created by the Bankruptcy Acts of 1800, 1841, and 1867. This Article theorizes that federal bankruptcy specialization very likely occurred under the pre-1898 systems and marshals evidence to that effect, primarily focusing on the Bankruptcy Act of 1841 (the 1841 Act). That statute marked a critical turning point in federal bankruptcy law, shifting …

Tariffs And The Taxing Power: Historical Lessons For Major Questions And Nondelegation, Conor Clarke, Ari Glogower

Scholarship@WashULaw

American law is grappling with basic questions about the President’s power to impose tariffs—questions concerning whether Congress can delegate this authority, and the degree to which it has. But the ongoing tariff controversy emerges against a backdrop of conflicting and shifting historical practice. Early Congresses drafted tariff statutes in painstaking detail, while some of the broadest delegations in the early Republic involved internal taxes. In the modern era, by contrast, Congress has delegated more expansive tariff powers to the President, while retaining closer control over internal taxes. How should we understand this seemingly conflicting history of practice, and its relevance …

Foreword: The Constitution And Public Finance—Why Now And Why Ever?, Conor Clarke, Eric Kubo

Scholarship@WashULaw

This paper introduces the Washington University Law Review’s 2026 symposium issue on “Taxing, Spending, and the Constitution.” We situate the symposium’s ten papers within three interconnected developments in public finance law: the Supreme Court’s recent decision on the Sixteenth Amendment in Moore v. United States; the Trump Administration’s assertions of executive control over appropriated funds; and the use of emergency and trade statutes to justify sweeping tariff authority.

We also step back to ask why constitutional issues in public finance—long treated as a technical backwater—have become such a central site of doctrinal and political conflict. We offer several explanations beyond …

Tariffs And The Progressive Fiscal Constitution, Lawrence J. Liu, Alex Zhang

Scholarship@WashULaw

For more than a century, progressive taxation has constituted the American fiscal state. A resurgent and expanding tariff regime, however, threatens that commitment to progressive distribution. Given the ongoing popularity of tariffs, this Article examines how they might be designed and administered in a way that mitigates their regressive distributive impact. The Article thus develops and assesses proposals to (1) vary tariff burdens in accordance with the consumption of imported goods, (2) reduce income- or payroll-tax burdens on lower-income households, and (3) earmark tariff revenue for specified spending programs. Although none is perfect, we seek to articulate possibilities and highlight …

Private Money, Public Risk: Why Florida’S Sb 178 Undermines Equity, Ethics, And Accountability In K–12 Athletics, Delante Clark

Graduate Scholarship and Creative Works

This paper critically evaluates Florida Senate Bill 178, which would require the Florida High School Athletic Association to adopt bylaws allowing coaches to use personal funds to support student athletes, once reported and presumed not to be an impermissible benefit. While the bill is framed to help students who lack essential items, it introduces serious structural risks that outweigh its intended benefits. By relying on private contributions within a public educational system, SB 178 threatens equity, transparency, and ethical governance.

The bill encourages uneven financial assistance that varies based on a coach’s personal means and the socioeconomic conditions of individual …

C.A.S. Full Assessment Report: State Of Florida Government Portal, Delante Clark

Graduate Scholarship and Creative Works

The purpose of this assessment is to evaluate the cognitive overhead, transparency, and attentional integrity of

official State of Florida digital interfaces using the Cognitive Attentional Standards (C.A.S.) platform.

While the Florida Digital Bill of Rights (FDBR) establishes strict regulatory guardrails for consumer data

transparency, tracking opt-outs, and attentional safeguards, the State of Florida explicitly exempts its own

government agencies, public universities, and non-profit entities from complying with these rules.

This assessment serves to investigate the tension between legislative intent and government execution. By

analyzing public sector websites through the C.A.S. platform, this project will establish a “state-enforced vs.

state-executed” …

The Attention Safeguard Models: Governing Digital Harm Without Restricting Lawful Speech, Delante Clark

Graduate Scholarship and Creative Works

Digital platforms increasingly govern contemporary social, civic, and psychological life through systems optimized for attention capture, amplification, and monetization. While lawful expression remains protected under the First Amendment, the infrastructural mechanisms that determine how speech circulates have produced a range of attention‑based harms, including cyberbullying, engagement farming, compulsive doom scrolling, emotional dysregulation, and civic polarization. This research paper introduces the Attentional Safeguards Model (ASM), coined and formalized by Delante Clark, as a novel governance framework that mitigates such harms by regulating systems of amplification rather than restricting expression itself. Building on attention economy theory, technological mediation, constitutional free‑speech doctrine, …

Exploring The Role Of Hawaiian Collectivist Values In Shaping Employee Engagement In Native Hawaiian Organizations, Jessalyn Tran

Dissertations from the Executive Doctorate in Business Administration Program

Employee engagement is a key driver of organizational performance but remains underexplored in indigenous contexts, particularly within Native Hawaiian organizations (NHOs). This study examined how Hawaiian collectivist values (HICV) influence employee engagement, positioning culture as both a motivational and identity-based driver of work behavior. Employee engagement is defined as the physical, cognitive, and emotional expression of one’s full self in work roles (Kahn, 1990). The study is grounded in Employee Engagement Theory (EE), Organizational Identification Theory (OID), Social Exchange Theory (SET), and Hawaiian collectivist values (HICV), which together explain how perceived cultural authenticity and reciprocal exchange shape employee engagement. Partial …

Activity-Dependent Remodeling Of Muscle Architecture During Distinct Locomotor Behaviors In Caenorhabditis Elegans, Adina Fazyl, Akash Anbu, Sabrina Kollbaum, Andres G. Vidal-Gadea

Faculty Publications – Biological Sciences

Muscle structure is dynamically shaped by mechanical use, yet how distinct locomotor behaviors influence sarcomere organization remains poorly understood. In Caenorhabditis elegans, crawling and swimming constitute discrete gaits that differ in curvature, frequency, and mechanical load, providing a tractable model for studying activity-dependent remodeling. Using confocal imaging of phalloidin-stained body-wall myocytes, we quantified myocyte geometry, sarcomere length, and sarcomere number across anterior, mid-body, and posterior regions in animals reared exclusively under crawling or swimming conditions. Quantification and hypothesis testing used linear mixed models that accounted for repeated myocyte measurements within animals, with interaction terms testing region-specific effects of locomotor …

Developing A Best Practice Guideline For Clinical Practice In A Digital Health Environment: Systematic Reviews Based On The Grading Of Recommendations, Assessment, Development, And Evaluation Approach, Lauren Bailey, Lyndsay Howitt, Nafsin Nizum, Christine Buchanan, Maureen Charlebois, Jennifer Yoon, Rob Beleno, Michelle Beyn, Rebecca Bliss, Elizabeth Borycki, Margarita Cleghorne, Sandra Davidson, Lorie Donelle Phd, Rn, Fcan, Faan, Alexander Hamilton, Tsz Yee Ip, Margery Konan, Daile Moffat, Sanaz Riahi, Tiziana Rivera, Tammy Rooke, Vaishali Sengar, Steve Sottile, Meredith Whitehead, Vanessa Burkoski

Publications

Background:

Digital health refers to the field of knowledge and practice associated with the development and use of digital technologies to improve clinical practice and health outcomes. Knowledge of digital health technology is becoming essential for all nurses and health providers.

Objective:

This study aims to present the results of the systematic reviews that were used to inform the recommendations in a best practice guideline (BPG) following the GRADE (Grading of Recommendations, Assessment, Development, and Evaluation) approach. Reviews focused on digital health education for nurses and health providers, peer champion models, and the use of predictive analytics in digital health …

The Online Atlas Of Illinois: Teaching The Geography Of The Land Of Lincoln, John C. Kostelnick, Jill Freund Thomas, Amy M. Bloom

Faculty Publications - Geography, Geology, and the Environment

From the introduction:

The state atlas, with a variety of thematic and reference maps, has an established history within cartography in part due to the convenience of using political boundaries to organize map content for presentation to wide audiences. Several US states have produced state atlases to highlight their unique history, physical geography, and human geography (e.g., Meacham and Allan 2003). Such atlases may be designed for general map enthusiasts, and they may play an important role in the teaching of regional geography and key concepts that students may find more relatable when presented in a familiar geographic context.

Imaging-Based Colorimetric Gas Sensing For Wearable Applications, Syed Saad Ahmed

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Continuous monitoring of gases is a critical challenge for wearable health monitoring systems and portable environmental gas detection. The technology used for gas detection, including electrochemical sensors, metal oxide semiconductors, and non-dispersive infrared systems, is based on bulky optical components, which limit their practicality as an ideal tool for wearable and field-deployable stages. This thesis investigates if the passive colorimetric chemistry read-out provided by a low-power CMOS imager-based architecture can provide a non-invasive alternative across two different application domains: medical transcutaneous CO₂ monitoring systems and toxic gas detection from environmental. Two sensing platforms were developed and evaluated. In the first …

Personhood Amidst Process, Bennett B. Gilbert

History Faculty Publications and Presentations

Both process philosophy and key forms of philosophical personalism aim to harmonize the flux of reality, especially of organisms, with cosmic values and human meaningfulness. This is because both must face our mortality. This paper makes four suggestions for considering further the connection between these two approaches. First, that process philosophy can supply for personalism a thoroughly reasoned ground for nonreducible complexity. Second, that process thought borrows from personhood its model for cosmic creativity. Third, that both approaches share strong notions of the interdependence of all parts of a relational universe. And fourth, that they differ in respect of moral …

Darrell Grayson Undated Poetry, Darrell Grayson

Darrell Grayson Creative Writings

Selected poems from Darrell Grayson.

02 Electrostatics Ii, Gerhard Müller

Electromagnetism (2026)

Part 2 of course materials for Electromagnetism taught by Gerhard Müller at the University of Rhode Island.

03 Electrostatics Iii, Gerhard Müller

Electromagnetism (2026)

Part 3 of course materials for Electromagnetism taught by Gerhard Müller at the University of Rhode Island.

07 Magnetostatics Ii, Gerhard Müller

Electromagnetism (2026)

Part 7 of course materials for Electromagnetism taught by Gerhard Müller at the University of Rhode Island.