Digital Commons Network^™

The Objective Observer: The Washington State Supreme Court's Remedial Aspirations And Experience On The Ground, David B. Owens

Washington Law Review

The Washington State Supreme Court has adopted an “objective observer rule” for addressing whether race impacted jury selection and extended this rule to evaluating all aspects of Washington courts, including jury trials. The objective observer rule allows courts to evaluate whether decisions in those courtrooms could be viewed as the result of racial bias, even where there is no evidence of specific racial animus and in the absence of racial slurs. The rule, which covers a form of disparate impact, has now existed for over half a decade. This Article outlines the Washington State Supreme Court’s development of the objective …

The Gift Of Public Funds Bogeyman, Noah Purcell, Michelle Saperstein

Washington Law Review

Washington’s “gift of public funds” doctrine is frequently misunderstood in ways that impede innovative ideas aimed at remedying some of our state’s most intractable problems. This doctrine arises from article VIII, sections 5 and 7 of the Washington Constitution, which prohibit state and local governments from gifting assets or loaning credit. While the Washington State Supreme Court historically applied these provisions in restrictive and confusing ways, the Court’s modern jurisprudence recognizes that the doctrine is inapplicable to funding expended for any of the many “fundamental purposes” of government. Even where a government program does not fall under this broad category, …

John R. Commons, Reasonable Value, And Power: A Critique, Jacob Powell

Working Papers

No abstract provided.

Attempting To Resolve The Felon-In-Possession Prohibition Circuit Split: The Second Amendment Historical Analogue Test After United States V. Rahimi, Chloe E. Bonds

Mercer Law Review

The Second Amendment provides, “[a] well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.” The inception of this amendment was rooted in the Founding Fathers’ Enlightenment ideals and disapproval of the English Crown’s “standing armies.” In founding-era America, the militias were not composed of professional soldiers but instead of local citizens with the aim of providing common defense. The main concern surrounding the ratification was that the Second Amendment would give too much power to the federal government and result in the same …

Sustainability And Human Dignity Rights, James R. May

UMKC Law Review

No abstract provided.

Humans In Nature: Creating Our New Reality Through Ecological, Cultural, Global, Ethical, And Legal Reform, John Head

UMKC Law Review

No abstract provided.

The Hidden Secret Of Religion: Perpetrators Of Adult Abuse Escape Justice, Emma King-Murphy

UMKC Law Review

No abstract provided.

Looking For The Public In Public Law, Nikhil Menezes, David E. Pozen

University of Chicago Law Review

The “public” is everywhere and nowhere in contemporary public law. Everywhere, in that the term is constantly invoked to justify and explain existing arrangements. Nowhere, in that serious attempts to identify a relevant public and elicit its input are few and far between. Scholars and officials depict the U.S. public as playing myriad roles in governance—checking, guiding, approving, repudiating—without offering an account of how public preferences are formed or how they exercise influence on questions of interest.

This Article seeks to identify and call attention to the foundational dilemmas underlying this disconnect, to clarify their normative contours and intellectual history, …

Stomach Content And Stable Isotope Analysis Of Invasive Lionfish (Pterois Volitans) In The Florida Keys, Emily E. Shallow, Cassandra N. Glaspie, Michael J. Polito, Mitchell S. Lovell

Faculty Publications

The invasive red lionfish, Pterois volitans, plays a unique role in seagrass and reef ecosystems, where it functions as a top predator and competitor for both food and shelter. Given the ubiquitous distribution of lionfish in the Gulf of Mexico and Caribbean basins, their species provides an excellent opportunity to understand how an invasive predator's diet and primary energy pathways change as a function of size and habitat type. To investigate these patterns, we studied lionfish from a mosaic of deep reef, shallow patch reef, and seagrass bed habitats in the Florida Keys using stomach contents and stable isotope analysis …

Letter From The Editor, Davis Hayman

Criminal Law Practitioner

Dear Readers,

Thank you for your interest in The Criminal Law Practitioner. This marks my first publication as the Editor-in-Chief for the 2025-2026 academic year. I am thrilled to leave this remarkable team as we continue to solicit, write, and publish issues in criminal law.

 This issue continues this trend by highlighting topics including evolving interpretation of the 8th Amendment and a discussion on Constitutional venue issues related to internet crimes. Our authors provide some intriguing, unique insights that I invite you to dig into. In “The Continuing Unevolving Model of Decency, Kennedy v. Louisiana in Peril”, Professor Patrick S. …

Where Does A Hack Happen? Computer Intrusion Crimes And Constitutional Venue, Harrison Parker Blanchard Grant

Criminal Law Practitioner

The United States Constitution guarantees the right to a criminal trial where the criminal offense was committed. This guarantee—the venue requirement—forces courts to analyze where criminal conduct occurred. Technology makes that locational analysis more complicated. For one computer hacker, that same analysis led to his trial and conviction in Massachusetts, despite the fact that he did not hack into anything in Massachusetts. This Article examines the hacker’s case, exploring the technologies used to execute the hack and linking those technologies to the hacker’s trial in Massachusetts.

In Place Of Prison, Grace Y. Li

UC Law Journal

A new, previously unstudied institution is addressing felonies, including violent felonies of the highest levels, without imposing incarceration as the sanction. Attempts to abolish prisons, or at least reduce racialized mass incarceration, must consider how to respond to serious and violent crimes. This Article offers an analysis of a real-world, ongoing experiment in doing so.

The Manhattan Felony Alternative-to-Incarceration Court (“ATI Court”) is the first and, thus far, the only court in the country that systematically offers defendants of any demographic and any charge the opportunity to be diverted from the traditional criminal legal system and to avoid prison. Defendants …

Ecological Footprint Analysis Of Chatgpt (Gpt-3), Isabella Boulais

Computer Science and Software Engineering

Climate change is an escalating crisis that demands immediate action from all sectors, including the rapidly advancing field of artificial intelligence (AI). While AI offers climate solutions, its own environmental impact raises concerns. Unfortunately limited research due to rapid development, system complexity, and lack of standardized methodologies hinders our understanding of AI’s environmental consequences. This project aims to conduct a comprehensive ecological footprint analysis of OpenAI’s GPT-3 model that is used to power ChatGPT, establishing guidelines for assessing AI systems’ environmental impact and proposing a framework for improvement. Going beyond tracking carbon emissions, this project will outline the broader lifecycle …

From Disruption To Recovery: Charter School Performance During And After The Covid-19 Pandemic, Adam Kho, Shelby Smith, Ron Zimmer

Public Policy and Administration Faculty Publications

In recent decades, an increasing number of students have pursued alternative educational options, including charter schools, as school choice has continued to expand. This trend was accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic. While it is well established that students experienced widespread learning loss during the pandemic, it remains unclear whether the extent of that loss or the pace of recovery has differed between charter and traditional public schools (TPS). In the current study, we examine the effects of Tennessee charter schools on student achievement during and after the pandemic. Using student-level data from 2017-18 to 2022-23, we estimate the charter school …

Large Language Models And International Law, Ashley Deeks, Duncan Hollis

Chicago Journal of International Law

Large Language Models (LLMs) have the potential to transform public international lawyering in at least five ways: (i) helping to identify the contents of international law; (ii) interpreting existing international law; (iii) formulating and drafting proposals for new legal instruments or negotiating positions; (iv) assessing the international legality of specific acts; and (v) collating and distilling large datasets for international courts, tribunals, and treaty bodies.

This Article uses two case studies to show how LLMs may work in international legal practice. First, it uses LLMs to identify whether particular behavioral expectations rise to the level of customary international law. In …

The Rise Of Big Data And The Law Of Armed Conflict, Laura A. Dickinson

Chicago Journal of International Law

Big data—extremely large quantities of information and the analytics used to process it—is now crucial to the way militaries operate on the battlefield. Data is used to run weapons systems, analyze intelligence, procure and deploy personnel, evaluate battlefield conditions, detain prisoners, and more. And not only is data increasingly being used on the battlefield, but operations targeting adversaries’ data—to acquire it, delete and destroy it, or distort or poison it—are becoming increasingly important as well. Beyond the battlefield, big data lies at the epicenter of adversarial activities below the armed conflict threshold. Because data is the fuel of artificial intelligence …

Interpretation As Creation: Article Vi Of The Outer Space Treaty, Charles Stotler

Chicago Journal of International Law

From the launch of Sputnik I in 1957 to proposals for In-Space Servicing, Assembly and Manufacturing (ISAM) and new lunar activities such as resource utilization, advancing technology has always been a driving factor in the creation of space law. From a legal-historical perspective, the notion of law as creation should be contextualized in a broader legal-philosophical transition that began with the rise of positivism. Article VI of the Outer Space Treaty orbits unsteadily between international obligations and national implementation measures, rendering significant States’ understandings of those provisions. Our understanding of Article VI turns on perhaps the most creative legal endeavor: …

Battlefield Evidence In The Age Of Artificial Intelligence-Enabled Warfare, Winthrop Wells

Chicago Journal of International Law

A number of emerging technologies increasingly prevalent on contemporary battlefields—notably unmanned autonomous systems (UAS) and various military applications of artificial intelligence (AI)—are working a sea change in the way that wars are fought. These technological developments also carry major implications for the investigation and prosecution of serious crimes committed in armed conflict, including for an under-examined yet potentially valuable form of evidence: information and material collected or obtained by military forces themselves.

Such “battlefield evidence” poses various legal and practical challenges. Yet it can play an important role in justice and accountability processes, in which it addresses the longstanding obstacle …

Satellite Infrastructures And Law In The Making Of Planetary Knowledge, Benedict Kingsbury, Yirong Sun

Chicago Journal of International Law

Imaginations of Planet Earth as-a-whole—that is, Earth conceived in planetary terms by wide publics—have been shaped over several decades by the growing capabilities of artificial Earth satellites to image the whole Earth, to specify all locations, and to integrate the Earth’s diverse orbital space with everyday human activities. Different Earth orbits are becoming more densely used, more securitized, more intensely managed from Earth, and more integral to activities on Earth.

This Article focuses on two categories of satellite systems that contribute directly to planetary knowledge, Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) and Earth Observation Satellite Systems (EOSS). GNSS and EOSS have …

Two Terribles: A Day Without Space And Ai Enabled Synthetic Biological Weapons A Warning Order, James E. Baker

Chicago Journal of International Law

A day without space, a term used to describe the loss or destruction of America’s space assets, and the potential generation of novel biological threats using AI and synthetic biology present catastrophic and potentially existential threats to U.S. security in a way that nuclear weapons did before and continue to do so today. Yet they have not received the level of attention from national security lawyers or commentators they warrant. This article describes the threats. It describes the current and inchoate nature of the law to address these threats. And it makes initial recommendations to policymakers and lawyers about how …

Whose Truth Commission, Lehlohonolo January

Notre Dame Journal of International & Comparative Law

It is often said that the victor always dictates the narrative and thus dictates how history is represented. The end of Apartheid in South Africa wasn’t a result of an outright victorious defeat of the Apartheid State together with its institutions of coercion but rather came about as a result of a culmination of a series of events. If this adage holds true, then why is it that the narrative seems to paint a picture of a victor’s perspective? This assertion is not made lightly but is no less reflective of how the facts seem to portray themselves in that …

Examining The Legal Responsibilities And Key Challenges Of Personal Representatives In Malaysian Inheritance Management, Muhammad Amrullah Drs Nasrul, Anis A'Fifah Zairin Zain, Wan Noraini Wan Mohd Salim

The Indonesian Journal of Socio-Legal Studies

Personal representative connotes a person authorised under the law to manage the estate of the deceased person. The personal representative is responsible to gather all the assets belonging to the deceased and distribute the assets to the beneficiaries legally. The process of inheritance management in Malaysia requires a formal application to be made to the administrative bodies for the appointment of a personal representative, either as an executor or administrator. However, instances of misappropriation of the deceased’s estate by personal representatives have raised serious concerns, affecting the proper administration of estates and the rights of beneficiaries This study emphasises on …

Learning And Optimization Under Human-Centric Considerations, Qian Shao

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

This dissertation investigates learning and optimization problems shaped by humancentric considerations, such as preferences, demonstrations, behavioral patterns, and resource constraints. As real-world decision-making increasingly involves interaction with human agents, data, and limitations, modeling these factors becomes critical for building practical, adaptive, and robust systems.

The research spans four domains. First, we study preference-aware delivery routing by learning implicit practitioner preferences and incorporating them into a hierarchical route optimization framework. Second, we develop imitation learning methods for cost-constrained settings, enabling agents to mimic expert behavior while respecting safety and resource limitations. Third,we explore early rumor detection in data-limited environments, integrating large …

Adam Smith: Social Imaginary And Religion, Jan Van Vliet

Pro Rege

No abstract provided.

Policy Library- 305 Faculty Appointment, Promotion, Tenure, And Evaluation, Indiana State University, General Counsel

Policy Library

Policy 305 Faculty Appointment, Promotion, and Tenure

Policy Library- 450 Policy On Student Organizations, Indiana State University, General Counsel

Policy Library

Policy 450 Student Organizations

Distinction, Proportionality, And Precautions In Attacks At Sea In The New Era Of The Law Of Naval Warfare, James Kraska

Chicago Journal of International Law

China has upset the security balance in East Asia through the development of a long- range strike complex composed of anti-ship ballistic missiles, drones and cruise missiles, and hypersonic missiles that put U.S. naval fleets at risk. Beijing’s innovative approach to sea control through the projection of power from land-based fires highlights three important differences between the law applicable to naval warfare and the law of armed conflict (LOAC) as it is implemented on land.1 These legal distinctions are subtle in law, but they shape concrete choices available to naval commanders and could determine the outcome of war at sea. …

Policy Library- 147 Foundational Studies, Indiana State University, General Counsel

Policy Library

Policy 147 Foundational Studies

Policy Library- 165 Constitution Of The Indiana State University Student Government Association, Indiana State University, General Counsel

Policy Library

Policy 165 Constitution of the Indiana State University Student

Policy Library- 923 Non-Discrimination And Anti-Harassment, Indiana State University, General Counsel

Policy Library

Policy 923 Non-Discrimination and Anti-Harassment