Digital Commons Network^™

Beyond Policy: Overcoming Challenges In Prosecuting Gender Persecution At The International Criminal Court, Milena Sterio, Yvonne Dutton

Law Faculty Articles and Essays

While the ICC’s jurisdictional and resource constraints undoubtedly pose significant obstacles to its ability to tackle all cases of gender persecution worldwide, the Court’s efforts serve as a catalyst for progress in the field of international criminal law. By shining a spotlight on the crime of gender persecution and prioritizing its investigation and prosecution, the ICC sets a precedent for national jurisdictions to follow suit. Furthermore, the ICC’s engagement with gender-based crimes underscores the unique intersectionality of gender discrimination and conflict, highlighting the broader societal ramifications of such crimes, and the imperative to address them comprehensively.

In moving forward, the …

The Deferential Asian American: Low Racial Status And The Invisibility Of Asian Americans In Leadership And The American Narrative, Reginald Oh

Law Faculty Articles and Essays

This Article will proceed in five parts. First, an important caveat. When the Article refers to Asian Americans, it refers to all Asian American subgroups except for South Asian Americans, because South Asian Americans are not perceived to be deferential in the same way as other Asian American subgroups. Consequently, their experience with leadership is unique among Asian Americans, and much of the analysis in this Article does not apply to them.

With that caveat, Part I will discuss the invisibility of Asian Americans generally, but particularly in leadership positions. Part II will discuss the concept of social status bias …

Rethinking Social Rights From Latin America, Christian Gonzalez Chacon

Washington and Lee Journal of Civil Rights and Social Justice

International human rights courts and bodies have traditionally enforced social rights within constrained frameworks, such as “available resources” and “minimum provision,” often overlooking deeper structural inequalities and urgent global challenges. This paper advocates for a paradigm shift grounded in the capabilities framework, reconceptualizing rights to encompass sustainability, harmony, and human flourishing. Drawing on indigenous philosophies from Latin America, I propose strategies to strengthen enforcement mechanisms, including the establishment of specialized human rights courts, equitable taxation systems, and regenerative economic models. By aligning human rights with capabilities and ecological stewardship, this paper illustrates their potential to address poverty, inequality, and climate …

Ftc V. Amazon: A Turning Point For Antitrust Law?, Matthew Cole Conover

Washington and Lee Journal of Civil Rights and Social Justice

The United States is experiencing crippling economic inequalities that harken back to the Gilded Age. For the first time, legal scholars have turned to antitrust law to reverse this alarming trend. These scholars, including current Federal Trade Commission Chairwoman Lina Khan, are testing this ambitious theory in the E-commerce industry. E-commerce is a market largely dominated by one company: Amazon. With its dominance, Amazon lures small businesses into its third-party seller marketplace, where it controls those business’s prices and punishes those that resist. Lina Kahn’s FTC has formally launched its litigation campaign against Amazon, claiming that the company has violated …

Free Speech And Anti-Democratic Violence, Andy J. Carr

Washington and Lee Journal of Civil Rights and Social Justice

The resurgence of far-right extremist groups—like “sovereign” militias, white supremacists, and avowedly fascist gangs—has exposed the First Amendment’s vulnerabilities to the “leaderless resistance” model of extremist organizing. This model, first popularized by white supremacist Louis Beam, specifically aims to insulate extremist leaders from liability when their followers engage in violence. It does so through fragmented structures and coded messages: Leaders use indirect references in speaking to disparate followers, without specificity (of targets) or immediacy (of corresponding violence), as required, e.g., for “incitement” under Brandenburg v. Ohio.

This Article makes three contributions. First, it articulates this “gap” with precision, drawing …

Refereeing Nil Athlete Agents: Examining Equitable And Protective Measures For Ncaa Student-Athletes In A Post-Alston Environment, Katherine A. Berman

Washington and Lee Journal of Civil Rights and Social Justice

This Note examines the challenges posed by the lack of regulation surrounding athlete agents involved in Name, Image, and Likeness (NIL) deals across the United States and their impact on collegiate student-athletes. Despite efforts from the NCAA and higher education institutions for federal NIL legislation and guidance, many proposed solutions face significant obstacles, including conflicts with state laws and partisan divisions. This Note traces the commercialization of student-athletes through the history of the NCAA, reviews key NIL cases, and analyzes current state and federal legislation focused on athlete representation. This Note also explores the emergence of NIL service providers, including …

Amendment: Literary And Art Journal (2025)

Amendment, 2004-

Amendment is a VCU student-produced progressive literature and art journal that provides a platform for students to promote equality, tolerance, and social progression through artistic expression.

Introduction To Social Work, April Diaz

All Open Educational Resources

This is a collection of instructor-created slide decks and videos and links to free course materials curated for SOCW 260: Introduction to Social Work. This course introduces students to the profession of social work and its role in supporting individuals, families, and communities. Emphasizing collaboration across systems like healthcare, education, and justice, students will explore how social workers promote well-being and access to resources. Open to all majors, the course highlights the relevance of social work values and skills in a wide range of careers and everyday life.

Elements Of Statistics, Paul Flesher, Jeffrey Sadler, Jonathan Rehmert, Lanee Young

All Open Educational Resources

This undergraduate text, intended for an introductory statistics course, motivates and develops basic inferential statistics. The first chapter establishes the necessity of inferential statistics, lays the basis of a scientific worldview, and finishes by introducing sampling methods and variables. Subsequent chapters develop visualizations, descriptive statistics, probability, and random variables. Sampling distributions are treated in the fifth chapter which is immediately followed by the development of confidence intervals and hypothesis testing. The text concludes with a treatment of linear regression. The use of Excel is emphasized throughout. The text is best viewed online through LibreTexts.

The Design Of A Bioinspired Impact Mitigation System Towards The Prevention Of Brain Injuries, Bryce H. Reimer

Master’s Theses

Traumatic brain injuries (TBIs), including concussions and chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), remain a major concern across contact sports, military operations, and transportation. Despite advancements in protective equipment, current strategies often fall short in preventing the mechanical conditions that contribute to long-term neurological damage. This thesis presents the design and validation of a bioinspired impact mitigation system modeled after bighorn sheep horn structures, which have evolved to endure high-energy collisions without apparent brain injury.

Using biomimetic principles, the research integrates experimental and computational methods to evaluate how horn-like geometries reduce impact-induced accelerations. A custom drop tower was built to test dynamic …

Evaluation Of Physical And Chemical Stability In Liposomes Composed Of Mixed Phospholipids, Sharareh Rezaei, Kenny Mineart

Master’s Theses

Liposomes, spherical vesicles composed of lipid bilayers, are widely used in drug delivery due to their biocompatibility, biodegradability, and ability to interact with biological membranes. Despite these advantages, liposomes remain moderately unstable systems, highly susceptible to environmental stressors such as pH fluctuations, ionic strength variations, temperature changes, and interactions with other components. Addressing both chemical and physical instability is essential for translating liposomal formulations from experimental formulation to viable pharmaceutical products.

This study investigates the physicochemical characteristics of a mixed-phospholipid system in which one lipid is saturated, and the other is unsaturated (DMPC and DOPC respectively). Liposomes are prepared using …

Techniques & Technologies To Support Sustainable Education In The Academic Sphere: Pedagogy 5.0, Ivaylo Peev, Todor Todorov, Lucía Morales, Lia Pop

Books

The Second book of reports and papers is a result of the collaborative work of the European Common Laboratory for Pedagogical Action-Research and Student-Centred Learning (ELaRA), guided by Technological Education for Smart Development, Sustainability and Transdisciplinarity (TESST to Guide the European Research Institute), members, and would not have been possible without the kind support provided by the European University of Technology.The co-organisers' team from the Technical University of Sofia (Bulgaria), Technological University Dublin (Ireland), the Technical University of Cluj-Napoca (Romania) and the United Nations Institute for Training and Research (UNITAR), represented by book editors – Dr Ivaylo Peev, Todor Todorov, …

Ryan Rivera '25-Tim Yarboro '75, Ryan Rivera, Tim Yarboro

Alumni Oral History Project

No abstract provided.

State Travel Burdens For Out-Of-State Abortion Care In The Wake Of The Dobbs Decision, Kelsey D. Titus

Integrative Learning Experience (ILE) Theses

This project examines abortion-related travel burdens as a critical public health policy problem, using the Multiple Streams Framework to link lived experience, health inequities, and policy responses across levels of governance. Anchored in the problem and policy streams, the analysis treats post-Dobbs interstate travel for abortion as a population-level determinant of health that amplifies existing social and structural inequities.

The project employs a qualitative thematic policy analysis drawing on two data sources: a key informant semi-structured interview with a reproductive justice leader and a targeted review of contemporary opinion and commentary articles from leading public health and health policy outlets. …

Classifying Microlensing Events From Rome/Rea, Alaina Schweitzer, Rachel Street, Katarzyna Kruszyńska, Daniel Godines

Open Pedagogy: Selected Projects

The Roman Galactic Bulge Time Domain Survey will complete our census of free-floating and bound exoplanets by detecting microlensing events from timeseries photometry (M. T. Penny et al. 2019). But the literature on classifying microlensing events is limited compared with other types of transients. Building on recent developments in machine learning techniques, this research describes the preparation and training of an eXtreme Gradient Boosting classifier to detect microlensing events in the recent data release from the ROME/REA Survey. We evaluate the classifier’s ability to distinguish microlensing from various other categories of stars, both variable and constant. In this note we …

Just Housing: Expanding Economic Opportunity In The City Of Syracuse, Gianna Juarez, Logan Battaglia

The Lender Center for Social Justice

A 2025 report concerning housing in the Syracuse area.

Nanci Weinberger, Bryant University

Retired Faculty and Staff Profiles

No abstract provided.

Ripples: An Automated Embedding Generation Algorithm For The Forward-Forward Algorithm, Spencer Connolly

All Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Other Capstone Projects

The Forward-Forward algorithm (FF) is yet another novel invention by Geoffrey Hinton, the creator of the famous backpropagation algorithm (BP). Since its proposal, many papers have been published exploring its potential, and good progress has been made in increasing its viability. Though FF continually falls short of BP, its purpose is not to replace BP and preliminary research shows that there is plenty of room for growth. In this paper, we present a literature review for FF algorithms applied to Convolution Neural Networks (CNN) for image classification tasks and set the stage for applying FF to more complex datasets. The …

Defining Statesmanship: Expert Knowledge And Leadership For The Collective Good, Benjamin A. Ellis

Journal of Statesmanship & Public Policy: Briefs and Commentaries

This commentary explores the distinction between leadership and statesmanship. While leadership is broadly defined as the use of resources to achieve goals, statesmanship is characterized by the application of expert knowledge to govern for the benefit of all in a changing society. This commentary also outlines the traits, skills, and behaviors that define effective leadership and how these attributes translate to effective statesmanship. This commentary highlights the statesman's use of public perception to inspire empathy and pro-social behavior, ultimately contributing to stronger international relations.

Shame And Shame Resilience Among Students In An Alternative Suspension Program, James Alvin Rader Jr.

Theses, Dissertations and Capstones

This explanatory sequential mixed methods study investigated the impact of an alternative suspension academic recovery program on shame and shame resilience among academically suspended college students. Grounded in shame resilience theory, the study examined changes in shame, specifically avoidance behavior, negative self-perception, and overall feelings of shame, and in shame resilience, including critical awareness, recognition of shame, the ability to verbalize shame, help-seeking behaviors, and total shame resilience. Quantitative data were collected through pre- and post-program surveys using the Test of Self-Conscious Affect-4 (TOSCA-4) and a researcher-developed Shame Resilience Scale. Qualitative data were then gathered through postintervention focus groups to …

Sites 45ch01104 And 45ch00402 Determinations Of Eligibility, Chelan County, Washington, Benjamin Aa Hodges

All Graduate Projects

This Master of Applied Science (MAS) project report assesses the National Register of Historic Places (NRHP) eligibility of archaeological sites 45CH01104 and 45CH00402 near Wells Dam in Chelan County, Washington. Field investigations conducted in 2024 included pedestrian surveys, subsurface testing, and ground-penetrating radar (GPR) analysis to gather data on site conditions and potential cultural features. Site 45CH01104 was characterized by pre-contact lithic and fire-cracked rock (FCR) scatters and is recommended as eligible in this report for the NRHP under Criteria A and D due to its association with Indigenous subsistence activities and its potential to yield important archaeological information. It …

The Major League Baseball Pitch Clock: One Year Position Player Injury Analysis, Troy Puga, Nicholas Scigliano, Mckenna Box, John T. Riehl

North Texas Research Forum 2025

Background In 2023, Major League Baseball (MLB) implemented the pitch clock. The effects of the pitch clock on player injury rates is largely unknown, and some, including the major league baseball players association, have suggested that pitchers may be at an increased risk of injury with its implementation. Position players have received little attention in these discussions, even though they may be at the same theorized risk of injuries. The aim of this study is to determine if implementation of the 2023 MLB pitch clock influenced the incidence of injuries in position players. It is hypothesized that implementation of the …

When Osteoporosis Masks Multiple Myeloma: A Diagnostic Pitfall, Neil Maithel, Rabia Mahfooz, Easlie Chen, Ali Asghar, Aftab Mahmood

Gulf Coast Division GME Research Day 2025

No abstract provided.

Severe Hypercalcemia In A Patient Taking Chronic Shark Fin Supplements, Sumanth Reddy, Bishwas Upadhyay

North Texas Research Forum 2025

BACKGROUND/INTRODUCTION: In this study, we discuss a case of an 86 year old Vietnamese female who presents with severe hypercalcemia, 15.0, who presented with progressively worsening physical debility which resulted in the patient being wheelchair bound after being found to be taking chronic calcium supplements. Hypercalcemia is a metabolic abnormality that is known to cause muscle weakness, changes in sensorium, dehydrations, nausea, anorexia, polyuria, constipation, fatigue, and depression. CASE PRESENTATION: Patient is an 85 year old female with significant medical history of osteoarthritis who presented to the emergency department for generalized fatigue for the past 2 weeks. Patient reports that …

Efficacy Of Osteopathic Manipulative Treatment In Post-Stroke Recovery Patients, Elizabeth White, Dakota Dalton, Alexis Walker, Patrick Vu, Christopher Medina

North Texas Research Forum 2025

Each year, an estimated 795,000 adults in the United States have a stroke, making it the fifth leading cause of death and the tenth leading cause of adult disability. Current literature addresses the use of osteopathic manipulative treatment (OMT) for pain and physical limitations in the post-acute outpatient setting. However, stroke patients can benefit additionally from rehabilitation in the subacute hospital setting as demonstrated by this case study. A 53-year-old Caucasian female presented to the emergency department with a history of slurred speech and right-sided weakness secondary to a left middle cerebral artery (MCA) stroke. Head computed tomography angiogram (CTA) …

The Importance Of Early Source Control: A Case Of Resistant Mrsa, Jack Demirjian, Paul Mathew

Central & West Texas and San Antonio GME Research Day 2025

No abstract provided.

Cardiac Tamponade By Perforated Ventricle Post Tavr - A Rare But Life Threatening Case, Arjun Kamath, Jorge Garza, Ethan Goldberg, Deekshita Valiveti, Abhay Vakil, Zuhair Ali

Gulf Coast Division GME Research Day 2025

No abstract provided.

A Case Of Life Threatening Hemorrhage After In Office Drainage Of Suspected Bartholin Gland Cyst, Rebecca Johnson, Sandra Zhi, Megan Khuu, Robert Boccaccio

North Texas Research Forum 2025

Introduction: Labial masses are common in OBGYN clinics. They are benign the vast majority of times. Common causes are Bartholin cysts, epidermal inclusion cysts, labial warts, sebaceous cyst. We report a case of a 33 year old who presented for what appeared to be a benign Bartholin gland cyst but resulted in massive hemorrhage, exam under anesthesia, massive transfusion, and embolization. Case Summary: A 33 year old patient presents for a painless, non-enlarging labial mass that has been present for 3 weeks. History and physical exam were consistent with a commonly encountered condition, Bartholin gland cyst. Routine incision and drainage …

Fibrillary Glomerulonephritis Associated With Hepatitis C: A Case Report Of Progression To End-Stage Renal Disease, Boney Lapsiwala, Karthik Kasireddy, Marisha Sharma, Mayank Singh, Vaishnavi Singh, Victor Canela

North Texas Research Forum 2025

A Case of DNAJB9 with rapid renal progression to End-Stage Renal Disease in a patient with previously treated HCV Background Fibrillary glomerulonephritis (FGN) is a rare and progressive kidney disease, accounting for 0.5% to 1.4% of native kidney biopsies. It is characterized by non-amyloid fibrillar deposits in the extracellular matrix. Although historically regarded as idiopathic, recent studies have revealed associations with autoimmune diseases, malignancies, and Hepatitis C virus (HCV) infection. DNAJB9, a proteomic marker identified through mass spectrometry, has been consistently found in FGN cases, regardless of congophilia. This case illustrates FGN in a patient with a history of successfully …

Cryptococcoid Sweet Syndrome Following Carcinoid Tumor Removal, Ashlyn Fletcher, Taylor Smith

South Atlantic Division GME Research Day 2025

No abstract provided.