Digital Commons Network^™

The Demandingness Of Morality: The Person Confined, Jose Salazar

CMC Senior Theses

Losing ownership and control over the development of and connection to our own person detaches us from the most innate embodiment of ourselves, our person. Without being able to develop and connect to our person, we become detached from expressing our identity, exercising our autonomy, and formulating our own values, the most intrinsic features our person encapsulates. While we yearn to act on our own projects to express our identity, exercise our autonomy, and formulate our own values the way we want, morality imposes huge demands on our person that restrain us from doing so. Morality’s major requirement to always …

An Evolution Of The Kurdish Issue In Turkey: Beyond A State-Centric Perspective, Jack Adolfson

CMC Senior Theses

The left-wing Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) began its violent insurgency campaign against the Turkish state in 1984, claiming that an independent Kurdistan should exist. However, the origins of this conflict can be traced back even further – to the inception of the Turkish Republic in 1923. This thesis begins by investigating the history of how the conflict between the Kurdish and Turkish political frameworks escalated, exploring the concept of “Turkishness” as an element of a homogeneous nation-state. The paper then assesses the effects of a range of exclusionary measures adopted by the Turkish state (beyond punitive military responses in southeastern …

How The Willowbrook Consent Decree Has Influenced Contemporary Advocacy Of Individuals With Disabilities, Kristen S. Addessi

Student Theses

The existence of the Willowbrook State School was a culmination, of over a one-hundred-year history of Western society’s attempts to provide adequate care, and treatment for individuals with disabilities. The residents housed there, suffered violations of their human and civil rights in various forms of severe abuse, neglect, and violence. Following a three-year legal battle in 1975, as a result of the travesties that occurred, the legal doctrine known as the Willowbrook Consent Decree was written. The Consent Decree was implemented to ensure that the residents’ human and civil rights are met and protected. The Willowbrook State School and the …

Abandoning Counterinsurgency: Toward A More Efficient Antiterrorism Strategy, Steven Metz

Journal of Strategic Security

This article introduces the value of great power, such as that applied in Israel’s effective national defense strategy, to resolve the conundrum of eliminating global terrorism.

Navigating The Ascertainability Spectrum: Analyzing The Policy Rationales Behind The Various Ascertainability Standards As Applied Standards As Applied To Small-Value Consumer Class Actions, Stephanie Starek

Case Western Reserve Law Review

No abstract provided.

Conflict In The Small- And Medium-Sized Church, William D. Henard

Great Commission Research Journal

One of the most difficult aspects of dealing with any church is conflict. Because of humanity’s fallen nature and because of the difficulty of initiating and accepting change, conflict is almost always inevitable. Conflict becomes detrimental when it is not handled correctly or when it remains unchecked and finds its source deep within the sinful nature and motives of people. Conflict in the church, though, does not necessarily have to be destructive. Many of those within the church reconciliatory ministry say that conflict is essentially neutral. When handled properly, it can actually result in some positive benefits for the church.

The President's Private Dictionary: How Secret Definitions Undermine Domestic And Transnational Efforts At Executive Branch Accountability, Sudha Setty

Faculty Scholarship

The 2016 EU-U.S. Privacy Shield is an agreement allowing companies to move customer data between the European Union and the United States without running afoul of heightened privacy protections in the European Union. It was developed in response to EU concerns that the privacy rights of its citizens have been systematically abrogated by the U.S. government in the name of national security, and contains a variety of assurances that the United States will respect and protect the privacy rights of EU citizens.

How trustworthy are the U.S. assurances under the Privacy Shield? Both the Bush and Obama administrations secretly interpreted …

The Icc's Role In Combatting The Destruction Of Cultural Heritage, Mark S. Ellis

Case Western Reserve Journal of International Law

However, the case’s firm grounding in international law, and the clear connection between a category of cultural-property crimes and attempts at cultural erasure, challenges the notion that these are second-rate crimes. The case reinforces the legal principle that attacks on culture, like attacks against people, constitute war crimes subject to international criminal prosecution. The Al Mahdi case will be significant in determining how the international community should best deal with such abhorrent attacks in the future.

Al Mahdi Has Been Convicted Of A Crime He Did Not Commit, William Schabas

Case Western Reserve Journal of International Law

A closer look at the Rome Statute suggests that Al Mahdi did not commit the crime for which he was convicted.

Little Streams And Legal Transformations, Dave Owen

Utah Law Review

In 1972, Congress passed a statute whose text offered sweeping protection for waterways across the nation. In theory, those protections extended to little streams. Actual practices were different, not just in the 1970s but also well into the 1990s. But over the past twenty years, small streams have become a central focus of regulatory protection, with the extent and type of those protections continuing to evolve to this day, and with additional changes still possible. The future of that evolution is uncertain, and it may hang in the balance; Congress, the incoming administration, or the courts could nip much of …

Performance Simulation And Optimization Of A Simultaneous Transmit And Receive Phased Antenna Array Using Adaptive Beamforming And Genetic Algorithm Techniques, Ian Thomas Cummings

Dissertations, Master's Theses and Master's Reports

The development of simultaneous transmit and receive capabilities is on the cutting-edge of research in phased array technology [1, 2, 3]. The large disparity in power between the transmitted and received signals in antenna systems has traditionally prevented operation in a simultaneous mode. However, simultaneous transmit and receive offers great opportunities for increased capabilities and performance in communications, radar, and electronic warfare applications [3]. This technology will be made feasible by realizing a high level of isolation between the transmitted and received signals through a variety of techniques. This work explores the feasibility of choosing non-standard array partitions that--when paired …

Gender And Music: Can We Hear A Difference Between Female And Male Composers And Performers?, Arianna Edvenson

Honors Program Theses

This research investigates whether or not gender is perceptible in classical music. In order to test this hypothesis, different ideas such as the history of women in music, the various roles they have or have not played, and different characteristics of music that are considered “masculine” or “feminine” were examined. A survey was used to determine if these characteristics were audible. Specifically, participants were asked to try to identify the gender of the composer and performer of five different audio clips. This data was then broken down into categories that include the participant’s gender, age, and amount of musical experience. …

Newfoundland’S Constitution From Contact To King William’S Act, Philip Girard

Articles & Book Chapters

In his work The British Empire in America, published in 1708, the historian John Oldmixon observed casually that in Newfoundland, “there’s no need of much Law, for the Inhabitants have not much Land and no Money.”1 The premise was correct, but the conclusion did not necessarily flow. Observers often lamented the absence of law and legal institutions in early Newfoundland, and there were a variety of attempts to bring law to the plantation in the 17th century, all of them strange and unfamiliar to modern eyes. None of the apparatus of 19th-century colonial governance was established before 1700: there were …

Mission Completion, Troop Welfare And Destructive Idealism: A Case Study On The Phenomenology Of A Combat Veteran’S Social Reintegration, Gary Senecal, Marycatherine Mcdonald

Philosophy Faculty Publications

Post-traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) among combat veterans remains an urgent and intractable problem for those who have served in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. In this paper, we argue that one of the reasons that combat related PTSD remains so difficult to treat is because psychologists - and American culture at large - do not fully understand it yet. It is our contention that there are two contributing factors that currently hinder our ability to successfully treat combat related PTSD. The first is a failure to look critically at the theoretical underpinnings that ground our current understanding of the …

Grave Breaches: American Military Intervention In The Late Twentieth- Century And The Consequences For International Law, Calla Cameron

CMC Senior Theses

The duality of the United States’ relationship with international criminal law and human rights atrocities is a fascinating theme that weaves through all of American history, but most distinctly demonstrates the contradictory nature of American foreign policy in the latter half of the 20th century. America is both protector of human rights and perpetrator of human rights atrocities, global police force and aggressor. The Cold War exacerbated the tensions caused by American military dominance. The international political and physical power of the American military allowed the United States to do as it pleased in the 20th century with few consequences, …

English Statutes In Virginia, 1660-1714, John R. Pagan

Law Faculty Publications

Virginia had a government of dual legislative authorities in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Under the transatlantic const itution- an evolving framework of legal relations within England's empire- both the Crown and the General Assembly had jurisdiction to prescribe laws for the colony. The Crown occasionally required Virginians to enforce acts of Parliament, but for the most part the imperial government allowed colonists to deviate from the metropolitan model and enact legislation tailored to their own needs, provided they refrained from passing statutes contrary or repugnant to English law. Instead of delineating separate spheres of imperial and provincial legislative …

Weapons Of Mass Hysteria, Faulty Biothreat Predictions, And Their Impact On National (In)Security: A Case-Study Of Smallpox, Barbara Pfeffer Billauer

Health Matrix: The Journal of Law-Medicine

Biothreat projections for pandemic and bioterrorist planning are generated by a straight-forward computational system, rather than scientific evidence.

For The Sake Of Consistency: Distinguishing Combatant Terrorists From Non-Combatant Terrorists In Modern Warfare, Alexander Fraser

Law Student Publications

This article aims to offer a solution for prosecuting terrorists consistently and efficiently in the ever-expanding world of modern warfare. It argues that our country's approach to prosecuting terrorists has been wildly inconsistent, and that clarity and consistency are required moving forward. The executive branch, which directs the path the Department of Justice and military take in these arenas, has been the main instigator of the inconsistency. The decision whether to prosecute foreign, non-citizen terrorists in an Article III federal court or military tribunal/commission has become politicized, allowing political winds to dictate policy, albeit an inconsistent, unprincipled one. The Bush …

The 2016 Amendments To Criminal Rule 41: National Search Warrants To Seize Cyberspace, “Particularly” Speaking, Devin M. Adams

Law Student Publications

George Orwell's dystopia, with the ever-watchful Big Brother, has seemingly become a reality with the recently passed amendments to Rule 41 of the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure. Rule 41, governing searches and seizures, now permits magistrate judges to authorize agents- under a single warrant- to "remotely access," and simultaneously search, copy and seize information from an infinite number of unknown electronic devices in multiple districts anywhere in the country. The unlimited jurisdiction provision is triggered when a device's location is obscured through "technological means," or if agents are investigating computer crimes in five or more districts- regardless of whether …

The Bds Movement: That Which We Call A Foreign Boycott, By Any Other Name, Is Still Illegal, Marc A. Greendorfer

Roger Williams University Law Review

No abstract provided.

Refugees And The Primacy Of European Human Rights Law, Maryellen Fullerton

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Televising The American Nightmare: The Twilight Zone And Postwar Social Criticism, David Brokaw

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Rod Serling’s Twilight Zone (1959-1964) emerged during a period of American history which has since become something of myth, legend, and lore. Popularly portrayed as a kind of golden age when middle class aspirations were within reach, suburban housing affordable, and the nuclear family perfectly contented, postwar America was more accurately characterized by profound cognitive dissonances. At a time when the Cold War was understood to be first and foremost a battle of ideas, psychological marketing promoted many different facets of the American Dream. While market researchers plumbed the depths of American minds and explored their subconscious desires and insecurities …

Dorothy Day's Distributism And Her Vision For Catholic Politics, William Patric Schulz

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation is a study of Dorothy Day’s political ideas, her creation of the Catholic Worker movement, and her relationship with Distributism, the official socio-economic teaching of the Catholic Church. In order to fully understand Day’s views, it is necessary to review her intellectual development, and the foundational ideas and documents of Distributism. As is noted in the introduction, precious little scholarship has been done on Distributism, and few outside of Catholic academic circles are even aware of its existence. Beyond that, Day, herself, is not especially well-known, as existing scholarship tends to focus on either her early, Socialist activities …

The Truth About Your Monsters, Cassidy Creek

LSU Master's Theses

The Truth About Your Monsters is an immersive and dialogical exhibition formatted as a walk-through storybook environment. Viewers are transported into a child’s make believe world through hands-on stations. By building on the skeleton of an archetypal narrative, audience members are encouraged to tap into their own experience as they contribute imagery and action to the narrative. I call on audience members to discuss personal or universal fears by prompting them to draw images of monsters that represent their fear.

How Can The Use Of Human Enhancement (He) Technologies In The Military Be Ethically Assessed?, Philip Andrew Taraska

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

War is a terrible price to pay for the prospect of peace. Yet every nation has a moral obligation to protect its citizenry from unjust aggression and threats to security. To be sure, war is always a failure. It is a failure of mankind to come together in mutual respect for the inherent dignity of the human person. The issue of the use of HE in the military is relevant today because the Global War on Terror (GWOT) and the rapid rise of emerging technologies have led to a never-before-seen type of asymmetrical warfare. The rise of these technologies can …

The 1973 Oil Embargo And Us-Saudi Relations: An Episode In New Imperialism, Nathaniel David Sher

Honors Papers

This thesis examines the impact of the 1973 oil embargo on US-Saudi relations. It asks how and why the US and Saudi Arabia remained long-term allies after a five-month period of economic warfare. Most prior research focuses on the factors that influenced the embargo's implementation, failing to fully explain its resolution. This thesis explores the latter issue by appealing to US government memos, OAPEC meeting transcripts, and US-Saudi telegrams. It argues that, after five months of rhetorical and material distance, the US and KSA realigned over symbiotic trade dynamics-- “arms for oil"--and mutual opposition to communism. This subject remains important …

Race, Ethnicity And The Legacy Of Baseball In The Americas, Darren Brett Zaslau

Honors Papers

Baseball is America’s Pastime. When looking at its history in our modern day, it is difficult to imagine the racism and hate, which will always remain implanted in the roots of the game. From the Negro Leagues of 1920, to the racism surrounding Roberto Clemente, Hispanic players, and other racial minorities, the struggles of the past will never be forgotten. Although its history was filled with periods of adversity, the current inclusive state that baseball currently presents is truly remarkable. Analyzing these positive trends toward racial inclusion overtime will be the main focus of this independent major honors research project. …

Charting A Path From Data To Action: A Culturally Sensitive Intervention For Adolescent Self-Harm In Sri Lanka, Jeanne Marecek

Psychology Faculty Works

No abstract provided.

Outlook Magazine, Spring 2017

Outlook Magazine

No abstract provided.

A Critique Of The Uniquely Adversarial Nature Of The U.S. Legal, Economic And Political System And Its Implications For Reinforcing Existing Power Hierarchies, Areto A. Imoukuede, Jim Wilets

Journal Publications

This article argues that the uniquely adversarial nature of the United States litigation system, rooted in the medieval English system of "trial by battle," has replicated itself in almost all aspects of American society, distinguishing the United States from even its common law counterparts that shared the genesis of their legal systems in English "trial by battle." This "trial by battle" is often characterized in the context of speech by terms such as the 'marketplace of ideas," or in the context of economics by terms such as "the law of the jungle.," Even resolution of basic Constitutional concepts are subject …