Digital Commons Network^™

Ticking Toward Reform: Rethinking The Material Difference Exception In The Luxury Watch Resale Market And Beyond, Mallory K. Hogan

American University Law Review

The rapid growth of the luxury resale market has heightened tension between trademark holders and secondary-market sellers. Courts are increasingly left to apply the material difference exception to first sale doctrine defenses, to find trademark infringement when resold goods differ from the original product, even in de minimis ways. Originally designed to protect consumers from confusion where post-sale modifications affected product quality or safety, the exception has evolved into a broad enforcement tool that luxury brands leverage to challenge resellers over minor or cosmetic alterations. In the luxury watch and accessories markets in particular, courts have deemed even minimal differences …

Antidiscrimination Law Against Labor, Jordan Laris Cohen

American University Law Review

In recent years, employer compliance with antidiscrimination law has emerged as a major justification for limiting the rights of employees to organize and engage in collective action in the workplace. In IBM Corp., a Republican majority of the National Labor Relations Board cited “laws addressing workplace discrimination and sexual harassment” as a primary reason to deny nonunionized employees the right to a coworker representative during investigatory interviews. In General Motors, a Republican Board majority invoked antidiscrimination law in upending four decades of precedent regarding employer discipline of employees engaged in “opprobrious conduct” in the course of protected organizing …

The Leasehold World, Jeffrey Manns

American University Law Review

The ideal of American fee simple property rests on a popular misconception. Many Americans often think of fee simple property in terms of absolute ownership. In reality, however, fee simple title has many similar features of a “public” leasehold in practice, which has significant implications for understanding the relationship of private property “owners” to the state. The American state, at all levels, effectively serves as a landlord over private property “owners,” mirroring the traditional role of the king in feudal England.

The American Revolution is often framed as a sea change in property rights and individual liberty. But efforts to …

Lawbreaking As A Method Of Competition, Sandeep Vaheesan

American University Law Review

Business competition is not a free-for-all in which firms can compete and triumph by hook or crook. Instead, market rivalry is a process structured by laws of general application and sector-specific rules. Certain competitive strategies and tactics are proscribed by statutes, regulations, and common law. Firms may not compete by bombing their rivals’ facilities, bribing the employees of wholesale customers, or making false claims about their own goods.

In a range of industries, however, firms choose to compete by violating laws protecting consumers, workers, businesses, and the public and obtaining an unfair cost or other advantage over their rivals. Examples …

The Lawyer Of The Future: Ethics And Identity In The Age Of Ai, David Yosifon, Michael Santoro, Isaac Nikssarian

American University Law Review

The dawn of artificial intelligence (AI) poses a fundamental challenge to the legal profession’s practical function and social identity. We argue that this challenge should be met as an opportunity to reclaim the profession’s core ethical intentions. We approach the emergence of AI as an occasion to define and safeguard what is irreducibly human in legal work. We ground our approach in the ethical imperatives set out in the American Bar Association’s Model Rules of Professional Conduct, while extending them into an invigorated framework for the AI era.

We survey the uses and ethical challenges associated with cutting-edge deployment of …

Beyond Marriage: Challenging Marital Prerequisites In State Adoption Laws Through A Constitutional And Child-Centered Lens, Alisha Glass

American University Law Review

Many state adoption laws restrict joint adoptions to married couples, thus excluding unmarried partners who share loving and committed relationships with the children they seek to adopt. These marital prerequisites reflect society’s outdated preference for the nuclear family while conflicting with adoption law’s commitment to the best interests of the child. Nonmarital families experience unequal legal protections based on marital status and geographic location. Building on the Kentucky Supreme Court’s decision in G.G. v. Cabinet for Health & Family Services, this Comment examines the limits of resolving these disparities through statutory interpretation and identifies the constitutional questions that remain …

Application Of The Lancet Commission Criteria For The Diagnosis Of Obesity To A Clinical Trials Population: The Leap Trial, Faith Anne N Heeren, Kathleen R Ruddiman, Courtney Simmons, Brian N White, Byron C Jaeger, Nicholas M Pajewski, Stephanie A Hooker, Deborah B Horn, Katy Martin-Fernandez, Kimberly A Gudzune, Caroline Blackwell Young, Jamy Ard, Kristina Henderson Lewis

Faculty, Staff and Student Publications

Objective: This study aimed to apply The Lancet Diabetes & Endocrinology criteria for diagnosing obesity among clinical trial participants and understand participants' characteristics by obesity status.

Methods: The criteria were operationalized and applied to baseline data from the Long-term Effectiveness of the Anti-obesity medication Phentermine (LEAP) trial (NCT05176626). Excess adiposity, organ and tissue dysfunction, and limitations to daily activities were assessed. We examined differences between participants with "no obesity," "pre-clinical obesity," and "clinical obesity."

Results: Among the 860 participants, 0.8% had no obesity (mean BMI 29.0 kg/m2 [SD 0.6]), 18.7% had pre-clinical obesity (mean BMI 35.2 kg/m2 [SD …

Baseline Characteristics Of Men Undergoing Drug-Coated Balloon Dilation, Urethrotomy, Or Urethroplasty For Urethral Stricture, Melvin Zarghooni, Hoi Doan, Adithya Chandrasekaran, Travis Green, Rodrigo Donalisio Da Silva, Annie Chen

Faculty, Staff and Student Publications

Drug-coated balloon (DCB) dilation, direct vision internal urethrotomy (DVIU), and urethroplasty are used to treat urethral stricture in men. Understanding how patients differ across these procedures, and between those who are and are not retreated, is needed to interpret retreatment outcomes. We described baseline characteristics of men undergoing each procedure, overall and by 12-month retreatment status.

Using Epic Cosmos, a national database of 310 million patients, we identified men with urethral stricture who underwent an index DCB, DVIU, or urethroplasty in 2024-2025, grouped by procedure and 12-month retreatment. We described age, comorbidities, smoking, anticoagulant use, lichen sclerosus, residence, and preoperative …

Truth And Consequences: What Catastrophe Teaches Us About Homeownership And Underinsurance, Kenneth S. Klein

Faculty Scholarship

The firestorms enveloping Los Angeles in January 2025 made yet more inescapable the reality of the increasingly overwhelming impacts that climate change is having on communities. Many thousands of owner-occupied homes were destroyed. Most homes will have insurance, but many homeowners will be surprised to find themselves underinsured, meaning their insurance proceeds will be materially less than the insurer-reported, incurred cost of rebuilding their destroyed home. The human consequences on these homeowners, each of whom has lost everything in a single week, are a now sadly all too imaginable tragedy in real time.

How underinsurance happened and what could have …

Healthcare Provider Perspectives On A Clinical Decision Tool To Support Individualized Exercise Prescriptions And Discussions For Breast Cancer Survivors, Jinani Jayasekera, Oliver W. A. Wilson, Kaitlyn M. Wojcik, Eleanor M. Kerr, Rachelle Brick, David Berrigan, Jennifer Yeong-Shin Sheng, Takeo Fujii, Kathleen Thomas, Henri K. Parson, Padma Sheila Rajagopal, Richard L. Street Jr.

Department of Medicine Faculty Publications

Purpose: We evaluated healthcare providers' current knowledge, practices, and perspectives on a novel clinical decision tool (beta-version) to facilitate individualized exercise prescriptions and discussions in clinical settings.

Methods: We recruited healthcare providers who had treated or provided care to breast cancer survivors aged >= 35-years in the past 12 months. The participants were presented with a tool to provide individualized exercise recommendations considering women's individual, clinical, and contextual characteristics. Validated and reliable pre-existing instruments were used to survey providers' current knowledge, practices regarding exercise discussions, and perspectives on the beta-version (paper-draft) of the novel tool.

Results: The sample consisted of …

Physical Activity, Telomere Length, And Cardiometabolic Syndrome In Older Women: The Cardiovascular Health Study, Jeni Page, Melissa Richard, Elizabeth Lyons, Elizabeth Baumler, M Terese Verklan, Michelle C Odden, Elizabeth Lorenzo

Faculty, Staff and Student Publications

Background: Cardiometabolic syndrome (CMS) affects approximately 39% of US women and increases risk for cardiovascular disease, diabetes, and stroke. Telomere length, a biomarker of cellular aging, is associated with CMS and may be influenced by physical activity (PA), potentially mitigating telomere shortening. Black women have higher CMS prevalence compared to white women and may exhibit distinct telomere length dynamics influenced by interactions between CMS and PA.

Methods: Data were drawn from the Cardiovascular Health Study and included black and white women who provided data on PA, CMS risk factors, and telomere length (N = 417). Linear regression models examined the …

By Design, Roger Allan Ford

American University Law Review

In recent years, scholars and policymakers have increasingly embraced regulation “by design” to address new problems, especially those caused by new technologies. These approaches go by various names, like privacy by design, security by design, even the rule of law by design. Despite the popularity of these approaches, though, describing what goes into regulation “by design” is surprisingly challenging. Different speakers use the term in strikingly different ways, with little consensus about why design is important, how design and new technologies interact, or how design can be harnessed to deliver policy results.

Design exists along multiple dimensions: process versus result, …

Tyranny Of A Feather: Asymmetry In Civil Burdens Of Proof, Thomas O. Main

American University Law Review

Civil litigation suffers from a paradox that is at once self-evident, unfair, and overlooked: the trial process promises equality between plaintiffs and defendants under the preponderance-of-the-evidence standard, even as the pretrial process is skewed dramatically in defendants’ favor. At trial a plaintiff needs only “50% plus a feather” to tip the scales and prevail, reflecting a commitment to equal treatment of the parties. Pretrial, however, the playing field tilts steeply: plaintiffs alone must navigate a procedural gauntlet of motions that impose pleading and production burdens for which defendants face no equivalent. This entrenched asymmetry in pretrial practice has become so …

The Painted Ones’ Fine Line: Batok As A Protectable Form Of Traditional Knowledge Under Trade Secret Jurisprudence, Kathleen M. Dinoso

American University Law Review

For centuries, the ancestral tattooing practice of batok has served not as mere ornamentation but as a visual archive of Indigenous Filipinos’ history and identity. In 2021, a digital creator invited the public to learn batok online for merely fifteen dollars. Soon after, many discovered that the renown instructor, Apo Whang-Od, may not have agreed to take part. The resulting discourse exposed a broader issue: Indigenous customs and creations become increasingly vulnerable to misappropriation and improper commodification as they enter global markets and multimedia platforms. Though this event occurred abroad, it highlights how U.S. law is poorly designed to protect …

The Trademark Bargain: Registration As Disclosure, Dustin Marlan

American University Law Review

This Article highlights the central—and under-theorized—role that disclosure plays within trademark law. By loose analogy, the patent disclosure requirement is a cornerstone of patent law, embodying the “patent bargain” where an inventor must disclose their invention in exchange for a twenty-year monopoly. This quid pro quo is believed to stimulate the progress of science and technology, making patent disclosure the very pulse of the patent regime. However, the fundamental importance of disclosure in trademark law remains underexplored. Like patents, trademark law imposes a rigorous bargain—to obtain the enhanced rights granted by federal registration, trademark owners must first make significant disclosures …

Patenting The Unexpected, Sean B. Seymore

American University Law Review

Unexpected discoveries have transformed human existence. They’ve revolutionized science and spawned entire new fields of research. While unexpected discoveries seem inventive and worthy of patent protection, they don’t formally align with traditional patent theory. The bedrock principle that an invention begins with the conception of an idea in the inventor’s mind and ends with implementation doesn’t apply to unexpected discoveries. This misalignment is most acute for pharmaceuticals, where the discovery of new uses for old drugs has tremendous social and economic importance. Since a drug can inherently treat multiple conditions in a patient—even those unknown to the patient, doctor, or …

Federal Hiring Dysfunction And The Self-Shrinking Skew, Lindsey Barrett

American University Law Review

A half-century of remodeling agency workforces against corporate blueprints has hollowed out the civil service, enervated oversight, and facilitated the rise of tech oligarchy. Progressive commentors have criticized the neoliberal turn and proposed reinvigorating reforms, but they’ve overlooked a foundational obstacle: federal hiring dysfunction. Hiring dysfunction entrenches low-resource, deferential regulatory tactics, makes sharper or more onerous approaches less feasible, and undermines recruitment of technical staff for policy and regulatory functions. Concerns about hiring dysfunction and capacity dampen regulatory ambitions. Finally, hiring dysfunction creates plausible-seeming capacity pretexts to oppose novel or more confrontational tactics. The cumulative effects cement regulatory dismantlement to …

Elevated Sulfate Concentrations In Groundwaters Of Glaciated Terrains—Natural Or Anthropogenic?, Christabel Obi, Eric W. Peterson

Faculty Publications - Geography, Geology, and the Environment

Increasing sulfate (SO₄²⁻) concentrations in groundwater systems are a growing environmental concern due to their implications for drinking-water quality and biogeochemical cycling. While sulfate is commonly of geogenic origin, its behavior in agriculturally influenced glacial aquifers remains poorly constrained. This study investigates the distribution, depth dependence, and seasonal variability of sulfate concentrations in groundwater within a riparian system comprised of sediments deposited by glaciers in central Illinois, USA. The study specifically evaluates whether sulfate concentrations 1) vary with groundwater depth, 2) exhibit seasonal trends, and 3) reflect contributions from agricultural tile drainage waters. Groundwater samples collected from …

A Quantitative Analysis Of Barriers To College Students’ Seasonal Vaccination Intentions And Behaviors, Kelly S. Clemens, John Matkovic

Faculty Publications – Health Sciences

Objective
Vaccination is crucial to college student health, but quantitative analyses of barriers in this population are limited. The present study expands the work of Su and Chen to determine the relative influence of structural, psychological, and social vaccination barriers.

Participants
Participants were 650 students from a large, midwestern university during the 2024 vaccination season.

Methods
Participants were recruited from a college campus and randomized to respond to items assessing their barriers to, intentions to receive, and uptake of the COVID-19 or influenza vaccination.

Results
Structural, psychological, and social barriers were differentially important to vaccinations and to intentions vs. uptake …

Exponentially Many Correspondence Colourings Of Planar And Locally Planar Graphs, Luke Postle, Evelyne Smith-Roberge

Faculty Publications – Mathematics

We show that there exists a constant c>0 such that if G is a planar graph with a 5-correspondence assignment (L,M), then G has at least 2c⋅v(G) distinct (L,M)-colourings. This confirms a conjecture of Langhede and Thomassen. More broadly, we introduce a general method showing how hyperbolicity theorems for certain families of critical graphs can be used to derive lower bounds on the number of colourings of the associated class of planar graphs. Hence our main result follows from this method plus a technical theorem (that we proved in a previous paper) involving the hyperbolicity …

Shades Of Stress: Colorism As Minority Stress For Women Of Color, Caitlin M. Mercier, Brea M. Banks, Lourdes D. Concepción Cabán, Michelle Duong

Faculty Publications – Psychology

Women of color often endure indignities shaped by colorism and skin tone discrimination, pressuring them to adhere to racialized beauty ideals (i.e., lighter skin). In response, some women of color may internalize these standards (i.e., through internalized coping and racial self-hatred) which can foster psychological distress. Yet, these associations remain underexplored. Using minority stress theory, in our cross-sectional study we collected online survey data to examine whether internalization and racial self-hatred explained the indirect link between colorist microaggressions and psychological distress among 121 women of color at a Midwestern US historically white institution. Using path analysis, we found support for …

2024 Annual Operations And Maintenance Report 2024 Bres Annual Summary Report For Work Completed In Quadrant 4, Butte-Silver Bow Department Of Reclamation And Environmental Services

Silver Bow Creek/Butte Area Superfund Site

No abstract provided.

Artificial Intelligence Adoption Among Future Journalism And Mass Communications Professionals: A Tam-Based Approach To Students’ Generative Ai Adoption Intent, Chinwendu P. Akalonu

Journal of Communication Pedagogy

As artificial intelligence (AI) reshapes industries, journalism and mass communications professions are slowly adapting to these technologies. This study employs the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) and AI-TAM frameworks to examine predictors of AI adoption intent among college students preparing for careers in the field. Survey results reveal that perceived usefulness, trust in AI output quality, organizational requirement, ethical awareness, and certain sociodemographic factors such as race predict AI adoption intent. Additionally, the study highlights differences in adoption intent among students in different subfields of mass communication, including journalism, advertising, and public relations. It underscores the importance of expanding traditional TAM-based …

Impact Of Tactical Breathing On Marksmanship And Cognitive Function After Anaerobic Fatigue In Law Enforcement Personnel, Jackson D. Gilleland

College of Graduate Studies: Theses & Dissertations

Background: Tactical breathing is commonly used in law enforcement training to regulate stress, yet limited evidence exists regarding its acute effectiveness following physical fatigue. Purpose: To examine whether a brief tactical breathing intervention improves shooting performance and heart rate variability (HRV) following anaerobic fatigue in law enforcement officers. Methods: Thirty-eight officers completed baseline HR/HRV and a shoot/no-shoot scenario, followed by a maximal 500-m row and post-fatigue shooting. Participants were assigned to either a control group or a tactical breathing group, which received brief instruction and coaching before post-testing. Results: No significant between-group differences were observed for A-zone accuracy, shot time, …

Ai-Driven Penetration Testing For Arm Systems: A Comprehensive Framework With Experimental Validation, Matthew Ragsdale

College of Graduate Studies: Theses & Dissertations

The convergence of artificial intelligence and cybersecurity presents new opportunities for automated penetration testing capable of discovering, prioritizing, and remediating vulnerabilities at machine speed. However, deployment on resource-constrained ARM platforms remains unexplored despite ARM’s dominance in mobile, IoT, and edge computing with over 280 billion chips deployed globally. This thesis presents systematic experimental evaluation of AI-driven penetration testing across four paradigms—traditional machine learning, deep learning, large language models, and reinforcement learning—on three ARM platform tiers: Raspberry Pi 5 (8GB, Cortex-A76), Radxa ROCK 5B Plus (16GB LPDDR5 with NPU), and NVIDIA Jetson Nano (4GB with Maxwell GPU). The experimental framework generates …

Network-Aware Airline-Specific Flight Delay Prediction Using Tree-Based Ensemble Models, Mary Dufie Afrane

College of Graduate Studies: Theses & Dissertations

Flight delays pose persistent challenges to the efficiency and reliability of air transportation systems, affecting airlines, airports, regulators, and passengers alike. As traffic demand grows and operational environments become increasingly interconnected, accurately predicting both departure and arrival delays has become crucial for effective planning and mitigation. This study presents a network-aware, airline-specific framework for predicting flight delays in U.S. domestic air transportation systems using tree-based ensemble machine learning models. A large-scale dataset of 1.98 million flights, enriched with weather information, is used to develop predictive models for both departure and arrival delays. To capture the structural and operational complexity of …

The Influence Of First-Year Seminar Course Modality On The Academic Outcomes Of First-Generation College Students, Keia Dodd

College of Graduate Studies: Theses & Dissertations

When universities effectively implement first-year seminars, a popular type of support designed to assist students during their initial year of college, they can meaningfully boost the academic performance of first-generation college students. This study examined whether first-year seminars influenced the academic outcomes of first-generation college students at a specific institution compared with those of their continuing-generation peers. Specifically, it investigated the extent to which course modality (face-to-face, online, or hybrid) influenced variation in first-semester grade point average (GPA) and first-to-second-year retention after controlling for race, sex, and first-generation status. The sample included 7,848 first-time undergraduate students. Multiple linear regression was …

Comparison Of 2000-Meter Row Prediction To Measured Vo2peak During Gxt, Andrew S. Ashley

College of Graduate Studies: Theses & Dissertations

BACKGROUND: Aerobic capacity is essential for the performance of military personnel and first responders. Traditionally, graded exercise tests (GXTs) with metabolic gas analysis have been the criterion-referenced method for assessing aerobic fitness. However, treadmill running and cycle ergometers may not fully reflect the whole-body demands required in tactical environments. Rowing-based assessments and the currently commercially available VO2max prediction formula are widely used across tactical organizations as practical field measures, and most tactical operators are considered inexperienced rowers, which has been minimally examined. PURPOSE: The purpose of this study is to compare measured VO2peak from a rowing GXT with estimated VO2max …

Pixel-To-World Mapping For Multi-Camera Warehouse Robot Localization, Mariam Faruque Sharif

College of Graduate Studies: Theses & Dissertations

This thesis presents a comprehensive framework for camera calibration and pixel-to-world coordinate mapping for multi-camera robot localization in a structured warehouse environment. The study is conducted in the APRN-ROWS laboratory, where four overhead cameras observe a planar grid of known barcode locations used as the reference coordinate system.

The proposed approach combines geometric modeling and optimization-based techniques to estimate camera parameters. Initially, camera extrinsic parameters, including position and orientation, are derived using physical measurements and geometric relationships. Principal point locations are estimated through a zoom-based alignment method, ensuring accurate correspondence between the optical axis and the world coordinate system. Intrinsic …

Untalented: What Is The Role Of “Talent” In Art Class?, Sean Bianchi

College of Graduate Studies: Theses & Dissertations

The concept of talent in art education is widely accepted yet rarely challenged or questioned. This essay critically examines the construction of artistic talent perceptions, the sociohistorical roots of the term itself, and the implications of what talent does for art education. This speculative essay problematizes talent as a persuasive force over art students and art teachers alike, criticizes the accessibility of art to the naïve and art enthusiast alike, as well as the consequences of talent constructs over the future of artistic instruction within public education. Utilizing an aesthetic framework, I explore what the role of talent in art …