Digital Commons Network^™

The Duality Of Lawyers As Escrow Agents, Douglas R. Richmond

Loyola University Chicago Law Journal

An escrow agent is someone who holds money or property in trust for others under agreed terms until a transaction is completed, or a dispute is resolved. Although institutional depositaries are widely available, clients frequently ask their lawyers to serve as escrow agents in connection with transactions in which the lawyer represents the client. In fact, lawyers are generally permitted to serve as escrow agents with respect to clients' transactions so long as all parties involved knowingly consent to the arrangement. This is true both under agency law and as a matter of lawyers' professional responsibility.

Unlike a lawyer who …

Dignitatis Humanae, Francis J. Beckwith

Loyola University Chicago Law Journal

Sixty years ago the Second Vatican Council issued the document Dignitatis Humanae, a declaration on religious freedom. At the time it was considered to be the Catholic Church's most significant concession to the modern world, though the Council argued that the declaration was, given the political and religious realities at the time, a legitimate doctrinal development rooted in the Church's most ancient teachings. Its defense of religious liberty relied on widely held and uncontroversial beliefs about human nature, the common good, and the meaning of religion. But since the beginning of the 21st century those beliefs have been challenged …

Table Of Contents, Loyola University Chicago Law Journal

Loyola University Chicago Law Journal

No abstract provided.

The Right To 'Trip:' Navigating Psilocybin-Assisted Psychotherapy Under The Right To Try Pathway, Caitlyn S. Greenspun

Loyola University Chicago Law Journal

This Comment explores the legal, ethical, and regulatory challenges surrounding the use of psilocybin-assisted psychotherapy for terminally ill patients under the federal Right to Try (RTT) Act. While psychedelics like psilocybin are demonstrating extraordinary therapeutic potential, particularly in easing end-of-life psychological distress, patients remain barred from access due to the Controlled Substances Act (CSA) and the Drug Enforcement Administration's (DEA) narrow interpretation of its authority. Through a comprehensive analysis of legislative history, regulatory frameworks, and administrative law principles, this Comment argues that the DEA's position not only misinterprets the statutory relationship between the RTT Act and the CSA, but also …

Applicability Of Multilateral Environmental Agreements During International Armed Conflicts, Beatrice L. Hamilton

Loyola University Chicago Law Journal

Armed conflicts increasingly contribute to environmental damage and climate change, yet, as proven by recent and ongoing conflicts, the legal framework for the protection of the environment under the law of armed conflict (LOAC) fails to effectively mitigate these damages. With rising temperatures, already diminishing resources, the counter-acting of mitigation and adaptation efforts due to warfare and geo-political tensions on the rise, there is a strong case for considering the potential for enhancing the protection of the environment during armed conflicts.

This Article examines the terms of applicability of multilateral environmental agreements (MEAs) during international armed conflicts. The article draws …

Introduction To Issue Three, Carolyn Grammer

Loyola University Chicago Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Introduction To Issue Four, Keshini Mahesan

Loyola University Chicago Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Table Of Contents, Loyola University Chicago Law Journal

Loyola University Chicago Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Temporary/Forever: The Fissured Economy, Obstacles To Employment, And Regulating The Future Of Exploitation In Temp Work, Kevin Herrera

Loyola University Chicago Law Journal

Among workers in United States, contingent and temporary work arrangements have grown to represent a substantial segment of available jobs, with spikes in their predominance corresponding to major economic shake ups like the Great Recession and the COVID-19 pandemic. These arrangements are part of a larger trend of the “fissuring” of United States employment, wherein applicants are hired by one company and then sent to do their job at another, obscuring who actually employs the worker. Jobs through temp staffing agencies are a particularly dominant form of fissuring among low-wage workers and create conditions under which accountability for workplace abuses …

Advanced Magic In Illinois: Amendments To The Illinois Rules Of Professional Conduct And The Confusion Over How To Handle Flat Fees Paid In Advance, Alberto Bernabe

Loyola University Chicago Law Journal

Attorneys face ongoing challenges in structuring legal fees, particularly when deciding between hourly rates, contingency arrangements, and flat fees. This Article examines recent amendments to the Illinois Rules of Professional Conduct regarding flat fees and explores the persistent confusion over how attorneys should handle fees paid in advance. The debate centers on whether advance payments should be deposited in client trust accounts. The Article analyzes alternative regulatory approaches to address this issue, including proposals to eliminate or modify Rule 1.15(c), which currently governs the handling of advance fees. It evaluates the merits of different fee structures and examines whether there …

Racing To The Top Instead Of The Bottom In Illinois Estate Law, Sarah E. Waldeck

Loyola University Chicago Law Journal

In the last two decades, competition for trust business has led states to abolish the Rule Against Perpetuities, authorize trust decanting, and permit self-settled asset protection trusts all in the hope that settlors will bring their trusts (and the fees they generate) within a state's jurisdiction. But this legislation is profoundly inequitable because it primarily benefits wealthy settlors and those lucky enough to be their beneficiaries, while shifting cost and risk to everyone else.

In the face of such competition, Illinois has fought to retain its trust business by passing legislation that allows settlors to opt out of the perpetuity …

Mental Representations Of Computational Processes, Marlene Berke

Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dissertations

Human intelligence is uniquely powerful and flexible - operating in an enormous range ofsituations, from those as everyday as driving in traffic while carrying on a conversation, to those as extraordinary as cooperating to shift a culture. Work in cognitive science over the past decades has argued that two foundational types of representations form the building blocks of human intelligence: representations of the physical world in terms of objects, forces, spaces, substances, and so on (Carey, 2009), and representations of the social world in terms of agents and their mental states, like goals, beliefs, and knowledge (Gopnik, Meltzoff, & Bryant, …

The Devil Sounds Out: Affect And Intentionality In Conservative Evangelical Anti-Rock Discourse, 1965-1990, Philip Bixby

Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dissertations

Scholars have often described the evangelical reception of rock music as a discourse that changes in a positive direction, from the full-sail rejection of rock in the 1960s to the cautious acceptance of the genre as legitimate worship music throughout the 1970s, '80s, and '90s. This dissertation surveys anti-rock texts written by conservative evangelicals from the mid-1960s to the early 1990s, observing an alternative trajectory of the discourse. The dissertation shows that an uncompromising trend of anti-rock criticism persists well into the 1980s, especially promoted by preachers and writers (for example, Jeff Godwin and Jimmy Swaggart) who sought to deny …

Essays In Macroeconomics And Finance, Francesco Beraldi

Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dissertations

This dissertation consists of three independent essays in which I study how financial markets affect macroeconomic outcomes. I combine rich micro-data and structural models with heterogeneity to shed light on how interactions among different agents influence business cycle fluctuations and the distribution of resources in the economy. I leverage this approach to address central questions covering financial intermediation, household and corporate finance, and their implications for macroeconomic policy and financial stability. Chapter 1: Banking Relationship and Loan Pricing Disconnect. In the first chapter, I study how long-term relationships between banks and firms shape loan pricing and capital allocation. I use …

Essays On Consumer Inferences, Mohin Banker

Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dissertations

Consumers infer from what they know to impute what they wish to know. For example, to estimate the quality of a new product, one may infer that a product's price reflects its quality. This dissertation is composed of three essays investigating factors that affect consumers' inferences. The first essay examines how inferences of positive information differ from inferences of negative information, and shows that positive information is generalized to new objects more than negative information, all else equal. For instance, a good restaurant affects judgments of similar restaurants more than a bad restaurant does. The second essay investigates inferences about …

Improving Thermal Comfort Of Firefighter Personal Protective Equipment With A Focus On Enhancing Insulation And Moisture Management Abilities: A Meta-Analysis, Hallie Ivory

Major Papers by TMD Master of Science Students

Firefighters wear personal protective equipment (PPE) composed of multiple layers, each designed to serve a specific function in ensuring safety and comfort in high heat environments. The thermal liner is the innermost layer and plays a crucial role in thermal comfort by providing insulation and moisture management. Insulation provides protection from external hazards while moisture management keeps the wearer cool and dry.

Heat stress is a significant safety concern for firefighters, as prolonged exposure to high temperatures and insufficient evaporative cooling can lead to discomfort, injuries and or fatalities for them while on duty. Effective moisture management is critical in …

Incentivizing Evidence-Based Care: Policy Levers And Delivery-System Response, Tamara Beetham

Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dissertations

This dissertation examines how state and federal policies shape the addiction treatment landscape, focusing on how the treatment delivery system responds to policy changes. Through three chapters, I evaluate policy tools designed to expand access to life-saving yet underutilized services and their potential to mitigate or reinforce disparities. The first two chapters analyze a Medicaid policy change that allowed states to access previously restricted funding, contingent on improving their addiction treatment systems. Chapter one finds that improvements in access and quality were primarily driven by facility turnover - new facility openings and closures - rather than changes within existing facilities. …

Radial, Steffy Jeswin

Quill & Scope

No abstract provided.

When Do Children Think Inequality Is Fair?, Pinar Aldan

Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dissertations

Psychological research suggests that from infancy, humans are highly attuned to fairness and expect resources to be fairly allocated. However, despite this early sensitivity, people ultimately learn to live with - and sometimes even justify - widespread societal inequalities. This thesis explores how children, who in principle deeply value fairness, come to tolerate economic disparities. Through four chapters, this thesis examines how individuals of different ages interpret reasons for inequality that are common in social life yet underexplored in developmental research. Chapter 2 investigates how people reason about unequal compensation in division-of-labor contexts, where individuals assume distinct, qualitatively different roles. …

Microwave Techniques For Neutrino Mass Measurement, Arina Bykadorova Telles

Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dissertations

Direct neutrino mass measurement is one of the frontiers of particle and nuclear physics, with the most recent measurements setting an upper bound of 0.45 eV/c^2 and cosmological models and observations predicting an upper bound on the sum of neutrino masses of 0.12 eV/c^2. The next generation of neutrino mass experiments require new technology to push beyond the statistical and systematic limits of current measuring capabilities. Project 8 is a collaboration seeking to make this possible by combining the well-established tritium endpoint method with a relatively new technique called CRES. CRES uses the RF emission of electrons undergoing cyclotron motion …

Investigating Non-Canonical Roles Of Atr And Chk1 Throughout The Cell Cycle, Yoon Ki Joo

Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dissertations

Chromosome Instability (CIN), which results from DNA damage in interphase and chromosome missegregation in mitosis, is considered to be a potent driver of cancer. To prevent CIN, cells harbor the DNA Damage Response (DDR) pathway, which is responsible for detecting and repairing damaged DNA. Because of their importance in preventing CIN, the core members of the DDR pathway such as Ataxia Telangiectasia and Rad3-related (ATR) and Checkpoint kinase 1 (CHK1) have been studied as promising targets in cancer therapy. However, clinical trials show that ATR and CHK1 inhibitors elicit adverse side effects with unknown reasons. Recent research suggests that one …

Investigating The Structure And Assembly Of The Hiv-2 Capsid Protein: How Does It Compare To Its More Infamous Cousin?, Matthew David Cook

Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dissertations

Several million people live with infection by human immunodeficiency virus type 2 (HIV-2). Like its pandemic-causing relative, HIV-1, infection with HIV-2 can progress to AIDS, is largely incurable, and is similarly mutation-prone, presenting a challenge for treatment. Despite this, detailed study of HIV-2 is widely lacking while most of the understanding of the virus and its proteins is borne out of comparison with HIV-1. The two are sufficiently similar that this is generally effective, but differences in infection outcomes of the two viruses must be explicable by molecular determinants. One domain of viral biology particularly worth attention in this regard …

Quantum Zeno Effects On Photon Decaying From A Microwave Cavity, Vidul Ravindra Joshi

Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dissertations

Quantum mechanics and classical physics differ fundamentally when it comes to measurement. In classical physics, measurement is nonintrusive, which means the act of measurement does not disturb the state of the system. In quantum mechanics, however, measurement is often invasive, meaning the act of measurement has a back action on the system's state. This difference is illustrated to its full extent by the quantum Zeno effect, where the evolution of a quantum system is inhibited when it is repeatedly measured. The system is repeatedly projected into an eigenstate of the measurement operator, preventing its natural evolution. In theory, the quantum …

Resolving The Three-Dimensional Interactome Of Human Accelerated Regions During Human And Chimpanzee Neurodevelopment, Atreyo Pal

Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dissertations

Human Accelerated Regions (HARs) are regulatory elements highly conserved across species but exhibit a significant excess of human-specific sequence changes. They include transcriptional enhancers with human-specific activity and have been implicated in the evolution of the human brain. However, our understanding of how HARs contributed to uniquely human features of the brain is hindered by a lack of insight into the genes and pathways that HARs regulate. It is unclear whether HARs acted by altering the expression of gene targets conserved between HARs and their chimpanzee orthologs or by gaining new gene targets in human, a mechanism termed enhancer hijacking. …

Continization And Language Representation Of Chemical Information, Haote Li

Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dissertations

Throughout human history, our ancestors have continuously expanded the frontiers of their interests in nature. Chemistry is one of the essences of such explorations. Yet, despite countless discoveries and experiments, we are still on a journey to examine the possibilities within our finite time. With an ever-growing amount of information and open access to public resources, we are experiencing an inflection point. This moment redefines how efficiently we can solve problems, and the key lies in integrating increasing insights from the entire history of knowledge. Algorithms, in contrast to human efforts, are scalable with the amount of available hardware. In …

Essays On Demand-Driven Political Methodology, Amanda Weiss

Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dissertations

This dissertation demonstrates a demand-driven approach to political methodology research. The demand-driven approach entails studying and addressing technical problems while remaining in dialogue with political science as actually practiced. This dissertation, in particular, focuses on conducting credible research in politics and policy amid problems related to causal inference, statistical power, and data limitations. Chapter 2, "How Much Should We Trust Modern Difference-in-Differences Estimates?," takes up the challenge of estimating policy effects in observational settings. In particular, this chapter asks how well a range of difference-in-differences (DID)-style methods work for the empirical settings and sample sizes commonly used in political science, …

Methodological Innovations In Causal Inference: Estimation, Testing, And Decision Making, Yitan Wang

Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dissertations

Causal inference has been an important topic across many fields, such as computer science, statistics, econometrics, epidemiology, psychometrics, and political science, for decades. In this dissertation, we present methodological innovations in causal inference for three problems: estimation, testing, and decision making. In the first chapter, we provide an overview of this dissertation and introduce potential outcomes framework and confounded contextual bandit. In the second chapter, we describe a new design-based framework for drawing causal inference in randomized experiments. Causal effects in the framework are defined as linear functionals evaluated at potential outcome functions. Knowledge and assumptions about the potential outcome …

New Statistical Methods For Mediation Analysis With Independent And Correlated Data, Chao Cheng

Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dissertations

Causal mediation analysis is a popular statistical tool for evaluating the extent to which an observed exposure-outcome relationship is mediated by an intermediate variable, also referred to as the mediator. Through mediation analysis, the total effect (TE) from the exposure on the outcome can be decomposed into a natural indirect effect (NIE) through the mediator and a natural direct effect (NDE) whose impact is due solely to the exposure and possibly other mediators. Causal mediation analysis has been applied in a variety of empirical research fields, including but not limited to epidemiology, implementation science, economics, and psychology. In implementation science, …

Enhancing Culturally Responsive Pedagogy In Teaching And Learning For White Faculty: Can Professional Development Help?, Isabelle Jenkins

Scholarship and Professional Writing from the J.D. Power Center and Donelan Office

Pedagogies traditionally used by faculty in U.S. higher education tend to center white students and their success, simultaneously disregarding the learning strengths of BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Color) students. Culturally Responsive Pedagogy (CRP) may align better with BIPOC students; however, white faculty use of Keywords: culturally responsive pedagogy, professional development, teaching and learning, white racial consciousness CRP is limited and/or superficial. Therefore, professional development for CRP is needed to enhance and deepen the teaching and learning practices of white faculty. Using a multiple case study method, this study examines how white faculty from a diverse range of disciplines …

From Em To Depth Estimators: An Overparametrization View, Jiyi Liu

Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dissertations

This paper introduces the heated idea of overparametrization in the field of neural nets training into the statistical scenario, establishes the theoretical properties of the overparameterized Expectation-Maximization (EM) algorithm and its connections to deep learning and robust statistics. We establish a global convergence result for overparameterized EM in Gaussian mixture models (GMMs), demonstrating that overparameterization reshapes the optimization landscape and facilitates convergence. Inspired by its success in deep learning, we show that overparameterized EM mitigates initialization sensitivity while maintaining statistical consistency. Beyond EM, we introduce the Penalized Tangent Depth (PTD) estimator, a novel framework linking GAN training and depth-based robust …