Digital Commons Network^™

Amicus In Wilcox V. Trump On Presidential Removal And Unitary Executive Theorists’ Errors, Jed Handelsman Shugerman

Faculty Scholarship

As courts ask whether Free Enterprise and Seila Law call into question Humphrey’s Executor and independent officers or agencies, the more immediate questions should be focused on new historical evidence and new fact-checking finding pervasive and repeated historical errors and misinterpretations at the foundation of the unitary executive theory of removal.

Since the Supreme Court decided Seila Law, a wave of new historical research has shown that the Founding generation did not understand Article II to grant the President an indefeasible removal power over executive officials. In response, pro-unitary executive scholars have tried to offer new historical support. That …

Brief Amicus Curiae Of Professor Jed Hanelsman Shugerman In Support Of Respondents, Jed Handelsman Shugerman

Faculty Scholarship

Amicus Curiae Jed Handelsman Shugerman is a Professor of Law at Boston University. He holds a JD and a PHD is History. Shugerman subscribes to the interpretation of the Constitution based on original public meaning (i.e. originalism). He has written extensively on the history of presidential power and the original public meaning of Article II.

Shugerman and Gary Lawson have co-written "Presidential Removal as Article I, not Article II," offering originalist alternatives to limit Congress's power to restrict presidential removal power, while allowing good-cause conditions in traditional exceptional cases. This amicus brief summarizes these alternatives and shows how they are …

Challenging The Law, Steven Arrigg Koh

Faculty Scholarship

Frédéric Mégret’s engaging contribution, A Look Back at The Women’s Hague Peace Conference: What Contribution To International Law Today?, exposes a legal duality. On one hand, the legalist perspective: law is a closed system. From this perspective, law is objective, hard, universal, and bounded. On the other hand, the sociocultural perspective: law is a human practice. From this perspective, law is subjective, organic, particular, and porous. This Essay reads Mégret’s analysis of the 1915 International Congress of Women in The Hague as a “sociocultural challenge,” disrupting the legalist perspective on international law, war, and peace during World War I. …

The Endorsement Test's Early Years, 1983-1985: Notes From The O'Connor Files, Jay D. Wexler

Faculty Scholarship

One of Justice Sandra Day O’Connor’s signature contributions to U.S. constitutional law was the endorsement test, a subtle but critically important reformulation of the Court’s then prevailing approach to applying the Establishment Clause that focused on the message sent by government action supporting religion and the potentially harmful effects of that message on religious minorities and the political community. Now that the current Court has discarded the endorsement test, leaving the government freer than ever to support religion in a variety of ways, we should expect to see the harms that Justice O’Connor cared about become increasingly widespread and prevalent. …

Ten Tips For Legal Empiricists, Jordana Goodman, Christa J. Laser, Mark A. Lemley, Lisa Larrimore Ouellette, Melissa F. Wasserman, Saurabh Vishnubhakat, Janet Freilich, Jessica Silbey, David L. Schwartz, Neel U. Sukhatme

Faculty Scholarship

This essay offers practical tips from leading legal empirical researchers to assist new scholars who are entering the field. Topics include developing meaningful research questions, designing robust survey methodologies, balancing qualitative and quantitative approaches, ensuring data transparency, fostering interdisciplinary collaboration, and navigating ethical considerations in empirical work. Drawing from their own unique challenges and successes, scholars Michael D. Frakes, Janet Freilich, Mark A. Lemley, Lisa Larrimore Ouellette, David L. Schwartz, Jessica Silbey, Neel U. Sukhatme, Saurabh Vishnubhakat, Melissa F. Wasserman, Jordana Goodman, and Christa Laser illuminate what they wished they would have known going into empirical research and the pitfalls …

The Perverse Effects Of Mandatory Judicial Reporting To Bar Authorities Of Ineffective Assistance Of Counsel Determinations, Tigran W. Eldred, David M. Siegel

Faculty Scholarship

California Business & Professions Code § 6086.7(a)(2) provides that a court shall notify the State Bar “[w]henever a modification or reversal of a judgment in a judicial proceeding is based in whole or in part on the misconduct, incompetent representation, or willful misrepresentation of an attorney.” Some California judges now interpret this provision as mandating referral to the State Bar in any case in which a new trial or withdrawal of a plea is granted due to ineffective assistance of counsel. This interpretation directly conflicts with an attorney’s continuing duty to her former client. It is unnecessary and has profoundly …

Panel Discussion: Mindfulness In The Law School Environment, Erika George, Nicky Boothe, Kellyn O. Mcgee

Faculty Scholarship

A 2016 study of 13,000 lawyers conducted by American Bar Association Commission on Lawyer Assistance Programs and the Hazelden Betty Ford Foundation found that approximately 28 percent struggle with depression, 19 percent anxiety and 23 percent stress.¹² The study found “younger lawyers in the first ten years of practice and those working in private firms experience the highest rates of problem drinking and depression.”¹³ At least one study suggests that 40-70 percent of disciplinary proceedings and malpractice claims against lawyers involve substance abuse or depression.

According to a 2016 Survey of Law Student Well-Being including over 3,300 law …

Do Academic Researchers Care About Patent Infringement? A Pcr Case Study, Janet Freilich

Faculty Scholarship

Because much cutting-edge academic research involves building on other new technologies, university research often involves making or using a patented invention—an act of patent infringement. The problem of how patents affect academic researchers has attracted considerable attention, but legal scholars are divided on the magnitude of patents’ potential impact. Many scholars fear that patents will entirely hobble academic scientific research, while others find that academic researchers entirely ignore patents and thus that they have little impact. This Article adds a piece of empirical evidence to the debate by studying the example of polymerase chain reaction (PCR) technology. In the early …

Presuming Justice For Temp Workers, Andrew Elmore, Kati Griffith, Sachin S. Pandya

Faculty Scholarship

Workers need to know who their employers are. Who is responsible for remedying workplace dangers? Who can they sue for restitution when they are discriminated against at work, or do not get paid for all of the hours they work? Temp agency contracts complicate these seemingly simple questions. In workers’ rights cases involving “temps,” courts and administrative agencies often engage in protracted, resource-intensive joint employer inquiries to decide whether the temp agency clients share in employer obligations and liabilities with the agencies. This is the case even when the temp agency client has the key markers of an “employer,” such …

Human Rights Risks In Clean Energy Supply Chains: Racial Capitalism, Critical Minerals, And Corporate Responsibility, Erika George

Faculty Scholarship

This paper argues that decarbonization will fail to deliver climate justice unless the transition to clean energy confronts the racialized political economy that has historically structured extractive activity and shaped international economic law. Grounding its analysis in racial capitalism, the paper contends that the growing demand for critical minerals risks reproducing patterns of exploitation, expropriation, and expulsion. Using lithium extraction in Chile as a case study, it shows how colonial legacies, dictator-era neoliberal reforms, and present-day regulatory architectures governing foreign investment and natural resource extraction have prioritized investors over human rights and the environment. Recent decisions of the International Court …

Formal Victories And Roads Not Taken: Excavating Departures And Throughlines In Challenges To The Place Of Marriage, Linda C. Mcclain

Faculty Scholarship

A decade after Obergefell, Professor Mayeri’s fascinating and meticulously detailed new book, Marital Privilege: Marriage, Inequality, and the Transformation of American Law, tells the stories of “marriage’s challengers,”from the 1960s to the beginning of the twenty-first century.¹⁶ Along with the stories of some “well-known” lawyers, advocates, and scholars, Mayeri also “rescu[es]” the stories of now “obscure” Americans who “pushed marital boundaries” to protect their parental rights, their careers, or their “freedom to make decisions about their bodies and families.”¹⁷ Such rescue allows readers to “see change as a bottom-up as well as a top-down process.”¹⁸ Mayeri …

Why Did Prosecution Strengthen President Trump In The 2024 Election?, Steven Arrigg Koh

Faculty Scholarship

Why did criminal prosecution strengthen President Donald Trump's electoral prospects in the 2024 federal election? It was not supposed to be this way: after President Trump's 2024 New York state conviction, many speculated that President Trump's "felon" status would imperil his political career. In fact, the opposite occurred: federal and state criminal prosecutions reenergized President Trump's 2024 presidential candidacy. Contemporary criminal law theories-traditional individualist, expressivist, and critical-struggle to explain why. 

This Article advances a theory of criminal coalescence to explain why the Trump prosecutions led the former President to political victory. Criminal coalescence is the intensification of mass support for …

Mobility And Power In Temp Work, Andrew Elmore

Faculty Scholarship

Labor mobility is an underdiscussed determinant of temp worker power. Drawing on original interviews with professional and blue-collar workers who work as and alongside temps, this Article shows how businesses use staffing agencies to restrict the labor mobility of contingent workers. Staffing agencies limit worker mobility by imposing user- and worker-side contractual restraints while misrepresenting themselves to temp workers as their sole employer. They also exploit state-imposed mobility limitations by recruiting foreign nationals and people leaving incarceration and channeling them into their most precarious work. This enables clients to dismantle internal labor markets and to fill staffing shortages without raising …

Legislative Speech & Decorum, Sean J. Kealy

Faculty Scholarship

Decorum requires legislators to self-limit their free speech rights as citizens; things that may be said and done in the public square would violate legislative decorum rules. In 2023, two legislatures made headlines by using decorum rules to silence young legislators with minority views. In Tennessee, the House expelled two representatives after they walked into the House well and led protestors in the galleries in several chants demanding the House take up gun control legislation. In Montana, the House excluded a representative from the House Floor after she spoke against a bill to forbid minors access to gender affirming care. …

How Not To Democratize Algorithms, Ngozi Okidegbe

Faculty Scholarship

A growing set of jurisdictions has embraced “consultative algorithmic governance,” the idea that community members, particularly racially and otherwise politically marginalized ones, should be involved in the processes by which state institutions procure, construct, implement, and oversee artificially intelligent algorithms employed in public sector decision-making. Consultative processes range from public hearings that provide communities with an opportunity to comment about anticipated algorithmic use to community advisory boards that help public officials evaluate the impact of current or future algorithmic use.

This Article argues that consultative algorithmic governance is critically flawed and then builds upon this critique to point toward a …

Predicting Federal Third-Party Funding Regulation, Victoria Sahani

Faculty Scholarship

Third-party funding is a global phenomenon, although regulatory enforcement is local. Regulatory approaches vary widely from country to country and within countries, especially in federal legal systems, such as Canada, Australia, and the United States. The United States federal government is learning about third-party funding with an eye toward potential future regulation. Congress has been investigating funding, as evidenced by testimony in congressional hearings, proposed federal legislation, and a nonpartisan study on third-party funding by the Government Accountability Office. In addition, after more than a decade of observation, the United States Federal Civil Rules Advisory Committee recently formed a committee …

Under What Circumstances Is "Caste" Likely To Be Useful As An Analytic Concept (And Should We Care)?, Sanford V. Levinson, Robert L. Tsai

Faculty Scholarship

This Essay is the product of the 2025 “Constitutional Law Schmooze,” where academics from a variety of disciplines and from all over the country meet to discuss a common topic of constitutional law chosen by the moderator. This year’s topic was “caste.” The two of us, having written independent “tickets” of admission for the schmooze—i.e., short essays setting out our tentative thoughts about “caste”—turned out to be relative skeptics about the value of the term for lawyers. We are certainly not hostile to those who differ with us. This should be regarded as a “friendly dissent,” as distinguished, say, from …

What We Should Know About The Reliability Of Empirical Legal Studies, Kathryn Zeiler

Faculty Scholarship

The findings of replication studies conducted in the early 2010s led many to declare that science was in the midst of a “replication crisis.” Since then, a growing number of reforms have been proposed and tested. The field of empirical legal studies seems behind other fields such as psychology, economics, political science, medicine, biology, and others that have taken significant steps toward uncovering the general reliability of the field’s empirical work, investigating the causes of observed unreliability, and instituting and testing the effects of various reforms. The purpose of this Article is to summarize what we know about the reliability …

Automatic Reaction - What Happens To Workers At Firms That Automate?, James Bessen, Maarten Goos, Anna Salomons, Wiljan Van Den Berge

Faculty Scholarship

We provide the first estimate of the impacts of automation on individual workers by combining Dutch micro-data with a direct measure of automation expenditures covering firms in all private non-financial industries over 2000-2016. Using an event study differences-indifferences design, we find that automation at the firm increases the probability of workers separating from their employers and decreases days worked, leading to a 5-year cumulative wage income loss of about 8% of one year’s earnings for incumbent workers. We find little change in wage rates. Further, lost wage earnings are only partially offset by various benefits systems and are disproportionately borne …

Wglt Annual Report, 2025, Wglt, Illinois State University

WGLT Annual Reports

Annual report for WGLT, an NPR Network radio station licensed to and operating from Illinois State University.

Electronic Resources Management 101, Michelle E. Colquitt, Cassidy Carter, John Felts, Chris Vidas

Presentations

No abstract provided.

La Retroalimentación Bidireccional En El Proceso De La Enseñanza Y Aprendizaje Con Modalidad Hibrida En Una Institución Secundaria De Puerto Rico, Annette Muñiz Andújar

Theses and Dissertations

El objetivo del estudio fue determinar la percepción de los docentes sobre la importancia de la Retroalimentación Bidireccional en el Proceso de la Enseñanza-Aprendizaje con Modalidad Hibrida en una Institución Secundaria en Puerto Rico. Este estudio se realizó utilizando un diseño fenomenológico, con enfoque cualitativo. La población y la muestra del estudio estuvieron compuestas de docentes de una escuela Pública del área Norte de Puerto Rico. Los datos fueron recopilados mediante la entrevista semiestructurada. Durante este proceso, la investigadora utilizó un cuestionario guía, con el cual procedió a recolectar los datos, utilizando la entrevista semiestructurada.

Los datos cualitativos obtenidos de …

Uso De Herramientas De Inteligencia Artificial Generativa Por Parte De Docentes En Una Escuela Del Suroeste De Puerto Rico, Glorimar N. Rodríguez Guiliani

Theses and Dissertations

Esta disertación aplicada fue diseñada para investigar el nivel de conocimiento, uso y dificultades que enfrentan los docentes de quinto a duodécimo grado en una escuela privada del suroeste de Puerto Rico respecto a tecnologías emergentes las cuales presentan desafíos significativos para los docentes y los estudiantes. Se exploró la utilización de herramientas de inteligencia artificial generativa (GenAI) como ChatGPT dentro y fuera del aula para actividades pedagógicas y administrativas.

Los hallazgos revelaron una notable carencia en el conocimiento docente sobre el uso y habilidades de la inteligencia artificial. Se identificó, también, una deficiencia en la capacidad de los docentes …

Instructional Design And Technology Professionals: Why Are Some Laggards?, Hayley Mendelson Smith

Theses and Dissertations

Laggards are often thought of as aloof and uninformed late adopters, as traditionalists living in the past (Rogers,2003). Laggards represent the last 16% of a population to adopt an innovation, and, as a result, they are often depicted for their resistance to adopt an innovation much later than the rest of the population, if ever (Jahanmir et al., 2020; Rogers, 2003). The present study attempted to expand the research on laggards, specifically laggard Instructional Design and Technology (IDT) professionals.

IDT professionals were the target group because of their perceived innovativeness as a result of their high exposure to instructional technology …

Exploring The Self-Efficacy Of Physical Education Teachers To Teach Adapted Physical Education, Carolann Cautin

Theses and Dissertations

This applied dissertation was designed to explore experienced physical education teachers and their self-efficacy when teaching students with a disability. This qualitative analysis examined physical education teachers’ experience and their confidence level when teaching adapted physical education. Physical education teachers are expected to provide differentiated instruction for each student; however, this can be a challenge for teachers. The challenge lies in the fact that not all physical education teachers have the confidence or basic training to teach and instruct students who have a disability.

The research included 10 experienced physical education participants from Grades K–12. All participants completed a self-efficacy …

Percepción De Los Docentes De Las Escuelas Públicas Secundarias De Puerto Rico Sobre El Uso De Las Herramientas De Inteligencia Artificial En El Salón De Clases, Alice M. García Cardoza

Theses and Dissertations

Esta disertación aplicada fue diseñada con el propósito de determinar la percepción de los docentes de escuelas públicas secundarias de Puerto Rico sobre el uso de las herramientas de la Inteligencia Artificial (IA) en la sala de clases para mejorar los procesos de enseñanza y aprendizaje de los estudiantes. Actualmente, la tendencia en la educación es la utilización de las herramientas de la IA por su gran potencial y enriquecimiento educativo. Sin embargo, existen limitaciones en cuanto a la integración efectiva de la IA en el currículo por la falta de experiencia práctica y formación especializada. Además, los docentes poseen …

Factors That Contribute To Employment Success For Young Adults With Disabilities Completing A Postsecondary Education Program, Leatha Pfanmiller

Theses and Dissertations

The problem addressed in this research was low employment rates for young adults with disabilities. Young adults with disabilities are employed at a much lower rate than their neurotypical peers. The factors identified in this study could be beneficial to other college and postsecondary education (PSE) programs with employment components, to promote higher rates of employment for students with disabilities who attend those institutions.

The purpose of this qualitative study was to identify factors that contribute to employment success for young adults with disabilities completing a PSE program. The study was conducted at a medium-sized, 4-year, public university in the …

Percepción De La Policía De Puerto Rico Sobre La Utilización De Las Cámaras Corporales, Vicente Villegas Laboy

Theses and Dissertations

En Puerto Rico, según la literatura revisada, la investigación sobre el tema de las cámaras corporales policiacas apenas está comenzando. A pesar de esto, en lugares como en los Estados Unidos de América y Europa, si hay estudios relacionados con las cámaras corporales. Estas investigaciones, en su mayoría, se han concentrado en el efecto que causa esta tecnología en los policías que las utilizan, así como, en los ciudadanos que interactúan con estos policías. Este estudio de disertación doctoral explora este tema, pero, desde la percepción del policía que utiliza la cámara corporal, día a día, como parte de su …

Teacher Views Of Augmentative And Alternative Communication With Nonverbal Students With Severe Intellectual Disabilities: A Generic Qualitative Study, Lelita K. Thomas

Theses and Dissertations

Students with significant intellectual disabilities who are nonverbal often depend on augmentative and alternative communication devices to engage with lessons and participate in secondary educational environments. Despite advancements in this technology, issues pertaining to training, consistency, and institutional support persist, hindering effective application in urban schools. The objective of this generic qualitative study was to investigate the perspectives of teachers and related service providers regarding the utilization of these devices for nonverbal students with severe intellectual disabilities in urban secondary schools.

Data were gathered via semi-structured interviews with 11 participants, comprising special education instructors, related service providers, and special education …

The Perceptions Of Training And Development And Emotional Intelligence Among Virtual Leaders In Public And Private Institutions Of Higher Education, Ryan J. Trautweiler

Theses and Dissertations

This applied qualitative dissertation explored virtual leadership in higher education, examining virtual leaders' perceptions of training and development and emotional intelligence. Using an inductive research approach, data were collected through semistructured interviews and a questionnaire distributed via Google Forms to eight virtual leaders from public and private higher education institutions. Data were analyzed using interpretive phenomenological analysis (IPA) and thematic analysis to identify key patterns and themes. Findings revealed distinctions between public and private institutions. In public institutions, training and development focused on faculty preparedness, resourcefulness in overcoming limitations, and its impact on student engagement. In private institutions, training was …