Digital Commons Network^™

Prurient Interests: The Law Of Sexual Desire, Lawrence M. Friedman

FIU Law Review

A recent book by George Fisher tries to explain the history of drug and alcohol laws in terms of social and legal norms against whatever can rob people of rational thinking; this article extends the analysis to laws about sexual behavior in the last two centuries, their rise and fall.

The Motherhood Myth, Traditional Firms, And The Underrepresentation Of Women, Paula Schaefer

FIU Law Review

This Article explains that the motherhood narrative—that women are underrepresented in partnership and leadership ranks of law firms because they are their children’s primary caregivers—is a myth. After detailing how the motherhood myth has been used as an excuse for poor retention of women, the Article provides evidence of an alternative explanation: traditional firms—characterized by extreme work expectations and reliance on the unpaid labor of attorneys’ stay-at-home spouses or partners (SAHSs)—are structurally and culturally hostile to women. To thrive in a traditional firm, an attorney needs a SAHS—not just an equal parenting partner as the motherhood myth claims. Traditional firms’ …

Unvaccinated By Doubt: How Covid-19 Governance Sparked A Measles Revival, Ellen Black

FIU Law Review

A measles outbreak occurred in the United States this year, with measle cases reaching the highest levels in over two decades, even though the disease had been declared eliminated in 2000. In large part, this measles resurgence can be traced to unvaccinated individuals who have chosen to disregard public health officials' vaccination guidance. Clearly, the public has lost trust in their governmental public health officials. As the next disease outbreak looms, the need for restoration of trust becomes imperative.

This article demonstrates how the government's actions during COVID-19 further led to this lack of trust, by providing conflicting guidance as …

Absent Words, Absent Consent: Gisèle Pélicot And The Limits Of French Rape Law, Victoria Baez

FIU Law Review

France's force-based definition of rape, which centers on violence, coercion, threat, or surprise, fails to adequately protect victims who are unconscious, incapacitated, or otherwise unable to resist. This deficiency was highlighted by the Mazan case, where structural gaps in French law made prosecuting mass sexual assaults involving an unconscious victim unusually complex. Under this framework, the legal requirements to establish rape distort the understanding of consent and perpetuate longstanding rape myths, including the presumption that silence implies agreement. Although convictions were ultimately secured in the Mazan case, they occurred despite the structure of the law. Without reform, France's current rape …

Should All Exercise Routines Be Precluded From Copyright Protection? The Current Scope Of Copyrightable Choreography, Malina Lapenes

FIU Law Review

Choreography as copyrightable subject matter is an underdeveloped topic in copyright law. Few cases discuss the line drawn between routines that can be protected by copyright and those that cannot. In cases where a choreographic routine tells a story, such as a theatrical performance, copyright protection is warranted. This is because the routine's expressive elements can easily be separated from the routine's underlying athletic movements. However, for routines that do not have readily identifiable expressive elements, courts seem to use too narrow a standard for copyright classification. Specifically, in Tracy Anderson, the district court used a narrow approach in classifying …

Editorial Board

FIU Law Review

No abstract provided.

Publisher

FIU Law Review

No abstract provided.

Electing The Supreme Court, Dmitry Bam

FIU Law Review

There is a curious irony in how we select United States Supreme Court justices. According to basic constitutional theory, as well as the arguments made by many leading Framers at the time of the Founding, one of the Court’s primary roles is to serve as a check on the executive and legislative branches when they exceed the constitutional limits imposed by the American people. Yet, we ask those very branches to jointly select the justices responsible for enforcing these limits, leaving the American people with only an indirect (if any) role in the process. Not surprisingly, the justices nominated by …

Emergency Oversight, Catherine Baylin Duryea

FIU Law Review

This Article examines one of the most pressing questions in administrative law: How much judicial oversight should administrative agencies face during an emergency? This issue was particularly salient during the COVID epidemic, but it is not new. The Second World War saw a significant expansion and consolidation of the power of administrative agencies as well as experimentation with the appropriate oversight role for courts. This Article analyzes one such experiment: judicial oversight of agencies implementing wartime anti-inflationary measures, i.e. price controls and rationing. During the war, Congress created a specialized court, the Emergency Court of Appeals (ECA), to hear disputes …

The Hunger Games: Food As A Right, Not A Privilege, Camesha F. Little

FIU Law Review

Despite the United Nations' explicit declaration that all humans have a right to food, food insecurity and hunger remain persistent problems in the United States and around the globe. The dystopian landscapes depicted in novels such as The Hunger Games and Parable of the Sower—societies crippled by poverty, oppression, and pervasive starvation—resonate with sobering contemporary realities. This Article examines existing food laws, food rights, and the current protections safeguarding the United States food supply from a humanitarian perspective. Ultimately, this Article argues that the human right to food must expand to encompass a right to healthy or natural food, and …

Agents In A Tangled Bank: An Ecosystem Approach To Ai Regulation, Andrew W. Torrance, Bill Tomlinson

FIU Law Review

As autonomous artificial intelligence agents ("Agents") become increasingly prevalent in society, legal frameworks must evolve to govern their behavior effectively. This article argues that autonomous AI agents must be understood as operating within complex ecosystems of other agents, humans, institutions, and actual biological ecosystems-similar to how biological organisms exist within broader ecosystems. Drawing on established research in multi-agent systems and environmental law, we propose that effective governance of AI agents requires moving beyond just regulation on individual agents to include system-level approaches. We examine how existing legal frameworks handle heterogeneous autonomous entities (humans, corporations, and animals) and explore how these …

Being Pregnant In Someone Else's Body, Jennifer S. Hendricks

FIU Law Review

In the wake of the Dobbs decision overturning the right to abortion, now is a critical time to re-assess how legal feminism theorizes the pregnant body. Before Dobbs, feminist legal scholarship had blazed a path of anti-maternalism, a stance rooted in liberal, formalist notions of equality that denigrates the “feminine” and too often minimizes the importance of reproductive issues both as tools of sex-based subordination in the present and as foundations for liberation in the future. Anti-maternalism is attractive to legal scholars because it minimizes sex and gender differences and may appear to be gender-inclusive. It has produced arguments that …

Defending Form Contract Consent, Wayne R. Barnes

FIU Law Review

The issue of standard form contracts has bedeviled Contracts scholars for a century. The basic problem has long been known. Contract is supposed to be a quintessentially consensual activity, whereby both parties are operating with full knowledge and comprehension of the array of terms and conditions being negotiated and agreed to. But by employing standard forms replete with boilerplate fine print, companies have created a regime whereby it is most likely irrational for consumers to bother reading the terms before consenting to the transaction. The existing “duty to read” doctrine is that consumers fully consent to all terms when they …

Fifty Years Of Protecting The Surviving Spouse: The Origin And Evolution Of Florida's Elective Share, Flavia Argamasilla

FIU Law Review

Currently, Florida’s elective share framework calculates the amount a surviving spouse is entitled to based on a decedent’s “elective estate.” Although this “elective estate” represents a significant improvement from previous law, where a decedent was free to completely disinherit a surviving spouse, issues still loom regarding the fairness of the framework. Granting a surviving spouse a fixed share of 30 percent of the decedent’s “elective estate” regardless of the length of the marriage can lead to inequitable outcomes. For instance, a surviving spouse who was married to the decedent for any period of time, one month even, can elect to …

Nevada’S Blockchain Gamble: Can A State Embracing Web3 Technology Lead Probate Courts Into The Digital Age?, Ariel Sweeney

FIU Law Review

Probate stands as a bastion of legal formalism, seemingly resistant to the transformative currents of digital innovation that have swept through other domains of American law. While financial transactions, real property conveyances, and contract execution have increasingly begun exploring the use of Web3 technologies such as blockchain and smart contracts, estate and probate law remain tethered to paper-based procedures and rigid execution requirements. Nevada was the first state to provide legal support for Web3 technology, amending its Uniform Electronic Transactions Act statutes in 2017 to recognize blockchain-based transactions as valid and judicially enforceable. Yet despite this progressive legislative framework, the …

Copula-Based Bayesian Model For Detecting Differential Gene Expression, Prasansha Liyanaarachchi, N. Rao Chaganty

Mathematics & Statistics Faculty Publications

Deoxyribonucleic acid, more commonly known as DNA, is a fundamental genetic material in all living organisms, containing thousands of genes, but only a subset exhibit differential expression and play a crucial role in diseases. Microarray technology has revolutionized the study of gene expression, with two primary types available for expression analysis: spotted cDNA arrays and oligonucleotide arrays. This research focuses on the statistical analysis of data from spotted cDNA microarrays. Numerous models have been developed to identify differentially expressed genes based on the red and green fluorescence intensities measured using these arrays. We propose a novel approach using a Gaussian …

In Search Of The Rational Voter In The 2020 Presidential Election: Understanding The Impact Of Voter Costs And Benefits On Turnout, Norou Diawara, Tiffany Henley, Samuel L. Brown, Md Iqbal Hossain

Mathematics & Statistics Faculty Publications

The ability to vote is one of the most valuable rights and privileges afforded by the Constitution of the United States to its citizens. For many, voting is not just a civic duty; it is also a choice. Voting is crucial to our democracy, and any changes to it may affect the efficiency of the democratic process. The bigger question is whether voters behave rationally by engaging in a cost-benefit calculus in deciding whether or not to vote. Using data science, this paper will examine the probability of voting and investigate its impact via cost and benefit among other variables …

A Bridge Too Low, John Adam

Mathematics & Statistics Faculty Publications

The article "A bridge too low" in the Physics Teacher journal discusses a low bridge near the River Greta in Keswick, England, with an arch shaped like a semiellipse. It presents questions about the maximum height a person of a certain height can walk under the bridge without hitting their head, the cross-sectional area of the arch, its eccentricity, and perimeter. The article also mentions the approximation by Indian mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan for the perimeter of an ellipse and invites readers to find the answers online.

A Question Of Transparency: Solutions For Fermi Questions, March 2025, John Adam

Mathematics & Statistics Faculty Publications

Question 1: Why is it easier to see through rain than fog?

Start thinking about this by imagining a fixed volume (V) of water being dispersed into, say, N identical droplets of diameter d. Surface area and volume considerations should lead to the answer in terms of V and d.

Solution to Question 1: N = VI(πd³/6) = 6V/πd³ ≈ 2V/d³.

The cross-sectional area A of each drop is πd²/4 ≈ 3d²/4, so the total area blocked off (assuming no overlapping drops—so this is an upper bound) is NA ≈ 1.5V/d, so the area blocked off is inversely proportional to …

‘Like A 6-Year-Old Dropped On Mars Without Parents’: Faculty Members’ Intercultural Competence And Cultural Adaptation In The Uae, Mustafa Aydogan, Esra İzmir, Hana Shahin

All Works

This study examines the intercultural competence and sociocultural adaptation of international faculty members (IFMs) in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), a highly multicultural educational setting. Using a mixed-methods approach, the study explores IFMs’ adaptation experiences and the impact of multicultural teaching training. Quantitative analysis of 167 IFMs revealed a significant relationship between intercultural competence and sociocultural adaptation, with training enhancing both. Participants from Muslim or Arab backgrounds adapted better, emphasizing the role of cultural familiarity with the host culture. Qualitative findings from 14 interviews identified five key themes: (a) UAE’s diverse environment, (b) cultural distance, (c) language and communication challenges, …

Examining The Role Of Prompt Engineering In Utilizing Generative Ai Tools For Lesson Planning: Insights From Teachers’ Experiences And Perceptions, Areej Elsayary, Mohammad Amin Kuhail, Zeina Hojeij

All Works

The purpose of this study is to explore the role of prompt engineering in utilizing GenAI tools like EduAid, Magic School, and ChatGPT to enhance lesson planning efficiency and content relevance. Additionally, it highlights the need for AI literacy and continuous professional development to align AI outputs with diverse student needs. A qualitative case study was used to collect data from 17 high school teachers from private and governmental schools. Document analysis, written reflections, and focus group talks were used as data sources to get detailed information about how the teachers used and thought about GenAI tools. The results show …

On The Validity Of Traditional Vulnerability Scoring Systems For Adversarial Attacks Against Llms, Atmane Ayoub Mansour Bahar, Ahmad Samer Wazan

All Works

This research investigates the effectiveness of established vulnerability metrics, such as the Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS), in evaluating attacks on Large Language Models (LLMs), with a focus on Adversarial Attacks (AAs). The study explores the influence of different metric factors in determining vulnerability scores, providing new perspectives on potential enhancements to these metrics. Approach - This study adopts a quantitative approach, calculating and comparing the coefficient of variation of vulnerability scores across 56 adversarial attacks on LLMs. The attacks, sourced from various research papers, and obtained through online databases, were evaluated using multiple vulnerability metrics. Scores were determined by …

Females On Board, Stakeholder Orientation, And Esg Disclosure: An Evidence From The Tourism And Transportation Industries, Akrum Helfaya, Phuong Bui, Ahmed Aboud

All Works

In the tourism and transportation (T&T) industries, female directors' contributions are undervalued despite the strong emphasis on board gender diversity in management research. We investigate whether the impact of multiple board gender diversity measures on environmental, social, and governance (ESG) practices varies between shareholder- and stakeholder-oriented countries and between T&T industries, drawing on insights from both managerial and psychological perspectives. Using an international sample of 790 firm-year observations representing 79 listed firms from 16 countries, we find that gender diversity is positively associated with ESG disclosure practices, and this relationship is more pronounced in shareholder-oriented countries and the transportation sector. …

Intrinsic Motivation, Future Orientation, And Financial Stress: A Student-Centered Model Of Metaverse Classroom Adoption In Low-Income Contexts, Mousa Al-Kfairy, Omar Alfandi, Saed Alrabaee

All Works

The rapid rise of immersive technologies has placed metaverse-based classrooms at the center of higher education innovation. Yet, little is known about how students in low-income contexts perceive and adopt these platforms, particularly when motivation, career goals, and financial pressures intersect. This study develops and tests a student-focused model that integrates intrinsic motivation, future time perspective, career relevance, and financial stress to explain behavioral intention toward metaverse adoption. A survey of 292 university students in Jordan—a lower-income national setting—was analyzed using Partial Least Squares Structural Equation Modeling (PLS-SEM). Results showed all hypothesized paths were significant. Future time perspective and career …

The Effectiveness Of A Proposed Guide To Improve The Role Of Parents In Developing Their Kindergarten Children English Language Skills, Laila Mohebi, Ghadah Al Murshidi, Asmaa Awad, Bushra Areashi, Ahmed Al Zaabi, Ahlam Hendawy

All Works

The aim of this study is to explore United Arab Emirates (UAE) parents’ perceptions of their involvement in their kindergarten children’s English language learning as a second language (L2) and the challenges they face. The study consisted of two phases: the first investigated the role of 329 parents using a questionnaire, revealing a strong need for guidance on how to support their children’s English learning. The second phase assessed the effectiveness of a structured educational guide. Pre/post-test results showed that the guide enhanced parents’ abilities to teach English as an L2 and apply strategies aligned with their children’s learning styles.

Deep Learning Models Based On Cnn, Rnn, And Lstm For Rainfall Forecasting: Jordan As A Case Study, La'aly A. Al-Samrraie, Ayman M. Abdalla, Khalideh Al Bkoor Alrawashdeh, Abeer Al Bsoul, Mohammad Abu Awad, Kamel Alzboon, Ahmed A. Al-Taani

All Works

This study is the first to compare deep learning models for rainfall prediction across several Jordanian cities representing diverse climates using 11 years of recorded climate data, something that previous studies have not addressed in the Jordanian context. The climate records for four Jordanian cities (Amman, Irbid, Karak, and Ajloun) were recorded hourly. The data was divided into training sets (80%) and test sets (20%), with and without the application of correlation analysis, feature selection, and data standardization steps applied. Three neural network models, Recurrent Neural Network (RNN), Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM), and Convolutional Neural Network-Recurrent Neural Network (CNN-RNN) were …

Making The Jump: A Self-Study Of The Implementation Of Gamification And Student Discussion In Middle School Mathematics, John Pauly

Dissertations and Theses @ UNI

Middle school mathematics teaching is a complex practice that incorporates both cognitive and emotional factors (Sen, 2022). Students must have permission to get stuck and unstuck in their thinking while critically considering their approaches (Kapp, 2016), along with opportunities to engage in decision-making, deep reasoning, and discussions about mathematics (Stein et al., 1996). Gamification and game-based learning can place students in an environment where discussion, collaboration and perseverance are highly valued in overcoming challenges and achieving common goals (Kapp, 2016).

This qualitative self-study reflects on the journey of John Pauly, a middle school mathematics teacher, told through his experiences and …

Accurately Constituting Robust Interfaces For High-Performance High-Energy Lithium Metal Batteries, Kevin V. Carballo, Meetesh Singh, Xiangbo Meng

Mechanical Engineering Faculty Publications and Presentations

High-energy lithium metal batteries (LMBs) have received ever-increasing interest. Among them, coupling lithium metal (Li) with nickel-rich material, LiNi_xMn_yCo_zO₂ (NMCs, x ≥ 0.6, x + y + z = 1), is promising because Li anodes enable an extremely high capacity (∼3860 mA h g⁻¹) and the lowest redox potential (−3.04 V vs. standard hydrogen electrode), while NMCs can achieve a much higher capacity of ∼200 mA h g⁻¹ and lower cost than those of LiCoO₂. However, the resultant Li‖NMC cells have been hindered from commercialization due to a …

Reflections On Crafting A Framework Companion Document For And By Science And Technology Librarians, Dawn Cannon-Rech, Allison B. Brungard, Rachel Hamelers, Rebecca Kuglitsch, Rebecca Renirie

University Libraries: Faculty Publications

Abstract unavailable.

Importance Of Library Metrics And Effective Methods Of Communication With Provosts, Katy Zane

Theses, Dissertations and Capstones

Provosts and librarians share a common goal of needing to measure library activity in such a way that appropriately conveys how it contributes to the institution’s campus initiatives and strategic planning. The goal of this research was to determine how best to analyze these activities through agreed upon metrics and preferred communication styles. By combining the two aspects of analytical metrics and communication methods, this research would provide a common ground that both provosts and librarians could build upon for the future growth and development of the library.