Law Commons^™

Mass Incarceration In America: Where's The Church?, Michael J. Wing

Doctoral Dissertations and Projects

Due to mass incarceration, correctional facilities in America are dealing with unprecedented levels of overcrowding, staff shortages, violence, suicide, and widespread mental illness among inmates. Budget cuts and the corresponding loss of vocational, educational, and treatment programs have exacerbated such problems. Mass incarceration and its deleterious consequences are challenging the very soul of America, and the church has largely stood by and watched this tragic situation unfold over the last fifty years. This research project has explored some of the barriers that have precluded churches from taking a more intentional, active, and impactful role in doing something about the national …

Polisci 3210f: Feasibility Of A National Disability Insurance Plan (Ndip) In Canada, Twana Hassan, Aditi Priya, Dylan Poole, Samantha Rubin, Ethan Chen

Community Engaged Learning Final Projects

This research report presents an overview of the feasibility and reliability of a National Disability Insurance Plan (NDIP) in Canada. Several Global North countries are leading the way in disability legislation and disability funding in comparison to Canada's inaction on the matter. A National Disability Insurance Plan in Canada will have social and economic benefits for everyone in Canada. The report concluded that Canada is capable of implementing a NDIP and doing so is the right choice.

"Takings" And "Givings" In Singapore: Land Law And Policy In The Search For Justice, Rachel Phang

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

In the United States and globally, cities are increasingly plagued by deepening housing crisis and widening economic inequality. In the face of these crises, this Article focuses on the potentially powerful role for land law and policy in the search for justice. Specifically, it does so by reference to two unusual yet illuminating choices of theory and application: the case study of Singapore, and the school of thought of Georgism, both of which accord inordinate and paramount importance to land. Singapore’s land law and policy have been characterized by extensive takings and givings of land. In consequence, the State owns …

Ai And The Issue Of Human-Centricity In Copyright Law, Arul George Scaria

Popular Media

This article urges Indian policymakers and courts to be cautious in extending existing IP protections to work generated by Artificial Intelligence. Reflecting on the concept of human-centricity in copyright law, it draws upon a recent US District Court judgement in Stephen Thaler v. Shira Perlmutter, which deals with the question of whether a work autonomously generated by AI should be copyrightable. It goes on to examine the Indian copyright regime in light of changing attitudes to AI regulation across the world.

Misconduct On Public Transit: An Exploratory Analysis Using The Comments Formerly Known As Tweets, Egbe Etu Etu, Asha Weinstein Agrawal, Imokhai Tenebe, Jordan Larot, Dang Minh Nhu Nguyen

Mineta Transportation Institute

This project developed a simple methodology for using Twitter data to explore public perceptions about misconduct on public transit in California. The methodology allows future researchers to analyze tweets to answer questions such as: How frequent are tweets related to assault, abuse, or other misconduct on public transit? What concerns arise most frequently? What are the types of behaviors discussed? We collected and analyzed data from Twitter posts in California about various types of public transit misconduct from January 2020 to March 2023 to identify the nature and frequency of reported misconduct. Our findings reveal that harassment, uncivil behavior, and …

Executive Order On The Safe, Secure, And Trustworthy Development And Use Of Artificial Intelligence, Joseph R. Biden

Copyright, Fair Use, Scholarly Communication, etc.

Section 1. Purpose. Artificial intelligence (AI) holds extraordinary potential for both promise and peril. Responsible AI use has the potential to help solve urgent challenges while making our world more prosperous, productive, innovative, and secure. At the same time, irresponsible use could exacerbate societal harms such as fraud, discrimination, bias, and disinformation; displace and disempower workers; stifle competition; and pose risks to national security. Harnessing AI for good and realizing its myriad benefits requires mitigating its substantial risks. This endeavor demands a society-wide effort that includes government, the private sector, academia, and civil society.

My Administration places the highest urgency …

Res Communis Omnium V. Res Nullius In U.S. Space Mining Law & Policy: A Multilevel Theoretical Analysis Of U.S. Public Policy On Space Minerals Mining Under Title Iv, §51301- §403, U.S. 2015 Commercial Space Launch Competitiveness Act (Public Law 114-90) & Its Implications For International Space Law Under Articles I & Ii, 1967 Outer Space Treaty, Samuel Chuks Japhets

Doctoral Dissertations and Projects

The outer space territory and celestial bodies are unfathomably rich in strategic mineral resources worth trillions of dollars such as water ice, helium-3, platinum, iron, cobalt, and ammonia. These space resources, distinct from their space territorial and celestial bodies loci, need to be located, characterized, captured, processed, concentrated, and transported to points of use in-situ or on Earth by capable state and private space investors, stakeholders, or national agencies, for private benefits. Investors in this embryonic space mining industry need legal certainty and predictability under unambiguous legal and policy frameworks that guarantee property interests over extracted minerals. The Problem is …

Minimum Exchange Rate And A Negative Interest Rate: The Swiss National Bank’S Unconventional Monetary Policy During Eurozone Volatility, Wally Bargeron

Independent Study Project (ISP) Collection

Monetary policy is one of the most important tools that a government has to influence its economy. This means the ability for a country to determine their own monetary policy is important to that country’s autonomy. Switzerland has consistently based its decisions on what would afford it the highest level of autonomy, including the decision not to join the European Union and subsequently the decision to retain their own currency.

The Swiss National Bank retains the mandate to keep price levels (inflation) stable, but it is challenged by an appreciating currency. Because the Swiss Franc is a safe-haven currency, money …

The Legal Case For Equity In Local Climate Action Planning, Amy E. Turner

Sabin Center for Climate Change Law

Over the last half decade, local climate action plans have regularly come to incorporate considerations of racial and socioeconomic equity, recognizing the ways in which low-income communities and communities of color experience earlier and worse consequences from global warming, and these communities are also at risk of being harmed by policies meant to address climate change. Until now, however, the discourse on equity in climate action planning has largely pertained to policy; it acknowledges the disproportionate harm that certain communities experience as a result of climate change and policies to address climate change, and suggests policy tools that can address …

A Reflection Of Change: Evolutions In International Water Law Principles Through The Lens Of Euphrates-Tigris Dispute, Maeve Sullivan

Independent Study Project (ISP) Collection

As climate change intensifies, water scarcity will increase. Coupled with a growing global population, water security is a major modern challenge. To bring stability to international watercourses, states must establish effective sharing agreements. On this matter, international water law can help. International water law captures some of the major principles and considerations that states must account for while considering issues related to water security. This paper uses primary interviews and secondary sources to identify some of the major characteristics, features, and developments in international law to develop a conceptual framework for the topic. It then moves into a case study …

The Role Of U.S. Government Regulatioms, Bert Chapman

Libraries Faculty and Staff Presentations

Provides detailed coverage of information resources on U.S. Government information resources for federal regulations. Features historical background on these regulations, details on the Federal Register and Code of Federal Regulations, includes information on individuals can participate in the federal regulatory process by commenting on proposed agency regulations via https://regulations.gov/, describes the role of presidential executive orders, refers to recent and upcoming U.S. Supreme Court cases involving federal regulations, and describes current congressional legislation seeking to give Congress greater involvement in the federal regulatory process.

Firearm Deaths In The Mountain West, 2020, Lana Kojoian, Annie Vong, Caitlin J. Saladino, William E. Brown Jr.

Criminal Justice

This fact sheet examines data from the RAND Corporation report “Understanding Firearm Deaths by State—and How to Reduce Them,” which provides data on state and national rates of firearm related deaths, including suicides and homicides for 2020 This fact sheet includes firearm death data for five Mountain West states: Arizona, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, and Utah.

Contextual Determinants Of Re-Reporting For Families Receiving Alternative Response: A Survival Analysis In A Midwestern State, Jianchao Lai, Michelle Graef, Todd Franke, Toby Burnham

Center on Children, Families, and the Law: Faculty Publications

Differential response (DR) has been widely adopted in over 30 states to address shortcomings of the traditional approach to child maltreatment reports in complex family and case circumstances. However, despite continued evaluation efforts, evidence of the effectiveness of DR remains inconclusive. The current study aims to assess the impact of a DR program and potential predictors, including service match and number of family case workers, on maltreatment re-reports in a Midwestern state. The study utilized a randomized control trial and assigned eligible families to either the Alternative Response (AR) track or Traditional Response (TR) track. The enrollment was implemented in …

Twitter Trends During The 82nd Session Of The Nevada Legislature, 2023, Annie Vong, Zachary Billot, Mary Blankenship, Caitlin J. Saladino, William E. Brown Jr.

Elections & Governance

This fact sheet examines Twitter trends during the 82nd Session of the Nevada Legislature (2023). Data are comprised of tweets posted on Twitter by users located in Nevada addressing the most discussed topics during the session.

Recidivism Among Rehabilitated Offenders With Mental Illness: A Quantitative Study, Robert Olando Walker

Doctoral Dissertations and Projects

Offenders with severe mental illness (SMI) found a place within the criminal justice system (CJS) with its most crucial objectives including the reduction of recidivism among discharged offenders and their safe reintegration into a free community as rehabilitated offenders. Beyond the monetary costs of recidivism, the continued potential for criminality among offenders with mental illness (OMI) added enormous costs to all law-abiding citizens and their respective communities. However, no study was found in the literature that attempted to investigate the relationship between recidivism and the successful rehabilitation of patients with mental illness. Those found involved offenders without mental illness and …

Aclp - State Broadband Profile - Tennessee (July 2023), New York Law School

Reports and Resources

No abstract provided.

Testing Automated Driving Systems By Breaking Many Laws Efficiently, Xiaodong Zhang, Wei Zhao, Yang Sun, Jun Sun, Yulong Shen, Xuewen Dong, Zijiang Yang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

An automated driving system (ADS), as the brain of an autonomous vehicle (AV), should be tested thoroughly ahead of deployment. ADS must satisfy a complex set of rules to ensure road safety, e.g., the existing traffic laws and possibly future laws that are dedicated to AVs. To comprehensively test an ADS, we would like to systematically discover diverse scenarios in which certain traffic law is violated. The challenge is that (1) there are many traffic laws (e.g., 13 testable articles in Chinese traffic laws and 16 testable articles in Singapore traffic laws, with 81 and 43 violation situations respectively); and …

Harmonizing Product-Level Ghg Accounting For Steel And Aluminum, John Biberman, Gyunbae Joe, Perrine Toledano

Columbia Center on Sustainable Investment

Greenhouse gas (GHG) accounting methods for steel and aluminum products have begun converging towards common standards within their respective industries in recent years. However, accounting methods for steel products and aluminum products are still not fully comparable with each other. If emissions are measured and allocated differently for these products, then these accounting differences have the potential to influence materials choices for manufacturers concerned about reducing their reported GHG footprint. Companies could therefore be motivated to make a choice between aluminum and steel according to emissions benefits that materialize from differences in accounting frameworks, but which do not actually exist …

Finance For Zero: Redefining Financial-Sector Action To Achieve Global Climate Goals, Lisa E. Sachs, Nora Mardirossian, Perrine Toledano

Columbia Center on Sustainable Investment

As of 2023, the financial system is woefully misaligned with the world’s climate goals. Six times the current annual level of investment in non-fossil fuel investments is needed between 2023 and 2030 to stay on a 1.5ºC warming pathway. The ratio of clean-energy lending and equity underwriting by banks relative to fossil fuels needs to reach 4 to 1 by 2030, whereas for 1,142 assessed banks, the ratio was between 0.8 and 1 at the end of 2021.

As providers, underwriters, and fiduciaries of trillions of dollars of capital flows annually, financial institutions (FIs) play a critical role in decarbonizing …

Aclp - Further Updated Estimates Of State Bead Allocations - As Of June 16, 2023, New York Law School

Reports and Resources

No abstract provided.

Trust And Robotics: A Multi-Staged Decision-Making Approach To Robots In Community, Wenxi Zhang, Willow Wong, Mark Findlay

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

With the desired outcome of social good within the wider robotics ecosystem, trust is identified as the central adhesive of the human–robot interaction (HRI) interface. However, building trust between humans and robots involves more than improving the machine’s technical reliability or trustworthiness in function. This paper presents a holistic, community-based approach to trust-building, where trust is understood as a multifaceted and multi-staged looped relation that depends heavily on context and human perceptions. Building on past literature that identifies dispositional and learned stages of trust, our proposed decision to trust model considers more extensively the human and situational factors influencing how …

The Shared Ethical Framework To Allocate Scarce Medical Resources: A Lesson From Covid-19, Ezekiel J. Emanuel, Govind C. Persad

Sturm College of Law: Faculty Scholarship

The COVID-19 pandemic has helped to clarify the fair and equitable allocation of scarce medical resources, both within and among countries. The ethical allocation of such resources entails a three-step process: (1) elucidating the fundamental ethical values for allocation, (2) using these values to delineate priority tiers for scarce resources, and (3) implementing the prioritisation to faithfully realise the fundamental values. Myriad reports and assessments have elucidated five core substantive values for ethical allocation: maximising benefits and minimising harms, mitigating unfair disadvantage, equal moral concern, reciprocity, and instrumental value. These values are universal. None of the values are sufficient alone, …

Why Are Post-Conflict Countries More Inequitable?, Claire Cole

Belmont University Research Symposium (BURS)

Why is there continuing socio-economic inequity in post-conflict countries? Post-conflict governments are too weak to prosper and function cleanly, resorting to making deals with and allowing multinational corporations inside its system, resulting in governmental capture. Multinational corporations contribute to the disparity of wealth in post-conflict zones, often ignoring the community and partnering with the government. There is a question of whether Western and European countries actually have a humanitarian interest or self-interest in post-conflict countries. This research includes a comparative study that aims to show how foreign investment shifts during conflict, where each country scores on transparency and corruption; where …

Centrality And Compliance: Unitary Vs. Federalist Political Systems In The Implementation Of The Kyoto Protocol In Argentina And Uruguay, Aidan Homan

Baker Scholar Projects

When Uruguay and Argentina first gained their respective independence in the early 1800s, they appeared to be following the same path of development As countries that came from the same Spanish colonization, share almost identical agricultural economies, and retain a close relationship, it is logical that they would follow similar trajectories. This assumption proves to be inaccurate in more ways than one, but most prominently within the environmental sphere. One way to analyze this difference in policy implementation lies in compliance with international environmental treaties which contain specific goals and limits for all parties involved. The Kyoto Protocol presents a …

Does Electoral Proximity Influence Commitment To International Human Rights Law?, Nolan Ragland

Baker Scholar Projects

The core international human rights treaties from the United Nations have been signed and ratified by varying groups of states, and much of previous research has been dominated by a desire to explain ratification of international human rights law (IHRL) through the democratic lock-in effect and states’ economic and political ties to one another. In this paper, I seek to understand when states are ratifying IHRL, testing whether the presence of elections influences commitment to three of the nine core international human rights treaties: the International Convention on the Protection of the Rights of All Migrant Workers and Members of …

Ballad Health: Understanding Appalachia’S Regional Healthcare Monopoly, Meredith A. Bailey

Baker Scholar Projects

The Ballad Health merger of 2018, which combined the now 21 hospitals in the region under one organization, has impacted the healthcare landscape in Northeast Tennessee and Southwest Virginia. Historically, Appalachia has had to persevere through primary physician shortages, a lack of specialty care, geographic obstacles to accessing healthcare, challenges related to substance abuse, and much more. Since the merger of Mountain States Health Alliance and Wellmont Health System, little research has been done to assess the perceived impact the aggregation of providers has had on the population it serves. This study utilizes an online survey to better understand the …

The Eagle’S Eye On The Rising Dragon: Why The United States Has Shifted Its View Of China, Jackson Craig Scott

Baker Scholar Projects

Since 1978, the People’s Republic of China (PRC) has long been viewed as an economic trading partner of the United States of America (US). The PRC has grown to be an economic powerhouse, and the US directly helped with that process and still benefits from it. However, during the mid-2010’s, US rhetoric began to turn sour against the PRC. The American government rhetoric toward the PRC, beginning with the Obama administration, switched. As Trump’s administration came along, they bolstered this rhetoric from non-friendly to more or less hostile. Then, Biden’s administration strengthened Trump’s rhetoric. Over the past ten years or …

Reforming Illinois K-12 Public Education Through A Four-Pronged Approach, Seth Brooks

Senior Honors Theses

Public education in the United States has produced lackluster results in the past decades. Various forms of school choice have emerged in recent years to combat the poor results seen in the public education system, but these private schools are financially unattainable for many Americans. Bureaucratic overload, city corruption, inequities in funding, and frequent teachers’ strikes have certainly contributed to the destitute state of Illinois’ public education. In this thesis, the attainability of fiscal relief for Illinois families who choose alternative education and the necessity of the state in permitting such alternatives is discussed.

Current school choice policies in the …

The Impacts Of Site Formation Processes On Excavation Methodology: The Study Of A World War Ii B-24 Crash Site In Munster, Germany, Alicia J. Lawson

Anthropology Department: Theses

Academic partnerships between universities and the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency (DPAA) are a recent development to provide top research universities resources to assist in recovering and identifying MIA service members since World War II. A University of Nebraska – Lincoln (UNL)/DPAA Partner excavation revisited a WWII B-24H crash site in Münster, Germany in the summer of 2022. B-24H [redacted] crashed into three agricultural fields on 23 March 1945. Utilizing quantitative and qualitative data collected on the incident-related and archaeological osseous remains and artifacts recovered from the fields and the fields’ land use history, this thesis focuses on analyzing the site …

The Proposed Eu Directives For Ai Liability Leave Worrying Gaps Likely To Impact Medical Ai, Mindy Duffourc, Sara Gerke

Faculty Scholarly Works

Two newly proposed Directives impact liability for artificial intelligence in the EU: a Product Liability Directive (PLD) and an AI Liability Directive (AILD). While these proposed Directives provide some uniform liability rules for AI-caused harm, they fail to fully accomplish the EU’s goal of providing clarity and uniformity for liability for injuries caused by AI-driven goods and services. Instead, the Directives leave potential liability gaps for injuries caused by some black-box medical AI systems, which use opaque and complex reasoning to provide medical decisions and/or recommendations. Patients may not be able to successfully sue manufacturers or healthcare providers for some …