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\u3cem\u3eRahimi \u3c/em\u3e and the Future of (the Rest of) the Protection Order Prohibition
No full textIn the summer of 2024, the Supreme Court considered United States v. Rahimi. Scholars and lawyers watched with bated breath to see how the court would interpret and apply the foundation-shifting Second Amendment test it established in New York State Rifle & Pistol Ass’n v. Bruen two years earlier. Ultimately, the Court upheld the federal law which temporarily bans some protection order respondents from possessing firearms. But the Court provided little in the way of additional guidance that lower courts desperately needed as evidenced by the disparate outcomes on gun cases nationwide following Bruen. Rather, the Court opted for a narrow approach, failing to even rule on the entirety of the statute at issue in Rahimi. This article explores the unexamined portion of that federal statute—18 U.S.C. § 922(g)(8)(c)(ii)—
and how it is critical that this subsection of the law also remain constitutional to provide safety to victims of domestic violence who seek protection from the courts. The article then describes how a careful reading of Bruen and Rahimi demonstrates that lower courts should uphold this subsection moving forward, as it has historically
Space Agriculture, Biotechnology, and Terraforming: Rethinking the Paradigm of Harmful Contamination
No full textAs humanity transitions from sporadic exploratory space missions to permanent settlements on celestial bodies (like the Moon or Mars), agriculture biotechnology, and, potentially, terraforming projects will be essential for establishing self-sustaining settlements.
These activities raise critical issues concerning the interpretation of the principle of harmful contamination under Article IX of the Outer Space Treaty (OST) and its implementation through the Committee on Space Research’s Policy on Planetary Protection (COSPAR Policy) referred together in this article as the “Planetary Protection Framework,” which is primarily oriented toward exploration with scientific integrity rather than permanent habitation.
The challenge lies in the fact that agriculture, biotechnology, and terraforming inherently involve the introduction and manipulation of biological systems—such as plants, microbes, and other organisms—to create habitable conditions, produce food, and support life. Conversely, the existing Planetary Protection Framework prioritizes preventing biological contamination of extraterrestrial environments, particularly to preserve their scientific integrity, over the practical needs of long-term habitation.
This paper examines the tension between the current Planetary Protection Framework and the practical requirements of the activities essential for permanent habitation, for which the current Framework risks becoming a significant impediment. At the heart of this discussion lies a critical question: can planetary protection principles evolve to balance the need for scientific preservation with the demands of human settlement?
This paper discusses the situation in the long term, when a paradigm shift from planetary protection to an environmental protection framework like on Earth is envisioned, and the situation in the short and middle term, for which this paper advocates an evolution in the interpretation of Article IX OST and a modification of the COSPAR Policy, either by amending the Policy itself or through a modified reception in national regulation. This new approach—which recognizes settlement zones as the default and scientific zones as the exception—accepts biological contamination as a necessary and inevitable consequence of humanity’s aspirations for a multi-planetary future, provided that such contamination remains sustainable
The Meaning of Other Minerals and Other Incidents of Mineral Ownership
No full textOf all the contracts used in the oil and gas industry, none is as important as the oil and gas lease. It is the foundational instrument in oil and gas and a required prerequisite to development for those who do not own the mineral estate. Its uniqueness arises in that, unlike most other oil and gas contracts, it is both a contract and a conveyance of property. Part I of this article begins with an overview of the mineral estate, the predecessor to an oil and gas lease. Part II examines theories of oil and gas rights ownership and oil and gas lease ownership. Part III provides a general overview of the oil and gas lease. Part IV reviews the granting clause, examining its rights of use and the accommodation doctrine; substances granted by the lease; lands and interests granted by the lease, which includes in gross provisions, Mother Hubbard and coverall clauses, after acquired title language, proportionate reduction clauses, subrogation clauses, and warranty clauses. Part V focuses on the incidents of mineral ownership and the meaning of “other minerals.
Path Tracing and Physically-based Rendering with DirectX Raytracing
No full textThis artifact is designed to simulate global illumination by using DirectX raytracing pipeline. Physically-based Rendering (PBR) and path tracing were integrated to achieve photo realistic rendering effect
The Legality of Nuclear-Weapons Sharing Arrangements under International Law: United States-NATO and Russia-Belarus
No full textThis Essay argues that certain nuclear sharing agreements between nuclear and non-nuclear powers are legal under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. This topic is highly important as Russia has announced its stationing of nuclear weapons in Belarus and Belarus has signaled its intent to use them
(Mis)Measuring the Drivers of Ad Performance
No full textWe study the potential risks and benefits of using large-language model (LLM) annotations in video ad creative research. Using a custom-built, large-scale dataset of over 10,000 human-labeled video ads, we demonstrate that off-the-shelf multimodal LLMs perform poorly when encoding certain types of features. We then show, using ad quality ratings from a large (500+) consumer panel provided by iSpot.tv, that such misaligned measurement may lead to downstream effect estimates that are significant in the opposite direction to those inferred with human-labeled data. However, we demonstrate that such bias can be largely mitigated by fine-tuning a model using our large-scale human annotations. This fine-tuned model exceeds average pairwise human agreement on many features, realigns downstream estimates with those based on human annotations, and substantially improves the explanatory power of labeled content features for ad performance, allowing for the recovery of significant effects that are otherwise missed when using human-labeled data due to inter-annotator noise
The Role and Impact of Forensic Evidence in the Prosecution of Homicide Cases in the U.S.
No full textThe role of forensic evidence in the criminal justice process is an important topic that is significant from both theoretical and practical perspectives. The present study is dedicated to a critical analysis of the role of this evidence in the U.S. criminal justice process with a focus on its significance in homicide cases. Specifically, this dissertation examines the implications of using DNA and fingerprint evidence for convictions in U.S. homicide cases by analyzing the role of DNA and fingerprint evidence in the prosecution of “hot” and “cold” homicide cases, discussing the main ways in which forensic evidence assists with prosecuting criminal cases, and identifying significant challenges associated with the use of DNA and fingerprint evidence in homicide investigations. The researcher adopted the method of qualitative content analysis to analyze various criminal cases (n=54), mostly homicides. Examination of secondary data on the legal and ethical aspects of using DNA and fingerprint evidence evaluated challenges associated with DNA and fingerprint analysis techniques, advancement of DNA databases, and other topics relevant to the research problem. The results of the study suggest that DNA and fingerprint evidence play a substantial role in investigating and prosecuting homicides and other crimes in the U.S. At the same time, the link between their use and the likelihood of reaching an accurate verdict is not straightforward for several reasons, such as the exoneration of the innocent based on the results of DNA analysis, inadmissibility issues, and the value for money factor. DNA evidence was found to be much more significant in cold cases than in open homicide investigations still actively pursued, since advanced techniques like familial DNA analysis can locate suspects and link them to crime scenes. The role of DNA and fingerprint evidence in the criminal justice process is multifaceted and ranges from corroborating other types of evidence to serving as the main vehicle of the investigative process. Monetary efficiency factors have been specifically identified as a ii critical issue related to the research problem. Due to the high costs of most advanced DNA analysis techniques, their use is reserved for high-profile cases. In addition, while ethics and reliability concerns are not among the key barriers to the utilization of DNA and fingerprint evidence, admissibility issues often prevent prosecutors from using this evidence to reach a guilty verdict. The results of the study provide a set of avenues for future research and a series of practical recommendations for optimizing the use of DNA and fingerprint evidence in the investigation and prosecution of criminal cases in the U.S. A comparative analysis of Sharia law as implemented in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia emphasizes significant legal and procedural differences from the U.S
