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Transportation Security Administration Use of Facial Recognition Technology: Turbulence Surrounding Traveler Rights
Full text linkFacial recognition technology has been employed by law enforcement agencies and private companies for decades. This technology promises safer and more efficient processes to identify individuals in the name of safety. However, not everyone approves of their biometric data being collected. This Article provides an overview of the current use of facial recognition technology by the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) in airport security checkpoints. It begins by explaining the underlying technology behind facial recognition and explores the safety and security concerns behind it. Building on this foundation, this Article then evaluates how the TSA’s use of facial recognition influences science and technology law and policy, considering past, current, and future implications
Mapping Food Justice: Urban Farms and the Examination of Equitable Food Access
Full text linkIn this project, we worked alongside members from an urban farm in South Dallas to learn about issues related to food justice, urban farming, and food deserts. Using participatory design research methods, we created data visualizations showing how society can reduce inequities relating to food access produced in historically underserved neighborhoods. The research goals guiding this study are: a) to identify food deserts and urban farms in the Dallas-Fort Worth metropolitan region (DFW) and b) to determine which urban farms service the needs of these food deserts. To identify food deserts, we took two steps: First, we used open-access data sources and web-scraping tools to map grocery store locations and identify food deserts consistent with the USDA’s definition (Morrison, 2016). Second, we examined the economic status (income and percentage of Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program recipients) and transit conditions (car ownership and access to public transportation) of residents within each food desert using data from the American Community Survey (ACS). This yielded a sub-selection of food deserts with low-income and low-mobility residents. To identify urban farms, we used web-scraping tools to collect and map their locations across DFW. Finally, we examined the proximity of urban farms to food deserts with low-income and low-mobility residents. This allowed us to discern which urban farms are best suited to service the needs of these areas. This study complicates and refines the USDA’s definition of a food desert and positions urban farms as stakeholders who can improve food access
The Persistence of Common Law Limits on Armed Travel in the Early Republic: Surety and Affray Laws in Historical Context
No full textIn New York State Rifle & Pistol Ass’n v. Bruen, the Supreme Court abandoned the two-step test that had emerged after its landmark, but controversial ruling in District of Columbia v. Heller. The new approach announced in Bruen rejected the second prong of this test, casting aside means end scrutiny, or balancing, in favor of a “text, history, and tradition” approach. More recently, in United States v. Rahimi, the Court clarified some of the confusion over its Bruen test. One ongoing problem that lawyers and judges face when implementing this framework flows from the nature of materials required by the historical approach. Early American legal materials are often not easy to locate, and serious gaps in both the historical record and scholarship exist. Moreover, interpreting these materials requires an understanding of Anglo-American common law in the Founding Era. To be sure, most lawyers do get a smattering of common law in their law school course work, but learning to think and read like a Founding Era lawyer, the foundational claim that supports modern originalism, including Second Amendment jurisprudence, places much greater demands on lawyers and judges to think in common law terms about Founding Era law. Rather than apply the Founders’ common law, many jurists and legal scholars have resorted to a form of “common law lite,” a caricature that bears scant resemblance to the way common law functioned in early America. The problems with this “common law lite” approach emerge clearly in the way Bruen and its defenders have interpreted the role of sureties and early statutes prohibiting affray and traveling armed with offensive weapons. Implementing text, history, and tradition requires a more sophisticated approach to the past, one shaped by rigorous historical research and a more serious engagement with the Founders’ common law
The Mutability of Dangerousness: Domestic Violence and Second Amendment Restoration After \u3cem\u3eRahimi\u3c/em\u3e
No full textThis Article considers whether the Constitution permits the permanent disarmament of individuals once deemed dangerous—particularly in cases involving domestic violence. In United States v. Rahimi, the Supreme Court reaffirmed that the Second Amendment protects the right of the people to keep and bear arms, subject only to regulation consistent with historical tradition. That tradition, as examined under New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen, does not support lifetime bans absent an ongoing threat.
The Article argues that dangerousness is not immutable. Founding-era laws recognized disarmament as a temporary, conditional measure tied to present conduct, not a permanent judgment based on past behavior. By contrast, modern laws often impose categorical and indefinite prohibitions, untethered from individualized findings or temporal limits. These laws diverge not only from historical practice but from the principle that rights may not be extinguished by legislative fiat.
Drawing on historical sources and empirical data, the Article demonstrates that many individuals convicted of violent offenses—including domestic violence—pose no ongoing danger and remain fully capable of exercising their rights responsibly. To hold otherwise is to depart from the Constitution’s design, which contemplates both accountability and restoration.
At bottom, the question is not whether government may disarm dangerous individuals—it plainly may—but whether it may do so without limit or end. The Second Amendment does not permit such a result, and the constitutional structure does not tolerate it
High Crimes in Low Airspace: The Rise of Drones in Cross-Border Drug Trafficking
No full textCan the United States effectively regulate its airspace when criminal actors exploit it without entering traditional territorial channels? Mexican drug trafficking organizations increasingly deploy drones to deliver narcotics across the U.S.–Mexico border. These flights often occur at low altitudes, at night, and in remote areas, which renders them nearly undetectable by conventional enforcement methods. Yet, no statute squarely addresses the use of drones in cross-border drug trafficking. The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) regulates drones under the FAA Modernization and Reform Act of 2012, but its mandate is safety, not interdiction. The result? A growing technological asymmetry: criminal cartels innovate, while the law remains outdated.
International law fares no better. Treaties like the 1988 United Nations Convention Against Illicit Traffic in Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances (Vienna Convention) criminalize drug trafficking and encourage international cooperation; however, they assume traditional actors and manual modes of transport. What happens when the trafficker is an autonomous system launched from sovereign soil and recovered by accomplices on the other side? The principle of territoriality falters and jurisdictional lines blur, while traffickers face minimal risk. If the drone crashes, there is no mule to arrest. If it succeeds, the payload is delivered efficiently, silently, and lucratively.
This Comment argues that drug trafficking via drones poses an urgent threat to national sovereignty and public health.
Current legal frameworks are insufficient and structurally unprepared for the strategic and operational realities of drone smuggling. The response must be multi-layered: statutory reforms that explicitly prohibit drone-based drug delivery, enhanced surveillance and detection systems; airspace restrictions near the border, and international agreements adapted to drones. However, these solutions are not enough. As long as the United States remains the largest consumer of opioids in the world, enforcement solutions will amount to a stopgap. Supply will always meet demand.
If left unaddressed, the legal void surrounding drug trafficking via drones could establish a dangerous precedent, an argumentum ex silentio. The silence of the law becomes its own kind of permission. The longer regulatory inertia persists, the more the airspace above the U.S.–Mexico border risks becoming contested and controlled by drug traffickers
\u3cem\u3eAmes\u3c/em\u3e, The Seventh Amendment, and the Honest Belief Trap Tautologizing Title VII
No full textA widely covered Sixth Circuit decision on July 29, 2025, against a tenured African American female law professor at the University of Michigan has dramatically materialized in the face of the unanimous decision of the Supreme Court of the United States only weeks earlier in Ames v. Ohio Department of Youth Services, decided on June 5, 2025. The Court had just eliminated another basis for employment-discrimination case dismissals, centering its original-textualist interpretative mode under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and buttressing plaintiffs’ Seventh Amendment rights to trial by jury. Meanwhile, the Michigan panel in Beny v. University of Michigan was applying its “Honest Belief” doctrine, affirming a trial court’s dismissal of a high-profile lawsuit by reaching the factual conclusions that the employer’s mistaken conclusions harmful to the employee were excusable non-discrimination because of the presence of “honest belief.” The 3-0 panel effected a shutout in an intriguing case featuring eyebrow-raising factual disputes within a storied law school significant in historic American DEI jurisprudence.
The bombshell conflict presents an urgent setup for another U.S. Supreme Court tempering of judicial overreach, this time over the pattern of the lower courts’ substituting their conclusions of fact and credibility for those of juries. The current clash surfaces through a doctrine rejected by some circuits and implemented in others: Honest Belief. In this piece, the author illustrates that, by permitting any mistaken but “honest” rationale as legally sufficient to deny a Title VII claimant a trial by jury, the Honest Belief doctrine collapses the classical pretext analysis into a self-validating circle. In effect, purported honesty becomes its own proof, rendering discrimination law incoherent by insulating defendants from meaningful fact-finding as to motive. It is this logical circularity – an epistemic loop, as far as employment law is concerned – that calls for full exposition in order to move the discourse beyond partial critiques and toward a principled rejection of the doctrine altogether.
Although several prominent scholars have noticed and taken aim at the Honest Belief doctrine in recent years, their treatments have remained circumscribed. These works are appropriately critical, recognizing the doctrine’s lack of textual basis and its function as a judicial invention that offends Rule 56 protocols. Yet these contributions remain deferential to the idea that an employer’s Honest Belief might ever be a legitimate defense. This article goes further, exposing the doctrine’s inherent tautology and establishing that circularity as a fallacy irreconcilable with unanimous U.S. Supreme Court precedents dating back to 2003 overturning dismissals similar to the one in Beny.
Courts’ application of the Honest Belief Doctrine is contravening unanimous U.S. Supreme Court precedents, vitiating Seventh Amendment rights, and fostering juridical emotionalism. The result is the recurring imposition of clearly erroneous dismissals of Title VII cases that abrogate Plaintiffs’ Seventh Amendment rights to trial by jury. The author concludes that the freshly prominent Honest Belief doctrine is a jurisprudential trap that the U.S. Supreme Court should eliminate immediately
Slave Servants and Saved Souls: Jesuit Evangelization and the Development of Afro-Catholic Mission, 1605-1654
No full textHistories of Christianity in Latin America root its development in the encounters of Iberian Catholic missionaries with indigenous populations. Beginning with 16th century evangelization and jumping to 20th century liberation movements, the study of Christianity in Latin America remains enigmatic for those who seek to understand the early Atlantic encounter with enslaved Africans. “Slave Servants and Saved Souls: Jesuit Evangelization and the Development of Afro-Catholic Mission, 1605-1654” illuminates this gap through an exploration of the early 17th century Jesuit mission for enslaved Africans in the cosmopolitan port city Cartagena de las Indias, shedding light on the initial processes of Christianization of enslaved Africans—often ignored yet vital to the development of Latin American religion and society.
In 1605, Alonso de Sandoval, S.J. established the first American mission dedicated to the material well-being and spiritual salvation of enslaved Africans. Recording its purpose in a monumental 1627 treatise, De Instauranda Aethiopum Salute, Sandoval elucidates the first comprehensive argument justifying the incorporation of enslaved Africans into the Church. He reveals a network of communication with slaves, traders, Jesuits, travelers, and merchants throughout the Atlantic, through which he and his pupil Pedro Claver, S.J. appraised the conditions of enslavement and errors of evangelization. Proposing serious implications for the Church’s failure to minister to Blacks, they together developed a system of accompanying the enslaved in their “miserable state.” While unprecedented for its time, their singular focus on salvation raises questions about the function of race, slavery, class, and religion in the early colonial processes of evangelization. Utilizing Sandoval’s treatise, Jesuit reports, and the documented testimony of Claver’s life collected by the Catholic Church, this project refreshes our understanding of the Catholic inculturation of enslaved Africans, contending that these innovative missionary methods, while exacerbating particular inequalities, nonetheless created the first sustained space of African engagement with Catholicism in the Americas, marking a pivotal development in the history of Latin American missions
Predicting Simulation Times for Multiphase Thermal-Hydraulic Models
No full textAddressing the challenge of computationally intensive OLGA
simulations in the oil and gas industry, a machine learning framework is
developed for accurate runtime prediction. A specialized feature extraction
pipeline identifies key parameters—such as simulation time, time step,
number of branches, and section count—from OLGA input files that serve as
high-impact predictors. Multiple predictive models, including regression,
tree-based ensembles, and neural networks, are implemented to validate
accuracy and robustness. Results reveal that prioritizing simulations based on
predicted runtimes optimizes licensing resources and reduces operational
costs, making real-time scheduling more efficient. This research demonstrates
the effectiveness of data-driven runtime prediction in enhancing both
decision-making and resource allocation for complex engineering
simulations
Simulating 3D Humanoid Ragdoll Physics Using Velocity Verlet Integration, Pin Constraints, and Rigid Body Collision Systems
No full textRagdoll physics simulates realistic character collapse with physical realism by responding to environmental forces rather than using predefined animations