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Some of the material in is restricted to members of the community. By logging in, you may be able to gain additional access to certain collections or items. If you have questions about access or logging in, please use the form on the Contact Page.
This is a book review essay, using Daniel Callahan's 2009 book, Taming the Beloved Beast: How Medical Technology Costs Are Destroying Our Health Care System, as the jumping off point. Kapp takes strong issue with Callahan's proposal...
A rhetorical analysis of Davis v Davis: Merging postmodern and feminist voices
Description:
In this dissertation, I examine the rhetorical analysis of a recent reproductive technology court dispute, Davis v Davis. This case was rendered by the Tennessee State Supreme Court by Justice Daughtrey on June 1, 1992. The opinion seeks... In my analysis, I first make an argument for the merger of postmodern, namely Foucauldian, and feminist voices. Later, I suggest that these postmodern feminists can mobilize around the Critical Legal Studies (CLS) to produce explicit... In chapter seven, I apply the analysis of explicit change to a close reading of Davis. In my reconstruction of Davis, I turn to legal storytelling and feminist narrativity as a possible alternative reading. Last, I conclude the major findings of the study and provide several suggestions for possible future research in the area.
Judicial review in state supreme courts: 1981-1985
Description:
The primary goal of this study is to assess the policymaking role which state supreme courts play in state political systems. Cases involving judicial review of state laws decided in the supreme courts of all fifty states are examined.... Docket control is associated with higher levels of judicial review opportunity. Constitutional complexity and docket control are associated with higher levels of judicial review activism. The types of statutes challenged and declared unconstitutional most often are examined in order to determine the areas of law which are most controversial and unsettled, and the areas in which state supreme courts are most willing to... Criminal laws are challenged most often, but overturned least often. Civil liberties and inter-governmental result in higher rates of invalidation. Cases decided on the basis of state constitutional grounds result in laws being declared...
This thesis examines the presence of legal institutions in the accounts of enslaved and apprenticed people who resided in the British colonies of Jamaica, Antigua and Mauritius. Focusing on the lives of three individuals, Mary Prince, ...
Evolution of the doctrine of academic abstention in American jurisprudence
Description:
This legal-historical study proposed to determine the current legal status of American postsecondary education in terms of academic autonomy and freedom by examining the development of the common-law doctrine of academic abstention. The... An analysis of over 700 state and federal decisions revealed that the term "academic abstention" did not appear in any reported decision but originated in the secondary literature. Judges employed a variety of synonymous phrases to... Jurists applied other legal theories to justify abstention, including in loco parentis, discretionary authority, state-federal comity, the law of private associations, and contract law. These theories have little to do with academic... The exercise of judicial abstention is a situational phenomenon. Applying interpretations appropriate to the factual aspects of each controversy and focusing on procedural, nonacademic issues, the courts have balanced the elements of...
Unwarranted disparity and determinate sentencing: A longitudinal study of presumptive sentencing guidelines in Minnesota
Description:
Using an interrupted time-series design, this paper analyzes the impact of Minnesota's sentencing guidelines on reducing unwarranted disparity in sentencing outcomes that fall within their scope of authority. Specifically, two questions...
Daily fantasy sports games have recently emerged as one of the fastest growing segments associated with the sports industry. While traditional fantasy sports have long been associated with sport consumption, daily fantasy sports allow...
The development, reliability, and validity of the Attorney Communication Skills Inventory
Description:
The purpose of this dissertation is to create a psychometric instrument, the Attorney Communication Skills Instrument (ASCI), which measures the communication strengths and weaknesses exhibited by attorneys during their client interviews. The Inventory is composed of three tests, the ACSI-Climate, ACSI-Listening, and ACSI-Nonverbal, which were assessed in three empirical surveys. The first assessment involved a mail survey to 500 randomly selected members of The Florida... The results indicate a highly defensible psychometric inventory. The results evidence a strong set of homogeneous, unidimensional items which appear to reliably and validly measure the communication constructs of establishing a...
Issues of law and punishment in Islam: Theory, practice, discussion
Description:
This study seeks to identify the major trends that have shaped the past history and present development of Shari'a ("Islamic Law") approaches to criminal justice and penology. It further attempts to show how the record of Islamic legal... The history and intellectual development of Muslim thought in the areas of criminal justice and penology are traced from early Islamicate times to the present day.$\sp1$ The extensive development of Shari'a family, business, and other ...
Tipping the Balance in Privacy Calculus: The Roles of Perceived Trustworthiness, Uncertainty, and Cyber Self-Efficacy in an Online User's Intention to Disclose PII
We should be concerned when our privacy - including our information privacy - is lost. Information privacy impacts us not only as individuals, but collectively as a society. Particularly as regards information privacy online, we stand to...
Saudi Arabia has long been held as one of the largest oil producers in the world with a vast amount of wealth. The country's meteoric rise to their current status can be attributed to the development of its oil fields by an American...
Negligence cases involving prehospital care providers and the implications for training, continuing education, and quality assurance
Description:
The purposes of this study were (1) to identify the factors present in negligence suits found in case law involving prehospital care providers and (2) based on those factors, to develop a typology of causation of legal actions that could... Using traditional legal research methods, 182 state and federal cases were identified. It was found that lawsuits involving prehospital care providers and systems have been increasing. A marked increase since 1981 was noted. Elements of alleged negligence were identified, coded, and ultimately used to develop a typology of causation. The four major categories of causation were, in decreasing order of frequency, (1) treatment and care issues; (2) ambulance... Implications of the typology for postsecondary educators, administrators, policy makers, and others were discussed. It was suggested that the typology be used to emphasize and/or alter certain aspects of educational curricula, such as... Legal precedents set down by the courts were dissected in order to view trends. Precedents, such as, immunity issues, emergency vehicle status, guest statutes, common carrier status, constitutional issues, and duty of care were discussed...
The Minimum Wage Restoration Act of 1989? Wage-relation, class politics, and the rhetoric of wage minimizers
Description:
My dissertation deploys a recent case-study--the legislative struggle to enact the 1989 Fair Labor Standards Act Amendments--to elucidate the explanatory power of class-centered theories of the U.S. state. My variant of class-centered... In Part I (chapters one through three), I establish a theoretical and historical foundation for interpreting minimum wage politics. Chapter one illustrates the origins and consequences of Theda Skocpol's ahistorical, functionalist... In Part II, I provide an in-depth, historical case study of political class struggles to enact the Fair Labor Standards Amendments of 1989. I demonstrate how organized labor and organized capital, through official representative agencies...
Alternative discipline trends in selected Florida schools
Description:
The Florida legislature granted local school boards the option to abolish corporal punishment in schools in 1989. Fourteen Florida school districts did so from 1989 to 1992. This study proposed to answer the following questions related... The study utilized an historical-legal case analysis of selected cases relating to issues of civil liability, criminal prosecution, cruel and unusual punishment, due process of law, equal protection of the law, and teacher dismissal... The study involved two survey approaches. First, Florida school districts were surveyed to identify districts that had banned corporal punishment. Second, selected school administrators were surveyed regarding the administration of... Trends that were noted include: (1) For districts banning corporal punishment, the incidence of suspension (both types) has increased. (2) Districts that have not formally banned corporal punishment reported modest declines in its use. ...
Litigation and the Florida law presuming shared parental responsibility
Description:
The main premise of this study was the possibility that for some divorcing families, the Florida law presuming shared parental responsibility provides the essential ingredients for pragmatic paradox, a double bind which provides the... The proposed model was partially supported and revised in response to the findings from the eleven hypotheses. While family structure elements such as age of oldest child, numbers of children, and parental disappearance or default were... While the process of family and court did not initially show differences in litigation related to judicial assignment, further examination of the data indicated some judges were much more likely to order shared parenting than others....
The decision-making of capital jurors in Florida: The role of extralegal factors
Description:
Prior research on arbitrariness in capital sentencing suggests that impermissible factors still influence jury decisions of life or death even under sentencing guidelines approved by the Court. Unfortunately, there is almost no direct...
An empirical investigation of claimants' legal representation and workers' compensation case outcomes in Florida
Description:
This dissertation examines the relationship between claimants' legal representation and the magnitude of workers' compensation benefits in the State of Florida. Attorney involvement in workers' compensation has been cited as a primary... Data from the State of Florida, consisting of 44, 130 workers' compensation claims from 1985 to 1992, is segmented into forty-eight groups by injury type and body part injured as a control the severity of the injury. Two-stage least... For all injury type/body part groups there was a positive statistically significant (.10 level) relationship between claimants' legal representation and the claimants' impairment rating. The results suggest that for the date to maximum...
There is an increasing incidence of dementia, depression and other affective disorders, delirium, and other mental health problems such as psychoses among older individuals in the United States. Because the severity of mental illness, in...
Past research indicates that the quantity and quality of resources available for immigrants in a destination city have serious implications for an immigrant's overall success. Previous research though, has failed to look at resources for...
Human Biological Materials (HBM) come from individuals in a variety of circumstances. The use of HBM for research purposes raises a host of difficult ethical questions. The law is important in this arena because, in most cases, legal...
Most caregiving and companionship provided by family members and friends to older individuals in home environments occurs because of the caregiver's feelings of ethical and emotional obligation and attachment. From a legal perspective, ...
The Acts and Resolutions of the General Assembly of the State of Florida, Passed at its Eighth Session: Begun and Held at the Capitol, in the City of Tallahassee, on Monday, November 24, 1856
Some older individuals lack sufficient present cognitive and/or emotional ability to make and express autonomous decisions personally. In those situations, health care providers routinely turn to available formal or informal surrogates...
Religious communities find unity in a shared tradition, system of beliefs, and a determination to respond to those beliefs through active ethical engagement in the world. While these shared beliefs, often founded on sacred texts and...
This study examined administrative appeals under the U.S. Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) at two federal government agencies: the Department of the Army and the U.S. Forest Service. The study reviewed all provided case files for...
Negligence cases involving aquatic facility operation: Implications for reducing injuries, lawsuits and liability
Description:
Aquatic facility owners and operators are more likely today than ever to become involved in negligence litigation. Courts throughout the country are handing down decisions that create ever expanding liability and new areas of potential... The purpose of this legal case study was to identify legal precedents involving negligent liability in aquatic facility operation, particularly cases involving drowning, near drowning, and spinal cord injuries. A second purpose was to... The traditional model for studying the judicial process served as the conceptual framework. Using traditional legal research methods, 132 state and federal cases, which were settled between 1970-1994, were identified. Analysis of the...
Issues frequently arise in Elder Law practice concerning the cognitive and emotional ability of an older individual to make legally significant decisions. The physicians who have treated the person whose competence is being called into...
Courts and politics: A quantitative analysis of lawyers and criminal appeal cases
Description:
This study focuses upon decision-making in criminal appeal cases by an intermediate appellate court. Criminal appeals from two trial courts, the Leon and Gadsden Counties Circuit Courts, in the state of Florida were analyzed. These cases... The major premise of this study is that courts can be viewed as political institutions. This study commences with a discussion of the political founding of the American judiciary system. Thereafter, a detailed discussion of the political...
The utility of the Criteria-Based Content Analysis in distinguishing between truthful and fabricated statements made by white and black speakers
Description:
This study concerns the Criteria-Based Content Analysis (CBCA), an interview technique developed to determine the truthfulness of child sexual abuse allegations. The technique uses a set of 18 verbal criteria which indicate truthfulness.... The results first demonstrated that the technique, as it is currently applied, is not effective in distinguishing between truthful and fabricated statements of any speaker. The fact that this study was the only one in which written... Second, by applying a discriminant function's linear combination of the criteria instead of the sum of the criteria in each statement, it was shown that the criteria were useful in making the truthfulness discriminations. It was also...
Clinical depression is a serious medical problem in the older population. Although it is considered to be highly treatable, physicians and other health care professionals often are criticized for doing an inadequate job of recognizing, ...
Jurors' perceptions of child victim-witnesses in a real-world sexual abuse trial setting
Description:
Historically, legal professionals as well as laypersons have maintained generally negative expectations of children's abilities as eyewitnesses. However, little research has been conducted directly investigating jurors' perceptions of... this research on future study and general methodological issues related to this topic are also discussed.
This study examines the research and scholarship sharing and dissemination practices in an online environment among law school faculty. Guided by one of the most widely used technology usage and adoption models, Unified Theory of...
American culture and public policy have long held a split vision about the aged: vulnerability, dependency, and special need for law and policy to act as a protective shield versus the aged as independent, self-reliant, and capable of...
Title VII is a federal anti-discrimination in employment statute that was passed as a part of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The passage of Title VII of the 1964 Act was the result of years of political wrangling to enact federal...
TOWARD A CRITICAL LEGAL THEORY: DEVELOPMENT OF AN OPPOSITIONAL LEGAL DISCOURSE UNDER LATE CAPITALISM
Description:
The paper examines the emancipatory potential that resides in the contradictions of late (monopoly) capitalism and offers an alternative, oppositional form of legal discourse in an effort to realize such potential. Grounded in a Neo...
The colony of Maryland, granted to Lord Baltimore by Charles I in 1632, was the host of considerable, political turmoil regarding the scale of the royal governor's authority. The Charter of Maryland granted Baltimore, for all intents and...
Severity of punishment changes in Nigerian law: An application of Frantz Fanon's Colonial Model
Description:
This dissertation advances Frantz Fanon's Colonial Model (and his two-revolutions theory of decolonization) as a basis for predicting the evolution of specific changes in Nigerian legal code during the precolonial, colonial, and... Thus, speaking generically, the maintenance needs of oppression (MNOO) is a shorthand for two essentials that oppression/colonialism requires to preserve and prolong its life: a particular structural/institutional configuration, and a... Content analysis was performed by the author of this dissertation on the legal data using these criteria as well as other relevant variables. The variables did not depart from Frantz Fanon's concepts of colonial oppression and its...
Race, social control, and enhanced sentencing of defendants: A contextual assessment
Description:
The question of discrimination in sentencing is an issue that continues to be a source of controversy in the social sciences. Authors such as William Willbanks (1987) have concluded that after controlling legally relevant variables there... Logistic regression models show a strong and significant impact of race (black) on the odds of being sentenced as an habitual offender. This significant impact became stronger under a variety of economic and structural controls. The...
Synthesis and assessment of standards for implementation of Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 in postsecondary institutions
Description:
The Rehabilitation Act of 1973 initiated civil rights protection for citizens with disabilities. Section 504 prohibits exclusion from participation, denial of benefits or discrimination by any program or activity receiving Federal... The two-fold purpose of this study was: to study existing case law, administrative regulations and related literature in order to synthesize standards for postsecondary institutional implementation of Section 504; and to assess the... Assessment of the standards was conducted a university and a community college, with research tools associated with naturalistic inquiry. The assessment revealed current attempts to implement Section 504 to be consistent with some of the... The conclusions of this research represent a convergence of case law, administrative regulations and institutional practice. The standards provide guidance for institutions seeking to implement Section 504.
The conflict between confidentiality and open meetings law and its impact on the faculty promotion and tenure process in the Florida state university system
Description:
This study explored how the conflicting issues of academic freedom, confidentiality, and public disclosure impact the tenure and promotion process at public universities in Florida. Through legal, historical, and document analysis and... The legal standard of academic freedom falls on a continuum of discretion in which courts may defer to the special expertise of academic professionals or may recognize an institutional academic freedom, except when university action... A standard of privacy or confidentiality covers an individual's right to control information about himself/herself, limited by the rights of others. In Florida, exemption of faculty personnel records from the Public Records law provides... The public disclosure standard, as manifested in opening meetings law, focuses on the status of a group as a governing body and on the decision-making process. In Florida, if a university group is considered a governing body, then... In the discrepancy evaluation, institutional practice was discovered to be fairly congruent with the academic freedom and confidentiality standards. The comparison to the open meetings standard was less conclusive. In the system, peer...
Mediating environmental enforcement disputes: An empirical analysis
Description:
Environmental enforcement disputes have traditionally been resolved through unassisted negotiations, administrative hearings, or litigation. Mediation, an extension of the negotiation process that involves the assistance of a neutral... These claims were tested using environmental enforcement actions of the Florida Department of Environmental Protection that were filed between July 1, 1988 and June 30, 1990. The findings of this research call into question some of the key assumptions found in the environmental mediation literature. While mediated cases were found to have higher settlement rates than non-mediated cases, no support was found... The study concludes with questions that need to be addressed in future environmental mediation research as well as several research design recommendations. Recommendations are also provided for steps that environmental regulatory...
A comparison of legal and extra-legal factors affecting criminal court decision-making
Description:
Prior court research has focused primarily on the judge's sentencing behavior and to a lesser degree the prosecutor's charging decision. None of these studies have taken into account relationships between multiple case decisions. This... Decisions were compared across counties and within counties with the expectation that decision-making factors would be different across counties for the same decision because of the contextual differences of each county. Within counties... Differences across counties revealed a concern for the crime rate and court processing characteristics such as whether bond was made. The small caseload county decisions were based on seriousness of the crime, but the actual decision...
The political economy of federal criminal justice legislation: 1948-1987
Description:
Georg Rusche observed in the 1930s that the political economy contributed significantly to the development of penal systems in various countries. This research project explores Rusche's contention that the political economy significantly...
If you make health care decisions for another adult person—or might at some future point—this handbook is for you. Learn what it means to become a "health care substitute."
Constitutional freedoms of speech, assembly and association in public colleges and universities: Implications for institutional policy toward students
Description:
Student exercise of freedom of speech, assembly and association raises special concerns for public colleges and universities. Provisions of the First Amendment of the Constitution of the United States have been made applicable to the... Student challenges of institutional practices and policies in a variety of settings have resulted in judicial interpretations of free speech and association freedoms that have evolved over time. A legal-historical analysis of the... Freedoms of speech and association clearly are to be respected by public colleges and universities. However, those freedoms may be regulated reasonably by public institutions by using permissible time, place and manner restrictions. The...
Some of the material in is restricted to members of the community. By logging in, you may be able to gain additional access to certain collections or items. If you have questions about access or logging in, please use the form on the Contact Page.
