Asset Forfeiture and Attorneys’ Fees: The Zero-Sum Game

The history of asset forfeiture law spans almost as long as the history of the United States. However, in the last thirty years, the number of crimes for which asset forfeiture can be levied has grown exponentially both on the federal and state levels. As a result, a growing number of defendants face asset forfeiture. When these criminal defendants seek legal representation, they place their attorneys in a difficult legal and ethical position. Asset forfeiture has developed in such a way that the criminal defense attorney cannot provide her client with zealous advocacy if the attorney seeks to retain her fees. Additionally, the law is designed to prevent these attorneys from withdrawing their representation once they learn that the funds being used to pay their fees are tainted. This Note examines these, and other, ethical dilemmas that arise for criminal defense attorneys whose clients may be subject to asset forfeiture. Ultimately, this Note proposes a statutory fix to resolve these ethical issues to ensure that lawyers retain their hard-earned fees and clients receive zealous advocates

Innovative Mobility: Carsharing Outlook Carsharing Market Overview, Analysis, And Trends.

Since 1998, 94 carsharing programs have been deployed in North America - 40 are operational and 52 are defunct. As of January 1, 2018, there were 18 active programs in Canada, 21 in the United States (U.S.), and one program in Mexico. In North America, carsharing membership totaled approximately 2,110,111 members sharing 23,376 vehicles. The three largest carsharing operators in the U.S. and Canada accounted for 91% and 86% of the total membership, respectively. Only one operator provided service in Mexico as of January 2018

Temporal Changes in the Fishes of Waller Creek and Invasion of the Variable Platyfish

This poster was presented at the second Waller Creek Symposium held on the University of Texas campus at the Recreational Sports Center on May 7, 2018.Waller Creek is an entirely urban creek flowing 11km through Austin, Travis County, Texas into Ladybird Lake. We gather the historic fish data, all held in our own Fishes of Texas Project database (Hendrickson and Cohen, 2018), for the creek and attempt to describe temporal change in the fauna of the creek. Minimal samples exist from the 1940’s and ’50s, but its fish fauna is rigorously sampled in the 1970’s when Edwards (1976) first formally surveyed the creek. It was uncollected in the 1980s. The Hendrickson lab, working with the public, local schools and universities, began sampling the creek in the 1990’s and continues to do so. These two sources (Edwards and Hendrickson Lab) are the main generators of data and we compared pre- and post-1980s data largely generated by these two sources. The fish fauna remains dominated by the same seven species Edwards collected in the 1970s (Gambusia affinis, Campostoma anomalum, Astyanax mexicanus, Lepomis megalotis, Lepomis cyanellus, Cyprinella lutrensis, and Herichthys cyanoguttatus), with the exception of an invasive species (Xiphophorus variatus), first detected in 2004, that is now the dominant species in the creek. Two of these seven species are firmly established non-natives (Astyanax mexicanus and Herichthys cyanoguttatus). Most of the less common native species collected in the 1970’s are no longer present (Ameiurus melas, Dionda flavipinnis, Fundulus zebrinus, Lepomis humilis, Lepomis macrochirus) or rare (Cyprinella venusta, Micropterus salmoides, Pimephales promelas) based on the data.Integrative BiologyWaller Creek Working Grou

Decision theory for agents with incomplete preferences

Orthodox decision theory gives no advice to agents who hold two goods to be incommensurate in value because such agents will have incomplete preferences. According to standard treatments, rationality requires complete preferences, so such agents are irrational. Experience shows, however, that incomplete preferences are ubiquitous in ordinary life. In this paper, we aim to do two things: (1) show that there is a good case for revising decision theory so as to allow it to apply non-vacuously to agents with incomplete preferences, and (2) to identify one substantive criterion that any such non-standard decision theory must obey. Our criterion, Competitiveness, is a weaker version of a dominance principle. Despite its modesty, Competitiveness is incompatible with prospectism, a recently developed decision theory for agents with incomplete preferences. We spend the final part of the paper showing why Competitiveness should be retained, and prospectism rejected

Partition theory: A very simple illustration

We illustrate the main features of a recently proposed method based on ensemble density functional theory to divide rigorously a complex molecular system into its parts [M.H. Cohen and A. Wasserman, J. Phys. Chem. A 111, 2229 (2007)]. The illustrative system is an analog of the hydrogen molecule for which analytic expressions for the densities of the parts (hydrogen "atoms") are found along with the "reactivity potential" that enters the theory. While previous formulations of Chemical Reactivity Theory lead to zero, or undefined, values for the chemical hardness of the isolated parts, we demonstrate they can acquire a finite and positive hardness within the present formulation.Comment: 8 pages, 8 figure

Social Media and eDiscovery: Emerging Issues

Courts, as well as private sector and government policymakers, have only just begun to address the practical litigation issues raised by the proliferation of social media channels and content. This Article comments on some of those issues as they relate to electronic discovery (“eDiscovery”) and examines how they have been approached in emerging case law. It does not address proposed legislation on a domestic and international level that may impact social media’s use in litigation, nor does it purport to be in any way comprehensive in its coverage of developments and potential developments in the legal implications of social media

Fishes of Texas Project: Data Visualization and Analysis Tools

Poster presentation presented at the 2020 Texas Chapter of the American Fisheries Society annual meeting in Waco, Texas on January 24, 2020.The Fishes of Texas Project (FoTX) (http://fishesoftexas.org) database currently has 124,452 specimen-vouchered occurrence records spanning > 150 years with over 400,000 new records (including non-vouchered sources such as literature, anecdotal, and photo-based) in the process of being imported. Continual data growth prompted creation of new tools to dynamically assess (as the data evolve) the state of data coverage across various dimensions to increase user understanding and accessibility to the data and improve overall utility of the project. We produced species sampling curves, temporal species accumulation graphs, and heat maps of collecting event density over time and space for each river sub-basin within Texas. A QGIS plugin was also created to better assess the suspect status of incoming records. Each type of visualization has basic documentation, easily accessible statistical summaries, flexible queries, and exploration tools to help reveal variations in sampling density over both temporal and spatial dimensions. We highlight here the San Bernard River as an example of a notably under-sampled sub-basin (as indicated by diverse forms of evidence). With addition of future records, these dynamic tools will continue to illustrate taxonomic and spatial sampling deficiencies that in turn will help guide conservation planning.Texas Parks and Wildlife Department, under the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service State Wildlife Grant Program, grant TX T-180-R-1, F17AF01129 (CFDA# 15.634)Integrative Biolog

From the Temple to the Synagogue: Exploring Changes in Judaism After the Fall of the Second Temple

From the Temple to the Synagogue is an analysis on the influence of external cultures, predominantly the Persian religion of Zoroastrianism on the early rabbis following their failed revolt against Rome and the destruction of the Second Temple in the first century CE. How did the Jewish people react to the upheaval of their center of worship? What can we attribute to the major changes in their religious literature and centers of worship following the demise of their rebellion? Is it possible that what has traditionally been seen as an isolated and uniform group of people did in fact borrow major theological ideas from neighboring religions? This analysis demonstrates the transmission of ideas into this new center of power in the Jewish community, that of the rabbis, through their changed notions of the afterlife, the incorporation of artistic design within the synagogue, and the apocalyptic literature of the Dead Sea Scrolls community of Qumran. While the conversation has become more open in recent years to the idea that Judaism did not simply grow in a bubble, the extent to which Persian ideas made their way into Jewish theology has been largely ignored. This work seeks to demonstrate how open early rabbinic Judaism was to the exchange of ideas and how much of their ideas can be attributed to their non-Jewish neighbors