Bostock: A Clean Cut into the Gordian Knot of Causation

Regardless of merit, most individual employment discrimination claims die a fast death at summary judgment. Judges apply the fine mesh net created by McDonnell Douglas v. Green, and most cases are caught in its trap. This dated, obfuscatory Supreme Court case creates a complex and flawed binary approach to causation: either discrimination or an innocent reason caused an adverse employment action. For decades, all three levels of the federal judiciary have wrestled with McDonnell Douglas, creating snarls and knots in construing causation. Because of this causal confusion, the ideal of equal opportunity in employment is on life-support. Judges and practitioners must take note of Bostock v. Clayton County, a stunning Supreme Court case that lays a new foundation to clear this causal confusion. In this Article, I argue that Bostock creates a new mixed-motive paradigm that, if correctly applied, should transform individual discrimination law in this country by allowing juries to hear more cases. Bostock explicitly recognizes what the social sciences have long known: decision-making in the workplace is often complex, and both discriminatory and innocent reasons may be “but-for” causes of an employer’s adverse action against an employee. Tort law labels these “multiple sufficient cause” cases. In the first work of its kind, I apply the causation standards in Bostock to create a taxonomy of causation scenarios that should guide lower courts in their analysis of individual discrimination cases at pre-trial stages. As Bostock borrows its causation standards from tort law, this Article examines the nuances of that discipline to determine the legitimacy of Bostock’s causation discussion. I conclude that while Bostock conforms to tort law, the riddle of causation persists in that and almost every discipline. Still, Bostock’s causation logic is sufficient to guide courts into the future on firm ground. In the first comprehensive work of its kind, this Article assists courts by applying Bostock at each stage of litigation through jury trials. Bostock can help revive the ideal of equal opportunity in employment. I conclude the paper with tandem principled suggestions. First, I posit that the Court or Congress could create a burden-shifting scheme in multiple sufficient cause cases. Second, such a burden shifting of proof would pave the way for an allocation of fault scheme, similar to that found in tort law, whereby the plaintiff would recover those damages that correlate to the employer’s percentage of discriminatory causation

Wich v. Fleming: The Dilemma of a Harmless Defect in a Will

Case note that influenced Texas legislature to change the law regarding self-serving affidavits in wills

EFFECTIVE GROUPING FOR ENERGY AND PERFORMANCE: CONSTRUCTION OF ADAPTIVE, SUSTAINABLE, AND MAINTAINABLE DATA STORAGE

The performance gap between processors and storage systems has been increasingly critical overthe years. Yet the performance disparity remains, and further, storage energy consumption israpidly becoming a new critical problem. While smarter caching and predictive techniques domuch to alleviate this disparity, the problem persists, and data storage remains a growing contributorto latency and energy consumption.Attempts have been made at data layout maintenance, or intelligent physical placement ofdata, yet in practice, basic heuristics remain predominant. Problems that early studies soughtto solve via layout strategies were proven to be NP-Hard, and data layout maintenance todayremains more art than science. With unknown potential and a domain inherently full of uncertainty,layout maintenance persists as an area largely untapped by modern systems. But uncertainty inworkloads does not imply randomness; access patterns have exhibited repeatable, stable behavior.Predictive information can be gathered, analyzed, and exploited to improve data layouts. Ourgoal is a dynamic, robust, sustainable predictive engine, aimed at improving existing layouts byreplicating data at the storage device level.We present a comprehensive discussion of the design and construction of such a predictive engine,including workload evaluation, where we present and evaluate classical workloads as well asour own highly detailed traces collected over an extended period. We demonstrate significant gainsthrough an initial static grouping mechanism, and compare against an optimal grouping method ofour own construction, and further show significant improvement over competing techniques. We also explore and illustrate the challenges faced when moving from static to dynamic (i.e. online)grouping, and provide motivation and solutions for addressing these challenges. These challengesinclude metadata storage, appropriate predictive collocation, online performance, and physicalplacement. We reduced the metadata needed by several orders of magnitude, reducing the requiredvolume from more than 14% of total storage down to less than 12%. We also demonstrate how ourcollocation strategies outperform competing techniques. Finally, we present our complete modeland evaluate a prototype implementation against real hardware. This model was demonstrated tobe capable of reducing device-level accesses by up to 65%

Wich v. Fleming: The Dilemma of a Harmless Defect in a Will

Case note that influenced Texas legislature to change the law regarding self-serving affidavits in wills

Ethical Dilemma: Police Access to Private Internet Data An analysis of the ECPA of 1986, its effects on the St. Louis area, and the proposed solutions to remedy this outdated document.

My research was focused on the ethical dilemma of police access to private internet data and how it pertains to the outdated Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA) of 1986. This work contains a case study of serial killer Maury Travis, an overview of the history of the ECPA, an argument for why police should have access to private data, an ethical analysis of the two solutions to this dilemma, and an argument for what solution I believe to be the best one. My research concluded that the two possible solutions to this dilemma were to revise the ECPA or to replace it. I thoroughly analyze the lawmaking process as well as the possible consequences of each solution before concluding that revision is the most beneficial solution for all parties involved. My findings are significant as they define how out of date the ECPA truly is, and how precarious the position of the courts and police officers are when determining what is and what is not allowable when accessing private data

Hitting the Wall: The Next Step in Addressing the Pink Tax

For thirty-some-odd years, scholars and consumer advocates have called for the elimination of gender-based price discrimination, also known as the “Pink Tax.” Efforts to address this issue have included studies demonstrating the phenomenon’s existence, social movements incited to garner public support for the cause, consumer attempts to bring the issue before courts in hopes of judicial intervention, and legislative undertakings at both the state and federal level to craft legislation prohibiting the practice. Yet, gender-based price discrimination has proven evasive of regulation, outside the scope of judicial reach, and difficult to isolate in terms of hard proof. Even agreeing on a definition of the Pink Tax has proven challenging, as the waters surrounding the issue are muddied by other recognized discriminatory practices such as the Tampon Tax and the gender wage gap, which all contribute to the additional financial burden imposed by society onto women. The last several decades reveal the elusiveness of the Pink Tax and demonstrate that, thus far, documented efforts to address the practice are individually insufficient to eliminate the practice. Still, each attempt constitutes a vital step, or misstep, in the path to a final solution. This Comment explores the path to the current state of the issue of gender-based price discrimination