Tribal Sovereign Immunity and the Need for Congressional Action

Native American Indian tribal sovereign immunity is a judicially created doctrine that provides immunity from suit for Indian tribes in the United States. Although judicially created, the United States’ courts have repeatedly emphasized that only Congress has the power to limit Indian tribal immunity. As a result, tribal sovereign immunity has become a seemingly boundless means of avoiding lawsuits and liability. Moreover, tribal sovereign immunity has created a gap in the United States judicial system in which an individual may avoid certain lawsuits by entering into a favorable transaction with an Indian tribe. In these transactions, an individual may transfer property rights to an Indian tribe, thereby allowing the tribe to assert immunity in a suit concerning the property. Without congressional action, tribal sovereign immunity and the judicial loophole it creates will continue to be exploited

Assessing Baseline Knowledge and Practices on Trauma-Informed Care across Workforce Sectors

INTRODUCTION: Adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) are traumatic exposures that have a profound impact in children’s lives. The Kaiser-CDC ACE Study was instrumental to informing the SAMHSA trauma-informed care (TIC) framework. Building trauma-informed ecosystems in family and child-serving sectors is critical, especially given that ACEs are widespread. However, there remains a lack of information on baseline knowledge and practices across various sectors. AIM: The purpose of this study is to explore the baseline knowledge and practices of trauma-informed care among adults working in four different sectors: child welfare, education, healthcare, and law enforcement in Georgia. METHODS: The present study utilizes secondary evaluation data from participants who took The Why and How of Trauma-Informed Care© from 2017-2018. The data were collected as a baseline evaluation assessment for the workforce training and includes the following sectors: healthcare; child welfare, advocacy, and justice; and educational sectors. In total, 148 individuals responded to the baseline questionnaire. Analysis was conducted using SAS 9.4 to calculate the proportion who had knowledge and/or education. Chi-square statistics were used to examine differences in knowledge and practice across sectors using an alpha of p\u3c.05. RESULTS: Examination of sectors in aggregate indicated that a quarter of participants don’t know or do not think it is applicable that there be education or training to help staff members talk about a crisis after it happens (29.64%). Additionally, close to a quarter (24.03%) indicated that they did not know or thought it was not applicable to discuss self-care topics in team meetings. Other findings of importance included that 80% had previously received education or training on what is traumatic stress. CONCLUSION: Given the findings, baseline knowledge and training appear to be highly evident in most of the workforce who took part in the study. However, an area that appears to need more attention includes the aspects about self-care in the context of secondary trauma. Also, more work needs to be done to ensure universal education and training across sectors

You Might Just Have to Wait: Interpreting State Action Immunity and the Ability to Appeal Following the Ninth Circuit\u27s Decision in \u3cem\u3eSolarCity Corp. v. Salt River Project\u3c/em\u3e

On June 12, 2017, the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit held in SolarCity Corp. v. Salt River Project Agricultural Improvement and Power District that the doctrine of state action immunity confers immunity from liability, and therefore a court ruling granting or denying state action immunity may not be immediately appealed. In concluding this, the Ninth Circuit joined the Fourth and Sixth Circuits in opposition to the Fifth and Eleventh Circuits, which held that state action immunity confers immunity from suit and may be immediately appealed. The interpretation of state action immunity thus directly affects whether a party may immediately appeal a court’s ruling on state action immunity. This Comment argues that state action immunity only grants immunity from liability and thus is not immediately appealable, following the decision of the Ninth Circuit

Human machine collaborative decision making in a complex optimization system

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Sloan School of Management, Operations Research Center, 2005.Includes bibliographical references (p. 149-151).Numerous complex real-world applications are either theoretically intractable or unable to be solved in a practical amount of time. Researchers and practitioners are forced to implement heuristics in solving such problems that can lead to highly sub-optimal solutions. Our research focuses on inserting a human "in-the-loop" of the decision-making or problem solving process in order to generate solutions in a timely manner that improve upon those that are generated either scolely by a human or solely by a computer. We refer to this as Human-Machine Collaborative Decision-Making (HMCDM). The typical design process for developing human-machine approaches either starts with a human approach and augments it with decision-support or starts with an automated approach and augments it with operator input. We provide an alternative design process by presenting an 1HMCDM methodology that addresses collaboration from the outset of the design of the decision- making approach. We apply this design process to a complex military resource allocation and planning problem which selects, sequences, and schedules teams of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to perform sensing (Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance - ISR) and strike activities against enemy targets. Specifically, we examined varying degrees of human-machine collaboration in the creation of variables in the solution of this problem. We also introduce an IIHMCDM method that combines traditional goal decomposition with a model formulation into an Iterative Composite Variable Approach for solving large-scale optimization problems.(cont.) Finally, we show through experimentation the potential for improvement in the quality and speed of solutions that can be achieved through the use of an HMCDM approach.by Jeremy S. Malasky.S.M

The infectiousness of tuberculosis patients coinfected with HIV

The current understanding of airborne tuberculosis (TB) transmission is based on classic 1950s studies in which guinea pigs were exposed to air from a tuberculosis ward. Recently we recreated this model in Lima, Peru, and in this paper we report the use of molecular fingerprinting to investigate patient infectiousness in the current era of HIV infection and multidrug-resistant (MDR) TB