Is Baseball Shrouded in Collusion Once More? Assessing the Likelihood that the Current State of the Free Agent Market will Lead to Antitrust Liability for Major League Baseball\u27s Owners

This Note examines how Major League Baseball’s (MLB) current free agent system is restraining trade despite the existence of the league’s non-statutory labor exemption from antitrust. The league’s players have seen their percentage share of earnings decrease even as league revenues have reached an all-time high. This reality is due to the players’ inability to “cash-in” when their market value hits its apex. Once these players enter the open market, their value has greatly deteriorated and consequently, they are unable to generate earnings commensurate with their value to the league. This Note first explores the progression of MLB’s exemption from antitrust before briefly examining the history of the sport’s reserve clause. This Note then chronicles free agency’s inception, its subsequent development, the league’s brushes with collusion over the past several decades, and how the Curt Flood Act has critically peeled back the sport’s antitrust exemption. Finally, it demonstrates how the current system of free agency is restraining trade before positing that the pursuit of antitrust litigation is the optimal measure players can turn to in order to combat the current state of the free agent market

Notions of Monad Strength

Over the past two decades the notion of a strong monad has found wide applicability in computing. Arising out of a need to interpret products in computational and semantic settings, different approaches to this concept have arisen. In this paper we introduce and investigate the connections between these approaches and also relate the results to monad composition. We also introduce new methods for checking and using the required laws associated with such compositions, as well as provide examples illustrating problems and issues that arise.Comment: In Proceedings Festschrift for Dave Schmidt, arXiv:1309.455

Restriction categories III: colimits, partial limits, and extensivity

A restriction category is an abstract formulation for a category of partial maps, defined in terms of certain specified idempotents called the restriction idempotents. All categories of partial maps are restriction categories; conversely, a restriction category is a category of partial maps if and only if the restriction idempotents split. Restriction categories facilitate reasoning about partial maps as they have a purely algebraic formulation. In this paper we consider colimits and limits in restriction categories. As the notion of restriction category is not self-dual, we should not expect colimits and limits in restriction categories to behave in the same manner. The notion of colimit in the restriction context is quite straightforward, but limits are more delicate. The suitable notion of limit turns out to be a kind of lax limit, satisfying certain extra properties. Of particular interest is the behaviour of the coproduct both by itself and with respect to partial products. We explore various conditions under which the coproducts are ``extensive'' in the sense that the total category (of the related partial map category) becomes an extensive category. When partial limits are present, they become ordinary limits in the total category. Thus, when the coproducts are extensive we obtain as the total category a lextensive category. This provides, in particular, a description of the extensive completion of a distributive category.Comment: 39 page

A True Sense of Security: How Kirschner v. J.P. Morgan Chase Illustrates the Failings of the Reves Family-Resemblance Test and the Need to Recognize Some Syndicated Loans as Securities for the Sake of the Financial System

Following the 2008 financial crisis, Congress implemented a number of reforms aimed at ensuring that such a man-made disaster—fueled by greed and willful ignorance—is not permitted to happen again. On the surface, these reforms appear to be a success; however, under the surface, there is currently a capital market that is effectively ignored, not only by the reforms passed in the wake of the financial crisis, but by virtually all securities regulation. This capital market, which revolves around so-called syndicated loans, is estimated to be larger than the subprime-mortgage collateralized debt obligations market was at its apex, and yet it is unregulated, in large part due to the application of the Reves family resemblance test—the test courts use to determine if something is a security, and thus subject to securities laws. This test is outdated and fails to account for the modern-day syndicated loan market, which has undergone considerable changes in the last decade. In order to ensure that courts are properly classifying securities as securities, this note proposes an updated test for subjecting investment vehicles to securities laws and regulations, which properly takes into account the modern-day realities of the syndicated loan market. This solution will promote increased accountability and diligence in the syndicated loan market, which is necessary to ensure that Congress’s goal of preventing another financial crisis is realized

Chamblee High School Extended Learning Time Optimization Project

The following is a report on the design and documentation of a program meant to assist Chamblee High School. The definition of the problem, front and back-end development, analysis of the program, integration between programs, final results and conclusions contained within the report contain multitudes of information about the system and recommendations for the continued development of the program after the involvement of the Kennesaw Industrial Education Team. The basic problem of the project is the organization of information flow. To solve problems with the basic solution to organization within the school, the team must develop a method to creating a software that will assign students and teachers within the new flexible learning period that Chamblee intends to integrate into its block schedule in the fall semester, 2022. In response to the problems with the baseline solution, the team developed a new flowchart that would alleviate the problems presented by it and found a method of testing the program quality to check if the final product was sufficient or if new tools would need to be recommended. The front-end development was handled entirely through the preferred system, Coda.io, at the recommendation of the client. The development of the software was temporarily halted due to the legal ramifications behind student anonymity and the school’s inability to share information, but the development of the software served to establish the future for a new software. The front-end accomplished the creation of a teacher and student view that accomplished most requirements of the interface. The back-end development accomplished the stated goals of the algorithm and servers but was not optimal because of the difficulties integrating with Coda.io and involved the use of MySQL, R, and Python. Integration proved to be the most intense challenge of the project. Maintaining the data structure and working with the suboptimal routines for data transfer in Coda.io made the process incredibly difficult. Employing the use of API, third-party servers, and Python after the initial solution recommended by the developers at Coda.io, Zapier, failed to be capable of the data transfer that was necessary. After the analysis of the program revealed a less than optimal software quality, and that the program on review did not meet all requirements of the software due to limitations in Coda.io, the team is forced to make recommendations that involve the abandonment of Coda.io as a platform and strategies to rework the current back-end development and servers to create a smoother overall program

Le droit international et l'État de droit : enjeux et défis de l'action internationale à travers l'exemple d'Haïti

Thèse en cotutelle : Université Laval Doctorat en droit (L.L. D.) et Université Panthéon-Assas, Paris II Paris, France, Doctorat en droit.La société internationale promeut de plus en plus l’État de droit notamment depuis le début des années 1990, en particulier en Haïti. En quête d’une démocratie introuvable et ravagé par des crises politiques et humanitaires, cet État fait constater les difficultés de l’action internationale. Interdisciplinaire, la thèse, centrée sur l’accès à la justice comme garantie, examine comment et dans quelles mesures les normes utilisées pour la promotion de l’État de droit peuvent constituer une obligation juridique de l’État et un moyen de changement. Invoquant le droit international protégeant la personne, États, organisations internationales et acteurs non étatiques brandissent les sources juridiques variées de l’État de droit dans diverses circonstances concourant à son élasticité au cœur d’une institutionnalisation évolutive au double niveau national et international. Le cas haïtien montre que le droit international contribue à une structuration et une consolidation de l’État de droit par la recherche d’un meilleur encadrement de l’État. Les compétences de celui-ci sont appelées à s’inscrire dans un droit interne conforme au droit international et des institutions solides, protégeant les droits et libertés dont le respect est surveillé par des mécanismes et institutions variés. Néanmoins, l’articulation entre droit interne et droit international, État de droit et immunités, la souveraineté, les relations entre l’État et les membres permanents du Conseil de sécurité de l’ONU, ainsi que les faiblesses structurelles entravant une culture favorable à la primauté du droit, limitent l’accès effectif des particuliers à la justice. Dès lors, il apparaît nécessaire de réorienter les actions menées, par des réformes transversales devant contribuer à de meilleures pratiques au sein de l’État pour valoriser la personne humaine. Descripteurs : Droit international, droit interne, droits de l’homme, démocratie et État de droit, indivisibilité des droits, accès à la justice comme garantie des droits et libertés, réforme de la justice et des institutions, fonctions de l’État, lutte contre l’impunité en Haïti, représentations, culture juridique, droit à réparation des victimes, éducation aux droits de l’homme, formation des acteurs de la justice, coopération internationale.Since the beginning of the 90’s, international community bosltered the Rule of Law, particularly in Haiti. Looking in vain to establish a democracy and devastated by humanitarian and political crises, this State emphasizes the difficulties of acting at the international level. This interdisciplinary thesis focuses on access to justice as a guarantee of rights and freedoms. It examines how and to what extent the norms used to promote the Rule of Law can be considered as States’ legal duties and as a mean of change. Appealing to international human rights law, States, international organizations and non-state actors use different legal sources of the Rule of Law in various circumstances and contribute to its elasticity in the context of progressive institutionalization at the national and international levels. The Haitian example shows that by being internationalized, the Rule of Law becomes structured and consolidated through improved State guidance, the exercise of its competences being part of a national law that respects international law, and because of strong institutions protecting rights and freedoms of which the respect is monitored by various mechanisms and institutions. Nonetheless, the relationships between national and international law, the Rule of Law and immunities, sovereignty, relations between State and permanent members of the United Nations Security Council, as well as structural weaknesses impeding the development of a culture favorable to the Rule of Law restrain individuals’ effective access to justice. Therefore, it seems necessary to reorient actions through transversal reforms that should result in better practices of valuing human beings. Keywords: International law, national law, human rights, democracy and the Rule of Law, indivisibility of rights, access to justice as a guarantee of rights and freedoms, justice and institutional reform, State’s functions, fight against impunity in Haiti, representations, legal culture, victims’ right to compensation for damage, human rights education, training of justice actors, international cooperation