Stepping Up to the Plate: Minor Leaguers Attempt to Remedy their Unconscionable Plight

Professional baseball players are often thought of as making multi-million-dollar salaries, but most professional baseball players have recently made under $15,000 a year. Minor league players toiled under an onerous system resulting from baseball's judicially created antitrust exemption and lobbying efforts that exempted them from minimum wage and overtime. These factors allowed teams to impose a uniform player contract (UPC) on players with numerous unconscionable provisions for years. However, a late-night Tweet in August of 2022 sent shockwaves through the sports and labor world, announcing that the Major League Baseball Players Association (MLBPA) was sending out authorization cards to represent minor league players. After years of fighting to maintain the authority to impose conditions on minor league players, through lobbying and litigation, Major League Baseball (MLB) turned over a new leaf and recognized the unionization of minor league players under the MLBPA less than three weeks later. In light of this long sought-after recognition, this article takes a novel approach. First, it provides historical context for baseball's unique ability to impose working conditions on minor leaguers without significant concern for legal ramifications. Second, it provides an overview of the doctrine of contractual unconscionability and analyzes the prior UPC as an unconscionable agreement. Finally, it details the historic unionization process and makes detailed recommendations to ameliorate the unconscionable conditions minor league players have faced when they negotiate with MLB owners to draft their initial collective bargaining agreement.     

省直管县改革背景下市县横向分治与合作机制之构建

省直管县改革是为适应经济社会快速发展而进行的行政层级调整,对于破除市管县体制藩篱、激活和增强县域经济发展活力、提高行政效率具有重大意义。实践中,市县科层结构"交错纠缠"、省级政府管理幅度偏大、市县资源依赖关系受到冲击等问题一定程度上影响了省直管县改革的推进,导致改革的政策红利未能充分释放。应从增加省直管县试点数量、推动市县科层结构扁平化、维护市县共生性资源依赖关系、引导市县从资源竞争走向差异化合作等方面着手构建并完善市县横向分治与合作机制,以推动省直管县改革取得更大成效。     

“Complete Labelling” and Domestic Prosecutions for Crimes Against Humanity

Criminal Law Forum - Fair labelling is an established principle of criminal justice that scrutinises the way that States use language in labelling criminal defendants and their conduct. I argue...     

数字灵工的内卷化困境及其逻辑

本文以"内卷化"概念为理论视角,指出数字灵工在进行知识性、文化性的创意劳动时,能够提高工作激情和成就感,但面对平台注意力经济的不可预测性和平台规制时,他们陷入了一个高度内卷化的工作状态:"自我锁定""失活创意""路径依赖"。具体来说,数字灵工在平台资本裹挟和量化规制下,逐渐固化了创作内容类型,并展开了故步自封的逐量创作。从结果来看,数字灵工看似实现了自由和自雇,但个体化的职业形式导致后期发展动力不足,陷入有增长而无发展的状态中,难以产生对个人更大回报的增长模式。研究依托平台创作群体,重新阐释和理解内卷化概念,有利于我们拓展内卷化在劳动领域的解释力,同时揭示灵活就业的数字灵工平台劳动的困境及深层逻辑,尝试探究可能突破内卷困境的路径。     

Metric forensic anthropology decisions: Reliability and biasability of sectioning-point-based sex estimates

Subjective decisions make human cognitive processes more susceptible to bias and error. Specifically, research indicates that additional context biases forensic anthropologists’ morphological analyses. To address whether metric analyses are also subject to bias, we conducted a pilot study in which 52 experienced osteologists measured a difficult-to-classify human femur, with or without additional contextual information. Using a metric sectioning-point sex-estimation method, participants provided a sex estimate for individual skeletal element(s) and, when given multiple elements, the combined skeletal assemblage. Control group participants (n = 24) measured only the femur. In addition to the femur, bias group participants (n = 28) either measured a female humerus and viewed a female-biasing photograph (n = 14) or measured a male humerus and viewed a male-biasing photograph (n = 14). We explored whether the experts in the different groups would differ in: (1) femoral measurements; (2) femoral sex-estimation conclusions; and (3) final sex-estimation conclusions for the skeletal assemblage. Although the femoral measurements and femoral sex estimates were comparable across groups, the overall sex estimates in the female-biased group were impacted by contextual information—differing from both the control and male-biased groups (p < 0.001). Our results demonstrate that cognitive bias can occur even in metric sex-estimation conclusions. Specifically, this occurred when the metric data and single-element sex estimates were synthesized into an overall estimate. Thus, our results suggest that metric methods are most vulnerable to bias when data are synthesized into an overall conclusion, highlighting the need for bias countermeasures and comprehensive statistical frameworks for synthesizing metric data to mitigate the effects of cognitive bias.     

Observer determination of the make,model, and year of questioned vehicles

Often, criminal acts involving a vehicle are caught on digital video surveillance systems. While potentially useful for an investigation, the recording conditions are typically less than optimal for the extraction of key information for the identification of the perpetrator, such as a license plate. Providing the make, model and year of a questioned vehicle is a common request for examiners, to narrow the field of potential suspect vehicles. This study seeks to compare the performance of a nonpeer-reviewed make, model, and year determination between two separate groups, specifically, trained forensic image examiners and nontrained individuals. Results show that even with varied image capture conditions and quality, the trained forensic image examiners more correctly and completely identified the test group of questioned vehicles make, model, and year.     

Harming America: Corporate Crime in a Context of Deregulation

ABSTRACT

Like many Republican presidential candidates before him, Donald J. Trump campaigned on a pro-business, anti-regulation platform, and since his election in November 2016, he has directed his administration to move forward with deregulation in many arenas, including consumer financial protections, environmental controls, and workplace safety among others. Past efforts to roll back regulations governing certain industries, such as the savings and loan and the mortgage industries, have had harmful consequences for the general public or for specific interest groups. In this study, we review what the Trump administration has accomplished with regard to deregulation to date. Then, based on past deregulatory fiascos, we theorize the harmful collateral consequences that may result from this most recent swing of the regulatory-deregulatory pendulum.