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.     

论被继承人宽宥制度的适用

被继承人宽宥制度,是指当继承人因特定原因丧失继承权后确有悔过行为,经被继承人宽恕后重新恢复继承权的一项民事法律制度,在我国具有一定的社会基础和深厚的历史渊源。设立被继承人宽宥制度,旨在为有过错的继承人提供改过自新、重新获得继承权的机会。     

“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...     

工会组织参与社会治理创新实践初探

工会参与社会治理是创新社会治理体系的客观需要,也是发挥工会基本职能的必然要求.工会作为参与社会治理的重要群团组织,要主动有为,不断强化政治引领作用,创新服务手段,提高服务能力,发挥好自身优势,积极引领职工群众参与社会治理,推进我国社会治理体系和治理能力现代化.     

混合所有制企业党的监督途径:融合与协同发展

混合所有制企业需要建立科学的权力监督体系来维护投资方利益,促进资产保值增值,实现企业有质量、有效益、可持续发展,而加强党的监督工作,促进党的监督与企业其他监督系统融合与协同发展是重要途径。文章结合中国石油西南油气田公司实际,分析了其托管的混合所有制企业党的监督工作面临的挑战,提出了加强混合所有制企业党的监督的具体措施:明确各监督体系的职能定位和业务界面;实施严格的经营管理分级授权控制体系;加强企业监督体系的融合与协同管理;完善监督职能履行考核评价体系等。     

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.