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.     

“互联网+”时代背景下社会组织统战工作探究

随着改革开放的不断深入,我国社会组织获到了快速的发展,在社会各个领域之中扮演着越来越重要的角色。引导社会组织为推进全面建设社会主义现代化国家服务,已成为新时代统战工作的重要一环。但由于对社会组织统战工作重要性认识不足、部门间联系薄弱、统战组织建设不足等原因,社会组织统战工作进展缓慢。而互联网基建的完善以及软件设备的更新为实施社会组织“互联网+统战工作”提供了基础条件。因此,要主动树立网络统战辩证思维、完善亲民网络统战平台、建立网络统战长效机制、统筹网络舆情监督引导以及打造网络统战人才队伍,从而推进社会组织,网络统战工作。     

“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...     

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.