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.     

“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.     

论特区精神的辩证唯物主义意蕴

特区精神是在一个特殊的历史时期,一个心怀人民的政党在解放思想、实事求是,创造性地践行辩证唯物主义过程中所形成的,是为人民谋幸福、为民族谋复兴的重要精神里程碑。"特区"是特定的时代背景、社会条件和求变思维等相互作用的实践产物。改革开放的伟大实践为特区精神的形成奠定了坚实的基础,同时敢闯敢试、埋头苦干等特区精神也无不放射出辩证唯物主义的真理光芒。弘扬特区精神,就要继续坚持和发展辩证唯物主义,在推进新发展理念的过程中,全面深化改革和开放,创造新的伟大奇迹。     

新时代公安高职院校人才培养模式研究

随着我国职业教育改革与发展进入提质培优、增值赋能的快车道，职业教育理念与教育思路发生了格局性变化，在新时代职业教育人才培养模式面临新挑战和新需要的背景下，公安高职院校的发展应当主动适应新时代公安工作的发展和需求，建立起以应用型、实战型复合人才为导向的培养模式。通过深度发挥公安高等教育的行业特色和行业优势，完善以课程思政为引领的教育策略，从而全面打造实战应用型公安人才培养新模式，这对于提升公安高等教育理论水平实践效果和具有重要的学术价值和应用价值。     

冒用他人蚂蚁花呗构成盗窃罪

【裁判要旨】蚂蚁花呗的发行机构并非商业银行(含邮政金融机构),因此,蚂蚁花呗不属于刑法意义上的信用卡,冒用他人蚂蚁花呗的行为不构成信用卡诈骗罪。蚂蚁花呗具备信用卡的表观功能,根据花呗用户服务合同约定,冒用他人蚂蚁花呗购物或套现的行为,无需重新签订合同,责任由账户本人负担。     

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.