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.     

A mixed DNA profile controversy revisited

Semaan et al. (J Forensic Res, 2020, 11, 453) discuss a mock case “where eight different individuals [P₁ through P₈] could not be excluded in a mixed DNA analysis. Even though … expert DNA mixture analysis software was used.” Two of these are the true donors. The LRs reported are incorrect due to the incorrect entry of propositions into LRmix Studio. This forced the software to account for most of the alleles as drop-in, resulting in LRs 60–70 orders of magnitude larger than expected. P₁, P₂, P₄, P₅, and P₈ can be manually excluded using peak heights. This has relevance when using LRmix which does not use peak heights. We extend the work using the same two reference genotypes who were the true contributors as Semaan et al. (J Forensic Res, 2020, 11, 453). We simulate three two-donor mixtures with peak heights using these two genotypes and analyze using STRmix?. For the simulated 1:1 mixture, one of the non-donors’ LRs supported him being a contributor when no conditioning was used. When considered in combination with any other potential donors (i.e., with conditioning), this non-donor was correctly eliminated. For the 3:1 mixture, all results correctly supported that the non-donors were not contributors. The low-template 4:1 mixture LRs with no conditioning showed support for all eight profiles as donors. However, the results from pair-wise conditioning showed that only the two ground truth donors had LRs supporting that they were contributors to the mixture. We recommend the use of peak heights and conditioning profiles, as this allows better sensitivity and specificity even when the persons share many alleles.     

Crime and justice in the context of resource scarcity

This concept paper presents a theory of environmental scarcity developed byHomer-Dixon. Homer-Dixon developed a model to describe the consequences of scarcity for sub-national violence in third world countries. This paper hasfour interrelated purposes. First, it presents the model of scarcity developedby Thomas Homer-Dixon in 1999. Second, it assesses the way in which the scarcity model contextualizes criminal justice and criminology research, andby extension, how research in crime and justice processes can broaden the scarcity model. Third, it applies elements of the model to the United States,a goal that represents a generalization of the model from third-world to first-world settings. Fourth, it presents a particular case, the migrationof African-Americans from the rural South to urban centers in the 1950s and1960s and consequent inner-city violence in the 1960s, that displays manyelements of the environmental scarcity model.     

Bahrain: Central Bank of Bahrain succeeds Bahrain Monetary Agency

The Central Bank of Bahrain came into existence on 7 Septemberand has taken over all the tasks previously conducted by theBahrain Monetary Agency (‘BMA’). The Central Bankof Bahrain and Financial Institutions Law (‘CBB Law’)issued by Decree No. 64 of 2006 gives the CBB strong operationalindependence and a wider range of enforcement powers. The CBBLaw has also replaced the Insurance Law (Legislative DecreeNo. 17     

The Unemployment–Output Tradeoff in Transition Economies: Does Okun's Law Apply?

This paper investigates whether an Okun-type relationship between output and unemployment is taking hold in formerly planned economies as they move towards the market. Using a first-differences variant of Okun's Law, we test for its presence in 25 transition countries divided into groups of ``reform leaders'' and ``reform laggards.'' For leaders, represented by the 10 European Union (EU) accession countries, Okun's Law is detected in both 1991–94 and 1995–2000 periods. For laggards, represented by the remaining group, it is present only for the later period and only when countries affected by wars are removed from the sample. A comparison of unemployment–output elasticities and unemployment levels in EU candidates and EU members themselves indicates that their labor markets might be converging.     

When ADR becomes the law: A review of federal practice

Conclusion With the passage of the Administrative Dispute Resolution Act, the stage was set for innovation and change in federal agencies. Now, part way into the five-year life of the Act, a new administration has the potential to encourage even wider use of ADR at the federal level, providing still more examples from which to develop a clearer sense of best practice. Additional funds, both for ACUS and individual agencies, are vital to providing the level of experimentation, innovation, and documentation needed to ensure success.MIT ProfessorLawrence E. Susskind is director of the MIT-Harvard Public Disputes Program, 512 Pound Hall, Harvard Law School, Cambridge, Mass. 02138.Eileen F. Babbitt is associate director of the Public Disputes Program.Phyllis N. Segal is a practicing mediator with Endispute, Incorporated.The authors would like to acknowledge the federal dispute resolution specialists who contributed greatly to our work by providing interviews and materials for this article: Cathy Costantino of FDIC; David Batson of EPA; John Settle and Ron Walczak of HHS; David Drabkin of DLA; Jim Jones of DOL; Sheldon Guttman of FCC; Charles Pou of ACUS; Jeff Domber of GSA; and Diane Liff of DOT.     

The onset of adult offending: A neglected dimension of the criminal career

The conventional wisdom in criminology is that adult onset of offending is a rare event. Closer examination of the extant literature that use official records, however, reveals that an average of 50 percent of adult offenders initiate offending at age eighteen or older. Although criminological research has investigated late onset offending in adolescence, there is little research on adult onset offending and the correlates of adult offending. Using police contact and interview data from the 1942 and 1949 birth cohort data from Racine, WI, this study investigated the correlates of crime for adult onset and persistent offenders. The results show that employment is the only correlate to affect the probability of adult offending differently for previously delinquent and nondelinquent offenders. This article concludes by highlighting the neglect of research on adult offenders, specifically the large percentage of adult onset offenders, and calling for more research on this topic.     

Politics Lost, Politics Transformed, Politics Colonised? Theories of the Impact of Mass Media

In recent years, there has been a substantial increase in the literature on the relationship between politics and mass media, mainly in discrete topic areas such as the impact of mass media on electoral behaviour, the emergence of new forms of political communication, or media political economy. At the same time, this diverse literature has often focused on a single general issue, typically characterised in terms of the 'transformation' of politics. Despite this common theme, there has been relatively little attempt to connect and compare the different approaches. Looking at the theoretical differences in the new literature on politics and mass media reveals three perspectives – pluralist, constructivist, and structuralist. These approaches have too often tacitly co-existed, instead of more competitively striving to advance knowledge in the three main topic areas above.