Digital Commons Network^™

Textual Rules In Criminal Statutes, Joshua Kleinfeld

University of Chicago Law Review

No abstract provided.

On Prisoners, Politics, And The Administration Of Criminal Justice: Professor Rachel Barkow, Sonja B. Starr

University of Chicago Law Review

Professor Rachel Barkow has established herself as an indispensable voice in public and academic discourse on criminal justice reform. Beyond the very important contributions to the world of scholarship that earned her a well-deserved place in this “most-cited” list, she has also shaped policy directly (most notably as a member of the U.S. Sentencing Commission from 2013 to 2018), as well as influenced the education of countless law students through her coauthorship of the leading criminal law casebook.1 She is also an expert on administrative law and on the separation of powers, and this shapes her distinct perspective on the …

Guido Calabresi’S “Other Justice Reasons”, Adam Davidson

University of Chicago Law Review

No abstract provided.

Tribe’S Trajectory & Lgbtq Rights, Joshua Matz

University of Chicago Law Review

I’m not sure I’ll ever live it down. I actually said—out loud, to his face, a full ten minutes into our very first conversation—“Holy smokes, you’re Larry Tribe!” I was in Cambridge that day as a newly admitted student. Somehow, inexplicably (it’s not that big of a campus), I got lost. Very lost. Fortunately, a passerby professor took mercy and steered me to his office. In a bid to regain my composure, and to seem like a plausible future law student, I jumped straight to explaining why I was there: I wanted to be a civil rights lawyer. To prove …

Jeffrey Rachlinski: Man, Myth, Legend, Gregory S. Parks

University of Chicago Law Review

No abstract provided.

Law School Announcements 2021-2022, Law School Announcements Editors

Announcements

• Officers and Faculty
• The Law School – History
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Asymmetric Subsidies And The Bail Crisis, John F. Duffy, Richard M. Hynes

University of Chicago Law Review

When individuals are arrested or indicted for a crime, governments have legitimate interests in assuring that those individuals show up for future legal proceedings and also do not cause more social harm in the meanwhile. To serve those legitimate interests, governments may restrain the personal liberty of those presumptively innocent individuals—traditionally accomplished either by incarceration or by release subject to certain sureties and conditions. The choice, in short, is between jail and bail.

Currently, governments skew that choice by subsidizing the costs of jail but not bail. The result—wholly predictable given the size and asymmetric nature of the subsidy—is that …

It’S All About (Re)Location: Interpreting The Federal Sentencing Enhancement For Relocating A Fraudulent Scheme, Stephen Ferro

University of Chicago Law Review

Section 2B1.1(b)(10) of the U.S. Sentencing Guidelines Manual increases the recommended sentencing ranges for defendants who make fraudulent schemes harder to uncover. In particular, subsection (A) of this Guideline—the relocation enhancement—increases a defendant’s recommended sentence if she “relocated, or participated in relocating, a fraudulent scheme to another jurisdiction to evade law enforcement or regulatory officials.” This provision raises the question: Where is a fraudulent scheme located? The question might have a straightforward answer in cases that involve few defendants and few fraudulent acts. But federal circuit courts have split over how to apply this enhancement to schemes that span multiple …

Defining Forced Labor: The Legal Battle To Protect Detained Immigrants From Private Exploitation, Samantha Sherman

University of Chicago Law Review

Privately run immigration detention facilities allegedly profit from a nation-wide system of forced labor. People detained in these for-profit facilities allege that they are compelled to work—often without pay—under threats of solitary confinement, deprivation of basic necessities, and other serious harms. Advocates have challenged these human rights abuses through a series of class action lawsuits under the Trafficking Victims Protection Act (TVPA). The TVPA’s forced labor provision, codified at 18 U.S.C. § 1589, prohibits the use of “labor or services” obtained by force or coercion. If successful, these lawsuits would not only help vindicate the rights of the hundreds of …

Vindicating The Right To Be Heard: Due Process Safeguards Against Government Interference In The Clemency Process, Jay Clayton

University of Chicago Law Review

No abstract provided.

Comparative International Law And The Social Science Approach, Emilia Justyna Powell

Chicago Journal of International Law

The social science approach has already contributed and continues to contribute to the study of international law. In particular, research that incorporates the social science approach has provided much insight into reality and day-to-day functioning of international law by going beyond historical and normative description and providing generalizable theories. If based on a sound theoretical framework that is subsequently tested in a rigorous scientific manner, the social science approach allows us to uncover a multiplicity of factors that commingle to shape states’ preferences and actions toward international law. Combining insights provided by analysis of large-N data with qualitative methodology allows …

International Law And Transnational Legal Orders: Permeating Boundaries And Extending Social Science Encounters, Gregory Shaffer, Terence C. Halliday

Chicago Journal of International Law

This Essay elaborates in three ways the call for a renewal of social science approaches to international law advanced by Daniel Abebe, Adam Chilton, and Tom Ginsburg. First, while we affirm the importance of what they call the “scientific method” of hypothesis testing, we argue that it can and must be complemented by several other well-institutionalized social science approaches to international law. Second, we loosen the conventional “internal”/“external” distinction in legal scholarship and make the case that conceptualization and empirics are integral to both approaches. Third, we propose that the full promise of social science approaches to international law can …

Law School Record, Vol. 67, No. 2 (Spring 2021), Law School Record Editors

Law School Record

• Message from the Dean
• Power in Numbers
• Colloquia in the Time of Covid-19
• Eight Clerks for Eight Judges
• Building Community and Supporting Each Other
• Professor Martha C. Nussbaum Awarded 2021 Holberg Prize
• Professor Douglas Baird Named Chair of the National Bankruptcy Conference
• Faculty News
• Alumni News
• Development News
• In Memoriam

Competing Algorithms For Law: Sentencing, Admissions, And Employment, Saul Levmore, Frank Fagan

University of Chicago Law Review

Algorithms have found their way into courtrooms, college admission committees, and human resource departments. While defendants and other disappointed parties have challenged the use of algorithms on the basis of due process or similar objections, it should be expected that they will also challenge their accuracy and attempt to present algorithms of their own in order to contest the decisions of judges and other authorities. The problem with this approach is that people who can transparently see why they have been algorithmically denied rights or resources can manipulate an algorithm by retrofitting data. Demands for full algorithmic transparency by policy …

Competing Algorithms For Law: Sentencing, Admissions, And Employment, Saul Levmore, Frank Fagan

Articles

No abstract provided.

The Performance Of Africa's International Courts: Using Litigation For Political, Legal, And Social Change, Tom Ginsburg

Articles

No abstract provided.

Discovering Racial Discrimination By The Police, Alison Siegler

Articles

No abstract provided.

The Future Of Felon Disenfranchisement Reform: Evidence From The Campaign To Restore Voting Rights In Florida, Michael Morse

Articles

No abstract provided.

Valuation Blunders In The Law Of Eminent Domain, Richard Epstein

Articles

No abstract provided.

Rethinking Prosecutorial Discretion In Immigration Enforcement, Nicole Hallett

Articles

Prosecutorial discretion in immigration enforcement stands at a crossroads. It was the centerpiece of Obama's immigration policy after efforts to pass comprehensive immigration reform failed. Under the Trump administration, it was declared all but dead, replaced by an ethos of maximum enforcement. Biden has promised a return to the status quo ante, but the record of using prosecutorial discretion to accomplish humanitarian goals in immigration enforcement under Obama was, at best, mixed. Moreover, it is unclear whether Biden can depend on the availability of programs such as Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), Obama's signature prosecutorial discretion program. Although the …

Police Deception In Interrogation As A Problem Of Procedural Legitimacy, Margareth Etienne, Richard Mcadams

Articles

No abstract provided.

Global Impunity: How Police Laws & Policies In The World's Wealthiest Countries Fail International Human Rights Standards, Claudia Flores, Brian Citro, Nino Guruli, Mariana Olaizola, Chelsea Kehrer, Hannah Abrahams

Global Human Rights Clinic

No abstract provided.

The Other American Law, Elizabeth Reese

Articles

No abstract provided.

Global Impunity: How Police Laws & Policies In The World's Wealthiest Countries Fail International Human Rights Standards, Claudia Flores, Brian Citro, Nino Guruli, Mariana Olaizola Rosenblat, Chelsea Kehrer, Hannah S. Abrahams

Public Law and Legal Theory Working Papers

No abstract provided.

The Discrete Charm Of Leveling Down, Aziz Z. Huq

Public Law and Legal Theory Working Papers

Starting from Justice Ginsburg’s 2017 opinion in Sessions v. Morales-Santana, this essay explores the choice between ‘leveling up’ and ‘leveling down’ as a response to an unlawful difference in the legal treatment of two distinct groups. That problem can arise in the Equal Protection, Free Speech, Free Exercise, and Dormant Commerce Clause contexts. My analysis starts by defining the idea of a ‘leveling down’ disposition in the context of a constitutional equality claim. After exploring analogies in other areas of constitutional law, I turn to two alternative ways of analyzing and solving the leveling-down disposition—one through the lens of Article …

Artificial Intelligence And The Rule Of Law, Aziz Z. Huq

Public Law and Legal Theory Working Papers

This chapter examines an interaction between technological shocks and the “rule of law.” It does so by analyzing the implications of a class of loosely related computational technologies termed “machine learning” (ML) or, rather less precisely “artificial intelligence” (AI). These tools are presently employed in the pre-adjudicative phase of enforcing of the laws, for example facilitating the selection of targets for tax and regulatory investigations (Coglianese and Lehr, 2016). They are also increasingly used during adjudication, for example, to facilitate and guide determinations of individual violence risk during pretrial bail determinations (Huq, 2019). Predictions of a general displacement of human …

The Law Of Democratic Disqualification, Tom Ginsburg, Aziz Z. Huq, David Landau

Public Law and Legal Theory Working Papers

Almost all constitutions, including our own, include one or several ways to disqualify specific individuals from political office. The U.S. Constitution, indeed, incorporates no less than four overlapping pathways toward disqualification. This power of retail disqualification stands at the heartland of the complex project of democratic rule. In practice, it works both an instrument for preserving democratic rule, and also a knife against it. This Article is the first to analyze systematically the complex positive and normative questions raised by disqualification. It offers both a positive account of the function that disqualification plays in constitutional ordering, and a normative account …