Law Commons^™

Regarding Docket No. Fr-6111-P-02, Hud’S Implementation Of The Fair Housing Act’S Disparate Impact Standard, Sonia Gipson Rankin, Alfred Mathewson, Melanie Moses, G. Matthew Fricke, Kathy Powers, Gabriel R. Sanchez, Christopher Moore, Elizabeth Bradley, Mirta Galesic, Joshua Garland

Faculty Scholarship

The is a Comment on the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) Proposed Rule: FR-6111-P-02 HUD’s Implementation of the Fair Housing Act’s Disparate Impact Standard . This comment examines how algorithms in housing applications may be inherently biased against certain groups of people.

Their arguments against the proposed legislation:

1. To ensure that an algorithm does not have disparate impact, it is not enough to show that individual input factors are not “substitutes or close proxies” for protected characteristics.

2. It is impossible to audit an algorithm for bias without an adequate level of transparency or access to the …

Book Review: Jonathan P. Thompson, River Of Lost Souls: The Science, Politics, And Green Behind The Gold King Mine Disaster (2018), Clifford J. Villa

Faculty Scholarship

On August 5, 2015, contractors for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) investigating the Gold King Mine in southwestern Colorado accidently released some three million gallons of contaminated water into the Animas River, triggering weeks of front-page headlines, months of congressional hearings, and now years of litigation. River of Lost Souls: The Science, Politics, and Greed Behind the Gold King Mine Disaster, a new book by Jonathan P. Thompson, suggests by its title a human folly behind this “disaster” much broader and deeper than one tragic accident wrought by EPA contractors. On this thesis, Thompson certainly delivers. However, what …