Law Commons^™

Felony Financial Disenfranchisement, Neel U. Sukhatme, Alexander Billy, Gaurav Bagwe

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Individuals with prior felony convictions often must complete all terms of their sentence before they regain voter eligibility. Many jurisdictions include legal-financial obligations (LFOs) — fines, fees, and/or restitution stemming from convictions — in the terms of the sentence. Twenty-eight states, governing over 182 million Americans, either directly or indirectly tie LFO repayment to voting privileges, a practice we call felony financial disenfranchisement.

Proponents of felony financial disenfranchisement posit that returning citizens must satisfy the financial obligations stemming from convictions to restore themselves as community equals. Moralism aside, others claim low rates of electoral participation among those with felony convictions …

Empiricism And Privacy Policies In The Restatement Of Consumer Contract Law, Gregory Klass

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The Draft Restatement of the Law of Consumer Contracts includes a quantitative study of judicial decisions concerning businesses’ online privacy policies, which it cites in support of a claim that most courts treat privacy policies as contract terms. This Article reports an attempt to reproduce that study’s results. Using the Reporters’ data, this study was unable to reproduce their numerical findings. This study found in the data fewer relevant decisions, and a lower proportion of decisions supporting the Draft Restatement position. It also found little support for the Draft’s claim that there is a clear trend recognizing privacy policies as …

Empirical Health Law Scholarship: The State Of The Field, Michelle M. Mello, Kathryn Zeiler

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The last three decades have seen the blossoming of the fields of health law and empirical legal studies and their intersection--empirical scholarship in health law and policy. Researchers in legal academia and other settings have conducted hundreds of studies using data to estimate the effects of health law on accident rates, health outcomes, health care utilization, and costs, as well as other outcome variables. Yet the emerging field of empirical health law faces significant challenges--practical, methodological, and political.

The purpose of this Article is to survey the current state of the field by describing commonly used methods, analyzing enabling and …