Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®
- Keyword
-
- Criminal law (3)
- Mass incarceration (3)
- Algorithms (2)
- Criminal procedure (2)
- Law and race (2)
-
- Race (2)
- AI (1)
- Abolition (1)
- Abolitionist reform (1)
- Autonomy (1)
- Cancel culture (1)
- Charging (1)
- Choice (1)
- Collective bargaining (1)
- Community control (1)
- Crime (1)
- Criminal court (1)
- Criminal justice (1)
- Criminal statutes (1)
- Critical legal system (1)
- Decision making (1)
- Defendant-attorney relationship (1)
- Democratic exclusion (1)
- Democratizing criminal law (1)
- Discretion (1)
- Empirical legal studies (1)
- Expertise (1)
- Expressive fourth amendment (1)
- Fourth amendment (1)
- George Floyd (1)
Articles 1 - 7 of 7
Full-Text Articles in Law
An Argument Against Unbounded Arrest Power: The Expressive Fourth Amendment And Protesting While Black, Karen Pita Loor
An Argument Against Unbounded Arrest Power: The Expressive Fourth Amendment And Protesting While Black, Karen Pita Loor
Faculty Scholarship
Protesting is supposed to be revered in our democracy, considered “as American as apple pie” in our nation’s mythology. But the actual experiences of the 2020 racial justice protesters showed that this supposed reverence for political dissent and protest is more akin to American folklore than reality on the streets. The images from those streets depicted police officers clad in riot gear and armed with shields, batons, and “less than” lethal weapons aggressively arresting protesters, often en masse. In the first week of the George Floyd protests, police arrested roughly 10,000 people, and approximately 78 percent of those arrests were …
Inside The Black Box Of Prosecutor Discretion, Megan Wright, Shima Baradaran Baughman, Christopher Robertson
Inside The Black Box Of Prosecutor Discretion, Megan Wright, Shima Baradaran Baughman, Christopher Robertson
Faculty Scholarship
In their charging and bargaining decisions, prosecutors have unparalleled and nearly-unchecked discretion that leads to incarceration or freedom for millions of Americans each year. More than courts, legislators, or any other justice system player, in the aggregate prosecutors’ choices are the key drivers of outcomes, whether the rates of mass incarceration or the degree of racial disparities in justice. To date, there is precious little empirical research on how prosecutors exercise their breathtaking discretion. We do not know whether they consistently charge like cases alike or whether crime is in the eye of the beholder. We do not know what …
Bargaining For Abolition, Zohra Ahmed
Bargaining For Abolition, Zohra Ahmed
Faculty Scholarship
What if instead of seeing criminal court as an institution driven by the operation of rules, we saw it as a workplace where people labor to criminalize those with the misfortune to be prosecuted? Early observers of twentieth century urban criminal courts likened them to factories.1 Since then, commentators often deploy the pejorative epithet “assembly line justice” to describe criminal court’s processes.2 The term conveys the criticism of a mechanical system delivering a form of justice that is impersonal and fallible. Perhaps unintentionally, the epithet reveals another truth: criminal court is also a workplace, and it takes labor …
The Right To Counsel In A Neoliberal Age, Zohra Ahmed
The Right To Counsel In A Neoliberal Age, Zohra Ahmed
Faculty Scholarship
Legal scholarship tends to obscure how changes in criminal process relate to broader changes in the political and economic terrain. This Article offers a modest corrective to this tendency. By studying the U.S. Supreme Court’s right to counsel jurisprudence, as it has developed since the mid-70s, I show the pervasive impact of the concurrent rise of neoliberalism on relationships between defendants and their attorneys. Since 1975, the Court has emphasized two concerns in its rulings regarding the right to counsel: choice and autonomy. These, of course, are nominally good things for defendants to have. But by paying close attention to …
The Democratizing Potential Of Algorithms?, Ngozi Okidegbe
The Democratizing Potential Of Algorithms?, Ngozi Okidegbe
Faculty Scholarship
Jurisdictions are increasingly embracing the use of pretrial risk assessment algorithms as a solution to the problem of mass pretrial incarceration. Conversations about the use of pretrial algorithms in legal scholarship have tended to focus on their opacity, determinativeness, reliability, validity, or their (in)ability to reduce high rates of incarceration as well as racial and socioeconomic disparities within the pretrial system. This Article breaks from this tendency, examining these algorithms from a democratization of criminal law perspective. Using this framework, it points out that currently employed algorithms are exclusionary of the viewpoints and values of the racially marginalized communities most …
Of Afrofuturism, Of Algorithms, Ngozi Okidegbe
Of Afrofuturism, Of Algorithms, Ngozi Okidegbe
Faculty Scholarship
Algorithms are proliferating in criminal legal structures. The predictions produced by these algorithms inform life-altering decisions around surveillance and incarceration. Their continued use poses a challenge to ongoing racial justice efforts. Contesting how algorithms of today maintain the racial status quo requires a fundamental rethinking of the algorithm project. This essay explores how Afrofuturism can facilitate such a rethinking. It imagines how applying an Afrofuturist paradigm to the adoption, construction, implementation, and oversight of algorithms could radically change the kind of algorithms developed and the purposes for which they are developed. Tapping into this potential offers the chance for members …
“Cancel Culture” And Criminal Justice, Steven Arrigg Koh
“Cancel Culture” And Criminal Justice, Steven Arrigg Koh
Faculty Scholarship
This Article explores the relationship between two normative systems in modern society: “cancel culture” and criminal justice. It argues that cancel culture—a ubiquitous phenomenon in contemporary life—may rectify deficiencies of over- and under-enforcement in the U.S. criminal justice system. However, the downsides of cancel culture’s structure—imprecise factfinding, potentially disproportionate sanctions leading to collateral consequences, a “thin” conception of the wrongdoer as beyond rehabilitation, and a broader cultural anxiety that “chills” certain human conduct—reflect problematic U.S. punitive impulses that characterize our era of mass incarceration. This Article thus argues that social media reform proposals obscure a deeper necessity: transcendence of blame …