Science and Technology Law Commons^™

The Automated Fourth Amendment, Maneka Sinha

Faculty Scholarship

Courts routinely defer to police officer judgments in reasonable suspicion and probable cause determinations. Increasingly, though, police officers outsource these threshold judgments to new forms of technology that purport to predict and detect crime and identify those responsible. These policing technologies automate core police determinations about whether crime is occurring and who is responsible. Criminal procedure doctrine has failed to insist on some level of scrutiny of—or skepticism about—the reliability of this technology. Through an original study analyzing numerous state and federal court opinions, this Article exposes the implications of law enforcement’s reliance on these practices given the weighty interests …

Transparency's Ai Problem, Hannah Bloch-Wehba

Faculty Scholarship

A consensus seems to be emerging that algorithmic governance is too opaque and ought to be made more accountable and transparent. But algorithmic governance underscores the limited capacity of transparency law—the Freedom of Information Act and its state equivalents—to promote accountability. Drawing on the critical literature on “open government,” this Essay shows that algorithmic governance reflects and amplifies systemic weaknesses in the transparency regime, including privatization, secrecy, private sector cooptation, and reactive disclosure. These deficiencies highlight the urgent need to reorient transparency and accountability law toward meaningful public engagement in ongoing oversight. This shift requires rethinking FOIA’s core commitment to …

Constructing Countervailing Power: Law And Organizing In An Era Of Political Inequality, Kate Andrias

Faculty Scholarship

This Article proposes an innovative approach to remedying the crisis of political inequality: using law to facilitate organizing by the poor and working class, not only as workers, but also as tenants, debtors, welfare beneficiaries, and others. The piece draws on the social-movements literature, and the successes and failures of labor law, to show how law can supplement the deficient regimes of campaign finance and lobbying reform and enable lower-income groups to build organizations capable of countervailing the political power of the wealthy. As such, the Article offers a new direction forward for the public-law literature on political power and …

How Should Justice Policy Treat Young Offenders?: A Knowledge Brief Of The Macarthur Foundation Research Network On Law And Neuroscience, Bj Casey, Richard J. Bonnie, Andre Davis, David L. Faigman, Morris B. Hoffman, Owen D. Jones, Read Montague, Stephen J. Morse, Marcus E. Raichle, Jennifer E. Richeson, Elizabeth S. Scott, Laurence Steinberg, Kim Taylor-Thompson, Anthony Wagner

Faculty Scholarship

The justice system in the United States has long recognized that juvenile offenders are not the same as adults, and has tried to incorporate those differences into law and policy. But only in recent decades have behavioral scientists and neuroscientists, along with policymakers, looked rigorously at developmental differences, seeking answers to two overarching questions: Are young offenders, purely by virtue of their immaturity, different from older individuals who commit crimes? And, if they are, how should justice policy take this into account?

A growing body of research on adolescent development now confirms that teenagers are indeed inherently different from adults, …

Rise Of The Machines: Machine-Generated Data And The Confrontation Clause, Brian Sites

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

A Shattered Looking Glass: The Pitfalls And Potential Of The Mosaic Theory Of Fourth Amendment Privacy, David C. Gray, Danielle Keats Citron

Faculty Scholarship

On January 23, 2012, the Supreme Court issued a landmark non-decision in United States v. Jones. In that case, officers used a GPS-enabled device to track a suspect’s public movements for four weeks, amassing a considerable amount of data in the process. Although ultimately resolved on narrow grounds, five Justices joined concurring opinions in Jones expressing sympathy for some version of the “mosaic theory” of Fourth Amendment privacy. This theory holds that we maintain reasonable expectations of privacy in certain quantities of information even if we do not have such expectations in the constituent parts. This Article examines and …

Massachusetts Zappers - Collecting The Sales Tax That Has Already Been Paid, Richard Thompson Ainsworth

Faculty Scholarship

No other New England state is as vulnerable to Zappers as is the State of Massachusetts. Zappers and related software programming, Phantom-ware, facilitate an old tax fraud – skimming cash receipts. In this instance skimming is performed with modern electronic cash registers (ECRs).

Zappers are a global revenue problem, but to the best of this author’s knowledge they have not been uncovered in Massachusetts. A global perspective says: it is highly unlikely that Zappers are not in the Commonwealth – we just need to find them. In fact, using a Quebec template, tax losses from Zappers and related frauds in …

Developmental Incompetence, Due Process, And Juvenile Justice Policy, Elizabeth S. Scott, Thomas Grisso

Faculty Scholarship

In 2003, the Florida District Court of Appeal reversed the murder conviction and life sentence imposed on Lionel Tate, who was twelve years old when he killed his six-year-old neighbor. Since Lionel was reported to be the youngest person in modern times to be sent to prison for life, the case had generated considerable debate, and the decision was appealed on several grounds. What persuaded the appellate court that the conviction could not stand, however, was the trial court's rejection of a petition by Lionel's attorney for an evaluation of his client's competence to assist counsel and to make a …

A Mind To Blame: New Views On Involuntary Acts, Deborah W. Denno

Faculty Scholarship

This article examines the legal implications linked to recent scientific research on human consciousness. The article contends that groundbreaking revelations about consciousness expose the frailties of the criminal law's traditional dual dichotomies of conscious versus unconscious thought processes and voluntary versus involuntary acts. These binary doctrines have no valid scientific foundation and clash with other key criminal law defenses, primarily insanity. As a result, courts may adjudicate like individuals very differently based upon their (often unclear) understanding of these doctrines and the science that underlies them. This article proposes a compromise approach by recommending that the criminal law's concept of …

"Uncontrollable" Actions And The Eighth Amendment: Implications Of Powell V. Texas, Kent Greenawalt

Faculty Scholarship

No questions of criminal justice are more fundamental than the bases for imposing criminal punishment, yet the Federal Constitution says nothing explicit about them. It is, therefore, understandable that the increasing limitations imposed by constitutional interpretation upon procedures for ascertaining criminal guilt have not been accompanied by similar limits upon principles of criminal responsibility. That the difference in treatment is understandable does not, of course, necessarily mean it has been justified.

When the Court struck down a law punishing addiction in Robinson v. California in 1962, it was still unclear whether it was willing to become significantly implicated in developing …