Digital Commons Network^™

Police Surveillance And The Perils Of Techno-Solutionism, Prithika Balakrishnan

Michigan Journal of Race and Law

This Article charts domestic law enforcement’s use of video surveillance, beginning in the backlash to the Civil Rights movement in the late 1960s, continuing through the War on Terror and, more recently, in the context of the post-George Floyd public critiques of policing. The undergirding philosophy of policing’s embrace of surveillance technology is techno-solutionism, the view that all complex social situations can be simplified to measurable data primed for quick-fix, unbiased, algorithmic answers. While technology may have initially been adopted by police to respond to specific problems, it has changed the problems themselves, altered the array of potential solutions, and …

Legal Ethics Of Ai Snake Oil: Navigating The Hype, Harm, And Hope Of Legal Ai, Drew Simshaw

Michigan Law Review

A review of AI Snake Oil.By Arvind Narayanan and Sayash Kapoor.

The Court And The Killing State, Eric Berger

Michigan Law Review

A review of Secrets of the Killing State: The Untold Story of Lethal Injection. By Corinna Barrett Lain.

Senior Day 2026, University Of Michigan Law School

Commencement and Honors Materials

Program for the May 11, 2026 University of Michigan Law School Senior Day.

Regulating Ai Beyond Product Liability, Shruti Trikanad

Michigan Technology Law Review

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is being used by governments across the world to enforce regulatory mandates, adjudicate benefits and privileges, predict and analyze risks, and much more. Although this has significant potential to increase efficiency and responsiveness, it also comes with several risks of transparency, government accountability, and the amplification of discrimination and bias. It is crucial we oversee and regulate these AI systems effectively. This essay argues against the models that current regulatory frameworks are adopting to govern AI use: those resembling product liability.

Through the lens of the European Union's AI Act and Liability Directive, it highlights the unsuitability …

Book Review: Automobiles, Cultures And The Question Of Law, Stephen M. Young

Journal of Law and Mobility

Unsettling Colonial Automobilities: Criminalisation and Contested Sovereignties is a compelling interdisciplinary and multileveled study that sits at the intersection of law, criminology, settler colonial studies, and cultural analysis. The authors are well-suited to this task. They include Professors Harry Blagg, with expertise in First Nations community-engaged criminology; Thalia Anthony, from legal and carceral studies; Wiradjuri scholar Juanita Sherwood, who studies Indigenous health and community research; and Kieran Tranter, an expert in cultural legal theory. Together, they offer a layered interrogation of how the motor vehicle and automobility shape the settler colonial ordering of Australia.

This review is comprised of three …

Crypto Kleptocracy, W. Robert Thomas, Jeffery Y. Zhang

Michigan Law Review Online

Many Americans are worrying about whether they will soon be living in a postdemocracy autocracy. But in the meantime, they may already be living in a crypto-fueled kleptocracy. Less than one year into his second presidential term, Donald Trump has reportedly taken his wealth to new heights by embracing, both as a businessman and a politician, the crypto industry. Trump’s family businesses are involved in minting Trump-themed meme coins, creating America- themed stablecoins, and mining crypto assets—so successfully that most of Trump’s wealth is likely now from crypto, not real estate. All the while, the Trump Administration is rolling back …

Disability Rights On Probation And Parole, Alexis Karteron

Michigan Law Review

This Article addresses disability discrimination in community supervision programs, a large—but frequently overlooked—component of the criminal legal system and important contributor to America’s mass incarceration crisis. The long-standing concerns of legal scholars and advocates about disability discrimination in prisons and policing, particularly against people with mental health disabilities, apply with equal measure to probation and parole. This Article examines the experiences of people with intellectual/developmental, cognitive, and mental health disabilities to understand how disability discrimination manifests in probation and parole programs and identifies numerous policies and practices that likely run afoul of two major federal disability rights laws: the Americans …

The Victims’ Rights Mismatch, Lee Kovarsky

Michigan Law Review

A puzzling mismatch lurks inside victims’ rights law. Victims’ rights are most easily justified when held by living victims, but the cultural movement has triumphed largely as a response to crime-caused death. This Article identifies the mismatch between victims’ rights and their justifications in dead-victim cases, analyzes the normative questions involved, and recommends an institutional response. The mismatch persists because American jurisdictions assign a single bundle of rights to all people denominated as “victims.” In dead-victim cases, however, the primary bearers of interpersonal harm are gone. Instead, their rights are assumed by aggrieved family members and legal estates. In those …

Reforming Abolition, Daniel Fryer

Michigan Law Review

Abolition is an elusive concept, which allows people with various political views to identify with the idea. This Article unpacks some of the conceptual features that lead to its elusiveness. This imprecision has empowered some to point out the diverse—if not inconsistent—positions that self-identified abolitionists take when articulating the contemporary abolition movement’s demands. The question then becomes whether the movement could protect itself from being a rootless position with insufficient tools to guide change. I suggest that it can. Rather than getting caught up in debates about abolition’s ends, I propose that more attention be paid to abolition’s grounds. By …

Burdens Of Proof In Criminal Procedure, Eve Brensike Primus

Articles

The Supreme Court’s haphazard approach to allocating burdens of proof in criminal procedure has created a system in which constitutional rights can be rendered meaningless simply because defendants are required to prove things they cannot possibly know. Even though allocations of the burden of proof often drive litigation outcomes, the Court has failed to establish clear burden allocation structures for cases arising under the Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, and Fourteenth Amendments, leaving lower courts split about how to allocate the burdens. When the Supreme Court does allocate burdens, it often does so without explanation or consideration of key factors. Recent Supreme …

Prosecutor Transparency Project: Racial Disparities Study (Washtenaw County, Michigan), Grady Bridges, J. J. Prescott

Law & Economics Working Papers

This report investigates and estimates racial disparities in prosecutorial decision-making in the Washtenaw County Prosecutor’s Office (WCPO) from 2017 to 2022. The analysis relies on currently available data resources at the WCPO and examines decision-making at four different junctures in the prosecutorial process: 1) case approval (i.e., warrant authorization) and charge selection, 2) habitual-offender designation (under Michigan law), 3) plea bargaining, and 4) diversion and deferral opportunities. Racial disparities appear most visibly at the earliest stages of the criminal justice process, with People of Color substantially overrepresented in the warrant requests the WCPO receives from law enforcement. The data further …

Reasoning From Injustice, Robert L. Tsai

Michigan Journal of Race and Law

In a series of lectures at Yale Law School, the Harvard political theorist Judith Shklar critiqued leading models of justice as overly abstract and lacking a realistic account of the social dynamics that perpetuate injustice. In this essay, Professor Tsai builds on Shklar’s account of injustice as a social phenomenon by offering a structural reading of key literary texts that explore the nature of legal injustice—from the Book of Job to Harriett Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Frederick Douglass’s The Heroic Slave. A close reading of these texts permits us to flesh out Shklar’s observations and “give injustice …

(Re)Birth Of A Nation: Reconstruction’S Unfinished Business, Zanita E. Fenton

Michigan Journal of Race and Law

The irony, alluding to the title of the 1915 silent movie Birth of a Nation, seeks to make conspicuous the counter-stories that more authentically account for the “birth” and development of American society. Ku Klux Klan-sponsored propaganda designed to evoke hyper-racist fearmongering and perpetuate sexual paternalism over White women, the plot from Birth of a Nation reflects the paradigmatic race-bait: relentless pursuit of a White woman by a Black man. This storyline was fictionalized, culturally unrealistic and deliberately omitted the very real sexual exploitation of Black women and girls. Birth of a Nation parallels Constitutional history that marginalizes supplemental …

The “Founder’S Gaze”: How The Fourth Amendment Is A Surveillance Technology That Enables Ai To Scale Control Over The Subaltern, Diego H. Alcalá Laboy

Michigan Journal of Race and Law

Much has been written about the rise of artificial intelligence and machine learning applications and how the current Fourth Amendment law has been unable to mitigate the privacy harm that these tools produce. This article explores how the development and usage of AI and machine learning models is dependent on the originalism principles of Fourth Amendment Law. Utilizing Critical Surveillance Studies and Anticolonial Theory, I posit that the Fourth Amendment is a surveillance technology that categorizes conduct, persons, and places to impose the material conditions for the subjugation of historically minoritized communities within the United States. Furthermore, this article explores …

The Expungement Process: Survey Evidence On Applicant Experiences, Mira Edmonds, J.J. Prescott, Sonja Starr, German Marquez Alcala

Articles

Tens of millions of Americans with publicly accessible criminal convictions face significant collateral consequences that affect their employment, housing, and family life, which not only harm these individuals but also limit society’s access to their skills, productivity, and participation. In response, policymakers have enlarged the scope and enhanced the accessibility of criminal-record expungement laws. Little is known, however, about how individuals perceive, navigate, and take advantage of these new, broader laws. This Article presents findings from a large-scale survey of 1,439 expungement applicants and recipients in Detroit, conducted in partnership with Project Clean Slate (PCS), a city initiative assisting residents …

Redesigning Post-Incarceration Employment Tax Credits: Making Work Opportunity Credits Work For Former Felons, Stephanie Hunter Mcmahon

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

Former felons have a significantly higher unemployment rate than other groups of American workers. This unemployment increases recidivism as well as broader societal problems. Consequently, Congress enacted the Work Opportunity Tax Credit to encourage employers to hire former felons (and other groups of targeted workers) by offsetting their wages. For the credit to increase employment, employers must know whether potential workers would likely qualify for the credit before hiring decisions are made. However, the growing Ban the Box Movement seeks to defer or eliminate conviction history questions in hiring. After examining the credit’s stated purpose, its operating mechanism, and some …

Senior Day 2025, University Of Michigan Law School

Commencement and Honors Materials

Program for the May 12, 2025 University of Michigan Law School Senior Day.

Bowe V. United States: Brief Of Federal Courts Scholars As Amici Curiae In Support Of Petitioner, Leah Litman, Eve Brensike Primus

Appellate Briefs

Amici curiae are law professors who research, study, teach, and write about the writ of habeas corpus and federal postconviction relief. They share an interest in seeing habeas law applied in a way that ensures the just adjudication of claims.

Taking Revolution Seriously, Zohra Ahmed

Michigan Law Review

A review of Tip of the Spear: Black Radicalism, Prison Repression, and the Long Attica Revolt. By Orisanmi Burton.

Truth, Fiction, And Abolition, Xiao Wang, Samuel Weiss

Michigan Law Review

A review of Chain-Gang All-Stars. By Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah.

Abolition By Algorithm, Peter N. Salib

Michigan Law Review

In one sense, America’s newest abolitionist movement—advocating the elimination of policing and prison—has been a success. Following the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests, a small group of self-described radicals convinced a wide swath of ordinary liberals to accept a sweeping claim: Mere reforms cannot meaningfully reduce prison and policing’s serious harms. Only elimination can. On the other hand, abolitionists have failed to secure lasting policy change. The difficulty is crime. In 2021, following a nationwide uptick in homicides, liberal support for abolitionist proposals collapsed. Despite being newly “abolition curious,” left-leaning voters consistently rejected concrete abolitionist policies. Faced with the difficult …

Deputization And Privileged White Violence, Ekow N. Yankah

Articles

A number of high-profile and racially charged killings, such as Trayvon Martin’s, Kenneth Herring’s, Ahmaud Arbery’s, and Jordan Neely’s, have been at the hands of civilians declaring themselves the law. These deaths stemmed from a phenomenon best described as “deputization.” Deputization describes a latent legal power that has empowered White people throughout American history to claim authority to enforce the law, as they see it, upon racial minorities generally and Black people in particular. This power turned the ancient common law duty to police all felons in England into a specific American common law duty to police Blacks. From the …

Perttu V. Richards: Brief Of Law Professors As Amici Curiae In Support Of Respondent, Margo Schlanger

Appellate Briefs

Amici are professors of law who have studied, taught, and written about prisoner litigation and about rights to jury trials. They submit this brief to share their views, based on that experience, on the proper interpretation of the Prison Litigation Reform Act) in light of the important jury trial rights at stake and the practical realities of prisoner litigation.

Perttu V. Richards: Brief Of Law Professors As Amici Curiae In Support Of Respondent, Margo Schlanger

Appellate Briefs

Amici are professors of law who have studied, taught, and written about prisoner litigation and about rights to jury trials. They submit this brief to share their views, based on that experience, on the proper interpretation of the Prison Litigation Reform Act) in light of the important jury trial rights at stake and the practical realities of prisoner litigation.

Identifying The Guilty, Protecting The Innocent: Amending The Federal Rules Of Evidence To Address Admissibility Of Eyewitness Identification, Louisa M. A. Heiny

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

Mistaken eyewitness identification is among the most common factors in wrongful conviction cases. Indeed, hundreds of innocent defendants have been convicted for a crime they did not commit, their fate sealed by an eyewitness who convincingly, but mistakenly, testified, “That’s the one!”

Scientific researchers have documented the fallibility of eyewitness identification for decades. Their collective work has produced recommendations for eyewitness identification reform, focusing on procedural problems most likely to result in mistaken identification. The law in this area, however, has not kept pace with the science. Rather than representing a cohesive series of safeguards against inaccurate eyewitness identifications, federal …

Generative Artificial Intelligence: Legal Ethics Issues, Kincaid Brown

Law Librarian Scholarship

Generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) is transforming nearly every sector of society including the practice of law. Legal professionals are increasingly using AI tools for research, drafting, contract review, and even predicting judicial outcomes with as many as one third of respondents to a survey using GenAI daily. But with this rapid adoption come questions that go beyond efficiency and instead point to the core of legal ethics including issues such as competence, confidentiality, and professional judgment.

Celebrating The Fiske Fellowship Program: 2001-2025, University Of Michigan Law School

Event Materials

This program contains statements of impact from the 2001-2025 recipients of Fiske Fellowships.

Some information was shared in 2022 and may not reflect current roles and/or responsibilities of Fiske Fellows.

What’S Left Of The New Deal State?, Sandeep Singh Dhaliwal

Michigan Law Review Online

A vast body of scholarship situates itself in the New Deal era. Another extensive collection explores the history of criminal justice in the United States. To date, however, there has been little effort to bring these conversations together. New Deal Law and Order, written by legal historian Anthony Gregory, fills this conspicuous gap. Gregory remarkably narrates the New Deal era through the lens of President Franklin Roosevelt’s “war on crime” (p. 1), challenging how we think about both the New Deal’s legacy and the foundations of the modern security state.

Police Gatekeeping, Emily M. Poor

Michigan Journal of Race and Law

The role of policing in American society is more pervasive (and less visible) than many acknowledge. Police do not just patrol, arrest, and keep peace – they also gatekeep. Many and varied ostensibly non-criminal processes rely on police fact-finding to adjudicate claims, establish eligibility for resources, and take adverse action against individuals. This Article examines the phenomenon of police gatekeeping, both as a practical barrier to resources and remedies and as a hegemonic mechanism to construct the social conception of truth.

Recognizing the ways in which civil society relies upon police as gatekeepers of both practical resources and the social …