Digital Commons Network^™

Ethics Of Using Artificial Intelligence To Augment Drafting Legal Documents, David Hricik

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Skynet is not and may never be self-aware, but machines are al-ready doing legal research, drafting legal documents, negotiating disputes such as traffic tickets and divorce schedules, and even drafting patent applications. Machines learn from us, and each other, to augment the ability of lawyers to represent clients—and even to replace lawyers completely. While it also threatens lawyers’ jobs, the exponential increase in the capacity of machines to transmit, store, and process data presents the opportunity for lawyers to use these services to provide better, cheaper, or faster legal representation to clients. By way of familiar example, instead of determining …

The Law Firm Chief Innovation Officer: Goals, Roles, And Holes, Michele M. Destefano

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No abstract provided.

Things Fall Apart, Anthony V. Alfieri

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Introductory Essay: Things Fall Apart: Hard Choices In Public Interest Law, Anthony V. Alfieri

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No abstract provided.

The End Of Bargaining In The Digital Age, Saul Levmore, Frank Fagan

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Surrogacy Professionalism, June Carbone, Christina O. Miller

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Adminization: Gatekeeping Consumer Contracts, Yonathan A. Arbel

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Large companies and debt collectors frequently file unmeritorious claims against consumers Recent highprofile actions brought by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau "CFPB" against JP Morgan Citibank and large debt collectors illustrate the breadth and importance of this phenomenon Due to the limited financial power of individuals consumers often do not defend against such baseless claims which results in the entry of millions of default judgments every year To combat this problem policymakers and scholars have explored a variety of courtbased solutions that would make it easier for consumers to defend in court but these prove ineffectualTo solve the problem of …

Adminization: Gatekeeping Consumer Contracts, Yonathan A. Arbel

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Large companies and debt collectors frequently file unmeritorious claims against consumers. Recent high-profile actions brought by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau against J.P. Morgan, Citibank, and other large debt collectors illustrate the breadth and importance of this phenomenon. Due to the limited financial power of individuals, consumers often do not defend against such baseless claims, which results in the entry of millions of default judgments every year. To combat this problem, policymakers and scholars have explored a variety of court-based solutions that would make it easier for consumers to defend in court, but these prove ineffectual.

To solve the problem …

Collaborative Enforcement, Andrew Elmore

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Labor standards enforcement in the low-wage workplace has long suffered from a lack of capacity, expertise and remedies that blunt the impact of public and private enforcers alike. The question of how to address these pathologies in state and local workplace regulation has gained new urgency with the virtual explosion of regional labor lawmaking and the deregulatory impulses of the new federal administration.

This Article identifies collaboration between state and local agencies and private, public interest organizations ("PIOs") as one pathway to address these enforcement gaps, by amplifying the deterrent effect of public and private enforcement and by improving legal …

Happy Birthday Siri! Dialing In Legal Ethics For Artificial Intelligence, Smartphones, And Real Time Lawyers, Jan L. Jacobowitz, Justin Ortiz

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Judges Behaving Badly - Clinics Fighting Back: The Struggle For Special Immigrant Juveniles In State Dependency Courts In The Age Of Trump, Bernard P. Perlmutter

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Selling Attorney's Fees, Anthony J. Sebok

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Attorneys in the United States are under increasing pressure to change and adopt practices commonly found in the world of finance and business. Over the past thirty years, the bar and legal academics have debated what to do; the focus of this debate has been whether to change Model Rule of Professional Conduct 5.4 to allow partnerships between attorneys and nonlawyers or partnerships owned by nonlawyer shareholders.

One of the reasons attorneys are debating changes to Rule 5.4 is that the practice of law depends on capital, and the old methods for raising capital are no longer sufficient. Rather than …

Encore Professor: Crafting A New Story For Life After The Legal Academy Aals Contributions, Steven H. Hobbs

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Economic Empowerment In The Alabama Black Belt: A Transactional Law Clinic Theory And Model, Casey E. Faucon

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Duty To Protect: Enhancing The Federal Framework To Prevent Childhood Lead Poisoning And Exposure To Environmental Harm, Allyson E. Gold, Emily A. Benfer, Emily Coffey, Mona Hanna-Attisha, Bruce Lanphear, Helen Y. Li, Norton, Ruth Ann;, David Rosner, Kate Walz

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Scientific evidence indisputably demonstrates that lead poisoning causes permanent neurological damage and numerous co-morbidities for children and adults. Exposure to lead hazards irreversibly harms individuals and, left unchecked, can devastate communities into the future. In recognition of these threats, the President's Task Force on Environmental Health Risks and Safety Risks to Children (Task Force) was established by Executive Order in 1997. The original Task Force created the first coordinated federal response to eliminate childhood lead poisoning in the United States and set an ambitious ten-year timeline to achieve its goals of prevention, treatment, research, and progress management. However, the most …

Socioeconomic Status Discrimination, Danieli Evans

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This Article makes the case for protecting socioeconomic status (SES) under discrimination statutes that govern employment, housing, education, voting, public accommodations, and credit/lending. While others have argued that poverty should be a protected class under the Fourteenth Amendment, the courts have rejected this idea. The possibility of protecting SES under discrimination statutes has received little consideration. I argue that this idea deserves more serious attention. I advance four arguments in favor of adding SES to the list of protected traits. Two moral, one political, and one legal.

First and most straightforward, the values animating discrimination law apply to poverty: Existing …

Work Only We Can Do: Professional Responsibility In An Age Of Automation, Sherman J. Clark

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Automation can help us do our work as lawyers; but in the process, it should also force us to be more thoughtful about what our work really is or ought to be.' The challenge for the profession, as I see it, is not simply to survive the advent of new technology, nor even merely to make effective use of new tools. While addressing those immediate concerns, we should also welcome the concomitant opportunity to develop and refine our understanding of what it means to be a good and ethical lawyer. As technological developments free us from and prevent us from …

Improving Access To Justice In State Courts With Platform Technology, J. J. Prescott

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Access to justice often equates to access to state courts, and for millions of Americans, using state courts to resolve their disputes—often with the government—is a real challenge. Reforms are regularly proposed in the hopes of improving the situation (e.g., better legal aid), but until recently a significant part of the problem has been structural. Using state courts today for all but the simplest of legal transactions entails at the very least traveling to a courthouse and meeting with a decision maker in person and in a one-on-one setting. Even minimally effective access, therefore, requires time, transportation, and very often …

The Death Of Rules And Standards, Anthony Casey, Anthony Niblett

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Factors In Fairness And Emotion In Online Case Resolution Systems, Youyang Hou, Cliff Lampe, Maximilian Bulinski, J. J. Prescott

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Courts are increasingly adopting online information and communication technology, creating a need to consider the potential consequences of these tools for the justice system. Using survey responses from 209 litigants who had recently used an online case resolution system, we investigate factors that influenced litigants’ experiences of fairness and emotional feelings toward court officials. Our results show that ease of using the online case resolution system, the outcome of the case, and a litigant’s perceptions of procedural justice are positively associated both with whether the litigant views the process as fair and whether the litigant ultimately feels positive emotions toward …

The Downside Of Requiring Additional Experiential Courses In Law School, Douglas A. Kahn

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In recent years, the bar has expressed dissatisfaction with what is considered by some to be inadequate preparation of law students to begin practicing law immediately after graduation. There are several reasons why this has become a matter of concern for the legal profession. The profession itself has undergone significant changes. Although there are a few exceptions, most law firms no longer wish to spend time training their young associates or allowing them much time to develop the skills they need. First, clients are unwilling to pay for the time a young lawyer spends in acquiring needed skills. Second, the …

Medical-Legal Partnerships With Communities: Legal Empowerment To Transform Care, Tamar Ezer

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Medical-legal partnerships (MLPs) integrate legal services into health care settings to provide holistic care and address the social determinants of health. This article brings a legal-empowerment lens to MLP work, arguing for a stronger focus on communities. It examines the application to MLPs of bringing services to communities, investing in rights literacy, and partnering with community-based paralegals. It then outlines the potential for a transformation in health and legal services to a rights - rather than needs-based framework where communities are active partners in program design and development.

A Tale Of Two Clinics: Similarities And Differences In Evidence Of The Clinic Effect On The Development Of Law Students' Ethical And Altruistic Professional Identities, Jonel Newman, Donald Nicolson

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My Life In Crime: An Intellectual History Of The Juvenile Court, Barry Feld

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Inner-City Anti-Poverty Campaigns, Anthony V. Alfieri

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This article offers a defense of outsider, legal-political intervention and community triage in inner-city anti-poverty campaigns under circumstances of widespread urban social disorganization, public and private sector neglect, and nonprofit resource scarcity. In mounting this defense, the Article revisits the roles of lawyers, nonprofit legal services organizations, and university-housed law school clinics in contemporary anti-poverty, civil rights, and social justice movements, in part by chronicling the emergence of a faith-based municipal equity movement in Miami, Florida. The Article proceeds in four parts. Part I introduces the notion of community triage as a means of addressing the impoverished and segregated aftermath …

Ending The Pursuit: Releasing Attorney Advertising Regulations At The Intersection Of Technology And The First Amendment, Jan L. Jacobowitz

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Addressing Cultural Bias In The Legal Profession, Debra Chopp

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Over the past two decades, there has been an outpouring of scholarship that explores the problem of implicit bias. Through this work, commentators have taken pains to define the phenomenon and to describe the ways in which it contributes to misunderstanding, discrimination, inequality, and more. This article addresses the role of implicit cultural bias in the delivery of legal services. Lawyers routinely represent clients with backgrounds and experiences that are vastly different from their own, and the fact of these differences can impede understanding, communication, and, ultimately, effective representation. While other professions, such as medicine and social work, have adopted …

Stress Hardiness And Lawyers, Pamela Bucy Pierson, Ashley Hamilton, Michael Pepper, Megan Root

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This article empirically analyzes original data to look at stress and stress hardiness in the legal profession A number of studies address stress in the legal profession and its impact on the mental health of lawyers Our study is the first to examine stress hardiness in the legal profession Drawing on quantitative data gathered from 20132016 in surveys of 530 law students and lawyers and qualitative data from 106 indepth interviews with lawyers and building on the work of research psychologists Salvatore Maddi and Suzanne Kobasa we look at whether some lawyers more stress hardy than others and if so …

Lawyer Resilience Alabama Lawyer Assistance Program, Pamela Bucy Pierson

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Sovereignty And Social Change In The Wake Of India's Recent Sodomy Cases, Deepa Das Acevedo

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American constitutional law scholars have long questioned whether courts can really drive social reform and this position remains largely unchallenged even in the wake of recent landmark decisions affecting the LGBT community In contrast court watchers in India "” spurred by developments in a special type of legal action developed in the late 1970s known as "public interest litigation" or "PIL" "” have only recently begun questioning the judiciary's ability to promote progressive social change Indian scholarship on this point has veered between despair that PIL cases no longer reliably produce good outcomes for India's most disadvantaged and optimism that …