Digital Commons Network^™

Ai Systems As State Actors, Kate Crawford, Jason M. Schultz

Faculty Articles

Many legal scholars have explored how courts can apply legal doctrines, such as procedural due process and equal protection, directly to government actors when those actors deploy artificial intelligence (AI) systems. But very little attention has been given to how courts should hold private vendors of these technologies accountable when the government uses their AI tools in ways that violate the law. This is a concerning gap, given that governments are turning to third-party vendors with increasing frequency to provide the algorithmic architectures for public services, including welfare benefits and criminal risk assessments. As such, when challenged, many state governments …

Consequential Sex: #Metoo, Masterpiece Cakeshop, And Private Sexual Regulation, Melissa Murray

Faculty Articles

The last sixty years have ushered in a tectonic shift in American sexual culture, from the sexual revolution—with its liberal attitudes toward sex and sexuality—to a growing recognition of rape culture and sexual harassment. The responses to these changes in sexual culture have varied. Conservatives, for their part, bemoan the liberalization of sexual mores and the rise of a culture where “anything goes.” And while progressives may cheer the liberalization of attitudes toward sex and sexuality and the growing recognition of sexual harassment and sexual assault, they lament the inadequacy of state efforts to combat sexual violence. Although these responses …

Democratic Policing Before The Due Process Revolution, Sarah A. Seo

Faculty Articles

According to prevailing interpretations of the Warren Court’s Due Process Revolution, the Supreme Court constitutionalized criminal procedure to constrain the discretion of individual officers. These narratives, however, fail to account for the Court’s decisions during that revolutionary period that enabled discretionary policing. Instead of beginning with the Warren Court, this Essay looks to the legal culture before the Due Process Revolution to provide a more coherent synthesis of the Court’s criminal procedure decisions. It reconstructs that culture by analyzing the prominent criminal law scholar Jerome Hall’s public lectures, Police and Law in a Democratic Society, which he delivered in 1952 …

Segregation By Citizenship, Emma Kaufman

Faculty Articles

For centuries, prisoners in the United States were housed together regardless of their citizenship status. That changed in 1999 when the federal government began to send noncitizens into separate prisons. Today, tens of thousands of people — more than half of all noncitizens in federal prison — live in an institution segregated by citizenship. The vast majority of these people are Mexican nationals. Nearly all of them are Latino. The rise of the all-foreign prison raises pressing questions about federal immigration power and noncitizens’ equal protection rights. Yet no legal scholarship examines these unusual institutions. Few even know they exist. …

Categorical Mistakes: The Flawed Framework Of The Armed Career Criminal Act And Mandatory Minimum Sentencing, Rachel E. Barkow

Faculty Articles

The Court’s current approach to the ACCA, the categorical approach, makes the best of a bad situation in a manner that is consistent with the Constitution’s requirements. Interpreting the ACCA as narrowly as possible and robustly enforcing the rule of lenity should be the Court’s other touchstones in this area in light of the harsh consequences the ACCA imposes and the vast discretion it gives prosecutors. But ultimately there is only so much the Court can do. It is up to Congress to fix its mistakes and, until it does, we can expect to see more ACCA cases on the …

Rulemaking And Inscrutable Automated Decision Tools, Katherine J. Strandburg

Faculty Articles

Complex machine learning models derived from personal data are increasingly used in making decisions important to peoples’ lives. These automated decision tools are controversial, in part because their operation is difficult for humans to grasp or explain. While scholars and policymakers have begun grappling with these explainability concerns, the debate has focused on explanations to decision subjects. This Essay argues that explainability has equally important normative and practical ramifications for decision-system design. Automated decision tools are particularly attractive when decisionmaking responsibility is delegated and distributed across multiple actors to handle large numbers of cases. Such decision systems depend on explanatory …

Strategic Games And Algorithmic Secrecy, Ignacio N. Cofone, Katherine J. Strandburg

Faculty Articles

We challenge a claim commonly made by industry and government representatives and echoed by legal scholarship: that algorithmic decision-making processes are better kept opaque or secret because otherwise decision-subjects will “game the system”, leading to inaccurate or unfair results. We show that the range of situations in which people are able to game decision-making algorithms is narrow, even when there is substantial disclosure. We then analyze how to identify when gaming is possible in light of (i) how tightly the decision-making proxies are tied to the factors that would ideally determine the outcome, (ii) how easily those proxies can be …

When Stop And Frisk Comes Home: Policing Public And Patrolled Housing, Alexis Karteron

Faculty Articles

In response to programmatic stop-and-frisk, police killings, and other recent controversies in American policing, many have called for “smart policing”—the evidence-based deployment of police resources. An often-heralded example of smart policing is hot spots policing, which involves directing police attention to locations where crime and disorder fester. It is difficult to argue with the logic of hot spots policing, and this Article does not do so. Instead, it critically examines how the Fourth Amendment operates when hot spots policing and similar targeted strategies are used in a common setting: public housing developments and their private counterparts. Largely because of mass …

Political Lawyering For The 21st Century, Deborah N. Archer

Faculty Articles

Legal education purports to prepare the next generation of lawyers capable of tackling the urgent and complex social justice challenges of our time. But law schools are failing in that public promise. Clinical education offers the best opportunity to overcome those failings by teaching the skills lawyers need to tackle systemic and interlocking legal and social problems. But too often even clinical education falls short: it adheres to conventional pedagogical methodologies that are overly narrow and, in the end, limit students’ abilities to manage today’s complex racial and social justice issues. This Article contends that clinical education needs to embrace …

How Courts In Criminal Cases Respond To Childhood Trauma, Deborah W. Denno

Faculty Scholarship

Neurobiological and epidemiological research suggests that abuse and adverse events experienced as a child can increase an adult’s risk of brain dysfunction associated with disorders related to criminality and violence. Much of this research is predictive, based on psychological evaluations of children; few studies have focused on whether or how criminal proceedings against adult defendants consider indicators of childhood trauma. This Article analyzes a subset of criminal cases pulled from an 800-case database created as part of an original, large-scale, empirical research project known as the Neuroscience Study. The 266 relevant cases are assessed to determine the extent to which, …

Brands Take A Stand For Good: The Effect Of Brand Activism On Social Media Engagement, Alexis A. Gray

Honors Theses and Capstones

Brands are entering an era where brand activism and corporate social responsibility strategies are holding a large influence on consumer purchase decision making, rather than the traditional brand product marketing. A major distribution outlet for the rising brand activism strategy is through social media, where users can directly interact with brands and other users surrounding major issues. Higher engagement with such activism campaigns suggests more consumer support for the brand, leading to higher sales performance potential. This study examines the influence of brand activism campaign qualities on social media engagement, specifically on the Twitter platform. Tweets for 8 different brands …

Privacy’S Political Economy And The State Of Machine Learning, Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar, Aziz Z. Huq

Public Law and Legal Theory Working Papers

Our aim in this essay is to consider how policymakers make decisions about government surveillance in what we might call the machine learning state –– a nation-state equipped with sufficient bureaucratic and technological capacity to rely extensively on machine learning techniques for surveillance, law enforcement, and national security. We focus particularly on the question of how the state’s political economy influences its decision to adopt privacy-relevant machine learning technologies. Since machine learning tools can also be deployed in many ways that are not pertinent to privacy, our focus therefore is on a specific subset of state uses of such technology …

Equality’S Understudies, Aziz Z. Huq

Public Law and Legal Theory Working Papers

Our Republic these days is riven by divides about what equality demands of us as private and public actors. Consider just a few recent examples:

• Harvard University is challenged in federal court for preferring African-Americans over other racial minorities, especially Asian-Americans, in their admissions pool^.1 Harvard’s flagship law review, meanwhile, faces its own suit over its preferment of minority candidates.²

• Virginia’s Governor Ralph Northam and its Attorney General Mark Herring are swept up into political controversy by news that both dressed in ‘blackface’ during their college or medical school days.³ The historical significance of ‘blackface’ …

A Right To A Human Decision, Aziz Z. Huq

Public Law and Legal Theory Working Papers

Recent advances in computational technologies have spurred anxiety about a shift of power from human to machine decision-makers. From prison sentences to loan approvals to college applications, corporate and state actors increasingly lean on machine learning tools (a subset of artificial intelligence) to allocate goods and to assign coercion. Machine-learning tools are perceived to be eclipsing, even extinguishing, human agency in ways that sacrifice important individual interests. An emerging legal response to such worries is a right to a human decision. European law has already embraced the idea in the General Data Protection Regulation. American law, especially in the criminal …

Essays On Applications Of Spatial Econometric Models, Jihu Zhang

Wayne State University Dissertations

Since the infamous riot of 1967, high crime rates and negative media reports have labeled the city of Detroit as one of the most dangerous cities in the U.S. For a better understanding of crime situation in Detroit, we discuss the spatial interactions of crime rates among block groups as well as the impact of socioeconomic variables on crime by using spatial autoregressive models, crime data, and socioeconomic data. In particular, we introduced a geographical methodology: inverse distance weighting (IDW), which is mainly used to estimate distance based weighting from a scattered set of points. This paper is an essential …

Clark Magazine, Winter 2019, Clark University

Clark Magazine

The Winter 2019. edition of Clark Magazine. Clark Magazine is a twice-yearly publication primarily geared towards Clark University Alumni.

The cover story is 'School of Rock: Talent agent Larry Webman '92 represents Coldplay, the Barenaked Ladies, and more bands you haven't heard of -- yet'.

A Decade's Tale: Consent Decrees And Police Use Of Disproportionate Excessive Force With Communities Of Color, Dasha J. Rhodes, David L. Robinson, Paul C. Archibald, Laurens Van Sluytman

Social Work Faculty Publications

According to the U.S. Department of Justice (US DOJ, 2016), African Americans have experienced disproportionate instances of police use of excessive force as a result of discriminatory practices and insufficient training. Officers are permitted to use appropriate force in specific situations; however, when force is excessive and deemed unnecessary, it then becomes an issue of concern. The U.S. Department of Justice was invited to investigate police departments that participated in the use of excessive force and a consent decree was developed with those departments to remedy the DOJ's findings. The researchers conducted a consent decree analysis examining government investigations of …

Developing A Culturally Responsive Assessment Model For Short-Term Study Abroad At An Urban Community College, Grace Pai, Katie Wilson

Publications and Research

The literature on assessing education abroad is dominated by studies using pre-/post-survey instruments to measure student growth across broad dimensions like global perspectives or intercultural competencies. Most studies also focus on study abroad programs in private, four-year or graduate schools. There is limited research assessing programs in community colleges serving underrepresented students, despite the increasing diversity of education abroad participants. This article addresses that gap, and even more important, illustrates the process of how an urban, Minority Serving Institution-designated community college designed a culturally responsive assessment framework—one that that combines quantitative analysis of surveys with qualitative analysis of student e-Portfolios— …

Graduate Catalog And Student Handbook 2019-2020, Nova Southeastern University

Abraham S. Fischler College of Education and School of Criminal Justice Graduate Course Catalogs

No abstract provided.

The Structural Underpinnings Of Access To Justice: Building A Solid Pro Bono Infrastructure, Latonia Haney Keith

Mitchell Hamline Law Review

No abstract provided.

The Relationship Between Race-Related Stress And Coping Strategies Of African American Men, Rynata Trevyce Leach

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

The purpose of this research was to identify coping mechanisms that African American men use when they perceive race-related stressors. Race-related stress derives from the occurrence of racism and discrimination that individuals, generally African Americans in the United States, experience in addition to daily life stress. Race-related stress may involve cultural racism, individual racism, or institutional racism. The coping mechanisms used by African American men when perceiving race-related stress were identified through the use of an online survey that consisted of 3 instruments: The Index of Race-Related Stress-Brief Version (IRRS-B), Brief Coping Orientation to Problems Experienced Inventory (Brief COPE), and …

Jail Administrators' Compliance With The Prison Rape Elimination Act, Leone M. Lee

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

Correctional institutions across the United States continue to experience prisoner sexual assault despite the enactment of the Prison Rape Elimination Act of 2003 (PREA). The purpose of this correlational study was to examine the association between jail administrators' difficulty complying with the PREA and their transformational leadership styles. The theories of punctuated equilibrium theory and general strain theory formed the theoretical framework of the study. The data were collected through an Internet-based survey from 22 local and regional jail administrators from the East Coast. Data analysis using Pearson's correlation coefficient was performed on leadership scores to test the hypotheses. There …

The Effects Of Popular Culture On Public Attitudes Toward Female Parolees, Annette Smith Durrette

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

The depiction of offenders in drama shows may play a significant role in how society views them. The purpose of using Gerbner's cultivation theory in this study is the belief that the frequency of watching, and the content of television shows can influence public perception. Previous research has used cultivation theory to investigate television shows, but no effort was made to differentiate between genres. There is an important gap in the current literature because few studies have examined how particular television shows influence society's views of female parolees. This study intends to address that weakness by limiting the study to …

Contents

University of Chicago Law Review

Contents and editorial information.

About A Revolution: Toward Integrated Treatment In Drug And Mental Health Courts, Sara Gordon

North Carolina Law Review

No abstract provided.

Lots Of Squeeze, Little (Or No) Juice: North Carolina's Habitual Misdemeanor Larcency Statute, A Law Where Results Do Not Justify Costs, William O. Walker

North Carolina Law Review

No abstract provided.

Beyond Vawa: Protecting Native Women From Sexual Violence Within Existing Tribal Jurisdictional Structures, Jessica Allison

University of Colorado Law Review

One in three American Indian women will be raped in her lifetime. This rampant assault is only exacerbated by the fact that tribes have not been able to prosecute non- Indians for any crime, including rape, since the 1970s. The Violence Against Women Reauthorization Act of 2013 took a small step toward filling this jurisdictional hole by creating provisions under which tribes can prosecute certain non- Indian defendants for a limited set of sexual violence crimes. However, VAWA is not enough to protect Indian women from the astronomical rates of violence they experience. This Comment explores mechanisms used by tribes …

Reforming Service Of Process: An Access-To-Justice Framework, Andrew C. Budzinski

University of Colorado Law Review

Over the past few decades, the number of pro se litigants in state civil courts has risen exponentially-between 75 percent and 90 percent of litigants in family law cases, landlordtenant disputes, and small claims actions did not have a lawyer in 2015. Procedural rules governing those proceedings, however, often impose requirements that disproportionately burden unrepresented litigants, fail to optimally protect the due process rights of those parties, and thereby deny them access to justice. Rules governing service of process illustrate this problem by requiring litigants to find a third party to hand-deliver court papers to a defendant directly or to …

Press Speakers And The First Amendment Rights Of Listeners, Ronnell Anderson Jones

University of Colorado Law Review

No abstract provided.

From Aspirational To Prescriptive Capacity Building: Post-Conflict States, Rule Of Law, And Hybrid International Justice, Daimeon Dean Shanks

University of Colorado Law Review

Mass-atrocity crimes present unique accountability challenges, challenges that are often exacerbated by the social and political conditions that facilitated the commitment of the crimes in the first place. International accountability mechanisms were developed to address these obstacles by providing a means of holding individuals accountable for international crimes when their host states were incapable of doing so or unwilling to do so. The first iteration of these tribunals, the international military tribunals, gained prominence following World War II, and a second-generation of non-military international tribunals were created in response to the mass atrocities committed in the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda. …