Digital Commons Network^™

Natural Language Processing In The Legal Domain, Daniel Martin Katz, Dirk Hartung, Lauritz Gerlach, Abhik Jana, Michael J. Ii Bommarito

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

In this paper, we summarize the current state of the field of NLP and Law with a specific focus on recent technical and substantive developments. To support our analysis, we construct and analyze a corpus of more than six hundred NLP and Law related papers published over the past decade. Our analysis highlights several major trends. Namely, we document an increasing number of papers written, tasks undertaken, and languages covered over the course of the past decade. We observe an increase in the sophistication of the methods which researchers deployed in this applied context. Slowly but surely, Legal NLP is …

Gender And The Social Structure Of Exclusion In U.S. Corporate Law, Matthew C. Jennejohn, Afra Afsharipour

Faculty Scholarship

Law develops through collective effort. A single judge may write a judicial opinion, but only after an (often large) group of lawyers choose litigation strategies, craft arguments, and present their positions. Despite their important role in the legal process, these networks of lawyers are almost uniformly overlooked in legal scholarship—a black box in a discipline otherwise obsessed with institutional detail.

This Article focuses upon a particularly crucial way that the structure of professional networks may shape the path of the law. Prior qualitative research suggests that networks are a crucial source of information, mentoring, and opportunity, and that those social …

Disability Misappropriation, Ruth Colker

American University Law Review

This Article argues that disability misappropriation is a systemic problem that undermines movement toward disability justice. By disability misappropriation, this Article refers to the tendency of the political right to assert a false concern for disability issues in service of a political agenda that actually harms the disability community. This tactic has influenced the adverse treatment of disabled people in the educational, institutional, and reproductive arenas. From birth to death, it has often had an adverse influence on the lives of disabled people as they receive inadequate and coercive health care, poor education, and limited housing options. While federal law …

It Takes Two To Incorporate: The Role Of Patent Co-Ownership In Inventor Choice Of Business Form, Shawn P. Miller

American University Law Review

The literature on the theory of the firm and the reasons why entrepreneurs choose one type of business organization over another is massive. However, few empirical studies have been conducted to test the importance of the various proposed determinants of choice of legal form of organization in real-world industries. This paper helps fill that gap through an econometric investigation of the differences in the characteristics of two groups of independent inventors engaged in the business of patent monetization: inventors operating as sole proprietors and those operating through business organizations, almost always LLCs or close corporations.

The results suggest that commonly …

A Contractual Relationship With Environmental Justice, Seema Kakade

American University Law Review

While corporations have long grappled with environmental issues, environmental justice is different. Corporations regularly manage compliance with environmental permits over a polluting facility’s long lifespan. Justice issues, however, are a fast-growing space for corporations as they wrestle with employee, government, customer, and public demands to step up for the communities that are directly impacted by the pollution their facilities produce. This Article explores the relationship between corporate polluters and impacted communities, with a focus on private-ordering tools like contracts. Such a focus enriches environmental justice law’s traditional focus on government decisionmakers, moving instead to corporate decision-making about where, how, and …

Living A Nightmare: A Study On The Reluctance Of Native American Women To Report Violent Crimes To Police, Misty Marie Neal

Theses and Dissertations

To address this problem, this study will explore, if at all, the differences and relationships between Native American women’s reluctance to report a violent crime to the police with their perception of police, previous interactions with police, prior victimization, tribal affiliation, and specific demographic factors. The population for this research will be Native American women from federally recognized tribes between 18 and 55 years of age. In addition, the participant's marital status, sexual affiliation, religion, level of education, and geographic location will be examined. From this population, a sample size of 500 - 600 participants will be constructed for this …

Expanded Criminal Defense Lawyering, Ronald Wright, Jenny Roberts

Hofstra Law Faculty Scholarship

This review collects and critiques the academic literature on criminal defense lawyering, with an emphasis on empirical work. Research on criminal defense attorneys in the United States has traditionally emphasized scarcity of resources: too many people facing criminal charges who are “too poor to pay” for counsel and not enough funding to pay for the constitutionally mandated lawyers. Scholars have focused on the capacity of different delivery systems, such as public defender offices, to change the ultimate outcomes in criminal cases within their tight budgetary constraints. Over the decades, however, theoretical understandings of the defense attorney's work have expanded to …

2023 Finance Calendar, Amanda Christensen, Melanie Jewkes, Andrea Schmutz, Alicia Nelson-Bell, Vincenza Vicari-Bentley, Lisa Cox

All Current Publications

This 2023 calendar from Empowering Financial Wellness, Utah State University Extension, outlines small monthly steps to improve personal finances throughout the year.

Services And Impact Of Ict Application On Job Performance In The Dissemination Of Information In Special Library: A Case Study Of Niger State Judiciary Library, Minna, Abdulkadir Mustapha Gana, Hussaini Musa, Abu Isa Omali

Library Philosophy and Practice (e-journal)

The deployment of technological innovation in libraries has been one of the underlying motivations for the application of Information Communication Technology (ICT) on job performance in dissemination of information in judiciary special library. ICT helps to improve the special library service to the users to which the library is of help to. The purpose of the study is to determine types of available ICT, to ascertain ICT services, to evaluate the impact of ICT on job performance in Niger State Judiciary Library. Descriptive method of research design was used to gather data from eighteen (18) respondents comprising paraprofessional and …

The Ultimate Injustice: States' Failure To Take Steps To Prevent Wrongful Convictions And, When Wrongful Convictions Are Exposed, To Provide Adequate Assistance To Exonerees, Natalie Lahera

FIU Law Review

Among the many rights guaranteed by the Constitution are the rights to a presumption of innocence, equal protection, due process, a speedy trial, a trial by jury, and legal counsel, if indigent and charged with a serious crime. But those rights do not ensure that the justice system succeeds every time. The United States has exonerated over 3,000 individuals since 1989. The exonerees have collectedly lost over 26,700 years of their lives. Each exoneration has provided insight into the causes of wrongful convictions, the issues with current compensation laws, and even the changes that need to be implemented to avoid …

The Public Defender Movement In The Age Of Mass Incarceration: Georgia's Experience, Robert L. Tsai

Faculty Scholarship

Focusing on the efforts of the Southern Center for Human Rights, this article offers a grassroots history of the creation of the first statewide public defender in the State of Georgia in 2003. Whereas federal court litigation to improve indigent defense failed to achieve lasting reform, a shift in tactics toward “rebellious localism,” characterized by state court lawsuits against county and city officials, succeeded in prodding lawmakers to create a new framework for delivering legal services to indigent defendants. This model of legal change was effective in documenting structural flaws and creating momentum for reform. Yet other conditions—such as front-end …

Family Needs, Family Leave In 2023, Katharine B. Silbaugh

Faculty Scholarship

Instituting support for women and children is a difficult task to imagine in a world that is removing reproductive freedom and healthcare. In this hypothetical, do we treat the removal of abortion care as a force majeure, natural disaster, or an earthquake? If so, after the earthquake, the community bands together and works tirelessly to compensate for what has happened. But the removal of abortion care was not a natural disaster-it was planned, and it is embedded in background conditions that are pushing further away from support for women and children.

The primary task of this Article is to respond …

Un-Erasing Race In A Medical-Legal Partnership: Antiracist Health Justice Advocacy By Design, Danielle Pelfrey Duryea, Peggy Maisel, Kelley Saia

Faculty Scholarship

This Article covers a potential response to a Massachusetts state law which has been interpreted to require health care providers and birthing hospitals to report to state authorities any infant born to a person taking medication of opioid use disorder. While the statute mandates reports where a professional has "reasonable cause to believe that a child is suffering physical or emotional injury" as a result of substance dependence at birth, the Article highlights that many institutions report all infants born to persons with substance abuse disorders, regardless of risk of harm, for fear of penalty for failure to report. As …

Automated Agencies, Joshua D. Blank, Leigh Osofsky

Faculty Publications

This article presents the first comprehensive study of how federal agencies use automated legal guidance tools—such as chatbots, virtual assistants, and decision-tree systems—to explain complex law to the public. The authors show that while automation offers administrative efficiency and wider reach, it often simplifies or distorts underlying legal rules. Through detailed analysis of agency tools and ten semi-structured interviews with officials, the article demonstrates that automated systems can portray unsettled or complex law as clear, omit exceptions, and answer too narrowly, thereby influencing user behavior in ways agencies neither fully appreciate nor monitor.

The study further finds that agencies lack …

Mass Sovereign Debt Litigation: A Computer-Assisted Analysis Of The Argentina Bond Litigation, Gregory Makoff, W. Mark C. Weidemaier

Faculty Publications

This Article presents a computer-assisted analysis of the first large-scale mass litigation of sovereign debt claims. Between 2002 and 2016, hundreds of lawsuits were filed against Argentina in the United States, virtually all in the Southern District of New York. Historically, litigation against a foreign government would have involved a few hedge funds that had invested in debt at distressed prices. Argentina faced thousands of investors, including small retail bondholders, in litigation that more closely resembled a mass tort or federal multidistrict litigation than any prior episode involving a sovereign’s debt default.

To study this sprawling litigation, this Article combines …

Well-Being, Changes To Academic Behavior, And Resilience Among Families Experiencing Parental Immigration Imprisonment, Caitlin Patler, Gabriela Gonzalez

Faculty Research, Scholarly, and Creative Activity

While the deleterious impacts of parental incarceration are well documented, we know less about the experiences of children with parents imprisoned by immigration authorities. We draw from 62 multigenerational and multiperspective interviews conducted in California with school-age children experiencing parental immigration imprisonment (PII), and their nondetained caregivers. We find that children experiencing PII report feelings and behaviors suggestive of significant psychological distress, which leads to changes in engagement and behavior at school. While some children access academic support and counseling, often following advocacy from nondetained parents or interventions by teachers, others do not receive such support. Many children conceal their …

The Legal Innovation Sandbox, Cristie Ford, Quinn Ashkenazy

All Faculty Publications

"The Legal Innovation Sandbox" examines a novel regulatory approach, called the innovation sandbox, in the context of the legal profession. The paper makes the claim that the “sandbox” regulatory model is in fact better suited to fostering innovation in the legal services arena than it is in the financial technology, or fintech, arena in which the sandbox concept developed. However, any effort to transplant a technique from one context to another needs to be carefully considered. This article is comparative across disciplines – financial regulation and legal services regulation – and across jurisdictions – covering the United Kingdom, the United …

New Crossroads And The Opportunity For A Crisis: The State Of Canadian Legal Education, Catherine Dauvergne

All Faculty Publications

This article considers the challenges facing Canadian law schools and compares the current state of affairs to that analyzed in the 1983 Arthurs Report. The opening sections describe how Canadian legal education is globally unique because of the tacit agreement between law schools and the legal profession that limits the number of law school seats in Canada and helps ensure the success of law schools and law students. On the fortieth anniversary of the Arthurs Report, the article concludes that legal education in Canada is overdue for a new mapping of its strengths, challenges, and future directions that takes the …

Building A Culture Of Scholarship With New Clinical Teachers By Writing About Social Justice Lawyering, Susan Bennett, Binny Miller, Michelle Assad, Maria Dooner, Miriam Hinds, Jessica Millward, Citlalli Ochoa, Charles Ross, Anne Schaufele, Caroline Wick

Scholarly Works

No abstract provided.

Ethics For Real Estate Lawyers Today, John G. Cameron Jr., Nancy B. Rapoport

Scholarly Works

This essay discusses various ethics issues that real estate lawyers experience: everything from new ABA Model Rule 8.4(g) (avoiding discrimination) to rules that apply when a lawyer works from home to technological competence and social media to the attorney-client privilege and to advance conflicts waivers. There is also a social science overlay that discusses why smart people do dumb things.

Accessing Justice With Zoom: Experiences And Outcomes In Online Civil Courts, Victor D. Quintanilla, Kurt Hugenberg, Ryan Hutchings, Nedim Yel

Articles by Maurer Faculty

The global COVID-19 pandemic brought significant change to our civil justice system, particularly in the rapid shift from in-person to remote court proceedings. Courts across the country, facing the unprecedented challenge of a global health emergency, embraced rapid innovation and the adoption of remote proceeding platforms, such as Zoom and Webex. State courts did so across case types, including within high-volume civil dockets containing evictions, debt collections, small claims, and family law cases, where millions of self-represented and unrepresented litigants encounter the U.S. civil justice system each year. Amid the pandemic, voices converged to encourage these justice innovations, including the …

Anti-Carceral Theory And Immigration: A View From Two Law School Clinics, Sabrina Balgamwalla, Lauren Bartlett

All Faculty Scholarship

This article explores clinical teaching philosophies related to anti-carceral theory and provides examples of how to support student learning in clinics serving immigrant clients. Anti-carceral theory in this context is used to refer to an approach that resists criminalization and incarceration within law, drawing on abolitionism, intersectional and anti-carceral feminism, and decolonization.

The anti-carceral lens provides framing and language to name the dynamics of social exclusion and discrimination inherent in immigration law. It also allows us to unpack immigration regulation as a series of choices made within the larger context of law enforcement and its systems of surveillance, policing, and …

Audit Committee And Internal Control Effectiveness In Public Sector Entities, Cosmas R. Masanja

Business Management Review

This paper reports the findings of a study that examined the audit committee and internal control effectiveness nexus. The study worked on the assertion that the audit committee of the board enhances internal control effectiveness, which is widely documented and supported, more so in the private sector. As a result, many public sector entities ' governing boards are increasingly establishing such audit committees. Yet, it is unclear to what extent such increase in audit committees contribute to public sector entities ' internal control effectiveness, especially in developing economies. This study, therefore, examined the explanatory power of the audit committee ' …

Aggregation Bias And Input-Output Regionalization: Detail Or Accuracy?, Randall Jackson, Caroline Welter, Gary Cornwall

Regional Research Institute Working Papers

Conventional wisdom holds that results from input-output (IO) models with greater sectoral detail are superior to those from models with less detail. However, there is an implicit assumption that the more detailed data are as accurate as their aggregated counterparts. In this paper, we explore the tradeoffs between sectoral detail and model accuracy in the context of IO regionalization, a practical context in which greater sectoral detail is commonly achieved via the imputation of missing values. This reality is especially apparent for increasingly smaller geographical regions where privacy concerns result in more suppressed and undisclosed data. As the number (or …

The Concept Of “Elderly Citizens” In The Indonesian Constitution: A Critical Analysis, Ari Wahyudi Hertanto, Satya Arinanto, Jufrina Rizal

Indonesia Law Review

Human existence is the most important element of the law and the state. They contribute greatly to the growth and development of a nation. Despite their great contribution, all human beings will experience a gradual decrease in their physical and psychological capacity due to ageing. According to the latest Central Statistics Agency report, there exists 29.3 million elderly citizens in Indonesia. This figure is equivalent to 10.82% of the total population. To anticipate this demographic condition, the government ought to ensure the welfare of its elderly citizens in accordance with the mandate of the 1945 Constitution. However, the 1945 Constitution …

The Legal Ethics Of Lying About American Democracy, Andrew M. Perlman

Suffolk University Law School Faculty Works

Numerous lawyers contributed to the disinformation campaign that led to the storming of the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021. Some of the lawyers filed lawsuits that questioned the legitimacy of the presidential election, and others spread falsehoods while acting as legislators or in similar high profile roles. This chapter explores the potential disciplinary consequences of their behavior and the larger implications of their conduct for American democracy. One theme of this chapter is that, when lawyers make claims about elections, the consequences of misinformation are severe and threaten to undermine trust in our democratic institutions. Given the stakes, the …

Conflict Resolution Procedures Within The Courtroom: Between The Adversarial And Inquisitorial Traditions, Amos Gabrieli, Michal Alberstein

Georgia Journal of International & Comparative Law

Modern courts have evolved around two central legal traditions—the adversarial and the inquisitorial. The two traditions have historically reflected different approaches towards consent and authority or towards conflict resolution and strict application of the law. Yet with the blurring of boundaries between the two legal traditions, and alongside various reforms in adversarial and inquisitorial legal systems, new practices of judicial conflict resolution within the courtroom have developed. This Article will compare the two legal traditions and examine the assimilation of ideologies and procedures typical to conflict resolution processes into the work of judges, as they strive to end civil legal …

Preparing Future School Counselors To Work With English Language Learners, Jennifer S. Watkinson, Qi Shi, Hope Slezak, Rachel Litvin

Journal of Counselor Preparation and Supervision

English Language Learners (ELLs) are one of the fastest growing student groups in the United States, yet school counselors often feel unprepared to address their unique needs. To better prepare school counselors to work with ELLs, counselor educators can integrate experiential learning activities that are grounded practice. Yet, little is known about the types of work experiences school counselors encounter when working with ELL students. This phenomenological study described the experiences of eight, first year school counselors who work with ELLs. Findings inform the types of training scenarios counselor educators can use to prepare school counselors-in-training (SCIT) to work with …

In Re: American Center For Civ

2022 Decisions

USDC for the District of New Jersey

The Impact Of The Covid-19 Pandemic On Risk Factors For Fatal Intimate Partner Violence And Domestic Violence Services Provided, Faith E. Alves

Honors Theses

The current study assessed the COVID-19 pandemic-related changes in risk factors for fatal intimate partner violence (IPV) among female victims. It additionally analyzed IPV services received before and during the pandemic. Data came from a system that most domestic violence (DV) agencies in Connecticut utilize to record their contacts with their clients, including an initial screening through a police-social service intervention. Results indicated that unemployment of the partner was significantly higher in the during-COVID group. Additionally, the delivery of criminal justice services was significantly higher in the pre-COVID group whereas delivery of law enforcement services was significantly higher in the …