Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®
- Keyword
-
- Empirical studies (2)
- Law reform (2)
- Lawyers (2)
- Accountability (1)
- Age (1)
-
- Bias (1)
- COVID-19 (1)
- Class and law (1)
- Coercion (1)
- Connectedness (1)
- Consent (1)
- Convictions (1)
- Corporations (1)
- Court proceedings (1)
- Criminal justice (1)
- Democracy (1)
- Discretion (1)
- Disparities (1)
- Economic inequality (1)
- Elitism (1)
- Employees (1)
- Employers (1)
- Employment (1)
- Ethics (1)
- Expungement (1)
- Homicide convictions (1)
- Implicit bias (1)
- Iowa (1)
- Judical systems (1)
- Law and class (1)
Articles 1 - 7 of 7
Full-Text Articles in Law
Lawyers Democratic Dysfunction, Leah Litman
Lawyers Democratic Dysfunction, Leah Litman
Articles
As part of the symposium on Jack Balkin and Sandy Levinson’s Democracy and Dysfunction, this Article documents another source of the dysfunction that the authors observe—elite lawyers’ unwillingness to break ranks with other elite lawyers who participate in the destruction of various norms that are integral to a well-functioning democracy. These network effects eliminate the possibility of “soft” sanctions on norm violators such as withholding future professional advancement. Thus, rather than enforcing norms and deterring norm violations, the networks serve to insulate norm violators from any meaningful accountability.
Consent, Coercion, And Employment Law, Samuel R. Bagenstos
Consent, Coercion, And Employment Law, Samuel R. Bagenstos
Articles
The Roberts Court has recently handed several high-profile wins in labor and employment law cases to anti-labor and pro-employer forces. This paper argues that those decisions replicate crucial moves made by some infamous Lochner-era cases — and that those same moves continue to underlie key elements of labor and employment doctrine more generally. In particular, these decisions rest on a contestable understanding of free worker choice. This paper begins by examining the key recent Roberts Court decisions and demonstrates that they appear to invoke at least two distinct and conflicting understandings of employee and employer choice. It then turns to …
Winks, Whispers, And Prosecutorial Discretion In Rural Iowa, 1925-1928, Emily Prifogle
Winks, Whispers, And Prosecutorial Discretion In Rural Iowa, 1925-1928, Emily Prifogle
Articles
Through the eyes of Charles Pendleton’s memoirs, this article walks through a rural community with a county attorney to consider how race, religion, gender, and sexuality influenced rural prosecutorial discretion in the early twentieth century. Rural communities like those in Buena Vista County, Iowa, where the article is centered, experienced “the law” through distinctly isolated geographies and social networks that lacked anonymity and thus shaped available methods of conflict resolution. But anonymity did not mean homogeneity. Ethnic, racial, and religious diversity created divisions within a community where social distance between individuals was small. Both onymity and diversity shaped who should …
Expungement Of Criminal Convictions: An Empirical Study, J.J. Prescott, Sonja B. Starr
Expungement Of Criminal Convictions: An Empirical Study, J.J. Prescott, Sonja B. Starr
Articles
Laws permitting the expungement of criminal convictions are a key component of modern criminal justice reform efforts and have been the subject of a recent upsurge in legislative activity. This debate has been almost entirely devoid of evidence about the laws’ effects, in part because the necessary data (such as sealed records themselves) have been unavailable. We were able to obtain access to de-identified data that overcome that problem, and we use it to carry out a comprehensive statewide study of expungement recipients and comparable nonrecipients in Michigan. We offer three key sets of empirical findings. First, among those legally …
Understanding Violent-Crime Recidivism, J.J. Prescott, Benjamin Pyle, Sonja B. Starr
Understanding Violent-Crime Recidivism, J.J. Prescott, Benjamin Pyle, Sonja B. Starr
Articles
People convicted of violent crimes constitute a majority of the imprisoned population but are generally ignored by existing policies aimed at reducing mass incarceration. Serious efforts to shrink the large footprint of the prison system will need to recognize this fact. This point is especially pressing at the time of this writing, as states and the federal system consider large-scale prison releases motivated by the COVID-19 pandemic. Those convicted of violent crimes constitute a large majority of older prisoners, who are extremely vulnerable to the spread of the virus behind bars. Excluding them from protective measures will deeply undermine those …
The Personal Responsibility Pandemic: Centering Solidarity In Public Health And Employment Law, Lindsay F. Wiley, Samuel R. Bagenstos
The Personal Responsibility Pandemic: Centering Solidarity In Public Health And Employment Law, Lindsay F. Wiley, Samuel R. Bagenstos
Articles
Our nation’s response to the coronavirus pandemic has revealed fundamental flaws in our legal regimes governing both public health and employment. Public health orders have called on individuals to make sacrifices to protect society as a whole. Simple fairness dictates that the burdens should be shared as widely as the benefits. And the case for burden-sharing does not rest on fairness alone. Public health measures are more likely to succeed when those who are subject to them understand them as fair1 and when their cooperation is supported. 2 Predictably, our pandemic response has placed disproportionate burdens on those who are …
Are Litigation Outcome Disparities Inevitable? Courts, Technology, And The Future Of Impartiality., Avital Mentovich, J.J. Prescott, Orna Rabinovich-Einy
Are Litigation Outcome Disparities Inevitable? Courts, Technology, And The Future Of Impartiality., Avital Mentovich, J.J. Prescott, Orna Rabinovich-Einy
Articles
This article explores the ability of technology—specifically, online judicial procedures—to eliminate systematic group-level litigation outcome disparities (i.e., disparities correlated with the visible identity markers of litigants). Our judicial system has long operated under the assumption that it can only be “impartial enough.” After all, judges, like all human beings, harbor implicit biases that are often sizable, unconscious, and triggered automatically, and research indicates that strategies to curb implicit biases in human decision making may be ineffective, especially in the face of the resource and caseload constraints of modern-day adjudication. The recent emergence of online court proceedings, however, offers new hope …