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Full-Text Articles in Law

Privacy, Poverty, And Big Data: A Matrix Of Vulnerabilities For Poor Americans, Mary Madden, Michele E. Gilman, Karen Levy, Alice Marwick Jan 2017

Privacy, Poverty, And Big Data: A Matrix Of Vulnerabilities For Poor Americans, Mary Madden, Michele E. Gilman, Karen Levy, Alice Marwick

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This Article examines the matrix of vulnerabilities that low-income people face as a result of the collection and aggregation of big data and the application of predictive analytics. On one hand, big data systems could reverse growing economic inequality by expanding access to opportunities for low-income people. On the other hand, big data could widen economic gaps by making it possible to prey on low-income people or to exclude them from opportunities due to biases entrenched in algorithmic decision-making tools. New kinds of “networked privacy” harms, in which users are simultaneously held liable for their own behavior and the actions …


Out Of Ferguson: Misdemeanors, Municipal Courts, Tax Distribution And Constitutional Limitations, Henry Ordower, J. Onésimo Sandoval, Kenneth Warren Jan 2017

Out Of Ferguson: Misdemeanors, Municipal Courts, Tax Distribution And Constitutional Limitations, Henry Ordower, J. Onésimo Sandoval, Kenneth Warren

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The matter of police and municipal courts as revenue producers became increasingly prominent following Michael Brown’s death from a police shooting. This article considers the use of misdemeanors, especially traffic violations, for the purpose of collecting substantial portions of the annual operating budgets in municipalities in St. Louis County, Missouri. The article argues that the revenue raising function of traffic offenses has displaced their public safety and traffic regulation functions. The change in function from public safety to revenue suggests that the governing laws are no longer valid as exercise of policing power but must be reenacted under the taxing …


Rationing Criminal Justice, Richard A. Bierschbach, Stephanos Bibas Jan 2017

Rationing Criminal Justice, Richard A. Bierschbach, Stephanos Bibas

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Of the many diagnoses of American criminal justice’s ills, few focus on externalities. Yet American criminal justice systematically overpunishes in large part because few mechanisms exist to force consideration of the full social costs of criminal justice interventions. Actors often lack good information or incentives to minimize the harms they impose. Part of the problem is structural: criminal justice is fragmented vertically among governments, horizontally among agencies, and individually among self-interested actors. Part is a matter of focus: doctrinally and pragmatically, actors overwhelmingly view each case as an isolated, short-term transaction to the exclusion of broader, long-term, and aggregate effects. …