Law and Society Commons^™

Learning Law In Elementary And High School: Innovating Civics Education For A More Empowered Citizenry, Ariel J. Liberman, Michael J. Broyde

Faculty Articles

A principal objective of the public school system in a democracy is to promote societal cohesion by way of preparing students for civic engagement. There exists a founding belief that a democratic nation ought to be composed of educated activists, run by innovators, and kept in check by involved citizens. For, indisputably, the democratic experiment—our values, our institutions—can only be upheld anew with each generation on the backs of critique, reinvention, and reinvigoration. But, as so many have mentioned when discussing the civics education paradigm, the increase in educational opportunities and the marked expansion of our school system has not …

Cultivating Attentiveness To Law In India Through Legal Anthropology, Deepa Das Acevedo, Jahnavi Chamarthi

Faculty Articles

This Article reviews and analyses scholarship at the intersection of anthropology and law. The first half of the Article provides context for understanding the boundaries, animating concerns, and tensions that have characterised the anthropology of law as an area of interdisciplinary inquiry. We focus especially on the subdiscipline’s Anglo-American history and show how a promising early period of engagement dissipated as both anthropologists and legal scholars lost enthusiasm for each others’ insights and methods. Then, we expand our analysis outward. Because legal anthropology belongs within, and is increasingly attentive to, the broader field of law and society scholarship, we explore …

Balancing Interests: Ai, Business & Human Rights, And The Legal Landscape In An Era Of Disruption, Jena Martin, Ritu Narula

Faculty Articles

On October 30, 2023, the Biden Administration issued a sweeping executive order espousing a policy to advance the development and use of artificial intelligence ("Al") while also establishing safeguards across the federal government. The Executive Order marked the U.S. government's largest move forward related to the regulation of Al. The Order also represents the government's latest effort to advance equity, privacy, and national security in the use of AI systems. Moreover, the Order comes at a time when governments around the world are wrestling with the impact of AI and its disruptive effect, not just on markets, but on society …

Beyond Social Media Analogues, Gregory M. Dickinson

Faculty Articles

The steady flow of social-media cases toward the Supreme Court shows a nation reworking its fundamental relationship with technology. The cases raise a host of questions ranging from difficult to impossible: how to nurture a vibrant public square when a few tech giants dominate the flow of information, how social media can be at the same time free from conformist groupthink and also protected against harmful disinformation campaigns, and how government and industry can cooperate on such problems without devolving toward censorship.

To such profound questions, this Essay offers a comparatively modest contribution—what not to do. Always the lawyer’s instinct …

Lest We Be Lemmings, Claire Wright

Faculty Articles

Lest We Be Lemmings concerns global warming, which is the most grave threat facing humanity today. In this article, I first: (1) discuss how the U.S. Congress and the U.S. Executive Branch, for decades, have been aware of the existence of global warming and its main cause – the burning of fossil fuels and emission of CO₂ - but have consistently failed to regulate the fossil fuel industry, reduce the lucrative subsidies that they provide to the fossil fuel industry, and hold the fossil fuel industry responsible for global warming; (2) explain how the fossil fuel industry, for decades, …

Role-Reversibility, Ai, And Equitable Justice — Or: Why Mercy Cannot Be Automated, Stephen E. Henderson, Kiel Brennan-Marquez

Faculty Articles

A few years ago, we developed the concept of “role-reversibility” in AI governance: the idea that it matters whether a party exercising judgment is reciprocally vulnerable to the effects of judgment. This idea, we argued, supplies a deontic reason to maintain certain spheres of human judgment even if (or when) truly intelligent machines become demonstrably superior in every utilitarian sense. While computer science remains far from that holy grail, generative AI is raging through systems as diverse as healthcare, finance, advertising, law, and academe, making it imperative to further shore up our claim. We do so by situating role-reversibility within …

Search And Seizure Budgets, Kiel Brennan-Marquez, Stephen E. Henderson

Faculty Articles

This article proposes a new means of restraining police power: quantitative limits on the number of law enforcement intrusions—searches and seizures—that may occur over a given period of time. Like monetary constraints, search and seizure budgets would aim to curb abusive policing and improve democratic oversight. But unlike their monetary counterparts, budgets would be indexed directly to the specific police activities that most enable escalation and abuse. What is more, budgets are a tool that finds support, conceptually, in the American framing experience. The Fourth Amendment has long been understood to require procedural limits, such as probable cause, on specific …

The Jury Veto, Stephen E. Henderson

Faculty Articles

While the American civic religion is to be distrustful of government, feelings of discontent regarding our systems of criminal investigation and adjudication feel historic. And while those systems are capable of great carnage en route, the endgame is, ultimately, criminal punishment. Yet before punishment can be imposed, every prosecution—and therefore every defendant—is meant to encounter a potential “circuit breaker”: the jury. I propose that we re-inject this democratic voice into our criminal adjudications, but through an entirely novel structure: the defendant (and perhaps the prosecutor) would have the choice of invoking a jury empowered to ‘veto’ any judicial sentence. By …

Beyond The Narrow Harvard Model Of Legal Education: Restoring Legal Education According To The Proposals Of Valentin Tomberg, Brian Mccall

Faculty Articles

Professor Mark Jones has argued that legal education needs to be “reliberalized” by returning to a state in which “all law students receive a basic minimum exposure to the general subject areas of legal history, jurisprudence, and comparative law, as well as to the general subject areas of international/trans-national/global legal studies . . . .” Jones’s call to restore the cultural dimensions has recently received an additional source of strength. The recent publication of an English translation of Dr. Valentin Tomberg’s doctoral dissertation for the first time, under the title The Art of the Good: The Regeneration of Fallen Jurisprudence, …

Seeing Those We’Ve Rendered Invisible – A Clarion Call For Criminal Justice, Stephen E. Henderson, Jordan Thomas

Faculty Articles

Jonathan Rapping, Gideon’s Promise: A Public Defender Movement to Transform Criminal Justice (Beacon Press 2020) In this brief review, we situate Rapping’s work among those demanding criminal justice reform, praise an unrelated bonus, and propose a friendly amendment to nudge his vision over the finish line of justice. It will not be enough to provide newly enabled and supported public defenders to those our systems consider indigent. We ought to provide them to us all.

Afterword: Collective Knowledge Production Toward Transformative Social Change: A Community-Grounded Model, Steven Bender

Faculty Articles

No abstract provided.

Double Jeopardy’S Dual Sovereignty: A Tragic (And Implausible) Lack Of Humility, Stephen E. Henderson, Dean Strang

Faculty Articles

The core proposition of the Fifth Amendment’s Double Jeopardy Clause is as intuitive as it is straightforward. After all, if a state could prosecute someone despite her previous conviction or acquittal, then the scope of punishment would be unlimited and its threat unending—the sort of proposition only a tyrant could love. Yet, in Gamble v. United States, the Supreme Court once again blessed a dual sovereignty exception that permits just such duplicative prosecutions. We hardly are the first to question this rule, but we submit the Court’s most recent primary mistakes were two. First, the Court began from a …

Beyond Equality And Discrimination, Martha Albertson Fineman

Faculty Articles

The theme of this Article for the SMU Law Review Forum focuses us on the challenges faced by the “economically disadvantaged” in the past decade and in the future. This framing is rooted in a distinction between that conceptual status of equality and the actuality of discrimination and disadvantage. This is the lens through which contemporary legal culture tends to assess the nature and effect of existing laws and determines the necessary direction of reform. As such, this paradigm provides the governing logic for both criticism and justification of the status quo. It is rooted in an understanding of the …

Join With Me, Won't You? Civic Engagement, Covid-19, And The Millennial Generation Of Law Professors, Joseph Schremmer

Faculty Articles

My goals in this essay are to place legal education’s COVID-19 crisis into this broader context and illuminate the unique opportunity that millennial law professors have to create the conditions for more robust community participation within and outside of our law schools. Part I summarizes the decline of civic engagement and social capital in preceding decades and its consequences for law, public discourse, and quality of life. Part II outlines how this deficit of social capital exacerbates the challenges facing law schools and professors in delivering legal education and constructing community during the coronavirus pandemic. Part III explores the unique …

Can God Create A Rock So Heavy That He Cannot Lift It?: Outlawing Pensions Under State Constitutions, Chad J. Pomeroy

Faculty Articles

Public pensions are a problem. More than twenty-seven million people participate in state and local government pension plans. And those plans are in the hole trillions of dollars. This means that state and local governments are going to have to raise additional trillions in taxes (or shift those trillions away from schools, police, firemen, or other spending targets) to satisfy these obligations.

What can be done about such a large, seemingly intractable problem? A number of states have installed specific pension funding requirements within their constitutions. Most state constitutions contain some kind of balanced budget requirement, and a number of …

Vulnerability And Social Justice, Martha Albertson Fineman

Faculty Articles

This Article briefly considers the origins of the term social justice and its evolution beside our understandings of human rights and liberalism, which are two other significant justice categories. After this reflection on the contemporary meaning of social justice, I suggest that vulnerability theory, which seeks to replace the rational man of liberal legal thought with the vulnerable subject, should be used to define the contours of the term. Recognition of fundamental, universal, and perpetual human vulnerability reveals the fallacies inherent in the ideals of autonomy, independence, and individual responsibility that have supplanted an appreciation of the social. I suggest …

John The Theologian: Towards Integrating Law And Religion, Gordon T. Butler

Faculty Articles

No abstract provided.

Vulnerability And Inevitable Inequality, Martha Albertson Fineman

Faculty Articles

The abstract legal subject of liberal Western democracies fails to reflect the fundamental reality of the human condition, which is vulnerability. While it is universal and constant, vulnerability is manifested differently in individuals, often resulting in significant differences in position and circumstance. In spite of such differences, political theory positions equality as the foundation for law and policy, and privileges autonomy, independence and self-sufficiency. This article traces the origins and development of a critical legal theory that brings human vulnerability to the fore in assessing individual and state responsibility and redefining the parameters of social justice. The theory arose in …

Lawn Signs: A Fourth Amendment For Constitutional Curmudgeons, Andrew Ferguson, Stephen E. Henderson

Faculty Articles

What is the constitutional significance of the proverbial “keep off the grass” sign? This question—asked by curmudgeonly neighbors everywhere—has been given new currency in a recent decision by the United States Supreme Court. Indeed, Florida v. Jardines might have bestowed constitutional curmudgeons with significant new Fourth Amendment protections. By expressing expectations regarding—and control over—access to property, “the people” may be able to claim greater Fourth Amendment protections not only for their homes, but also for their persons, papers, and effects. This article launches a constitutionally grounded, but lighthearted campaign of citizen education and empowerment: Fourth Amendment LAWn signs. With every …

Why Is It Good To Stop At A Red Light_ The Basis Of Authority And Obligation, Brian Mccall

Faculty Articles

Throughout history, some have questioned whether the authority exercised by some over others is consistent with human nature. Is it possible for a law made by one human being to bind the conscience of another, or is such a claim merely tyranny? If such a power to bind to laws made by humans is justified, what is its scope? The answers to these related questions explored in this Article are both descriptive and normative. This Article explains the nature of authority and the extent of the obligation to obey the law as well as explains how the architecture of natural …

Precarious Existence And Capitalism: A Permanent State Of Exception, Tayyab Mahmud

Faculty Articles

The contemporary neoliberal era is marked by an exponential expansion of contingent and precarious labor markets. In this context, the construct of precarity emerged to signify labor conditions of permanent insecurity and precariousness. Coming at the heels of the era of Keynesian welfare, precarity is mostly seen as an exception to the normal trajectory of capitalist formations. The basic argument of this paper is that under capitalism, for the working classes precarious existence is the norm rather than the exception. Precarity is the outcome not only of insecurities of labor markets but also of capital’s capture and colonization of life …

World Poverty And Food Insecurity, Carmen Gonzalez

Faculty Articles

Our present global economic order produces a stable pattern of widespread malnutrition and starvation among the poor, with some eighteen million persons dying each year from poverty related causes, and there are likely to be feasible alternative regimes that /ill not produce similarly severe deprivations. If this is so, the victims of avoidable deprivations are not merely poor and starving, but impoverished and starved through an institutional order coercively imposed upon them. There is an injustice to this economic order, which it would be wrong for its more affluent participants to perpetuate.

A Homeless Bill Of Rights (Revolution), Sara Rankin

Faculty Articles

This article examines an emerging movement so far unexplored by legal scholarship: the proposal and, in some states, the enactment of a Homeless Bill of Rights. This article presents these new laws as a lens to re-examine storied debates over positive and social welfare rights. Homeless bills of rights also present a compelling opportunity to re-examine rights-based theories in the context of social movement scholarship. Specifically, could these laws be understood as part of a new “rights revolution”? What conditions might influence the impact of these new laws on the individual rights of the homeless or the housed? On American …

Incarcerated Child Birth And “Broader Birth Control”: Autonomy, Regulation, And The State, Deborah Ahrens

Faculty Articles

In recent years, the scholarly literature, the journalistic press, and even pop culture have begun to grapple with the many ways in which prison life works to degrade and dehumanize female prisoners, particularly pregnant women and new mothers. These voices are drawn — quite understandably — to the worst abuses, to practices (such as the shackling of laboring women) that underscore the dichotomy between the brutality of prison life and the allegedly autonomous norms governing pregnancy and parenting in the outside world. This article supplements — and in crucial places challenges — the narrative implicit in those depictions by, first, …

Tracermarks: A Proposed Information Intervention, Margaret Chon

Faculty Articles

We live in a world of information. But paradoxically, we simultaneously suffer from a scarcity of “smart” information: information that is traceable and therefore reliable, trust-worthy, and ultimately verifiable. Combining the insights of global governance theory with behavioral economics, this Article approaches this challenge from a knowledge governance framework, sets forth various reasons for this unnecessary deficit and proposes an intervention to address it — tracermarks. Envisioned as a hybrid of trademarks and certification marks, tracermarks would encourage various stakeholders to disclose, disseminate and ultimately make decisions about previously hidden qualities of specific goods and services throughout global value networks. …

Decorating The Structure: The Art Of Making Human Law, Brian Mccall

Faculty Articles

This article continues to develop the theme of law as architecture begun in two published articles, The Architecture of Law: Building Law on a Solid Foundation, the Eternal and Natural Law and Consulting the Architect when Problems Arise: The Divine Law. Having considered the foundation and framework of human law, this article turns to the decoration of the structure through the craft of human law making. It examines the process whereby the natural law is determined in particular political communities. Human law is the craft of particularizing the general principles of natural law in a community’s laws. It relies on …

All That Heaven Will Allow: A Statistical Analysis Of The Co-Existence Of Same Sex Marriage And Gay Matrimonial Bans, Deirdre Bowen

Faculty Articles

This article offers the first analysis to date of national data evaluating whether defense of marriage acts (mini or super-DOMAs) preserve and stabilize the family. After finding that they do not—just as same sex marriage does not appear to destabilize families—the article analyzes what variables are, in fact, associated with family stability. Specifically, those variables are: families below the poverty line; men and women married three or more times; religiosity; percent conservative versus liberal in a state; disposable income; percent with bachelor’s degree; and median age of first marriage. Next, the article applies the sociological concepts of moral entrepreneurism and …

Can A Pluralistic Commonwealth Endure?, Brian Mccall

Faculty Articles

This article considers whether the American pluralist system can satisfy Cicero's definition of a commonwealth as a multitude united in a definition of law and justice. The analysis is based upon a review of Thaddeus Kozinski's book, The Problem or Religious Pluralism and Why Philosophers Can't Solve It. This book critiques the philosophy of John Rawls, Jacques Maritain and Alisdaire MacIntyre. The critique is based upon Cicero's definition of a commonwealth and the article concludes that a society which maintains a deep pluralism over the first principles of law and justice cannot survive as a commonwealth.

Debt And Discipline: Neoliberal Political Economy And The Working Classes, Tayyab Mahmud

Faculty Articles

Over the last three decades, neoliberal restructuring of the economy created a symbiosis of debt and discipline. New legal regimes and strategic use of monetary policy displaced Keynesian welfare, facilitated financialization of the economy, broke the power of organized labor, and expanded debt to sustain aggregate demand. Public laws and policies created a field of possibility within which financial markets extended their reach and brought ever-increasing sections of the working classes and the marginalized within the ambit of the credit economy. Reordered public policies and new norms of personal responsibility demarcated the horizon within which the economically vulnerable pursued strategies …

Full Disclosure: Cognitive Bias, Informants, And Search Warrant Scrutiny, Mary Bowman

Faculty Articles

This article posits that cognitive biases play a significant role in the gap between the rhetoric regarding Fourth Amendment protection and actual practices regarding search warrant scrutiny, particularly for search warrants based on informants’ tips. Specifically, this article examines the ways in which implicit bias, tunnel vision, priming, and hindsight bias can affect search warrants. These biases can affect each stage of the search warrant process, including targeting decisions, the drafting process, the magistrate’s decision whether to grant the warrant, and post-search review by trial and appellate courts. These biases create room for informant falsehoods to go unchecked, with a …