Law and Society Commons^™

Measures Of Justice: Researching And Evaluating Lay Legal Assistance Programs, Tanina Rostain, James Teufel

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

In recent years a national movement to train lay advocates and advisors to assist people with their common justice problems has emerged in the United States. A host of new programs have launched that allow trained navigators and justice workers to provide legal assistance. These programs – developed in Alaska, Delaware, South Carolina, Arizona, and Utah, among other places – vary in their substantive focus, the skills they impart, and their approaches to reaching the people and communities they seek to help. The proliferation of lay legal assistance programs creates research imperatives and opportunities. These programs need to be assessed …

Foreword, David L. Schwartz, Kat M. Albrecht

Northwestern University Law Review

Offering a critique is often easier than proposing a solution. This refrain echoed frequently in the months and years that we spent developing what would become the Systematic Content Analysis of Litigation EventS (SCALES) Open Knowledge Network, a project born from the collaborative efforts of experts across various disciplines.

The Scales Project: Making Federal Court Records Free, David L. Schwartz, Kat M. Albrecht, Adam R. Pah, Christopher A. Cotropia, Amy Kristin Sanders, Sarath Sanga, Charlotte S. Alexander, Luís A.N. Amaral, Zachary D. Clopton, Anne M. Tucker, Thomas W. Gaylord, Scott G. Daniel, Nathan Dahlberg

Northwestern University Law Review

Federal court records have been available online for nearly a quarter century, yet they remain frustratingly inaccessible to the public. This is due to two primary barriers: (1) the federal government’s prohibitively high fees to access the records at scale and (2) the unwieldy state of the records themselves, which are mostly text documents scattered across numerous systems. Official datasets produced by the judiciary, as well as third-party data collection efforts, are incomplete, inaccurate, and similarly inaccessible to the public. The result is a de facto data blackout that leaves an entire branch of the federal government shielded from empirical …

Settlement As Construct: Defining And Counting Party Resolution In Federal District Court, Charlotte S. Alexander, Nathan Dahlberg, Anne M. Tucker

Northwestern University Law Review

Most civil cases settle. Yet generating a definitive settlement rate presents complex definitional and empirical problems, both in what should count as a settlement and how to count it. This Essay makes three contributions to better understanding and defining settlement. First, we propose a flexible, empirically informed, operationalizable definition of settlement as party resolution. Second, we exploit a new federal litigation data source to count party resolutions using machine learning models trained on 11 million docket sheet entries. Third, we offer new findings on party resolution frequency and distribution in the federal courts. Settlement is more widely and differently deployed …

Prosecutorial Data Transparency And Data Justice, Caitlin Glass, Kat M. Albrecht, Perry Moriearty

Northwestern University Law Review

The U.S. criminal legal system is notoriously racialized. Though Black and Latinx people make up less than 30% of U.S. residents, they constitute more than 50% of the nearly two million people currently in U.S. prisons and jails. For decades, research has indicated that one group of decision-makers has had an outsized influence on these numbers: prosecutors. From whom to charge to what sentences to recommend, no actor plays a greater role in determining who goes to prison in this country. Highly subjective and lacking in formal guidance and accountability, prosecutorial decisions are especially vulnerable to racial bias. They are …

Lawyerless Litigants, Filing Fees, Transaction Costs, And The Federal Courts: Learning From Scales, Judith Resnik, Henry Wu, Jenn Dikler, David T. Wong, Romina Lilollari, Claire Stobb, Elizabeth Beling, Avital Fried, Anna Selbrede, Jack Sollows, Mikael Tessema, Julia Udell

Northwestern University Law Review

Two Latin phrases describing litigants—pro se (for oneself) and in forma pauperis (IFP, as a poor person)—prompt this inquiry into the relationship between self-representation and requests for filing fee waivers. We sketch the governing legal principles for people seeking relief in the federal courts, the sources of income of the federal judiciary, the differing regimes to which Congress has subjected incarcerated and nonincarcerated people filing civil lawsuits, and analyses enabled by SCALES, a newly available database that coded 2016 and 2017 federal court docket sheets. This Essay’s account of what can be learned and of the data gaps demonstrates the …

The War On Higher Education, Athena D. Mutua, Jonathan Feingold, Angela Harris, Emily M. S. Houh, Matthew Patrick Shaw, Francisco Valdes

Journal Articles

Higher education is under assault in the United States. Tracking authoritarian movements across the globe, domestic attacks on individual professors and academic institutions buttress a broader campaign to undermine multiracial democracy and the institutions that sustain and safeguard it. Reflecting on the past academic year, this essay charts the increasingly brazen right-wing efforts in the U.S. Congress and the States to erode academic freedom and university independence— two pillars of our democratic republic. We also identify a bi-partisan source of higher education’s present precarity: the neoliberal policies that precipitated the privatization and corporatization of universities across the country.

‘Constellations’ And ‘Entanglement’ In The Study Of Legal Pluralism: Reflections On The Scholarship Of Keebet Von Benda-Beckmann, Petra K. Mahy Dr

The Indonesian Journal of Socio-Legal Studies

Two key terms permeate the work of Keebet von Benda-Beckmann (and of her co-authors, especially Franz von Benda-Beckmann) in her discussions of legal pluralism: ‘constellations’ and ‘entanglement’. These terms are both concerned with describing the existence of, and interrelationships between, plural legal orders. This article critically analyses these two terms, their usage and implied meanings, and compares them with other alternative concepts employed elsewhere in legal pluralism and cognate literature. With reference to empirical evidence on plural work regulation in Indonesia, I argue that the terms have some descriptive benefits for understanding the realities of plural legal orders, but still …

Inmate Assistance Programs, Tim Friehe, Murat C. Mungan

Faculty Scholarship

This paper analyzes the deterrence implications of different inmate assistance programs (IAPs), carefully distinguishing between deterrence of first offenses and recidivism. All IAPs considered in our model reduce recidivism, and we identify IAPs that also reduce the first offense rate. However, IAPs which increase work opportunities, improve the reintegration of exiting inmates, and moderate individual’s self-control issues may lower the deterrence of first offenses, if this possibility is not adequately anticipated when designing these IAPs.

Law School News: No Outsiders In Rwu Law Professor's Classroom (8-29-2024), Suzi Morales, Roger Williams University School Of Law

Life of the Law School (1993- )

No abstract provided.

Barriers To Legal Help In The Transgender Rights Movement, Alexander Chen, Amanda Goad, Jazzmun Crayton

Loyola Interdisciplinary Journal of Public Interest Law

This transcript was taken from the Loyola Interdisciplinary Journal of Public Interest Law's second annual panel at the LMU Loyola Law School Public Interest Palooza, hosted by the Loyola Public Interest Law Foundation on Saturday, March 23, 2024.

Panelists

Alexander Chen, Founding Director, Harvard Law School LGBTQ+ Advocacy Clinic

Amanda Goad, Audrey Irmas Director, LGBTQ, Gender, and Reproductive Justice Project, ACLU of Southern California

Jazzmun Crayton, Associate Director, Access to Prevention Advocacy Intervention and Treatment Health Center

Moderator

James Gilliam, Director of Career Development & Public Interest Programs, Western State College of Law; Adjunct Professor, LMU Loyola Law School; …

Hudson Earns Community Leadership Award, James Owsley Boyd

Keep Up With the Latest News from the Law School (blog)

Empathetic. Driven. Supportive. Engaged.

Those are just a few of the many adjectives nominators used to describe Nashuba Hudson, the recipient of the 2024 Student Leadership in Fostering Community and Inclusiveness Award. Hudson, a 3L from Chicago, was presented the award today (Aug. 16) as part of the concluding events of this year’s 1L Orientation.

Established in 2018, the award, which comes with a $2,000 scholarship, celebrates a student who “goes above and beyond to foster our diverse, inclusive, supportive, and welcoming community.” Recipients are honored for their work in the previous year.

Hudson is the first Black woman to …

Killers That Once Were Humans: Reading The Role Of Modern Law Via Instrumental Rationality, Momen Abdelbari Hassan

Theses and Dissertations

For Max Weber, the process of modernization is the process of rationalization in which it includes every realm in our modern life, such as the economy, science, organization, education, and law. However, this kind of rationalization has created coercive and inhumane conditions because rationalization has converted to being instrumental (value-free) without regard to any transcendental or moral values. The inhumane paradigm has become the only fate of our world. The vision needs rational domination to be achieved through formal rational law. Modern law, along with bureaucratization, has paved the road to rational political domination. This kind of domination captures human …

We Are The Ai Problem, Tonja Jacobi, Matthew Sag

Emory Law Journal Online

This Essay describes what we call “the Black Nazi Problem,” a shorthand for the sometimes-jarring text and images produced by AI, from the incongruous—such as female Indian popes—to the outrageous—such as depicting minorities as their own historical oppressors, including Black Nazis. These images were the result of overzealous efforts by AI developers to correct for a lack of diverse representation in the training data used to create Generative AI models. The overrepresentation of white, fully-abled, Western men in images of high status categories, and the invisibility of women, people of color, and the disabled, except in low status categories, and …

University Of The District Of Columbia Law Review, University Of The District Of Columbia Law Review

University of the District of Columbia Law Review

No abstract provided.

Bovell, Furton, Haydel, Stroud To Receive Distinguished Service Awards In September, James Owsley Boyd

Keep Up With the Latest News from the Law School (blog)

Four alumni of the Indiana University Maurer School of Law will be presented with Distinguished Service Awards this September in Bloomington.

Dino Bovell, Matt Furton, Augie Haydel, and Terrance Stroud will be honored September 13 during a meeting of the school’s Alumni Board and before reunions for the classes of 1964, 1974, 1999, and 2014.

The Distinguished Service Award was established in 1997 to recognize graduates of Law School who have distinguished themselves in service to their communities and the school in ways far exceeding traditional business, professional, and civic duties.

Through their hard work, passion, and accomplishments, these alumni …

How Should We Measure Effectiveness Of Medical-Legal Partnerships?, Prashasti Bhatnagar, Deborah F. Perry, Margaret E. Greer

HJA Scholarship

Medical-legal partnerships (MLPs) try to mitigate health inequity by uniting legal and health professionals to respond to legal determinants of patients’ health. While there is a long tradition of “patients-to-policy” work in MLPs, the current empirical evidence base has evaluated MLP effectiveness by assessing benefits to individual patients, clinicians, and hospital and legal systems. This article calls for future research to measure how community power, which includes shifting power to impacted communities to develop and lead equity-focused agendas, is built as both a process and an outcome of MLPs.

Law School News: If There's Life, There's Hope (August 2024), Roger Williams University School Of Law

Life of the Law School (1993- )

No abstract provided.

The Limits Of Immigrant Resilience, Huyen Pham, Natalie C. Cook, Ernesto Amaral, Raymond Robertson, Suojin Wang

Faculty Scholarship

Economists have identified important adaptations that immigrant workers have made to weather economic crises. During times of economic contraction, immigrant workers have moved across industries or geographical locations, downshifted to part-time work, and accepted lower wages to stay employed. Evidence from the Great Recession (2007–2009) shows the benefits of that economic resilience: immigrant workers were more likely than native-born workers to remain continuously employed, to have shorter periods of unemployment when they lost their jobs, and to regain jobs more quickly in the recovery period. Of course, these adaptations had significant personal costs for immigrant workers and their families, but …

Even Laypeople Use Legalese, Eric H. Martinez, Francis Mollica, Edward Gibson

Faculty Scholarship

Whereas principles of communicative efficiency and legal doctrine dictate that laws be comprehensible to the common world, empirical evidence suggests legal documents are largely incomprehensible to lawyers and laypeople alike. Here, a corpus analysis (n=59 million words) first replicated and extended prior work revealing laws to contain strikingly higher rates of complex syntactic structures relative to six baseline genres of English.

Next, two pre-registered text generation experiments (n=286) tested two leading hypotheses regarding how these complex structures enter into legal documents in the first place. In line with the magic spell hypothesis, we found people tasked with writing official laws …

Is Grammar Religious Exercise? Addressing Transgender Students And The Limits Of The Complicity Doctrine, Saul R. Thorkelson

Cardozo Law Review

May teachers reject transgender students’ names and pronouns on religious grounds? Across the United States, many schools and universities have adopted policies calling on staff to use all students’ designated first names and gender-congruent pronouns. A number of conservative Christian teachers have claimed that they cannot address transgender students in this way without violating their religious beliefs. In several cases, after unsuccessful attempts by administrators to accommodate these objections, teachers who were subject to employment consequences have brought lawsuits alleging violation of their religious liberty and free speech rights.

This Note employs two recent cases to examine courts’ reasoning on …

Can Human Rights Be Reconciled With Citizenship: Reconsidering Marx's Zur Judenfrage Today, David Ingram

Philosophy: Faculty Publications and Other Works

This essay critically re-examines Marx’s youthful analysis of the separation of church and state and his complex views about the function of rights in the modern state. I argue that Marx’s condemnation of Christian nationalism and endorsement of citizenship for Jews is consistent with his view that the modern, secular state cannot emancipate itself entirely from religiosity, as evidenced by the continuing legacy of nationalism and cultural identity politics today. Although Marx correctly follows Hegel in identifying modernity with a structural differentiation between civil society and state, I argue that he misunderstands the nature of this separation and, along with …

Taylor Is First Indiana Law Student To Receive Sports Lawyers Association Student Writing Award, James Owsley Boyd

Keep Up With the Latest News from the Law School (blog)

A rising 3L at the Indiana University Maurer School of Law is one of 10 law students nationwide—and the first IU student ever— to receive the Sports Lawyers Association’s Student Writing Competition Award.

Amelia Taylor won the honors for her work “A Critical Analysis of Name, Image, and Likeness Policies and Their Implications for International Student-Athletes.”

While American student-athletes have been allowed to earn compensation through NIL deals since July 2021, international student-athletes have faced major hurdles due to immigration laws and policies.

“I chose to focus on international students’ NIL rights because this issue is often overlooked, with media …

Best Practice Democratic Policing In Papua: Activating Development And Security Through Community Participation, Hery Herjawan, Bambang Shergi Laksmono, Robertus Robet, Muhammmad Luthfi, Vici Sofianna Putera

Masyarakat: Jurnal Sosiologi

The implementation of Democratic Policing across various parts of the world demonstrates the interconnectedness of changes in approaches to addressing security issues. This transformation is a result of a systemic shift from operational and managerial police systems. This research seeks to affirm this argument in the policing practices in Mimika, Papua, highlighting changes in the level of community participation in maintaining public safety and order driven by democratic policing practices in the region. This research employs a qualitative method for both data analysis and data collection. Data collection was conducted through interview techniques, meanwhile data analysis is conducted using case …

26th Annual Open Government Summit: Your Guide To The Access To Public Records Act & Open Meetings Act, Peter F. Neronha, Roger Williams University School Of Law

School of Law Conferences, Lectures & Events

No abstract provided.

Office Of Attorney General: Peter F. Neronha, Attorney General: Access To Public Records Act ; Open Meetings Act (Powerpoint Presentation), Office Of The Attorney General Of Rhode Island, Roger Williams University School Of Law

School of Law Conferences, Lectures & Events

No abstract provided.

Law School News: Mandell-Boisclair Justice Camp Prepares Young Scholars To Become Future Lawyers, Social Justice Advocates 7-26-2024, Jordan J. Phelan, Roger Williams University School Of Law

Life of the Law School (1993- )

No abstract provided.

Rwu School Of Law Social Justice Camp, Roger Williams University School Of Law

School of Law Conferences, Lectures & Events

No abstract provided.

Dean Christiana Ochoa And 12 Maurer Alumni Named Indiana 250 Honorees, James Owsley Boyd

Keep Up With the Latest News from the Law School (blog)

What do Indiana Fever star Caitlin Clark, record-setting racecar driver and team owner Michael Andretti, Indianapolis Colts owner Jim Irsay, broadcasting icon Pat McAfee, and Indiana Law Dean Christiana Ochoa have in common?

All are among this year’s list of Indiana 250 honorees, recognizing some of the most influential and impactful leaders across the state, a list that also includes a number of Maurer School of Law alumni.

“The evolution of the Indiana 250 over time is one of our favorite things about it—and the reason we update the list annually,” said Nate Feltman, CEO and owner of IBJ Media. …

What Congress Needs To Break The Immigration Reform Stalemate, Maryam T. Stevenson

Catholic University Law Review

This article provides a policy proposal for an immigration reform package that could be successful in the modern-day Congress. It is the second article of a series that began with an analysis of why immigration reform has been unsuccessful over the past 30 years despite bipartisan support. That article argued that polarization combined with the framing of immigration by the media and political elites has caused the public to view immigration as a one-dimensional policy largely defined by border concerns, when in reality, it is a robust policy area that encompasses a number of various issues (i.e. family immigration, skilled …