Law and Society Commons^™

Crisis And Cultural Evolution: Steering The Next Normal From Self-Interest To Concern And Fairness, Robert A. Bohrer

Faculty Scholarship

This essay examines the current time of crisis and offers a vision of the way in which our society and our law can evolve in response. Crises of this scale are evolution-forcing events and I argue that the current moment can move us towards a fundamentally different vision of law and justice. It is the first essay or article to show that the autonomous pursuit of self-interest was a common assumption or value in the major intellectual forces of the twentieth century: classical free market economics, behavioral economics, and sociobiology, as well as in the competing visions of a just …

Introduction: What Matters For Black Workers After 2020?, Michael Z. Green

Faculty Scholarship

This paper operates as the Introduction to a Symposium that resulted from a Call for Papers discussing the topic of "What Matters for Black Workers after 2020?" to be published in the 25th volume of the Employee Rights and Employment Policy Journal for 2021. This paper briefly discusses the papers in that Symposium publication authored by Jamillah Bowman Williams, Michael Duff, and Henry Chambers that address this topic. I thank Noah Zatz, Marty Malin, Michael Oswalt, Marcia McCormick, and Tristan Kirvan for their dedicated efforts, feedback, and encouragement in completing this Symposium issue for the journal on this very important …

Disaggregating Chevron, Lawrence B. Solum

Faculty Scholarship

Chevron U.S.A. Inc. v. Natural Resources Defense Council, Inc. is widely regarded as the most important administrative law decision in the history of the United States. The scholarly literature is vast and defies summary or cataloging. Moreover, Chevron is contested and criticized, defended and derided, lauded and lamented—the source of “angst and rancor” in the words of Professor Kristin E. Hickman and R. David Hahn in their article, Categorizing Chevron. One might think that when it comes to Chevron, there is “no new thing under the sun,” but in fact, Chevron is still full of surprises. When we turn …

Design Justice In Municipal Criminal Regulation, Amber Baylor

Faculty Scholarship

This Article offers a model for addressing current inequities in U.S. municipal criminal regulation through design justice theory. Historically, municipal courts in the United States have been the arbiter of minor crimes, processing traffic tickets and other low-level criminal charges. They have also served to uphold Black Codes, segregation, anti-protest laws, and “broken windows” criminal regulation. Enhancing equality in municipal courts requires meaningful participation from across the city’s populace. Participatory design- a framework within urban planning, architecture and design fields- is a practice with honed protocols for implementing meaningful participation from “users” of a place or product. The goal of …

Let's Get Serious - The Clear Case For Compensating The Student Athlete - By The Numbers - A University Of Michigan Athletic Program Case Study, Neal Newman

Faculty Scholarship

Should college athletes be compensated for their play and if so, how? The first question has been a debate for some time now. But the second question—the “how”—not so much. This writing addresses both questions in depth. With the Ed O’Bannon case that was decided back in August of 2014 and the palaver the Northwestern football team raised in their efforts to unionize, it is acknowledged that the discussions on this issue may have reached its crescendo years ago. That is until now. On September 27, 2019, Gavin Newsom, the Governor of California, signed into law Senate Bill 206. Senate …

Beyond Algorithms: Toward A Normative Theory Of Automated Regulation, Felix Mormann

Faculty Scholarship

The proliferation of artificial intelligence in our daily lives has spawned a burgeoning literature on the dawn of dehumanized, algorithmic governance. Remarkably, the scholarly discourse overwhelmingly fails to acknowledge that automated, non-human governance has long been a reality. For more than a century, policymakers have relied on regulations that automatically adjust to changing circumstances, without the need for human intervention. This article surveys the track record of self-adjusting governance mechanisms to propose a normative theory of automated regulation.

Effective policymaking frequently requires anticipation of future developments, from technology innovation to geopolitical change. Self-adjusting regulation offers an insurance policy against the …

Inside The Master's Gates: Resources And Tools To Dismantle Racism And Sexism In Higher Education, Susan Ayres

Faculty Scholarship

The spring of 2020 saw waves of protest as police killed people of color. After George Floyd’s death, protests erupted in over 140 cities. The systemic racism exhibited by these killings has been uncontrollable, hopeless, and endless. Our country is facing a national crisis. In response to the police killings, businesses, schools, and communities held diversity workshops across the nation, and businesses and organizations posted antiracism statements. Legislators and City Councils introduced bills and orders to defund police and to limit qualified immunity. As schools prepared for the fall semester, teachers considered ways to incorporate antiracism materials into the curriculum. …

Ethical Challenges In The Middle Tier Of Covid-19 Vaccine Allocation: Guidance For Organizational Decision-Making, Nancy Berlinger, Matthew Wynia, Tia Powell, Aimee Milliken, Parinda Khatri, Fatma Marouf, Keisha Ray, Johanna Crane

Faculty Scholarship

This supplement to The Hastings Center’s “Ethical Framework” aims to help structure time-sensitive discussion of significant, foreseeable ethical concerns in responding to Covid-19 and to support collaboration across institutions throughout pandemic response and recovery. It is designed for use by county health systems and by hospitals, community health centers, and other health care organizations responsible for patient care or preventive health, including vaccine education, vaccine distribution, and vaccination. This document aims to support formal and informal convening and policy work within the same geographic region, such as a municipality, county, metropolitan area, state, or multistate area, led by public health …

Beyond Transparency And Accountability: Three Additional Features Algorithm Designers Should Build Into Intelligent Platforms, Peter K. Yu

Faculty Scholarship

In the age of artificial intelligence, innovative businesses are eager to deploy intelligent platforms to detect and recognize patterns, predict customer choices and shape user preferences. Yet such deployment has brought along the widely documented problems of automated systems, including coding errors, corrupt data, algorithmic biases, accountability deficits and dehumanizing tendencies. In response to these problems, policymakers, commentators and consumer advocates have increasingly called on businesses seeking to ride the artificial intelligence wave to build transparency and accountability into algorithmic designs.

While acknowledging these calls for action and appreciating the benefits and urgency of building transparency and accountability into algorithmic …

J. Krishnamurti And The Contemporary World Crises: Scholars’ Panel Two Session Four, Ashwani Kumar, Nayha Acharya

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

In this presentation, I describe my journey with Krishnamurti’s existential inquiry at a personal level and in the context of my academic life. I was introduced to Krishnamurti’s work during my Bachelor of Education program in India in 2004. While Krishnamurti was quite peripheral to the curriculum, he became a central focus of study for me during the Bachelor of Education, Masters of Education, and during my PhD. His insights have had a deep impact on how I view personal, educational, and social problems and how I approach teaching and research. His work is central to the four pedagogical and …

The Quotidian And Constitutive Practice Of Police Brutality Against Indigenous People, Elaine Craig

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

In Settler Colonialism, Policing and Racial Terror: The Police Shooting of Loreal Tsingine Sherene Razack gives voice to the settler colonial violence perpetrated against Loreal Tsingine, a 27-year-old Navajo women who was shot and killed by Austin Shipley. Shipley, a white male police officer, claimed he was trying to apprehend her for alleged shoplifting. The article, which is brilliantly and compellingly written (as is typical of all of Professor Razack’s work) makes several claims. Most centrally, however, she asserts that racial terror – a violence done at both structural and individual levels – is at the very heart of the …

J. Krishnamurti And The Contemporary World Crises: Introduction To The Conference Proceedings, Ashwani Kumar, Nayha Acharya

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

We, Ashwani Kumar and Nayha Acharya, are excited and honoured to share the conference proceedings of the J. Krishnamurti and the Contemporary World Crises International Online Conference. The conference took place at the end of February 2021. It was free for anyone to attend. In our introduction we share how the conference was conceptualized, why J. Krishnamurti is a relevant focus in today’s world, how the conference unfolded, and how attendees responded to this conference.

I, Ashwani Kumar, have spent much of my academic journey studying, applying, teaching, and engaging in dialogues about J. Krishnamurti’s insights into human consciousness and …

In The Name Of Public Health: Misoprostol And The New Criminalization Of Abortion In Brazil, Mariana Prandini Assis, Joanna Erdman

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

This article explores the criminal regulation of misoprostol as a controlled drug in Brazil as a new form of abortion criminalization. A qualitative analysis of Brazilian case law shows how the courts use a public health rhetoric of unsafe abortion to criminalize the distribution of misoprostol in the informal sector. Rather than an invention of the local bench, this judicial rhetoric reflects global public health discourse and policy on unsafe abortion and the double life of misoprostol as both an essential medicine and a controlled drug. In contrast to previous studies, the article shows that abortion criminalization is not the …

An Abortion Law Preformed, Joanna Erdman

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

This article engages the transcribed testimony of Carolyn Egan and Janice Patricia Tripp in R v Morgentaler as a critical moment of lawmaking. There is something revealing, often amusing, and sometimes devastating, when a lawyer asks a non-lawyer, in this case, a social worker: “What is the law?” The article focuses on those moments in their testimony when Egan and Tripp answered questions about the 1969 abortion law that made the law itself, its rules and procedures, the subject of examination, and in doing so, constructed new meanings of the law and social action in relation to it in the …

Securing Safe Supply During Covid-19 And Beyond: Scoping Review And Knowledge Mobilization, Matthew Bonn, Natasha Touesnard, Brianna Cheng, Michael Pugliese, Emilie Comeau, Claire Bodkin, Thomas D. Brothers, Leah Genge, Matthew Herder, Candis Lepage, Ayden Scheim, Dan Werb, Sheila Wildeman

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

Background

Safe supply is defined as the legal and regulated provision of drugs with mind and/or body altering properties that have been typically accessible only through the illegal drug market. In response to the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic and related social/physical distancing measures, efforts have been made to scale up and increase access to safe supply programs in an effort to reduce overdose and other drug- and drug policy-related risks. However, it remains unclear whether these efforts taken thus far have meaningfully mitigated the barriers to safe supply experienced by People Who Use Drugs (PWUD), both during and beyond …

Transforming Restorative Justice, Jennifer Llewellyn

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

From the global pandemic to the Black Lives Matter, the Me Too/Times Up and Indigenous reconciliation and decolonisation movements, the systemic and structural failures of current social institutions around the world have all been brought to our collective consciousness in poignant, painful and urgent ways. The need for fundamental social and systemic transformation is clear. This challenge is central to the work of dealing with the past in countries undergoing transition and in established democracies confronting deep structural inequalities and injustices. Rooted in lessons from the application of restorative justice across these contexts, this article suggests that grounding restorative justice …

Social Determinants Of Health And Slippery Slopes In Assisted Dying Debates: Lessons From Canada, Jocelyn Downie, Udo Schuklenk

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

The question of whether problems with the social determinants of health that might impact decision-making justify denying eligibility for assisted dying has recently come to the fore in debates about the legalization of assisted dying. For example, it was central to critiques of the 2021 amendments made to Canada’s assisted dying law. The question of whether changes to a country’s assisted dying legislation lead to descents down slippery slopes has also come to the fore—as it does any time a jurisdiction changes its laws. We explore these two questions through the lens of Canada’s experience both to inform Canada’s ongoing …

Attitudes Toward Withholding Antibiotics From People With Dementia Lacking Decisional Capacity: Findings From A Survey Of Canadian Stakeholders, Gina Bravo, Lieve Van Den Block, Jocelyn Downie, Marcel Arcand, Lise Trottier

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

Background

Healthcare professionals and surrogate decision-makers often face the difficult decision of whether to initiate or withhold antibiotics from people with dementia who have developed a life-threatening infection after losing decisional capacity.

Methods

We conducted a vignette-based survey among 1050 Quebec stakeholders (senior citizens, family caregivers, nurses and physicians; response rate 49.4%) to (1) assess their attitudes toward withholding antibiotics from people with dementia lacking decisional capacity; (2) compare attitudes between dementia stages and stakeholder groups; and (3) investigate other correlates of attitudes, including support for continuous deep sedation (CDS) and medical assistance in dying (MAID). The vignettes feature a …

The Non-Lawyer Attorney General- Problems And Solutions, Andrew Flavelle Martin

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

In this article, I provide a legal and policy analysis of the non-lawyer Attorney General and recommendations for legislative change. I begin in Part 1 by setting out and assessing Askin and its uptake in the case law and literature. I demonstrate that while the decision in Askin has two major weaknesses, the reasoning is presumably applicable across the country.7 In Part 2, I examine the legal consequences of Askin and its policy or practical consequences. I argue that it threatens the government’s solicitor-client privilege and that it leaves the non-lawyer Attorney General unconstrained by the law of lawyering more …

Reasonable Expectations Of Privacy In An Era Of Drones And Deepfakes: Expanding The Supreme Court Of Canada’S Decision In R V Jarvis, Suzie Dunn, Kristen Mj Thomasen

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

Perpetrators of Technology-Facilitated gender-based violence are taking advantage of increasingly automated and sophisticated privacy-invasive tools to carry out their abuse. Whether this be monitoring movements through stalker-ware, using drones to non-consensually film or harass, or manipulating and distributing intimate images online such as deep-fakes and creepshots, invasions of privacy have become a significant form of gender-based violence. Accordingly, our normative and legal concepts of privacy must evolve to counter the harms arising from this misuse of new technology. Canada’s Supreme Court recently addressed Technology-Facilitated violations of privacy in the context of voyeurism in R v Jarvis (2019). The discussion of …

Is It Actually Violence? Framing Technology-Facilitated Abuse As Violence, Suzie Dunn

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

When discussing the term “Technology-Facilitated violence” (TFV) it is often asked: “Is it actually violence?” While international human rights standards, such as the United Nations’ Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women, have long recognized emotional and psychological abuse as forms of violence, including many forms of technology-facilitated abuse, law makers and the general public continue to grapple with the question of whether certain harmful technology-facilitated behaviors are actually forms of violence. This chapter explores this question in two parts. First, it reviews three theoretical concepts of violence and examines how these concepts apply to technology-facilitated …

"Constructing Countervailing Power: Law And Organizing In An Era Of Political Inequality", Kate Andrias, Benjamin I. Sachs

Articles

This Article proposes an innovative approach to remedying the crisis of political inequality: using law to facilitate organizing by the poor and working class, not only as workers, but also as tenants, debtors, welfare beneficiaries, and others. The piece draws on the social-movements literature, and the successes and failures of labor law, to show how law can supplement the deficient regimes of campaign finance and lobbying reform and enable lower-income groups to build organizations capable of countervailing the political power of the wealthy. As such, the Article offers a new direction forward for the public-law literature on political power and …

People’S Electric: Engaged Legal Education At Rutgers-Newark Law School In The 1960s And 1970s, George W. Conk

Fordham Urban Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Analyzing Wrongful Convictions Beyond The Traditional Canonical List Of Errors, For Enduring Structural And Sociological Attributes, (Juveniles, Racism, Adversary System, Policing Policies), Leona D. Jochnowitz, Tonya Kendall

Touro Law Review

Researchers identify possible structural causes for wrongful convictions: racism, justice system culture, adversary system, plea bargaining, media, juvenile and mentally impaired accused, and wars on drugs and crime. They indicate that unless the root causes of conviction error are identified, the routine explanations of error (e.g., eyewitness identifications; false confessions) will continue to re-occur. Identifying structural problems may help to prevent future wrongful convictions. The research involves the coding of archival data from the Innocence Project for seventeen cases, including the one for the Central Park Five exonerees. The data were coded by Hartwick College and Northern Vermont University students …

Race And Equity In The Age Of Unicorns, Lynnise E. Pantin

Faculty Scholarship

This Article critically examines startup culture and its legal predicates. The Article analyzes innovation culture as a whole and uses the downfall of Theranos to illustrate the deficiencies in Silicon Valley culture, centering on race and class. The Article demonstrates that the rise and fall of the unicorn startup Theranos and its founder, Elizabeth Holmes, is emblematic of the problem with the glorification and pursuit of the unicorn designation for startup ventures. The examination of the downfall of Theranos exposes how investors, founders, and others in Silicon Valley engage with each other in the context of pursuing unicorn status. The …

Power Struggles – The Tyranny Of Merit And The Degredation Of Work: Comment On M. Sandel's The Tyranny Of Merit, Kate Andrias

Faculty Scholarship

The ideal of meritocracy is attractive: individuals obtain wealth, leadership roles, and social status based upon talent and hard work, rather than by virtue of their position in the aristocracy or their family connections. Sometimes framed as “equality of opportunity” or even “the American Dream,” meritocracy has for decades garnered widespread popular support in the United States, becoming more embedded over time. Yet, mounting empirical evidence from social scientists demonstrates that our country is not really a meritocracy. Some wield massive advantages from the beginning; others, no matter how talented and hardworking, have little hope of obtaining a coveted spot …

Legal Internalism In Modern Histories Of Copyright, Shyamkrishna Balganesh, Taisu Zhang

Faculty Scholarship

Legal internalism refers to the internal point of view that professional participants in a legal practice develop toward it. It represents a behavioral phenomenon wherein such participants treat the domain of law (or a subset of it) as normative, epistemologically self-contained, and logically coherent on its own terms regardless of whether the law actually embodies those characteristics. Thus understood, legal internalism remains an important characteristic of all modern legal systems. In this Review, we examine three recent interdisciplinary histories of copyright law to showcase the working of legal internalism. We argue that while their interdisciplinary emphasis adds to the conversation …

Nowhere To Run To, Nowhere To Hide, Praveen Kosuri, Lynnise E. Pantin

Faculty Scholarship

As the COVID-19 global pandemic ravaged the United States, exacerbating the country’s existing racial disparities, Black and brown small business owners navigated unprecedented obstacles to stay afloat. Adding even more hardship and challenges, the United States also engaged in a nationwide racial reckoning in the wake of the murder of George Floyd resulting in wide-scale protests in the same neighborhoods that initially saw a disproportionate impact of COVID-19 and harming many of the same Black and brown business owners. These business owners had to operate in an environment in which they experienced recurring trauma, mental anguish and uncertainty, along with …

Acid Attacks In India: A Socio-Legal Report, Vidhik Kumar

Dignity: A Journal of Analysis of Exploitation and Violence

India has the highest number of acid attacks globally every year, and despite the actions taken by the Indian Government and the Supreme Court of India, the crime is on the rise. This increase can be attributed to the patriarchal ideology that is prevalent in India and to India’s inadequate legal system, which does not deliver efficient remedies to the victims. This article will discuss the prevalence of acid attacks in India, motives behind the attacks, consequences on victims, and shortcomings in measures adopted to prevent the crime and provide justice to victims.

Drugs, Patents, And Well-Being, Christopher Buccafusco, Jonathan S. Masur

Faculty Scholarship

The ultimate end of patent law should be to spur innovations that improve human welfare-innovations that make people better off. But firms will only invest resources in developing patentable inventions that will allow them to make money-that is, inventions that people will want to use and buy. This can gravely distort the types of incentives that firms face and the types of inventions they pursue. Nowhere is this truer than in the pharmaceutical field There is by now substantial evidence that treatments for diseases that primarily afflict poorer people-including the citizens of developing nations-are dramatically underproduced, compared with drugs that …