Legal Studies Commons^™

Book Review: American Jericho: A Book Review Of The Hanging Judge By Michael A. Ponsor, Giovanna Shay

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Informal–Formal Sector Interactions In Automotive Engineering, Kampala, Dick Kawooya

Faculty Publications

This chapter provides findings from a Ugandan case study that examined innovation transfers between informal-sector automotive artisans and formally employed researchers at Makerere University’s College of Engineering, Design, Art and Technology (CEDAT). Th e primary site studied was CEDAT’s Gatsby Garage, an automotive workshop where it was found that the informal-sector artisans were central to innovative processes but were at the same time driven more by sharing impulses than by concern for the intellectual property (IP) implications of their work. Based on these findings, it is argued that Ugandan policy-makers need to seek policy tools to support innovation transfers between …

Education And Training Of Specialist Sexual Offence Investigators In Victoria, Australia From 2009 To 2011, Jennifer Anne Turnley

Theses: Doctorates and Masters

The topic of training specifically designed for investigators of sexual offences has received little attention from academic researchers to date. Previous studies have not described training provided to police investigators of sexual offences in Australia. This thesis developed Turnley’s Framework for the Examination of Police Training in Sexual Assault Investigation, to examine and describe a Sexual Offences and Child Abuse Investigative Teams (SOCIT) Course, provided to Victorian Police from 2009 to 2011. This entailed triangulation of findings from non-participant observations of one SOCIT Course, with quantitative and qualitative data sourced though an in-depth interview with course trainers; feedback sheets voluntarily …

Pricing Clinical Legal Education, Robert R. Kuehn

Scholarship@WashULaw

Some blame the cost of clinical legal education for high law school tuition. They argue that, regardless of the educational and employment benefits to students, clinical legal education, and law clinics in particular, are too expensive to expand or require for all students in a time of decreasing law school enrollments and revenues. This Article is an empirical examination of these claims. Reviewing tuition, curricular and enrollment data from all law schools, this Article demonstrates that 84% of law schools already have the capacity to provide a clinical experience to every student without adding courses or faculty, although only 18% …

Revisiting The Influence Of Law Clerks On The U.S. Supreme Court's Agenda-Setting Process, Christina L. Boyd, Ryan C. Black, Amanda C. Bryan

Scholarship@WashULaw

Do law clerks influence U.S. Supreme Court Justices’ decisions in the Court’s agenda-setting stage? For those Justices responding to their own law clerks’ cert recommendations, we expect a high degree of agreement between Justice and clerk. For non-employing Justices, however, we anticipate that the likelihood of agreement between clerk and Justice will vary greatly based on the interplay among the ideological compatibility between a Justice and the clerk, the underlying certworthiness of the petition for review, and the clerk’s final recommendation. Relying on a newly collected dataset of petitions making the Court’s discuss list over the 1986 through 1993 Terms, …

A Side Of Justice Rarely Seen: Professional Perspectives Toward Youth Justice And Sentencing Procedures In The Exploratory Context Of Canada And Russia, Serge Lokshin M.A.

Theses and Dissertations (Comprehensive)

This thesis contributes to the growing body of literature on comparative youth justice and policy. By analyzing dilemmas faced by youth in justice systems from the perspective of Canada and Russia, the study argues that professional outlooks have a considerable significance for understanding the legal system and its function, and play an important role in shaping judicial administration concerning juveniles. An investigation into professional perspectives on youth justice is used to formulate an understanding of the issues for young people within the legal systems of the respective regions, the sentencing procedures, and the social and procedural contentions facing youth on …

Racial Profiling As Collective Definition, Trevor George Gardner

Scholarship@WashULaw

Economists and other interested academics have committed significant time and effort to developing a set of circumstances under which an intelligent and circumspect form of racial profiling can serve as an effective tool in crime finding–the specific objective of finding criminal activity afoot. In turn, anti-profiling advocates tend to focus on the immediate efficacy of the practice, the morality of the practice, and/or the legality of the practice. However, the tenor of this opposition invites racial profiling proponents to develop more surgical profiling techniques to employ in crime finding. In the article, I review the literature on group distinction to …

Inmates For Rent, Sovereignty For Sale: The Global Prison Market, Benjamin Levin

Scholarship@WashULaw

In 2009, Belgium and the Netherlands announced a deal to send approximately 500 Belgian inmates to Dutch prisons, in exchange for an annual payment of £26 million. The arrangement was unprecedented, but justified as beneficial to both nations: Belgium had too many prisoners and not enough prisons, whereas the Netherlands had too many prisons and not enough prisoners. The deal has yet to be replicated, nor has it triggered sustained criticism or received significant scholarly treatment. This Article aims to fill this void by examining the exchange and its possible implications for a global market in prisoners and prison space. …

Financial Conglomerates And Information Barriers, Andrew F. Tuch

Scholarship@WashULaw

The organizational structure of financial conglomerates gives rise to fundamental regulatory challenges. Legally, the structure subjects firms to multiple, incompatible client duties. Practically, the structure provides firms with a huge reservoir of non-public information that they may use to further their self-interests, potentially harming clients and third parties. The primary regulatory response to these challenges and a core feature of the financial regulatory architecture is the information barrier or Chinese wall. Rather than examine measures to strengthen information barriers, to date legal scholars have focused on the circumstances in which to deny them legal effect, while economists have focused on …

Big Data Ethics, Neil M. Richards, Jonathan H. King

Scholarship@WashULaw

We are on the cusp of a “Big Data” Revolution, in which increasingly large datasets are mined for important predictions and often surprising insights. The predictions and decisions this revolution will enable will transform our society in ways comparable to the Industrial Revolution. We are now at a critical moment; big data uses today will be sticky and will settle both default norms and public notions of what is “no big deal” regarding big data predictions for years to come.

In this paper, we argue that big data, broadly defined, is producing increased powers of institutional awareness and power that …

The Four Freedoms And The Future Of Religious Liberty, John D. Inazu

Scholarship@WashULaw

The First Amendment’s rights of speech, press, religion, and assembly were once “interwoven” but distinct. Together, these freedoms advanced a pluralist skepticism of state orthodoxy that protected religious and other forms of liberty. The connections among these rights were evident at the Framing. They were also prominent during the 1930s and 1940s, when legal and political rhetoric recognized the “preferred position” of the “Four Freedoms.” We have lost sight of the Four Freedoms, supplanting their unified distinctiveness with an undifferentiated free speech framework driven by unsatisfying concepts like content neutrality and public forum analysis. It did not have to be …

Implicit Bias Deserves Our Explicit Attention, Kimberly Jade Norwood

Scholarship@WashULaw

What are implicit biases? In brief, we all walk around with two sets of attitudes and beliefs: our conscious (explicit) attitudes and our unconscious (implicit) attitudes. Scientists believe that human consciousness takes up approximately 10 percent of our brain activity. That means that for most things, our unconscious mind is doing the work. Implicit biases exist within our unconscious mind. Our brains are bombarded with millions of bits of information every second. To avoid overload, our brains automatically categorize information into schemas that we use to guide us in our everyday living.

Merging And Dissolving Special Districts, Conor Clarke

Scholarship@WashULaw

Special district governments exist in every state, providing services ranging from protection against fire to protection against fire ants. These governments are easy to form, but often they are difficult to dissolve or consolidate. Nevertheless, in many states, the number of special district governments is declining. This Comment draws on statistical analyses and interviews with government officials to explain the cause of this decline. It also discusses how existing legal frameworks may be revised to facilitate the efficient consolidation and dissolution of special district governments.

Is The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court Really A Rubber Stamp? Ex Parte Proceedings And The Fisc Win Rate, Conor Clarke

Scholarship@WashULaw

One of the most common criticisms of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court is that the court has approved more than 99% of the government’s 33,000 ex parte surveillance requests, a fact cited as extraordinary evidence that the court is nothing more than a rubber stamp. This Essay disputes that popular criticism in two ways. First, I argue that there are good reasons to expect ex parte processes to produce lopsided results, since the government selects applications based in part on the level of oversight the court applies – just as, in most other legal contexts, ‘the decision to litigate’ depends …

Systemic Barriers To Effective Assistance Of Counsel In Plea Bargaining, Peter A. Joy, Rodney J. Uphoff

Scholarship@WashULaw

In a trio of recent cases, Padilla v. Kentucky, Missouri v. Frye, and Lafler v. Cooper, the U.S. Supreme Court has focused its attention on defense counsel's pivotal role during the plea bargaining process . At the same time that the Court has signaled its willingness to consider ineffective assistance of counsel claims at the plea stage, prosecutors are increasingly requiring defendants to sign waivers that include waiving all constitutional and procedural errors, even unknown ineffective assistance of counsel claims such as those that proved successful in Padilla and Frye. Had Jose Padilla and Galin Frye been forced to sign …

Watching The Watchers, Neil M. Richards

Scholarship@WashULaw

In this essay from Wired Magazine (UK)'s special edition, The Wired World in 2014, Prof. Richards argues that sousveillance–watching the watchers–is an important development that will be on the rise in 2014.

Replication Of Known Dental Characteristics In Porcine Skin: Emerging Technologies For The Imaging Specialist, L. Thomas Johnson, Thomas W. Radmer, Dean C. Jeutter, Gary L. Stafford, Joseph Thulin, Thomas Wirtz, George Corliss, Kwang Woo Ahn, Alexis Visotky, Ronald L. Groffy

School of Dentistry Faculty Research and Publications

This study demonstrates that it is sometimes possible to replicate patterns of human teeth in pig skin and determine scientifically that a given injury pattern (bite mark) correlates with the dentitions of a very small proportion of a population dataset, e.g., 5 percent or even 1 percent. The authors recommend building on the template of this research with a sufficiently large database of samples that reflects the diverse world population. They also envision the development of a sophisticated imaging software application that enables forensic examiners to insert parameters for measurement, as well as additional methods of applying force to produce …

Educating The Next Generation Of Cyberforensic Professionals, Mark Pollitt, Philip Craiger

Publications

This paper provides a historical overview of the development of cyberforensics as a scientific discipline, along with a description of the current state of training, educational programs, certification and accreditation. The paper traces the origins of cyberforensics, the acceptance of cyberforensics as a forensic science and its recognition as a component of information security. It also discusses the development of professional certification and standardized bodies of knowledge that have had a substantial impact on the discipline. Finally, it discusses the accreditation of cyberforensic educational programs, its linkage with the bodies of knowledge and its effect on cyberforensic educational programs.

Artificial Meaning, Lawrence B. Solum

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

This Essay investigates the concept of artificial meaning, meanings produced by entities other than individual natural persons. That investigation begins in Part I with a preliminary inquiry into the meaning of “meaning,” in which the concept of meaning is disambiguated. The relevant sense of “meaning” for the purpose of this inquiry is captured by the idea of communicative content, although the phrase “linguistic meaning” is also a rough equivalent. Part II presents a thought experiment, The Chinese Intersection, which investigates the creation of artificial meaning produced by an AI that creates legal rules for the regulation of a hyper-complex conflux …