Law and Society Commons^™

Moving From Harm Mitigation To Affirmative Discrimination Mitigation: The Untapped Potential Of Artificial Intelligence To Fight School Segregation And Other Forms Of Racial Discrimination, Andrew Gall

Catholic University Journal of Law and Technology

No abstract provided.

The Negative Impact Of Service Member And Veteran Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (Ptsd) Rating Or Specter Of Ptsd On Child Custody Arrangements, Erhan Bedestani

Catholic University Journal of Law and Technology

No abstract provided.

Social Justice As Desistance: Rethinking Approaches To Gender Violence, Deborah M. Weissman

American University Law Review

Scholars and activists have directed increasing attention to the failure of the U.S. criminal legal system and the institutions of mass incarceration it has wrought and have identified the need for transformative changes in approaches to acts of harmful behaviors. Proponents of reforms have advocated for legal corrections to constrain sentencing practices, and remedy racial disparities in imprisonment to mitigate rates of incarceration and related punishments. COVID-19 release campaigns have revealed both the egregious conditions of prisons and the irrationality of punishment paradigms. Indeed, not a few abolitionists have repudiated the criminal legal system.

Portraits Of Bankruptcy Filers, Pamela Foohey, Robert M. Lawless, Deborah Thorne

Georgia Law Review

One in ten adult Americans has turned to the consumer bankruptcy system for help. For almost forty years, the only systematic data collection about the people who file bankruptcy has come from the Consumer Bankruptcy Project (CBP), for which we serve as co-principal investigators. In this Article, we use CBP data from 2013 to 2019 to describe who is using the bankruptcy system, providing the first comprehensive overview of bankruptcy filers in thirty years. We use principal component analysis to leverage these data to identify distinct groups of people who file bankruptcy. This technique allows us to situate the distinctions …

The Double-Side Of Deepfakes: Obstacles And Assets In The Fight Against Child Pornography, Abigail Olson

Georgia Law Review

Deepfake technology recently took the internet by storm. Although they can be used for both innocuous and nefarious purposes, deepfakes overwhelmingly depict people who appear to be creating nonconsensual pornography. The rise of deepfake technology must be accounted for in the existing federal legal framework, specifically in cases implicating images of children. While deepfakes’ malicious uses ought to be criminalized, exceptions should be made to use deepfake technology as a tool to enforce and deter purveyors of child pornography. This Note explores what the emerging legal framework addressing deepfakes should look like and considers the importance of using the “flipside” …

A Critical Race Theory Approach To Children's Rights, Jessica Dixon Weaver

American University Law Review

This Article uses critical race theory to analyze the impact of corporal punishment and physical child abuse on African American children’s rights in the United States. From an international perspective, the banning of corporal punishment is consistent with multidisciplinary research about the negative effects of physical discipline on children. However, throughout United States history, African American parenting oftentimes utilizes physical discipline to teach children strict compliance with authority in order to prevent deadly violence from being inflicted upon them by white people. Using critical race theory concepts, this Article illustrates how state endorsement of corporal punishment within the family and …

Presumed Unfit: The Dual Bind Faced By Pregnant And Parenting Youth In Foster Care, Kara R. Finck

American University Law Review

Pregnant and parenting youth in foster care are subject to a range of laws, policies, and practices that expose the realities of a child welfare system structured to focus on surveillance instead of support and family regulation instead of family integrity. Informed by my experience representing foster youth who become parents, this Article considers how youth in care are presumed unfit to parent their children because of a history in foster care and their age. A youth’s status as pregnant or parenting is weaponized to subject them to additional scrutiny, threats, and a shifting burden to justify their fundamental right …

The Constitutional Costs Of School Policing, Maryam Ahranjani, Natalie Saing

American University Law Review

Responding to fears of violence and liability on K-12 campuses, local school boards and superintendents have made on-site or embedded school police omnipresent in American public schools. Yet, very little attention is paid to the many costs associated with their presence. When situating law enforcement’s presence squarely in the racist history of policing and school policing, the juxtaposition with the civic purpose of public education reveals significant constitutional costs. This Article builds on existing scholarship by bringing attention to the conflict between the First, Fourth, Fifth, Eighth, and Fourteenth Amendments and the dimensions of embedded school police. Ultimately, schools must …

Regulating International Commercial Surrogacy: A Balance Of Harms And Benefits, Sophia Shepherd

University of Florida Journal of Law & Public Policy

International surrogacy can produce great joy, as well-paid surrogates help produce healthy children for caring parents. However, many current cross-border surrogacy arrangements occur under conflicting citizenship laws, which can leave surrogate-born children stateless and their intended parents fighting for parental rights. In addition, without sufficient regulation, international surrogacy can lead to abuses, including exploitation of surrogate mothers and abandonment of surrogate-born children. At the other extreme, excessive regulation, including prohibition, can also cause great harm as surrogates and intended parents are denied surrogacy’s benefits. Moreover, inadequate regulation can quickly lead to prohibition, as abuses cause a country to flip from …

Rethinking Juvenile Rehabilitation: Presumptive Waiver And Alternative Sentencing In Indiana, S. Reese Sobol Ii

Indiana Law Journal

Indiana’s juvenile justice system, like all systems of juvenile justice, is premised on rehabilitation. And while Indiana is far from an outdated, overly punitive system, there are several tangible opportunities for improvement. Indiana enacted an alternative sentencing scheme for juvenile offenders waived into adult court in 2013, but alternative sentencing has not been implemented in an effective manner yet. Furthermore, Indiana’s statutory system of waiver contains several aspects that are inconsistent with, or simply fail to account for, modern social science understandings.

This Comment seeks to expound upon relevant social science principles within the context of juvenile justice in order …

The Sec's Climate Disclosure Rule: Critiquing The Critics, George S. Georgiev

Articles

Climate change is an existential phenomenon, which entails a wide variety of physical risks as well as sizeable but underappreciated economic risks. In March 2022, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) moved to address some of the information gaps related to the effects of climate change on firms by proposing a rule that requires public companies to report detailed and standardized information about important climate-related matters for the benefit of investors and markets. Though the rule proposal was welcomed by many market participants, it was also met with a level of opposition that was unusual in both its intensity …

Toward A Socially Just Peace In The War On Drugs?: The Illinois Cannabis Social-Equity Program, Andre Douglas Pond Cummings, Steven A. Ramirez

Law Faculty Scholarship

Laudably, when Illinois legalized the recreational use of cannabis, it also sought to repair the damage wrought by the War on Drugs (WOD)through its social-equity initiatives. That harm included excessive and disproportionate incarceration in communities of color, over-policing within those communities, and all of the social and economic harms implicit in those realities. This harm necessarily creates intergenerational harm, as parents and children lose necessary pillars of support. Moreover, compelling evidence suggests that the progenitors of the WOD in-tended this harm. Measured against this historic social injustice, the social equity efforts in Illinois fail to secure a material unwinding of …

What We Are Owed: The Possibilities Of A Civil Law Response To Sexual Injuries, Nathalie Marx

Scripps Senior Theses

Drawing from philosophical, feminist, and legal frameworks, this thesis aims to reconceptualize our understanding of sexual violations. I suggest that rape and other sexual violations produce injuries unique from other forms of physical violence that must be addressed as an extension of a culture which objectifies, restricts the agency of, and shames women. It is argued that through the ability for survivors to bring a civil claim of negligence against their perpetrators following a sexual injury, pathways for restorative healing and cultural transformation are opened, and a more responsive legal standard for fault is created. This paper responds to theories …

The Color Of Pain: Racial Bias In Pain And Suffering Damages, Maytal Gilboa

Georgia Law Review

For more than half a century, our legal system has formally eschewed race-based discrimination, and nearly every field of law has evolved to increase protections for minority groups historically burdened by racial prejudice. Yet, even today, juries in tort actions routinely consider a plaintiff’s race when calculating compensatory tort damages, and they do so in a manner that systematically results in lower awards to Black plaintiffs than to White. This Article examines this problem, zeroing in on the specific issue of racial bias in calculations of tort damages for pain and suffering.

The severity of a plaintiff’s injury is commonly …

The Lost Cause Of Free Speech, Mary Anne Franks

Articles

No abstract provided.

Worth A Shot: Encouraging Vaccine Uptake Through "Empathy", Jody L. Madeira

Articles by Maurer Faculty

Pro- and anti-vaccine organizations and individuals have frequently invoked empathy as a strategy for increasing uptake of COVID-19 precautions, including vaccinations. On one hand, vaccine supporters deployed empathy to defuse conflict, prioritize safeguarding the collective welfare, and avoid government mandates. On the other hand, vaccine opponents used empathy to emphasize the alleged individual effects of pandemic precautions, mobilize public voices, and stress the importance of medical freedom in policy-making contexts.

This Article first defines empathy and reviews empathy scholarship, paying particular attention to its relationship with narrative and the contexts where empathy can be difficult or dangerous. It then applies …

Do Social Movements Spur Corporate Change? The Rise Of “Metoo Termination Rights” In Ceo Contracts, Rachel Arnow-Richman, James Hicks, Steven Davidoff Solomon

Indiana Law Journal

Do social movements spur corporate change? This Article sheds new empirical and theoretical light on the issue through an original study of executive contracts before and after MeToo. The MeToo movement, beginning in late 2017, exposed a workplace culture seemingly permissive of high-level, sex-based misconduct. Companies typically responded slowly and imposed few consequences on perpetrators, often allowing them to depart with lucrative exit packages. Why did companies reward rather than penalize bad actors, and has the movement disrupted this culture of complicity?

The passage of time since the height of the movement allows us to investigate these issues empirically, using …

Policy By The People, For The People:Designing Responsiveregulation And Buildingdemocratic Power, Scott L. Cummings, Doug Smith

Fordham Law Review

Policymaking in American democracy is often a process that happens to people rather than by them. This is especially the case with respect to policy that affects people with less power in low-income communities and communities of color. Urban policy, in particular, has historically been driven by business elites and white homeowners’ interests, which have shaped exclusionary policies, such as redlining and single-family zoning— etching racial and economic segregation into the fabric of city space. Even when outsider interest groups and social movement organizations gain enough power to shape the policy agenda, give input into the content of policy, and …

Disparate Discrimination, Leah M. Litman

Michigan Law Review

This Article explains and analyzes a recent trend in the Supreme Court’s cases regarding unintentional discrimination, where the argument is that a law has the effect of producing a disadvantage on members of a particular group. In religious discrimination cases, the Court has held that a law is presumptively unconstitutional if the law results in a comparable secular activity being treated more favorably than religious activity. Yet in racial discrimination cases, the Court has said the mere fact that a law more severely disadvantages racial minorities as a group does not suffice to establish unlawful discrimination.

The two tracks for …

Access To Counsel For Defendants In Lower Criminal Courts, Alyssa M. Clark, Andrew L. B. Davies, Karise M. Curtis

Other Publications

Criminal defendants unable to afford an attorney are entitled to one for free in the United States, but how and when they obtain access to that lawyer is another question. We examine judicial attitudes and behavior in granting access to counsel in areas where logistics are particularly forbidding. Based on survey responses from 1,091 magistrate judges presiding in lower criminal courts in suburban and rural jurisdictions in upstate New York, we describe both the procedures used to determine defendants' financial eligibility for free counsel, and the logistical challenges that surround securing the physical presence of a lawyer at the first …