Law and Society Commons^™

The Emerging Constitutional Law Of Remote Criminal Justice, Jenia I. Turner

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

The COVID-19 pandemic compelled courts to experiment with a novel mode of criminal process: conducting proceedings via video. The remote format helped protect public health during the pandemic, and its convenience has led many states to continue using it in certain circumstances. Yet questions about its desirability and constitutionality have lingered, and many are concerned that it undermines the justice and integrity of criminal proceedings. As the future of remote criminal justice is up for debate, it is important to assess to what degree it complies with fundamental constitutional principles. To that end, this Article offers a comprehensive analysis of …

Privacy Law’S Role In An Information Economy, Sari Mazzurco

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

What do we lose when we lose our privacy? A slew of recently enacted state laws suggest that the loss of privacy is merely a loss of individual choice in the market exchange of services for personal information. This Article argues that a loss of privacy risks something greater: the collapse of complex and fluid social identity. Without privacy, individuals cannot nurture their own senses of self because they are no longer free to try on different social roles across diverse relationships. Pervasive, private data collection threatens multifaceted selfhood by eliminating the boundaries that make social roles distinct and hindering …

Beyond Chatgpt: Transforming Government With Augmented Llms, Orly Mazur, Adam Thimmesch

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

The release of ChatGPT demonstrated the remarkable capabilities and the existing limitations of large language models (LLMs) and the natural language chatbots that they power. One area that is ripe for innovation using this new technology, but that has often been bypassed in mainstream discussions, is the public sector.

This Article redirects attention towards this overlooked area, acknowledging the limitations of LLMs, while specifically exploring their potential to transform government operations. The Article discusses the various technological advancements that allow for the development of tools far more refined than the general-use chatbots commonly available to the public. The Article then …

Time And Retribution, Meghan J. Ryan

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

Time is missing from discussions on the theory of retribution. A colossal body of scholarship has been devoted to exploring the theory of retribution, or 'just deserts," but much less has attempted to translate this theory into practice, explaining how to determine an actual offender's desert in real life. The limited scholarship on this topic touches on who might best assess an offender's desert. For example, should a judge, a juror, or the public itself be making these desert decisions? But there is also a temporal aspect to this decision making that has thus far largely eluded exploration: When should …

Reimagining The Inclusive Jury, Anna Offit

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

At the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, everyday life for many Americans was upended. And yet, the jury trial remained viable — even vital. Faced with an era-defining public health disaster, courts innovated, embracing novel technologies and techniques to reimagine where and how justice might be made. But why did it take a pandemic to spur this kind of institutional creativity? Prior to the outbreak of COVID-19, people who were otherwise eligible to participate as jurors were routinely — and uncontroversially — struck or exempted from service due to limited mobility, vision and hearing loss, and caregiving responsibilities. Recent experience …

Virtual Justice?: An Analysis Of Access To Court For People Experiencing Homelessness, Kaitlin Humer

Theses and Dissertations (Comprehensive)

Homelessness in Canada remains a wicked social problem that often intersects with compounding forms of marginalization. The criminalization of homelessness and living life in the public sphere explain, in part, why this population is likely to interact with the criminal justice system. Following the onset of the pandemic, the courts were forced to modernize and embrace digital technologies to maintain operations. Now four years since these changes, there are no signs of turning back and the court system is continuing forward with a hybrid model. Despite this, there is minimal research on the impact of virtual court proceedings on people …

Building Resilience: The Role Of Public Private Partnerships In Disaster Management For Vulnerable Communities, Latisha Nixon-Jones

Scholarly Works

This essay provides a compelling historical analysis of the legislative developments that have shaped the current framework of disaster management in the United States. By tracing the evolution of these laws, it highlights a crucial shift in disaster responsibility—from centralized government agencies to a shared burden with the communities they aim to protect. In response to this shift, I propose that disaster management agencies adopt a socio-legal framework designed to guide the formation of public- private partnerships (PPPs). Such a framework would offer a structured approach to balancing transparency with the profitability goals that often characterize private involvement in public …

Antisemitism: A View From Within The Rabbinic Legal Tradition, Suzanne L. Stone

Book Chapters

What does it mean to reflect on antisemitism and law? From an interdisciplinary perspective, the contributors examine the connections within this field of research for the first time. Approaches from diverse disciplines, including history, philosophy, sociology, literary studies, and law, fill initial gaps but also reveal problems, challenges, and areas for further study. Ultimately, this volume lays the foundation for a deeper understanding of antisemitism in legal scholarship and practice.

Fears, Faith, And Facts In Environmental Law, William W. Buzbee

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Environmental law has long been shaped by both the particular nature of environmental harms and by the actors and institutions that cause such harms or can address them. This nation’s environmental statutes remain far from perfect, and a comprehensive law tailored to the challenges of climate change is still elusive. Nonetheless, America’s environmental laws provide lofty, express protective purposes and findings about reasons for their enactment. They also clearly state health and environmental goals, provide tailored criteria for action, and utilize procedures and diverse regulatory tools that reflect nuanced choices.

But the news is far from good. Despite the ambitious …

Black Maternal Mortality Rate: Improving Outcomes For Black Mothers Using Legislation That Reverses The Effects Of Structural Racism In Medicine, Ashley Pattain

Mitchell Hamline Law Journal of Public Policy and Practice

No abstract provided.

Autism And Access To Healthcare, Amanda Forbes

Mitchell Hamline Law Journal of Public Policy and Practice

No abstract provided.

Trading Your Child’S Privacy Rights For Views And Sponsorships, Angel Guarneros

Mitchell Hamline Law Journal of Public Policy and Practice

No abstract provided.

It's More Than Just A Family Issue: A Global Analysis Of Parentage Assumption Law In Relation To Surrogacy, Jordan Chrispell

University of San Francisco Law Review

No abstract provided.

Fight Like A Girl: Holding Schools Accountable For Punishing Female Students' Sexuality In Violation Of Title Ix, Angela Garcia

University of San Francisco Law Review

No abstract provided.

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 …

Grasping The Third Rail: Restorative Justice And Violent Crime, Olwyn Conway

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

Restorative justice is a means of responding to harm— including criminal offenses—through active accountability and repair, rather than through passive punishment and isolation. While restorative justice has demonstrated potential to meaningfully improve processes and outcomes for individuals and communities, the implementation of restorative justice programs to address crime—both within and alongside the American criminal system—has been slow, limited, and misplaced. Programs are often directed at low-level, nonviolent offenses that involve little if any cognizable harm. This approach creates two problems. One, it risks net-widening: bringing more citizens under criminal surveillance and carceral control for minor offenses—further diluting the constitutional and …

The Fairness Model Of Legal Institutions, James M. Donovan

Law Faculty Books and Chapters

If any group is to endure over time, individual frustrations, while inevitable, must be usually experienced as acceptable, or at least tolerable. Failing that, little would prevent the losers in these conflicts from leaving or revolting, which would be cumulatively debilitating to the group. As opposed to holding law’s job to impose order and police infringers, the second approach suggests that finding the balance between group and individual desires is the ‘major difficulty of all law—the problem of really getting a fresh start in relations between litigants after disposition of a trouble-case. This is the problem not only of keeping …

The Violence Of Numbers: A Critical Appraisal Of The Justice Capabilities Framework, Abhineet Maurya

Socio-Legal Review

Systems of indicators and international rankings have today become a new mode of evaluating social, political, and economic life. In the context of measuring the rule of law and justice delivery systems at a local as well as a global level, such indicators enable empirically grounded solutions to justice reform issues. However, scholars like Siddharth Peter de Souza argue that the existing discourse concerning the rule of law and access to justice indicators promote a specific vision of a well functioning justice system grounded in western normative considerations. de Souza, in his book Designing Indicators for a Plural Legal World …

Cultivating Legalism From Paper Proofs: Analysing Everyday Forms Of Claim Making By Van Gujjar Pastoralists In Uttarakhand, Mohammad Meer Hamja, Pranav Menon

Socio-Legal Review

Scholarship from South Asia has often highlighted how subaltern peoples partake in social movements as figures of resistance but rarely analyse their techniques of working the law in their favour to negotiate citizenship with the state. Such modes of articulating claims through affective gestures and vernacular legalese foster plural meanings to otherwise rigid legal categories and dogmatic bureaucratic interpretation. This paper draws upon socio-historical and ethnographic accounts of Van Gujjars to highlight how these pastoralists utilise myriad forms of paper proofs and documentary evidence to engage in claim making across the forests of Uttarakhand. Through an articulation of everyday tactics …

On The Promises And Failures Of Anticolonial Constitutionalism In India: A Review Of Sandipto Dasgupta’S Legalizing The Revolution, Shaunna Rodrigues

Socio-Legal Review

This review of Sandipto Dasgupta’s Legalizing the Revolution: India and the Constitution of the Postcolony (Cambridge University Press 2024) delves into the complex legacy of constitutionalism in postcolonial India. The book assesses constitutionalism in India as an instrument that translated the revolutionary aspirations of an anticolonial mass movement into a legal framework for societal transformation. Dasgupta illuminates constitutionalism’s dynamic mediation of conflicting visions from India’s diverse masses and its political leaders, demonstrating how it intertwined the promise of anticolonialism with enduring tensions of representation, legal interpretation, and bureaucratic planning. He critically analyses its role in the development discourse in India, …