Introduction No matter how it begins, a police encounter may end in death, especially when the encounter involves people of color. There is no safe haven. Police-involved shootings happen everywhere—on the street, in a parked car, in a public park, or inside one’s own home. Police violence is a constant, its occurrence so predictable that […]
CLR Forum
Introduction An Estonian team is designing an artificially-intelligent (AI) agent to adjudicate claims of €7,000 or less, with the aim of clearing case backlog. The pilot version will focus on contract disputes: An algorithm will analyze uploaded documents to reach an initial decision, which can then be appealed to a human judge. This is but […]
Introduction Tim Wu’s essay, Will Artificial Intelligence Eat the Law?, posits that automated decisionmaking systems may be taking the place of human adjudication in social media content moderation. Conventional adjudicative processes, he explains, are too slow or clumsy to keep up with the speed and scale of online information flows. Their eclipse is imminent, inevitable, […]
The First Amendment is currently being pulled in opposite directions by a group of Hasidic schools in New York. Driven by deeply held religious beliefs, the leaders of these schools refuse to teach virtually any of the secular studies required for children by New York state law. Proponents of these schools point to the Free Exercise Clause and the “hybrid rights” of religion and parental control. However the state also has an interest in ensuring...
In their article Unsexing Pregnancy, David Fontana and Naomi Schoenbaum undertake the important project of disentangling the social aspects of pregnancy from those that relate to a pregnant woman’s body. They argue that the law should stop treating the types of work either parent can do—such as purchasing a carseat, finding a pediatrician, or choosing a daycare—as exclusively the domain of the pregnant woman. The project’s primary...
Introduction Professor Kang raises two fundamental worries about the associational path to party reform in The Problem of Irresponsible Party Government, his response to my essay, Networking the Party: First Amendment Rights and the Pursuit of Responsive Party Government. First, he doubts the feasibility of reestablishing thick relational parties given social, technological, and cultural changes […]
This Reply addresses the responses by Professors David Bernstein and Jed Shugerman to our essay Asymmetric Constitutional Hardball. Bernstein’s response, we argue, commits the common fallacy of equating reciprocity with symmetry: assuming that because constitutional hardball often “takes two” to play, both sides must be playing it in a similar manner. Shugerman’s response, on the other hand, helps combat the common fallacy of equating...
The “constitutional hardball” metaphor used by legal scholars and political scientists illuminates an important phenomenon in American politics, but it obscures a crisis in American democracy. In baseball, hardball encompasses legitimate tactics: pitching inside to brush a batter back but not injure, hard slides, hard tags. Baseball fans celebrate hardball. Many of the constitutional hardball maneuvers previously identified by scholars have...
Introduction In his important article, Criminal Justice, Inc., Professor John Rappaport identifies the establishment of a new and novel institution: a private company retained by retail stores to dispose of cases involving shoplifting claims. Still in its infancy, this new development has spawned two private for-profit, specialist companies since 2010: the Corrective Education Company (CEC) […]
Introduction American party politics may be as nationally competitive as they have ever been, but at the same time they are perhaps as unresponsive to average citizens as they have been in a long time. It is this paradox that Professor Tabatha Abu El-Haj creatively interrogates in her essay, Networking the Party: First Amendment Rights […]