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Current Print Edition

The Right to a Glass Box: Rethinking the Use of Artificial Intelligence in Criminal Justice

Brandon L. Garrett & Cynthia Rudin

L. Neil Williams, Jr. Distinguished Professor of Law, Duke University School of Law and Faculty Director, Wilson Center for Science and Justice, Earl D. McLean, Jr. Professor of Computer Science, Electrical and Computer Engineering, Statistical Science, Mathematics, and Biostatistics & Bioinformatics, Duke University. 

Artificial intelligence (“AI”) increasingly is used to make important decisions that affect individuals and society. As governments and corporations use AI more pervasively, one of the most troubling trends is that developers so often design it to be a “black box.” Designers create AI models too complex for people to understand or they conceal how…

Excuse 2.0 

Yehonatan Givati, Yotam Kaplan & Yair Listokin

Sylvan M. Cohen Professor at Hebrew University Law School, Professor at Hebrew University Law School, Deputy Dean and the Shibley Family Fund Professor of Law at Yale Law School. 

Excuse doctrine presents one of the great enigmas of contract law. Excuse allows courts to release parties from their contractual obligations. It thus stands in sharp contrast to the basic principles of contract law and adds significant uncertainty to contract adjudication. This Article offers a crucial missing perspective on the doctrine of excuse: the view…

Forced Robot Arbitration 

David Horton

Martin Luther King Jr. Professor of Law, University of California, Davis, School of Law. 

 

Recently, advances in artificial intelligence (“AI”) have sparked interest in a topic that sounds like science fiction: robot judges. Researchers have harnessed AI to build programs that can predict the outcome of legal disputes. Some countries have even begun allowing AI systems to resolve small claims. These developments are fueling a fascinating debate over whether…

Collective Disagreement: The Uneasy Interaction of the FLSA and FRCP 4(k) After Bristol-Myers Squibb

Ronahn Clarke

J.D. Candidate, Cornell Law School, 2024; B.A., Philosophy and Classical Civilization, Colby College, 2021. 

 

Across the country, due to a circuit split over the meaning of Federal Rule of Civil Procedure (“Rule”) 4(k), federal courts are enforcing the Fair Labor Standards Act (“FLSA”) inconsistently. This Note argues that, under the current state of the law, Rule 4(k) must be read to apply to out-of-state opt-in employee-plaintiffs’ claims and FLSA…

Dependent Contractors? The Case for Giving Non-Competes a Central Role in Worker-Classification Tests Under Federal Law

Cameron Misner

 J.D. Candidate, Cornell Law School, 2024; B.A. in Political Science, University of Indianapolis, 2021. 

As legal commentators and policymakers have taken greater notice of the harms that covenants not to compete (“noncompetes”) cause workers, they have offered numerous policy proposals seeking to curb those harms. Indeed, the Federal Trade Commission proposed an outright ban on non-competes on January 5, 2023. None of these policy proposals have yet become law…

Current Online Edition

The Expansive ‘Sensitive Places’ Doctrine: The Limited Right to ‘Keep and Bear’ Arms Outside the Home

Julia Hesse & Kevin Schascheck II

Julia Hesse is the co-chair of Healthcare Group at Choate Hall & Stewart LLP. She is a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania Law School ’01 and the University of Pennsylvania Center for Bioethics ’01.

Kevin Schascheck is currently serving as a federal law clerk. No view expressed herein reflects the opinion or written work of the judge for whom he is clerking. He is a graduate of the University of Virginia School of Law ’22.

In Bruen, the Supreme Court struck down New York’s “may-issue” licensing regime, recognized the right to carry arms outside the home, and announced the historical analogue method to analyze the constitutionality of modern gun laws. In doing so, the Court did not disavow the ‘sensitive places’ doctrine announced in Heller. In response, New York and…

Historical Appendix to “The Expansive ‘Sensitive Places’ Doctrine: The Limited Right to ‘Keep and Bear’ Arms Outside the Home”

Julia Hesse and Kevin Schascheck II

 

The following is not intended to be an exhaustive list of laws providing locational or temporal restrictions on firearms, and instead represents the laws we identified in approximately 40-50 hours of research. These laws are gathered into categories. The same law may be listed in multiple categories (e.g., if a law restricted carriage or firing…

How Did A Rogue 2011 IRS Instruction Produce A Nonsensical and Punitive AMT Investment Interest Expense Deduction Computational Formula and Nobody Knows It?

Jay Katz

Associate Professor of Instruction, University of South Florida

The Essay is organized as follows: Part I reveals the lack of any explanatory guidance or commentator attention to the 2011 IRS instruction apparent radical change to the AMT Computational Formula that is hiding in plain sight. Next, Part II examines the AMT Computational Formula prior to the TAMRA Amendment. Also included is a discussion…

The War on Terror & Vigilante Federalism

Maryam Jamshidi

Associate Professor of Law at the University of Colorado Law School.

In their article, Vigilante Federalism, Jon Michaels and David Noll sound the alarm about the rising trend of “vigilante federalism” across various states. As Michaels and Noll describe this phenomenon, Republican-led jurisdictions have been passing private enforcement laws empowering private actors to bring civil suits targeting certain activities and communities, including abortion, LGBTQI persons, and…

Substance and Form in Vigilante Federalism

Zachary D. Clopton

Professor of Law, Northwestern Pritzker School of Law.

Procedure is power, to be sure, but we should not let a lawyerly interest in procedural design distract from substantive justice. Vigilante Federalism makes an invaluable contribution by showing how a particular procedural form has been used to undermine substantive justice.  The authors deserve enormous credit for documenting, publicizing, and criticizing what they call “private…

Judicial Process and Vigilante Federalism

Charles W. “Rocky” Rhodes & Howard M. Wasserman

Professor of Law and Charles Weigel II Research Professor of State and Federal Constitutional Law, South Texas College of Law Houston & Professor of Law, FIU College of Law.

Jon Michaels’ and David Noll’s Vigilante Federalism decries the explosion of a specific class of state law—prohibiting locally unpopular, although perhaps constitutionally protected, conduct using private civil litigation as the exclusive or primary enforcement mechanism.  The trend begins with the Texas Heartbeat Act in 2021 (commonly referred to as “S.B. 8”), which prohibited abortions (prior…

Truth, Reason, Justice, and Evidence Law

Talia Fisher

Anny and Paul Yanowicz Professor of Human Rights, Tel Aviv University Faculty of Law and visiting fellow at Harvard Law School’s  Program on Behavioral Economics and Public Policy (2023).

This Essay addresses the most fundamental jurisprudential question underlying the institution of evidence law: it explores the justifications for subjecting legal fact‑finding to the regulation of evidence rules.  This issue has been at the center of evidence law scholarship since the days of Bentham’s Rationale of Judicial Evidence, which advocated a naturalistic approach to legal…

Incentive-Compatible Inflation Policy

Brian Galle

Professor of Law, Georgetown University Law Center

Imagine that we had to fight and adapt to the COVID-19 epidemic using only vintage 1970s technology. No mRNA vaccines; no designer anti-viral drugs. Want to work from home? Try that on a dial-up modem that transmits about 800 bits of information per second (today’s high-speed internet is literally one hundred million times faster). Nevertheless,…

The Leadership Limitation on Persecutors and Terrorist Organizations

Josh A. Roth
J.D. Candidate, Cornell Law School, 2024.

The asylum system in the United States is a melting pot of political discourse, international relations, and novel questions of law. Among other legal requirements, an asylee bears the burden of showing (1) they were persecuted or have a well-founded fear of future persecution and (2) that the persecution was committed by the government or…

Antitrust Remedies for Fissured Work

Brian Callaci & Sandeep Vaheesan
Chief economist, Open Markets Institute & Legal director, Open Markets Institute

Can parties control independent trading partners through contract? Antitrust law in the United States has confronted this question since its inception. From the 1940s through the 1970s, the Supreme Court generally held that corporations could not control the business decisions of distributors and suppliers using contracts, or vertical restraints in the parlance of antitrust. For…