Election Administration Concerns Meet Claims of a Fraudulent Election: A Comprehensive Analysis of the 2020 Presidential Election and its Aftermath in Wisconsin

The 2020 presidential election unearthed valid questions about how the election was administered and whether various state laws were properly followed. However, President Donald Trump and his closest allies routinely fail to distinguish between questions about whether state officials correctly interpreted and applied the state’ s election code and actual fraud or malfeasance. There is a significant difference between accusing election officials of wrongly interpreting state law or incorrectly implementing election procedures, and alleging that those same officials intended to rig the outcome. Failure to make this distinction has contributed to the stolen election narrative, which continues to roil the American body politic. Since the 2020 election, the United States has seen the emergence of several alarming consequences which evidence the severe impact this narrative has had on the country’s democratic institutions. First, President Donald Trump’s contentions that he won the 2020 election and that the United States election system cannot be trusted have eroded public faith in the outcome of that election. Second, the United States has seen an influx of candidates running for office who show little allegiance to democratic norms. Although many of these candidates lost in the 2022 midterms, a significant number won, including for positions that oversee election administration. Third, claims of a fraudulent election system have birthed reform proposals that would fundamentally affect the way elections are administered, including proposals that would further expose election administration to partisanship. These trends give rise to legitimate concerns with respect to how elections will be administered in the future

The Accident Network : A Network Theory Analysis of Proximate Causation

In torts, proximate causation, or legal cause, examines whether harmful negligent conduct is “closely enough related” to the damages that ensue. Torts professors often use the metaphor of a stone being thrown into a pond to explain this rather amorphous legal doctrine. The ripples the stone creates surrounding it are the direct result of the act of it being thrown. The stone tossed into the pond, i.e., a negligent act, created an effect which perpetuated via ripples to a long distance, forever changing the entire pond, i.e., causing close and far damages. Can all of those affected by the negligent act be compensated? Should they? It is up to proximate causation to determine if a ripple is too remote from the thrown stone to be viewed as its “direct” or “foreseeable” result. However, this does not provide the legal system with a lot of guidance. This is where network theory can be helpful

Artificial Intelligence Owning Patents: A Worldwide Court Debate

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Employee Beware: Why Secret Workplace Recordings are Risky Business for Employees

This Article examines the risks for employees when secretly recording workplace conversations. Although many employers flatly prohibit employees from secretly recording workplace conversations, case law contains dozens of examples of employees conducting such espionage. In the typical case, employees secretly record conversations to gather evidence to support claims of discrimination, harassment, or whistleblowing, but many of those individuals were likely unaware of the pitfalls associated with their clandestine activities. This Article uncovers various pitfalls for employees when secretly recording workplace conversations. These include being fired by their employer for violating its no-recording policy, finding courts unreceptive to claims of retaliation under the employment discrimination laws, having otherwise valid harassment claims dismissed for attempting to record evidence of harassment rather than timely reporting the matter to their employer, facing civil liability or criminal penalties for wiretap violations, and being found liable in tort for invasion of privacy. Given these numerous pitfalls, this Article concludes that employees should generally refrain from making secret workplace recordings and should seek to gather evidence in other ways

Volume 106, Winter 2022 Masthead

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The First Offense Is Just a Ticket? How Culture and Lobbying Shaped Wisconsin\u27s Drunk Driving Law, and What to Do About It

Wisconsin is known for, and proud of, its heavy drinking culture. The Badger State also acts as a safe haven for drunk drivers, of which there are many. Most notably, Wisconsin is the only member of the fifty states which does not criminally punish first-time drunk driving offenders. If the Wisconsin legislature has any interest in the public safety of its constituents, then new drunk driving prevention measures must be implemented

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Interconstituted Legal Agents

Legal theory and doctrine depend on underlying assumptions about human nature and sociality. Perhaps the most common and basic assumption is that we are separate persons who communicate imperfectly with one another. While this separation thesis has been questioned, it still dominates legal theory. However, I show that understanding separation and connection as alternative perspectives, rather than as ontologically true or false, reveals that legal conflict often arises when these perspectives give rise to clashing intuitions concerning the meaning of community and what constitutes goals and harms. This Article organizes perspectives on social relationships in increasing order of intersubjectivity: isolation, interaction, interdependence, and interconstitution. The last of these, interconstitution, understands people as continuously becoming who they are on account of one another, not as separate agents who merely influence one another. Some theories of human developmental biology suggest that this perspective has as reasonable a claim, and perhaps a greater claim, on social reality as do the more familiar ones. I use several problems in law to demonstrate the importance of the choice among these perspectives, especially highlighting the valuable insights of interconstitutionalism