Does the Death Penalty Require Death Row? The Harm of Legislative Silence

This Article addresses the substantive question, Does the death penalty require death row? and the procedural question, Who should decide? In most capital punishment states, prisoners sentenced to death are held, because of their sentences alone, in far harsher conditions of confinement than other prisoners. Often, this means solitary confinement for the years and even decades until their executions. Despite a growing amount of media attention to the use of solitary confinement, most scholars and courts have continued to assume that the isolation of death-sentenced prisoners on death row is an inevitable administrative aspect of capital punishment. To the extent scholars have written about death row, they have focused on its harshness. None has objected to the fact that prison administrators are the ones who have decided to maintain death row in most capital punishment states. This Article addresses for the first time the authority of prison administrators to establish or retain death row. It begins by exploring the nature of this death row decision, and concludes that death row is rational only if its intended purpose is to punish. This conclusion leads to the second and more significant claim in the Article: that only legislatures are competent to require death row. This claim is grounded in the need for democratic legitimacy and public deliberation in the imposition of punishment, in the separation of powers, and in the principle of legality. Death row should be abolished unless legislatures choose to retain it, expressly and deliberately, for retributive or deterrent reasons

An Administrative Jurisprudence: The Rule of Law in the Administrative State

This Essay offers a specification of the rule of law’s demands of administrative law and government inspired by Professor Peter L. Strauss’s scholarship. It identifies five principles—authorization, notice, justification, coherence, and procedural fairness—which provide a framework for an account of the rule of law’s demands of administrative governance. Together these principles have intriguing results for the evaluation of administrative law. On the one hand, they reveal rule-of-law foundations for some contested positions, such as a restrictive view of the President’s power to direct subordinate officials and giving weight to an agency’s determination of the scope of its own authority. On the other hand, these rule-of-law principles expose some long-established practices as having troublesome foundations, such as the settled doctrine that agencies need not justify their choice of policymaking form. Consideration of these principles in the context of administrative law and government ultimately shows—like so much of Professor Strauss’s work—the many ways in which government under law ultimately depends on officials taking the rule of law as their highest-order commitment

Technopanics, Threat Inflation, and the Danger of an Information Technology Precautionary Principle

Fear is an extremely powerful motivational force. In public policy debates, appeals to fear are often used in an attempt to sway opinion or bolster the case for action. Such appeals are used to convince citizens that threats to individual or social well-being may be avoided only if specific steps are taken. Often these steps take the form of anticipatory regulation based on the precautionary principle. Such “fear appeal arguments” are frequently on display in the Internet policy arena and often take the form of a full-blown “moral panic” or “technopanic.” These panics are intense public, political, and academic responses to the emergence or use of media or technologies, especially by the young. In the extreme, they result in regulation or censorship. This paper considers the structure of fear appeal arguments in technology policy debates, and then outlines how those arguments can be deconstructed and refuted in both cultural and economic contexts. Several examples of fear appeal arguments are offered with a particular focus on online child safety, digital privacy, and cybersecurity. To the extent that these concerns are valid, they are best addressed by ongoing societal learning, experimentation, resiliency, and coping strategies rather than by regulation. If steps must be taken to address these concerns, education and empowerment-based solutions represent superior approaches to dealing with them compared to a precautionary principle approach, which would limit beneficial learning opportunities and retard technological progress

The Hand Book of Nonprofit Governance

The Handbook of Nonprofi t Governance is a comprehensive overview of the principles and practices of nonprofi t boards. To compile this handbook, BoardSource drew on its extensive selection of books, articles, and topic papers by leading experts on nonprofit governance. The book is organized in two parts. Part One (Chapters One through Five ) addresses basic governance history, roles, and structures. Part Two (Chapters Six through Sixteen ) examines nonprofi t governance practices, drawing on the experience and wisdom of BoardSource experts to review basic approaches to board responsibilities and board self - management.Reflecting on board dynamics is a fitting way to conclude this handbook. While many principles and practices of nonprofit governance are well established, the essence of board interactions is often more difficult to express. When all is said and done, the board is a group of individuals with a collective commitment. How they engage with one another can make the difference between governance that is simply good and governance that is truly exceptional. The stakes are high, but the dynamic role of nonprofit organizations in our society attests to the fact that the women and men who serve on nonprofit boards fulfill their responsibilities with seriousness of purpose, dedication to service, and passion for their organizations ' missions

Porto Maphazardly - Representation of Place in Graphic Design

This project, Porto Maphazardly, examines the role of a graphic designer in exploring alternate means of mapping a location. A square in the Portuguese city of Porto was mapped through five sensory approaches: sound, smell, taste, activity, and color perception. The data that was gathered was translated into visuals to create a generated, but totally unique, graphic portrait of a place. The portmanteau maphazardly in the title combines the word ‘map’ with the adverb, ‘haphazardly,’ which means to do something determined by accident rather than design, without a clear plan or at the mercy of chance. The coining of the word is meant to evoke the extent to which the illustrations developed in response to observations, encounters and circumstance, rather than a client brief or a designer’s pre-decided aesthetic. In this report, the project is contextualized between the theory of critical cartography in the field of sociology, and the mapping works which already exist in the graphic design field, including the works of Paula Scher, Pedro Pina, Jeremy Wood, Alison Barnes and Kate McLean. The report presents a synthesized definition of ‘map’ for use in a visual, graphic analysis. A limited survey of the principles of information design is discussed, in its relation to traditional cartography, infographics, and our cognitive interpretations of maps. Finally, a brief analysis of changes in the nature of maps (smart-maps) is included, focusing on how user-centered maps have changed how one interacts with a city. The project endeavors to work in the realm of ‘designer as researcher,’ and is influenced by the writing of Russell Bestley and Ian Noble on visual research, in which the experiential nature of the data collection influences the design process. The methodology was developed through a series of test projects and by the application of ‘walking as method,’ and the report introduces the generative systems which were used to transform data— notes, photographs, and recordings—into illustrations. The final mappings are presented along with an analysis of successes and failures