Incomplete Innovation and the Premature Disruption of Legal Services

Article published in the Michigan State Law Review

The Reasonableness Machine

Automation might someday allow for the inexpensive creation of highly contextualized and effective laws. If that ever comes to pass, however, it will not be on a blank slate. Proponents will face the question of how to computerize bedrock aspects of our existing law, some of which are legal standards—norms that use evaluative, even moral, criteria. Conventional wisdom says that standards are difficult to translate into computer code because they do not present clear operational mechanisms to follow. If that wisdom holds, one could reasonably doubt that legal automation will ever get off the ground. Conventional wisdom, however, fails to account for the interpretive freedom that standards provide. Their murkiness makes them a fertile ground for the growth of competing explanations of their legal meaning. Some of those readings might be more rule-like than others. Proponents of automation will likely be drawn to those rule-like interpretations, so long as they are compatible enough with existing law. This complex dynamic between computer-friendliness and legal interpretation makes it troublesome for legislators to identify the variable and fixed costs of automation. This Article aims to shed light on this relationship by focusing our attention on a quintessential legal standard at the center of our legal system—the Reasonably Prudent Person Test. Here, I explain how automation proponents might be tempted by fringe, formulaic interpretations of the test, such as Averageness, because they bring comparatively low innovation costs. With time, however, technological advancement will likely drive down innovation costs, and mainstream interpretations, like Conventionalism, could find favor again. Regardless of the interpretation that proponents favor, though, an unavoidable fixed cost looms: by replacing the jurors who apply the test with a machine, they will eliminate a long-valued avenue for participatory and deliberative democracy

Developing the repository manager community

This paper describes activities which have taken place within the UK institutional repository (IR) sector focusing on developing a community of practice through the sharing of experiences and best practice. This includes work done by the UK Council of Research Repositories (UKCoRR) and other bodies, together with informal activities, such as sharing the experience of organising Open Access Week events. The paper also considers future work to be undertaken by UKCoRR to continue developing the community

Evaluating Norms: An Empirical Analysis of the Relationship between Norm-Content, Operator, and Charitable Behavior

There are several kinds of norms, and this variety can lead to spirited debate about the best norm to employ for the regulation of a particular activity. Should the norm be mandatory or aspirational? A rule or a standard? One important area in which norm-choice has come to the fore is the American Bar Association\u27s oversight of pro bono work. Currently, the organization utilizes an aspirational norm recommending that lawyers perform at least fifty pro bono hours annually, but there is pressure to adopt some sort of mandatory rubric. Inspired by this debate, we have designed and implemented an experiment that provides some insight into the effective design of norms for charitable giving. Our results challenge the conventional wisdom that the implementation of a mandatory framework will result in an overall increase in giving. These findings may be applicable not only to the pro bono debate but also to general legislative strategy with respect to inducement of charitable behavior. Prior empirical studies that have analyzed the effect of norm characteristics on behavior have typically pitted rules against standards. We placed these two norm-content classes in combination with two kinds of operators: aspirational and mandatory. Thus, we tested four norm combinations, each one representative of norms in important rubrics such as legal systems and codes of ethics. Through this more complex model, our results contribute to the literature on two psychological phenomena, motivation crowding and anchoring, that affect the way people respond to norms. We found that, in the context of inducing charitable behavior, it is more effective to use an aspirational rather than a mandatory operator when the operator is conjoined with moral norm-content. Additionally, we found that the effectiveness of norms that utilize mandatory operators is contingent upon the kind of norm-content that they employ, whether moral or bright-line, and that this is not true with norms utilizing aspirational operators. Lastly, the deficit in effectiveness that arises from using mandatory operators in conjunction with moral norm-content can be overcome by switching to bright-line norm-content, but only if the minimums are set very high. Our results support the view that norms can induce crowding out, leading to less charitable conduct than would have occurred under an aspirational system. They also illustrate a context in which aspirational norms are resistant to anchoring effects

Analyzing the Binding of Co(II)-specific Inhibitors to the Methionyl Aminopeptidases from \u3cem\u3eEscherichia coli\u3c/em\u3e and \u3cem\u3ePyrococcus furiosus\u3c/em\u3e

Methionine aminopeptidases (MetAPs) represent a unique class of protease that is capable of the hydrolytic removal of an N-terminal methionine residue from nascent polypeptide chains. MetAPs are physiologically important enzymes; hence, there is considerable interest in developing inhibitors that can be used as antiangiogenic and antimicrobial agents. A detailed kinetic and spectroscopic study has been performed to probe the binding of a triazole-based inhibitor and a bestatin-based inhibitor to both Mn(II)- and Co(II)-loaded type-I (Escherichia coli) and type-II (Pyrococcus furiosus) MetAPs. Both inhibitors were found to be moderate competitive inhibitors. The triazole-type inhibitor was found to interact with both active-site metal ions, while the bestatin-type inhibitor was capable of switching its mode of binding depending on the metal in the active site and the type of MetAP enzyme

A Motion Planning Algorithm in a Figure Eight Track

We design a motion planning algorithm to coordinate the movements of two robots along a figure eight track, in such a way that no collisions occur. We use a topological approach to robot motion planning that relates instabilities in motion planning algorithms to topological features of configuration spaces. The topological complexity of a configuration space is an invariant that measures the complexity of motion planning algorithms. We show that the topological complexity of our problem is 3 and construct an explicit algorithm with three continuous instruction