The Right to Swing?

An analysis of the Supreme Court of Canada\u27s decision in Labaye v. the Queen that held that the activities occurring in a Montral swingers club could not be classified as indecent. I posit that Labaye is best understood as concerning sexual liberty (as described in Lawrence v. Texas and other cases) and not as an indecency case

Utilising Provenance to Enhance Social Computation

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Charging Abortion

As long as Roe v. Wade remained good law, prosecutors could largely avoid the question of abortion. The Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization has now placed prosecutors at the forefront of the abortion wars. Some chief prosecutors in antiabortion states have pledged to not enforce antiabortion laws, whereas others are targeting even out-of-state providers. This post-Dobbs reality, wherein the ability to obtain an abortion depends not only on the politics of one’s state but also the policies of one’s local district attorney, has received minimal scrutiny from legal scholars. Prosecutors have broad charging discretion, but prevailing ethical rules and standards do not allow them to disregard laws that they regard as unjust. Nevertheless, since prosecutors do not have unlimited resources, and abortion cases are complex and sensitive, they should use their discretion to focus only on cases in which abortion care endangers women and in instances of coercion, as they did pre-Roe. Extraterritorial applications of antiabortion law are constitutionally suspect and are unlikely to further the public interest. Abortion is one of the most contentious issues in American life. In a morally pluralistic society, prosecutors must strive for neutrality in the abortion wars by relying on professional standards to guide their charging discretion rather than following public opinion and the dictates of individual conscience

Social Media Data in Research : Provenance Challenges

The work described here was funded by a grant from the United Kingdom’s Economic and Social Research Council Social Media - Developing Understanding, Infrastructure & Engagement (ES/M001628/1).Postprin

SC-PROV: A Provenance Vocabulary for Social Computation

The research described here is supported by the award made by the RCUK Digital Economy programme to the dot.rural Digital Economy Hub; award reference: EP/G066051/1.Postprin

The Law Professor Pipeline

Throughout U.S. legal education’s history, a small number of elite law schools have produced the vast majority of law professors. Although law professor hiring is now more inclusive in certain respects, the law school an aspiring professor attended continues to serve as a powerful predictor of hiring market success. Some scholars have maintained that this preference for graduates of elite law schools infects legal education with class bias and distorts legal pedagogy, but the absence of reliable data on socioeconomic diversity within law schools has muted these criticisms.This Essay reorients the debate on law school hiring by focusing on law professors’ undergraduate educations. This shift in focus is important for two main reasons. First, researchers have gathered reliable socioeconomic data on the student bodies of U.S. colleges, data that do not currently exist for law schools. Second, undergraduate education does not provide legal training or otherwise prepare students for legal academia and therefore should play little to no role in hiring.Drawing on entry-level hiring information from the last three years, I find that new law professors graduated predominately from elite private colleges that serve the wealthiest strata of U.S. society. The median hire attended a college in which 67% of students come from families in the top income quintile, and only a fraction of students come from families in the bottom three quintiles. Whatever professors’ individual backgrounds, beginning in college they are socialized in highly privileged environments that shape their pedagogy and research. This Essay concludes by describing legal education’s marginalization of non-elite views of the legal system and suggesting that hiring practices should be restructured to allow for a more socioeconomically diverse professoriate

The Legal Ethics of Family Separation

On April 6, 2018, the Trump administration announced a “zero tolerance” policy for individuals who crossed the U.S. border illegally. As part of this policy, the administration prosecuted parents with minor children for unlawful entry; previous administrations generally placed families in civil removal proceedings. Since U.S. law does not allow children to be held in immigration detention facilities pending their parents’ prosecution, the new policy caused thousands of children to be separated from their parents. Hundreds of families have yet to be reunited.Despite a consensus that the family separation policy was cruel and ineffective, there has been minimal focus on the attorneys who implemented it. One exception is Professor Bradley Wendel, who recently defended border prosecutors for following the zero-tolerance policy rather than pursuing their own conceptions of the public interest. Since immigration is not the only context in which prosecutors’ charging decisions may have the effect of separating families, the question of prosecutors’ ethical responsibilities in these situations continues to be of paramount importance. This Article contends that prosecutors, as ministers of justice, should consider their charging decisions’ effects on children and families. Because of limited resources and opportunity costs, prosecutors cannot pursue every criminal misdemeanor and inevitably take the public interest into account in making charging decisions. The Trump administration’s “zero-tolerance” policy may have limited prosecutors’ discretion but did not eliminate it. Prevailing prosecutorial standards recognize prosecutors’ broad charging discretion but focus predominately on culpability in individual cases. Prosecutors should instead seek justice for the situation, which could include declining to prosecute nonviolent misdemeanors to keep families intact

Protecting the Guild or Protecting the Public? Bar Exams and the Diploma Privilege

The bar examination has long loomed over legal education. Although many states formerly admitted law school graduates into legal practice via the diploma privilege, Wisconsin is the only state that recognizes the privilege today. The bar examination is so central to the attorney admissions process that all but a handful of jurisdictions required it amidst a pandemic that turned bar exam administration into a life-or-death matter.This Article analyzes the diploma privilege from a historical and empirical perspective. Whereas courts and regulators maintain that bar examinations screen out incompetent practitioners, the legal profession formerly placed little emphasis on bar examinations and viewed them as superfluous for graduates of accredited law schools. The organized bar turned against the diploma privilege as the legal profession began to diversify, and some states abolished the diploma privilege specifically to block black law students from the profession. The notion that bar examinations ensure a base level of competence is a relatively recent construct. A few studies have suggested that attorneys who struggle on the bar examination are more likely to commit misconduct. However, drawing on cross-state attorney complaint and charge data as well as Wisconsin attorney disciplinary cases, I demonstrate that the bar examination requirement has no effect on attorney misconduct. The complaint rate against Wisconsin attorneys is similar to that of other jurisdictions, and Wisconsin attorneys are charged with misconduct less often than attorneys in most other states. Moreover, the rate of public discipline against Wisconsin attorneys who were admitted via the diploma privilege is the same as that of Wisconsin attorneys admitted via bar examinations. Bar examinations as currently constituted do little to advance public protection. A carefully drafted and enacted diploma privilege would comply with the Constitution’s Dormant Commerce Clause and would incentivize law schools to better prepare students for practice. States also have more direct means to address attorney misconduct than relying on ex ante measures such as bar examinations