Improving Access to Justice in State Courts with Platform Technology

Access to justice often equates to access to state courts, and for millions of Americans, using state courts to resolve their disputes—often with the government—is a real challenge. Reforms are regularly proposed in the hopes of improving the situation (e.g., better legal aid), but until recently a significant part of the problem has been structural. Using state courts today for all but the simplest of legal transactions entails at the very least traveling to a courthouse and meeting with a decision maker in person and in a one-on-one setting. Even minimally effective access, therefore, requires time, transportation, and very often the financial wherewithal to miss work or to pay for child care. In this Article, I investigate the effects of altering this structural baseline by studying the consequences of introducing online platform technology to improve citizen access to justice. In courts that adopt the technology, citizens are able to communicate with law enforcement, prosecutors, and judges to seek relief or negotiate a resolution through an online portal at any time of day. Examining many months of data from half a dozen adopting state courts, I present evidence that introducing this technology dramatically reduces the amount of time it takes for citizens to resolve their disputes and satisfy any fines or fees they owe. Default rates also plummet, and court personnel, including judges, appear to engage constructively with citizens when using the platform. From the perspective of state courts, disputes end more quickly, the percentage of payments received increases, and it takes less time for courts to receive those payments. Even citizens who do not use the platform may benefit from the technology’s introduction, presumably because they find they face less congestion when they physically go to a courthouse

Child Pornography and Community Notification: How an Attempt to Reduce Crime Can Achieve the Opposite

Community notification laws, designed to reduce the frequency of sex offenses by alerting potential victims to nearby threats and by encouraging citizen monitoring of potential recidivists, may make sense in the context of traditional sex offenses and sex offenders. But child pornography crimes and the individuals who commit them are different, and they differ from archetypal sex crimes and criminals in ways that may unintentionally cause community notification laws to facilitate crime rather than inhibit it. Child porn offenses typically involve money or trade, and their commission hinges on successfully conspiring with others. Markets and information are necessary building blocks for this sort of criminal behavior. Child porn offenders must find each other to make crime pay. As a result, announcing the identity of past offenders may perversely make child pornography and its associated harms more, not less, of a problem. Lawmakers, therefore, should reconsider the blanket application of community notification requirements to child porn offenders. Shrinking the child porn market and its associated abuse of minors may be easier if the law subjects fewer child porn offenders to community notification requirements. For the same reason, when sentencing child porn distributors and possessors, judges should not assume that community notification can provide an effective substitute for the incapacitation benefits typically associated with incarceration

Do Sex Offender Registries Make Us Less Safe?

State legislatures enacted sex offender registration and notification (SORN) laws with the explicit and exclusive aim of reducing sex offender recidivism. The general idea that we ought to “regulate” released offenders — of any type — to reduce the likelihood of their returning to crime is an attractive one, at least in theory. Criminal recidivism generates significant social harm. Nevertheless, despite their now-widespread use, SORN laws became the norm without any systematic study of their consequences. Admittedly, the logic underlying these laws seems at first difficult to gainsay: if a known sex offender poses even a small risk to a potential new victim, how can it hurt if the police are keeping better tabs on that offender or if the offender’s neighbors are made aware that he is a threat so they can take measures to reduce their own risk of victimization? But this question and its implied answer presume that SORN laws have no influence whatever on whether released sex offenders opt to pursue new victims in the first place. If the enforcement of notification laws imposes significant financial, social, and psychological costs on released sex offenders, as an avalanche of evidence suggests it does, then notification may in fact be criminogenic. The result may well be many more attempted attacks by convicted sex offenders and therefore higher recidivism rates on the whole, even if every individual attack attempted becomes somewhat less likely to succeed

Child Pornography and Community Notification: How an Attempt to Reduce Crime Can Achieve the Opposite

Community notification laws, designed to reduce the frequency of sex offenses by alerting potential victims to nearby threats and by encouraging citizen monitoring of potential recidivists, may make sense in the context of traditional sex offenses and sex offenders. But child pornography crimes and the individuals who commit them are different, and they differ from archetypal sex crimes and criminals in ways that may unintentionally cause community notification laws to facilitate crime rather than inhibit it. Child porn offenses typically involve money or trade, and their commission hinges on successfully conspiring with others. Markets and information are necessary building blocks for this sort of criminal behavior. Child porn offenders must find each other to make crime pay. As a result, announcing the identity of past offenders may perversely make child pornography and its associated harms more, not less, of a problem. Lawmakers, therefore, should reconsider the blanket application of community notification requirements to child porn offenders. Shrinking the child porn market and its associated abuse of minors may be easier if the law subjects fewer child porn offenders to community notification requirements. For the same reason, when sentencing child porn distributors and possessors, judges should not assume that community notification can provide an effective substitute for the incapacitation benefits typically associated with incarceration

Assessing Access-to-Justice Outreach Strategies

The need for prospective beneficiaries to “take up” new programs is a common stumbling block for otherwise well-designed legal and policy innovations. I examine the take-up problem in the context of publicly provided court services and test the effectiveness of various outreach strategies that announce a newly available online court access platform. I study individuals with minor arrest warrants whose distrust of courts may dampen any take-up response. I partnered with a court to quasi-randomly assign outreach approaches to a cohort of individuals and find that outreach improves take-up, that the type of outreach matters, and that online platform access is itself effective

The effects of spacecraft environments on some hydrolytic enzyme patterns in bacteria

The effects of space flight on the production and characteristics of proteolytic enzymes are studied for a number of bacterial species isolated from crew members and spacecraft. Enzymatic make-up and cultural characteristics of bacteria isolated from spacecraft crew members are determined. The organism Aeromonas proteolytica and the proteolytic enzymes which it produces are used as models for future spacecraft experiments

Using the general equilibrium growth model to study great depressions: a reply to Temin

Three of the arguments made by Temin (2008) in his review of Great Depressions of the Twentieth Century are demonstrably wrong: that the treatment of the data in the volume is cursory; that the definition of great depressions is too general and, in particular, groups slow growth experiences in Latin America in the 1980s with far more severe great depressions in Europe in the 1930s; and that the book is an advertisement for the real business cycle methodology. Without these three arguments — which are the results of obvious conceptual and arithmetical errors, including copying the wrong column of data from a source — his review says little more than that he does not think it appropriate to apply our dynamic general equilibrium methodology to the study of great depressions, and he does not like the conclusion that we draw: that a successful model of a great depression needs to be able to account for the effects of government policy on productivity.