Punishing Homelessness

Homelessness is punishing to those who experience it, not just from the inherent and protracted trauma of living exposed on the street, but also due to widespread and pervasive laws that punish people for being homeless. People experiencing homelessness, particularly chronic homelessness, often lack reasonable alternatives to living in public. Yet cities throughout the country are increasingly enacting and enforcing laws that punish the conduct of necessary, life-sustaining activities in public, even when many people have no other option. These laws are frequently challenged in court and often struck down as unconstitutional. But legally sound, cost-effective, and non-punitive alternatives to ending chronic homelessness exist. This article exposes some of the problems with criminalization laws, not only for people experiencing homelessness, but also for the broader community. It discusses how current approaches often make chronic homelessness worse and explains why non-punitive alternatives, especially Housing First and permanent supportive housing, are the most cost-effective means of addressing chronic homelessness. Ultimately, this article urges cities and their constituents to stop punishing homelessness and instead to start solving it

Tired of Talking: A Call for Clear Strategies for Legal Education Reform: Moving Beyond the Discussion of Good Ideas to the Real Transformation of Law Schools

Legal education reform efforts have persisted for over one hundred years, supported by substantive expertise, empirical data, cutting-edge curricula, and effective pedagogy. But today, the normative face of legal education remains essentially unchanged. If the substance behind legal education reform is valid, then what is the problem? This article examines the stasis of legal education through the lens of historical reform efforts, political science, and contemporary organizational change theory. The author argues that legal education reform efforts are marginalized and have limited normative impact because reformers underestimate the strategic demands of systemic change. As a result, reformers have yet to build a coherent, collective strategy for the transformation of legal education. The author contends that reformers must shift from an exclusive focus on the substance of legal education reform to adopt a new focus on strategy. Finally, the author offers some starting points on how to begin a new strategic discussion on the transformation of legal education

The Influence of Exile

Belonging is a fundamental human need, but human instincts are Janus-faced and equally strong is the drive to exclude. This exclusive impulse, which this Article calls the influence of exile, reaches beyond interpersonal dynamics when empowered groups use laws and policies to restrict marginalized groups\u27 access to public space. Jim Crow, Anti-Okie, and Sundown Town laws are among many notorious examples. But the influence of exile perseveres today: it has found a new incarnation in the stigmatization and spatial regulation of visible poverty, as laws that criminalize and eject visibly poor people from public space proliferate across the nation. These laws reify popular attitudes toward visible poverty, harming not only the visibly poor but also society as a whole. This Article seeks to expose and explain how the influence of exile operates; in doing so, it argues against the use of the criminal justice system as a response to visible poverty. In its place, this Article argues for more effective and efficient responses that take as their starting point an individual right to exist in public space, which for many visibly poor people is tantamount to a right to exist at all

The hydrological performance of a permeable pavement

Urban stormwater runoff is a transport medium for many contaminants from anthropogenic sources. There are many alternative management strategies available to treat these contaminants. One of the technologies suggested for this purpose is the use of permeable pavements to minimise the quantity of surface runoff generated by impervious surfaces within an urban catchment. Reported herein are the results of a monitoring program undertaken to assess the effectiveness of permeable road surface for managing the quantity and quality of stormwater runoff. It was found that the catchment, where the permeable road surface was installed, had the effective imperviousness reduced from 45% prior to reconstruction of the road surface to less than 5% after reconstruction of the road. Furthermore, it was found that the generation of surface runoff from the permeable road surface required a rainfall intensity in excess of 20 mm/h. Finally, the quality of the surface runoff was found to be at the lower levels of runoff from road surfaces. © 2010 Taylor & Francis

Chains of large gaps between primes

Let $p_n$ denote the $n$-th prime, and for any $k \geq 1$ and sufficiently large $X$, define the quantity $$G_k(X) := \max_{p_{n+k} \leq X} \min( p_{n+1}-p_n, \dots, p_{n+k}-p_{n+k-1} ),$$ which measures the occurrence of chains of $k$ consecutive large gaps of primes. Recently, with Green and Konyagin, the authors showed that $$G_1(X) \gg \frac{\log X \log \log X\log\log\log\log X}{\log \log \log X}$$ for sufficiently large $X$. In this note, we combine the arguments in that paper with the Maier matrix method to show that $$G_k(X) \gg \frac{1}{k^2} \frac{\log X \log \log X\log\log\log\log X}{\log \log \log X}$$ for any fixed $k$ and sufficiently large $X$. The implied constant is effective and independent of $k$.Comment: 16 pages, no figure