The Necessity of the Good Person Prosecutor

In a 2001 essay, Professor Abbe Smith asked the question whether a good person—i.e., a person who is committed to social justice—can be a good prosecutor. Although she acknowledged some hope that the answer to her question could be “yes,” Professor Smith concluded that the answer then was “no”—in part because she saw individual prosecutors generally as having very little discretion to “temper the harsh reality of the criminal justice system.” In this Online Symposium revisiting Professor Smith’s question seventeen years later, my answer to her question is “yes”—a good person can be a good prosecutor

Big Data and Due Process

Today, electronic footprints may follow us wherever we go. Electronic traces, left through a smartphone or other device, can be tracked to the scene of a crime, or they can place a person far from a crime scene. By the same token, individuals may be falsely implicated due to errors in large government or commercial databases, and evidence of innocence may linger in such archives without ever coming to light. Professors Joshua Fairfield and Erik Luna and have done an important service by carefully introducing the problem of “digital innocence” and marking out areas in need of clear thinking and policy. In this online response to their wonderful piece, I discuss four additional problems at the intersection of big data and due process rights: (1) the need for developed electronic discovery rules in criminal cases; (2) the need to reconsider the meaning of Brady v. Maryland and the due process obligations of prosecutors and government agencies in the context of government data; (3) the parallel need to reconsider standards for effective assistance of defense counsel; and (4) the need for broader and better-adapted postconviction electronic discovery and remedies

Towards Symmetry in the Law of Branding

Companies sometimes want to abandon an old identity and rebrand with a new one. Trademark law probably does not have much to say about rebranding in itself. But we should be careful about how we think about rebranding and other undisclosed source relationships because, if not handled properly, law’s recognition of such techniques could end up reinforcing trademark owners’ ability to deter competition and control free speech

Learning to rank music tracks using triplet loss

Most music streaming services rely on automatic recommendation algorithms to exploit their large music catalogs. These algorithms aim at retrieving a ranked list of music tracks based on their similarity with a target music track. In this work, we propose a method for direct recommendation based on the audio content without explicitly tagging the music tracks. To that aim, we propose several strategies to perform triplet mining from ranked lists. We train a Convolutional Neural Network to learn the similarity via triplet loss. These different strategies are compared and validated on a large-scale experiment against an auto-tagging based approach. The results obtained highlight the efficiency of our system, especially when associated with an Auto-pooling layer

Protective Services or Protecting the Service? An Analysis of the United States Child Protection System

In its recent history, the United States child protection system has proven to fulfill a desperate need within our nation regarding the welfare and well-being of our nation’s children. An overview of the child protection system’s development shows tremendous progress has been made. And yet, what was created to be a solution to the growing number of children experiencing maltreatment in the form of abandonment, abuse, and/or neglect, has potentially become the very problem. Statistics illustrate just how serious the situation has and will continue to become if something is not done. Serious concerns have arisen and remain, and individuals have become increasingly frustrated and disappointed at the inadequacy of our current system. As it stands, the United States child protection system is ultimately harming the very individuals it was originally created and intended to serve. Due to the nature of our system, three already vulnerable populations are being placed at a greater disadvantage. Thus, our child protection system is in desperate need itself: a need that can only be satisfied by true reform. It is important to consider where that reform begins, whether it is at the federal, state, or local level. However, it is equally important to consider the perspectives of those who are directly affected by and experiencing first-hand the system at its worst. Ultimately, it comes down to whether our system contributes to the protection of our children or whether it continues to protect itself from our children

Protective Services or Protecting the Service? An Analysis of the United States Child Protection System

In its recent history, the United States child protection system has proven to fulfill a desperate need within our nation regarding the welfare and well-being of our nation’s children. An overview of the child protection system’s development shows tremendous progress has been made. And yet, what was created to be a solution to the growing number of children experiencing maltreatment in the form of abandonment, abuse, and/or neglect, has potentially become the very problem. Statistics illustrate just how serious the situation has and will continue to become if something is not done. Serious concerns have arisen and remain, and individuals have become increasingly frustrated and disappointed at the inadequacy of our current system. As it stands, the United States child protection system is ultimately harming the very individuals it was originally created and intended to serve. Due to the nature of our system, three already vulnerable populations are being placed at a greater disadvantage. Thus, our child protection system is in desperate need itself: a need that can only be satisfied by true reform. It is important to consider where that reform begins, whether it is at the federal, state, or local level. However, it is equally important to consider the perspectives of those who are directly affected by and experiencing first-hand the system at its worst. Ultimately, it comes down to whether our system contributes to the protection of our children or whether it continues to protect itself from our children

Data Privacy and Inmate Recidivism

Private companies are awarded contracts to provide Internet technologies within jails and prisons. These correctional contractors often argue that their services can reduce recidivism rates by, for example, providing inmates with access to video messaging services where inmates can communicate with loved ones who are otherwise unable to travel to communicate in person. A close examination of the privacy policies offered by correctional contractors, however, reveals how efforts to reduce recidivism rates are undermined.As this Essay will explain, correctional contractors collect sensitive data about inmates and the loved ones with whom they communicate. If this data is stolen or sold it can result in substantial harm. The privacy policies currently offered by correctional contractors do not protect against these problems. This Essay therefore calls on the Federal Communications Commission (“FCC”) to correct such harms

Selling Privacy at Auction

We initiate the study of markets for private data, though the lens of differential privacy. Although the purchase and sale of private data has already begun on a large scale, a theory of privacy as a commodity is missing. In this paper, we propose to build such a theory. Specifically, we consider a setting in which a data analyst wishes to buy information from a population from which he can estimate some statistic. The analyst wishes to obtain an accurate estimate cheaply. On the other hand, the owners of the private data experience some cost for their loss of privacy, and must be compensated for this loss. Agents are selfish, and wish to maximize their profit, so our goal is to design truthful mechanisms. Our main result is that such auctions can naturally be viewed and optimally solved as variants of multi-unit procurement auctions. Based on this result, we derive auctions for two natural settings which are optimal up to small constant factors: 1. In the setting in which the data analyst has a fixed accuracy goal, we show that an application of the classic Vickrey auction achieves the analyst's accuracy goal while minimizing his total payment. 2. In the setting in which the data analyst has a fixed budget, we give a mechanism which maximizes the accuracy of the resulting estimate while guaranteeing that the resulting sum payments do not exceed the analysts budget. In both cases, our comparison class is the set of envy-free mechanisms, which correspond to the natural class of fixed-price mechanisms in our setting. In both of these results, we ignore the privacy cost due to possible correlations between an individuals private data and his valuation for privacy itself. We then show that generically, no individually rational mechanism can compensate individuals for the privacy loss incurred due to their reported valuations for privacy.Comment: Extended Abstract appeared in the proceedings of EC 201