Privatization and the Law and Economics of Political Advocacy

A common argument against privatization is that private providers, motivated by self-interest, will advocate changes in substantive policy. In this Article, I evaluate this argument, using, as a case study, the argument against prison privatization based on the possibility that the private prison industry will distort the criminal law by advocating incarceration. This “political influence” argument applies at least as well to public provision: Government agencies, too, lobby for changes in substantive law. In the prison industry, for instance, it is unclear whether private firms advocate incarceration to any significant extent, but public guard unions are known to do so actively. Moreover, adding the “extra voice” of the private sector will not necessarily increase either the amount of pro-incarceration advocacy or its effectiveness. Prison privatization may well reduce the political power of the pro-incarceration forces: Because advocacy is a “public good” for the industry, as the number of independent actors increases, the largest actor’s advocacy decreases (since it no longer captures the full benefit of its advocacy) and the smaller actors free-ride off the largest actor’s contribution. Under some plausible assumptions, privatization decreases advocacy, and under different plausible assumptions, the net effect of privatization on advocacy is ambiguous. The argument that prison privatization distorts criminal law by fostering pro-incarceration advocacy is thus unconvincing without a fuller explanation of the mechanics of advocacy. The use of the political influence argument in other privatization contexts may also be theoretically unsound, to the extent it does not consider whether privatization reduces preexisting levels of public sector advocacy

Performance-oriented dependency parsing

In the last decade a lot of dependency parsers have been developed. This book describes the motivation for the development of yet another parser - MDParser. The state of the art is presented and the deficits of the current developments are discussed. The main problem of the current parsers is that the task of dependency parsing is treated independently of what happens before and after it. However, in practice parsing is rarely done for the sake of parsing itself, but rather in order to use the results in a follow-up application. Additionally, current parsers are accuracy-oriented and focus only on the quality of the results, neglecting other important properties, especially efficiency. The evaluation of some NLP technologies is sometimes as difficult as the task itself. For dependency parsing it was long thought not to be the case, however, some recent works show that the current evaluation possibilities are limited. This book proposes a methodology to account for the weaknesses and combine the strengths of the current approaches. Finally, MDParser is evaluated against other state-of-the-art parsers. The results show that it is the fastest parser currently available and it is able to process plain text, which other parsers usually cannot. The results are slightly behind the top accuracies in the field, however, it is demonstrated that it is not decisive for applications

Performance-oriented dependency parsing

In the last decade a lot of dependency parsers have been developed. This book describes the motivation for the development of yet another parser - MDParser. The state of the art is presented and the deficits of the current developments are discussed. The main problem of the current parsers is that the task of dependency parsing is treated independently of what happens before and after it. However, in practice parsing is rarely done for the sake of parsing itself, but rather in order to use the results in a follow-up application. Additionally, current parsers are accuracy-oriented and focus only on the quality of the results, neglecting other important properties, especially efficiency. The evaluation of some NLP technologies is sometimes as difficult as the task itself. For dependency parsing it was long thought not to be the case, however, some recent works show that the current evaluation possibilities are limited. This book proposes a methodology to account for the weaknesses and combine the strengths of the current approaches. Finally, MDParser is evaluated against other state-of-the-art parsers. The results show that it is the fastest parser currently available and it is able to process plain text, which other parsers usually cannot. The results are slightly behind the top accuracies in the field, however, it is demonstrated that it is not decisive for applications

The Modest Effect of Minneci v. Pollard on Inmate Litigants

This Symposium, on the recent Supreme Court Term’s criminal procedure jurisprudence, illustrates these complexities. Of the five “cases” discussed here, three come out in a “liberal” direction and two come out in a “conservative” direction. Nor do the results merely stem from Justice Kennedy’s swing vote (though he was in the majority in all of these cases); one of the “liberal” cases was decided by a majority of seven Justices, and one of the “conservative” ones was decided by a majority of eight. Looking at these cases together is a good way of reminding us to be wary of simplistic generalizations about either the trajectory or the partisanship of the Supreme Court’s thinking on criminal procedure. Minneci is somewhat harmful to federal inmate litigants in that it removes a potentially useful cause of action, and it may have been wrongly decided as a matter of Bivens doctrine. However, I argue here that it’s probably not nearly as harmful as some have charged, once one takes into account how hard it is to sue public prisons and how relatively generous are the tort-law regimes that govern private prisons

The Myth of the Federal Private Nondelegation Doctrine

Judges and scholars have often claimed that delegations of governmental power to private parties are constitutionally prohibited. However, such a “private nondelegation doctrine” is elusive, if not nonexistent. To understand why, first we need to realize that there are actually several distinct nondelegation doctrines. I develop a taxonomy that makes sense of these various doc-trines by focusing on the different reasons why a delegation might be problematic. A nondelegation doctrine might be “giver-based” (can Congress delegate this power?), “recipient-based” (can the recipient exercise this power?), or “application-based” (will the application of this power be unjust?). Once we distinguish these doctrines, it becomes apparent that none of them rules out private delegations. On the contrary, some doctrines actually facilitate privatiza-tion, because they provide that certain private delegations are exempt from certain constitutional requirements. As for the other doctrines, they do not embody any categorical antiprivate rule. Private status may be practically relevant in some cases, because the factors that matter to the various doctrines (e.g., how much a delegate is constrained, or the presence of bias) might tend to play out differently between the public and private sectors. But this is an empirical question; the same factors can in principle also invalidate public delegations; and attentiveness to these factors shows how to structure private delegations so they are constitutionally permissible. Constitutional law should continue looking to specific objectionable factors rather than the formal public-versus-private question

The Appeal

Appeal from the United States District Court. Hermann Bendemann, District Judge, Presiding. Argued and Submitted July 3, 1926. Filed May 1, 2005. Before: Alex K., Bucephalus and Godot, Circuit Judges. Opinion by Judge Alex K