Black Metropolis Research Consortium
University of Chicago Law School: Chicago UnboundNot a member yet
22435 research outputs found
Sort by
Law School Record, vol. 68, no. 2 (Spring 2022)
Get PDFMessage from the Dean Global Impact Teaching Through the Discourse - The Faculty Podcast Experiments There is No Environmental Law Without Environmental Justice Is This What Democracy Looks Like? Enriching the Exchange Law School Unveils Oil Paining of Earl B. Dickerson, 1920 Faculty News: Book published by Aziz Huq, Unraveling an American Story Faculty News: Book published by Omri Ben-Shahar, What If We Each Had Our Own Laws? Alumni News: Books by Alumni Published 2021 Development News: A Message from the Associate Dean of External Affairs Development: Daniel Daeniker, 96: Collective Philanthropy Motivates Peers and Breaks Giving Day Records Alumni in Memoriamhttps://chicagounbound.uchicago.edu/lawschoolrecord/1151/thumbnail.jp
Prospects for Reform? The Collapse of Community Policing in Chicago
Get PDFIn an era of renewed enthusiasm for police reform, it could be instructive to examine how reforms—even successful reforms—fail. In the 1990s and 2000s, Chicago’s community-policing initiative was widely recognized as one of the most impressive in the country. In short order, it then collapsed. Community policing’s accomplishments were numerous, but it fell victim to issues commonly facing reform: money—especially the impact of economic downturns; leadership turnover and policy preferences; changes in the social, political, and crime environments; and the emergence of new technologies for responding to community concerns
Gender Favoritism among Criminal Prosecutors
No full textProsecutors enjoy wide discretion in the decisions they make but are largely unstudied by quantitative empirical scholars. This paper explores gender bias in prosecutorial decision-making. I find that male and female prosecutors exhibit small and statistically insignificant differences in their treatment of defendants overall but demonstrate relative leniency toward defendants of their own gender. Such favoritism at charging translates into a sentencing gap of roughly 5 months of incarceration for defendants who are paired with an own-gender prosecutor versus an opposite-gender prosecutor, which represents a roughly 8 percent reduction in sentence length at the mean. The estimates do not appear to be driven by differences in case assignments for male and female prosecutors
Property Rights and Urban Form
No full textHow do the different elements in the standard bundle of property rights, including those of possession and transfer, influence the shape of cities? This paper incorporates insecure property rights into a standard model of urban land prices and density and makes predictions about investment in land and property, informality, and the efficiency of land use. Our empirical analysis links data on institutions for land titling and transfer with multiple urban outcomes in 190 countries. The evidence is generally consistent with the model’s predictions and more broadly with Harold Demsetz’s approach to property rights institutions in “Towards a Theory of Property Rights.” Indeed, we document worldwide improvements in the quality of institutions facilitating property transfer over time
The Folk Theory of Well-Being
Get PDFWhat constitutes a “good” life—not necessarily a morally good life, but a life that is good for the person who lived it (sometimes called “prudential goodness” or “well-being” or “welfare”)? On some views, of course, a life cannot be good for the person who lived it if it was not also morally good, but we want to prescind from that question. Even scholars holding those views—such as some of the ancient Greeks or Kant, who arguably thought moral goodness was central to welfare—also recognized that a good life must have other features or attributes.
What might those attributes be, and which (if any) is most important? In this experimental philosophy study, we assess three candidate views of the “good life” or “wellbeing”1 : According to Desire-Satisfaction [“Preferentism”], a good life is one in which the agent is able to satisfy his desires, or most of his desires, or his most important desires, or in which desire-satisfaction outweighs desire-frustration. According to Objectivism,2 a good life is one that includes certain good features, quite independent of how they make the person feel or the person’s desires: this might include, e.g., perfecting one’s skills or talents (or particular kinds of skills and talents), realizing one’s essential traits, or having certain kinds of widely recognized goods, such as loving relationships, wealth, recognition, and success. According to Hedonism, a good life is one in which pleasurable (or enjoyable) mental states are either dominant or outweigh the painful (or unpleasant) mental states.
These traditional categories will be useful for our purposes, even if they simplify many of the theoretical positions on offer and cannot claim to exhaust the possible views in logical space. For example, Fred Feldman (2004), an important contemporary hedonist, emphasizes the attitude of enjoyment (rather than sensory pleasure).
Constitutional Challenges to Public Health Orders in Federal Courts during the COVID-19 Pandemic
Get PDFWe examine federal judicial cases involving nonreligious civil-liberties challenges to COVID-19-related public health orders from the start of the pandemic in early 2020 to January 27, 2022. Consistent with the tradition of judicial deference toward states during emergencies, we find a high level of success for governments. However, governments did lose in 14.2% of the cases, and in those losses, there is evidence of partisan or ideological influence. Republican-appointed judges were more likely to rule in favor of challengers who brought claims based on gun rights and property rights, while Democratic- appointed judges were more likely to rule in favor of challengers who brought claims based on abortion rights. Judges also split along ideological lines with respect to challenges to federal eviction moratoriums and vaccine mandates. We conclude by arguing that courts should exercise greater deference to public health orders issued during emergencies