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Ethical Algorithms: Navigating AI in Legal Practice for a Just Jurisprudence
Get PDFExploring the professional obligations practitioners may face in light of developing AI technology by examining state and federal model rule language, current judicial treatment of AI, and AI best practices
Introduction: AI in 2024: A Year of Crossroads and Decisions
Get PDFThis Introduction discusses the issues and questions the legal profession must grapple with at the onset of the AI revolution
Patterns of Panic
No full textDisruptions in the constitutional order can agitate social anxiety, particularly when an out-group on the rise challenges an in-group\u27s political dominance and position in a constitutional regime. This has been acutely true concerning civil rights expansion, where civil rights opponents have turned to libertarian theories of law when their cultural currency is on the ropes. This essay highlights some of the similarities between libertarian ideological impulses at critical junctures of American constitutional development during Reconstruction and in resistance to the rights of gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender Americans in the twenty-first century. In these two crucial moments of constitutional development, a similar pattern of panic emerged whereby opponents to a more progressive constitutional order worked to steer civil rights jurisprudence toward a deregulatory, market-centered theory of rights, favoring live-and-let-live approaches to remedying social inequality over a state-backed right to dignity in the public square
Bringing the Right to Education into the 21st Century
No full textEducation is not only foundational to children\u27s development, it also helps children realize the full range of their human rights. Yet, the international law mandate on the right to education has changed little since 1948. This static state has left the right to education unfulfilled for millions of children. This Article argues that it is time to update the legal mandate on education, and in particular with respect to pre-primary and secondary education. The Article starts by explicating the limitations of the current mandate on the right to education and then evaluates whether so-called “soft law,” or non-binding measures, may have helped fill the gaps in existing treaty law on education rights. The Article uses a combination of manual review and computational text analytics to examine discussions of education in the Concluding Observations of the Committee on the Rights of the Child from 1993 to 2020. The Committee\u27s Concluding Observations evaluate States Parties\u27 progress in meeting their obligations under the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child and, as such, serve as a primary vehicle for advancing the implementation of human rights. Finding that non-binding measures are insufficient in practice, the Article concludes that the international community needs to agree to an updated legal mandate on education that ensures all children have access to an equitable start, can complete secondary education, and can develop to their full potential
Banging the Gavel: Supreme Court Decisions That Shook the Nation This Summer: High Court, Hot Topics
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The SCALES Project: Making Federal Court Records Free
No full textFederal court records have been available online for nearly a quarter century, yet they remain frustratingly inaccessible to the public. This is due to two primary barriers: (1) the federal government’s prohibitively high fees to access the records at scale and (2) the unwieldy state of the records themselves, which are mostly text documents scattered across numerous systems. Official datasets produced by the judiciary, as well as third-party data collection efforts, are incomplete, inaccurate, and similarly inaccessible to the public. The result is a de facto data blackout that leaves an entire branch of the federal government shielded from empirical scrutiny.
In this Essay, we introduce the SCALES project: a new data-gathering and data-organizing initiative to right this wrong. SCALES is an online platform that we built to assemble federal court records, systematically organize them and extract key information, and—most importantly—make them freely available to the public. The database currently covers all federal cases initiated in 2016 and 2017, and we intend to expand this coverage to all years. This Essay explains the shortcomings of existing systems (such as the federal government’s PACER platform), how we built SCALES to overcome these inadequacies, and how anyone can use SCALES to empirically analyze the operations of the federal courts. We offer a series of exploratory findings to showcase the depth and breadth of the SCALES platform. Our goal is for SCALES to serve as a public resource where practitioners, policymakers, and scholars can conduct empirical legal research and improve the operations of the federal courts. For more information, visit www.scales-okn.org