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Of Afrofuturism, Of Algorithms
Get PDFAlgorithms are proliferating in criminal legal structures. The predictions produced by these algorithms inform life-altering decisions around surveillance and incarceration. Their continued use poses a challenge to ongoing racial justice efforts. Contesting how algorithms of today maintain the racial status quo requires a fundamental rethinking of the algorithm project. This essay explores how Afrofuturism can facilitate such a rethinking. It imagines how applying an Afrofuturist paradigm to the adoption, construction, implementation, and oversight of algorithms could radically change the kind of algorithms developed and the purposes for which they are developed. Tapping into this potential offers the chance for members of marginalized communities to subversively use algorithms to challenge, contest, and potentially reform or dismantle and reconstitute the systems in which they are used
The Only Woman in the Room: Golda Meir and Her Path to Power
No full textIn this authoritative and empathetic biography, Pnina Lahav reexamines the life of Golda Meir (1898–1978) through a feminist lens, focusing on her recurring role as a woman standing alone among men. The Only Woman in the Room is the first book to contend with Meir’s full identity as a woman, Jew, Zionist leader, and one of the founders of Israel, providing a richer portrait of her persona and legacy.Meir, Lahav shows, deftly deflected misogyny as she traveled the path to becoming Israel’s fourth, and only female, prime minister, from 1969 to 1974. Lahav revisits the youthful encounters that forged Meir’s passion for socialist Zionism and reassesses her decision to separate from her husband and leave her children in the care of others. Enduring humiliation and derision from her colleagues, Meir nevertheless led in establishing Israel as a welfare state where social security, workers’ rights, and maternity leave became law. Lahav looks at the challenges that beset Meir’s premiership, particularly the disastrous Yom Kippur War, which led to her resignation and withdrawal from politics, as well as Meir’s bitter duel with feminist and civil rights leader Shulamit Aloni, Meir’s complex relationship with the Israeli and American feminist movements, and the politics that led her to distance herself from feminism altogether.Exploring the tensions between Meir’s personal and political identities, The Only Woman in the Room provides a groundbreaking new account of Meir’s life while also illuminating the difficulties all women face as they try to ascend in male-dominated fields.https://scholarship.law.bu.edu/books/1341/thumbnail.jp
The Rise of the Minimum Tax
No full textIn January 1969, during the last few weeks of the Johnson Administration, Treasury Secretary Joseph Barr testified before the Congressional Joint Economic Committee that in 1967, 155 individuals had 1 million and paid no Federal income taxes.6 It has been reported that Secretary Barr\u27s testimony caused more letters of outrage from the American public to members of Congress in 1969 than the United States\u27 involvement in the Vietnam War.7 Congress responded to Secretary Barr\u27s testimony by enacting a minimum tax as part of the Tax Reform Act of 1969 ensuring that upper-income taxpayers pay at least some minimum amount of tax.8 Also, as part of the 1969 tax reform, Congress enacted a minimum tax on large corporations, which were called out by Senator William Proxmire and others for paying minimal to no taxes.9 The 1969 minimum tax for both individuals and corporations operated as an excise tax on tax preferences. [...]the minimum tax was often referred to as an on tax. According to the Obama Administration, such a minimum tax would encourage domestic investment and not give companies an incentive to locate production overseas or engage in accounting games to shift profits abroad. [...]Republican policymakers would often point to House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Dave Camp\u27s discussion draft of international taxation, released in October 2011, as creating the concept, but not the term, of a minimum tax on foreign earnings.17 As part of TCJA, Congress enacted a new U.S. international tax system, eliminating deferral for most foreign earnings of a foreign subsidiary of a U.S. multinational but taxing such earnings at a preferential tax rate
Who Benefits?: How the AIA Hurt Deceptively Non-Joined Inventors
Get PDFCongress enacted the America Invents Act (“AIA”) to bolster economic development, sustain American innovation, and protect American jobs. This pro-business legislation, however, overlooked one actor critical to any successful innovation endeavor: the inventor. The AIA created access barriers, preventing inventors from efficiently and effectively seeking the entire remedy spectrum to which they are entitled. Paul Morinville and others have opined that the new first-to-file system put small inventors out of business, naming the AIA the single worst disaster in the history of the U.S. patent system. Beyond the filing and subject matter changes, the AIA created fundamental access to justice barriers that others have yet to fully interrogate. Through amendments to the AIA, specifically 35 U.S.C. § 256, Congress created a system which simultaneously impedes an inventor’s comprehension of their rights to remedy, affords greater leeway to patent owners to protect inequitably obtained patents, and fails to penalize bad actors.
Congress removed the “deceptive intent” language from § 256 and formally allowed inventorship corrections regardless of inequitable conduct. These amendments removed the choice of remedy for an inventor deceptively overlooked in the patent process – no longer clearly presenting their rights to pursue correction or invalidation of the patent. The amendments hide the spectrum of remedies from the wronged actor, providing yet another corporate advantage in the already imbalanced power dynamic between inventor-employee and corporation-employer. Further, Congress created an undue and duplicative litigation burden, wherein actors can seek both patent inventorship correction and patent invalidation for inequitable conduct in parallel litigation proceedings. Herein, I propose amendments to reestablish the balance between inventor and corporation, improving access to remedies and reducing duplicative burdens on the U.S. court system. Through these changes, the AIA can effectively bolster economic development by recognizing and empowering inventors
What Abortion Sanctuaries Can Learn from the Immigrants\u27 Rights Movement
No full textStates and localities are beginning to declare themselves “sanctuaries” for abortion seekers.
In June, California Governor Gavin Newsom (D) signed into law new provisions to immunize anyone who may face out-of-state civil actions for providing, assisting or receiving abortion care, proclaiming “We’ll be a sanctuary,” “Come to Chicago,” Mayor Lori Lightfoot said hours after the Supreme Court reversed Roe v Wade. “We will protect you.
Restructuring Support Agreements: An Empirical Analysis
Get PDFRestructuring support agreements (RSAs), or contracts that commit bankruptcy parties to supporting a plan of reorganization that will conform to certain requirements, are now a common feature of Chapter 11. Parties utilize these agreements in nearly half of all large cases. While prior literature has debated the normative value of RSAs, we take an empirical approach to look at what provisions the parties include in these agreements and how those provisions have changed over time.Our analysis looks at all RSAs associated with large bankruptcies through the end of 2020. We characterize the types of firms with RSAs, the parties involved, and the language contained within their key sections. A significant majority of RSAs are entered into on or before the petition date. Common provisions relate to the bargaining process during the case and often commit the parties in advance to certain elements of the restructuring plan. Provisions related to control such as debtor milestones have become more frequent in the last ten years of the sample
The Right to Counsel in a Neoliberal Age
Get PDFLegal scholarship tends to obscure how changes in criminal process relate to broader changes in the political and economic terrain. This Article offers a modest corrective to this tendency. By studying the U.S. Supreme Court’s right to counsel jurisprudence, as it has developed since the mid-70s, I show the pervasive impact of the concurrent rise of neoliberalism on relationships between defendants and their attorneys. Since 1975, the Court has emphasized two concerns in its rulings regarding the right to counsel: choice and autonomy. These, of course, are nominally good things for defendants to have. But by paying close attention to how the Court has defined and mobilized “choice” and “autonomy,” a more complex picture emerges. I argue the Court’s turn to choice mirrors one made by policymakers who, starting in the 1970s, embraced a new, neoliberal paradigm for public administration. Under this new mode of neoliberal governance, the state cut investment in social welfare and promoted government regulations that afforded citizens the capacity to exercise choice in accessing increasingly limited public goods and entitlements.
This approach, when applied to the courtroom, has produced troubling results. First, the range of choices accorded to defendants has been severely limited. Second, in practice, those choices have often led defendants to inflict self-harm. Third, defendants have only been given the right to make choices free from interference; they are not granted a right to be well-equipped to make choices to their advantage. Indeed, the Court has simply ignored the social conditions that shape a person’s capacity to exercise meaningful, autonomous choice. The Court has disavowed any responsibility to defendants making choices about their representation in criminal court. This disavowal parallels one that has happened in society more broadly with the advance of neoliberalism: the federal government shrank social welfare and abandoned those most likely to be criminalized. The Court and government’s systematic neglect has had grave consequences for defendants and their relationships with their attorneys.
Ableism, poverty and racism undermine defendants’ ability to access justice and to collaborate with their attorneys. Instead of dismantling these barriers to equality, the Court has naturalized unequal, differential access, contingent on ability and class. It has entrenched the reality that outcomes in court will depend on these hierarchies. By increasingly focusing on the choices of individual defendants, the Court has shifted responsibility away from government to deliver due process in legal proceedings. In form and in impact, neoliberalism has transformed the right to counsel, one of the pillars of criminal procedure. This exposition suggests that when the rules of process produce suboptimal outcomes, any meaningful redress will likely lie far outside of the doors of criminal court
January 6, Ambiguously Inciting Speech, and the Overt-Acts Rule
Get PDFA prosecution of Donald Trump for his role in the January 6 attack on the Capitol would have to address whether the First Amendment protects the inflammatory remarks he made at the “Stop the Steal” rally. A prosecution based solely on the content of Trump’s speech—whether for incitement, insurrection, or obstruction—would face serious constitutional difficulties under Brandenburg v. Ohio’s dual requirements of intent and likely imminence. But a prosecution need not rely solely on the content of Trump’s speech. It can also look to Trump’s actions: his order to the remove the magnetometers from the entrances to the rally and his repeated attempts to join the crowd at the Capitol.
This Article proposes a requirement of overt acts for the prosecution of ambiguously inciting speech. Trump’s overt acts offer a principled basis for criminal liability for Trump’s speech, while preserving Brandenburg’s prophylactic approach to protecting against the overcriminalization of speech. The prosecutorial use of overt acts also accords with historical practice going back to the Founding, when the Framers, influenced by prevolutionary English practice, required evidence of overt acts for the most serious of crimes: treason. In an age of increasing political polarization and violence, drawing a line between permitted and prohibited by our political officials is of the utmost importance. This essay is an attempt to make that line clearer