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Disbanding Police Agencies
Get PDFSince the killing of George Floyd, a national consensus has emerged that reforms are needed to prevent discriminatory and violent policing. Calls to defund and abolish the police have provoked pushback, but several cities are considering disbanding or reducing their police forces. This Essay assesses disbanding as a reform strategy from a democratic and institutionalist perspective. Should localities disband their police forces? One reason to do so is that discriminatory police departments are often too insulated from democratic oversight to be reformed. But can localities succeed in disbanding and replacing their forces with something better? Unfortunately, the structural entrenchment of sheriffs’ offices and municipal police forces insulates them against such attacks as well. To challenge police power, localities may have to disband, and to disband, localities may have to alter the legal structure of state and local govern-ment. Reformers must use rare moments of mobilization like this one to overcome the misguided efforts of past reformers to lock in their victories. Successful reformers can best avoid repeating such mistakes by trusting in the democratic experiment and concentrating supervision of law enforcement at one level, the most local
Why is it so difficult to ensure equality of access to public toilets for all?
Get PDFWhy is it so difficult to ensure equality of access to public toilets for all? To find pleasant facilities? To implement design practices that support safety, health, and function? Public toilets have been around for over 2000 years!
In recent years, restrooms have become the major spatial locus of conflict over trans* rights. But the trans* population is not the only one that has problems with restrooms. Human rights advocates recognize the importance of access to public toilets for dignity, health, and social participation. In low-income countries, providing safe and secure public toilets to reduce the spread of disease is a major public health initiative, especially important to support access to education and social participation by girls and women. Advocates have identified the “potty parity” problem as evidence that even high-income societies have not physically adapted to full equality for women. While many countries may have turned the corner on access for people with disabilities, it remains a major issue for people with disabilities in the developing world and, even in high income countries, regulations do not address all the disability issues
Jordan Fox Besek on climate change and life finding a way
No full textEpisode 22 of The Baldy Center Podcast features Department of Sociology Assistant Professor Jordan Fox Besek. Besek discusses his new project with Brooklyn College professor Daniel Shtob, humanity’s relationship with nature, and climate change. He explores the ways in which humans effect the environment, sometimes producing poor outcomes despite green intentions, and the ripple effect those actions have
The Illiberalization of American Election Law: A Study in Democratic Deconsolidation
Get PDFFor many years, the dominant view among American election law scholars has been that the U.S. Supreme Court’s constitutional jurisprudence of democratic practice got off to a promising start during the mid-twentieth century but has since then slowly deteriorated into incoherence. In light of the United States’ recent turn toward populist authoritarianism, that view needs to be substantially revised. With the benefit of hindsight, it now appears that the Supreme Court has functioned, in its management of the constitutional jurisprudence of democracy, as a vector of infection—a kind of super-spreader of populist authoritarianism.
There is, sadly, nothing unusual these days about an apex court reinterpreting a formerly liberal constitutional jurisprudence to support a populist authoritarian regime. Typically, however, constitutional courts pivot toward authoritarianism suddenly, after they have been captured through aggressive court-packing or coercive threats and intimidation. In the United States, however, federal courts retain real independence, and the process of illiberalization has been correspondingly slower and less immediate. In particular, the Supreme Court has slowly illiberalized American election law in a two-stage process: first, by deconsolidating a liberal jurisprudence into incoherence and then by reconsolidating it into a form more conducive to authoritarianism. The main strategy by which this has occurred has been an increasingly aggressive deployment of an ever-narrower palette of individual rights, gradually narrowing a complex and conceptually rich jurisprudence to a single dimension—a judicial strategy that, in its radical anti-pluralism, is deeply populist, fundamentally illiberal, and profoundly destructive of the inherited liberal democratic settlement of the late twentieth century
Monuments to the Enslaved
Get PDFIn the wake of George Floyd’s murder in May 2020, a grassroots movement to remove, and in some cases reimagine, Confederate monuments has refocused national conversations about racial justice, memory, and public space. While some have lamented these removals as an effort to “erase history,” others point out that these edifices represented only a mythologized past that itself erased the experiences of enslaved people and their descendants
Alexandra Harrington, COVID and Prisons: Grappling with the Effects of the Pandemic on Incarceration
Get PDFIn the last year, roughly 10% of the U.S. population has tested positive for COVID-19. In that same period, about 28% of people incarcerated in U.S. prisons tested positive for the virus. More than 2,500 incarcerated people have died of COVID-related causes. Trapped in congregate settings with little to no ability to socially distance or protect themselves from COVID, people in prisons are particularly vulnerable in the midst of a global pandemic
Public Comments Run Amok: Reforming the Notice and Comment Processto Help Reduce the Negative Effects of Mass and Fake Comments
Get PDFThe Administrative Procedure Act requires agencies to give the public an opportunity to submit comments in response to proposed regulations. When the proposed regulations address particularly hot-button issues, agencies can be flooded with millions of comments fromthe public in response. This most memorably occurred twice when JohnOliver exhorted viewers of his show to write in to protect net neutrality.The vast majority of the millions of comments submitted in both processes were duplicative, providing no benefit for the agency; sent inunder the name of a person who did not submit them; or both. If the vastmajority of the comments coming in are essentially useless, it is time torethink the process.
This Article argues that two simple fixes could help solve many of the problems caused by these duplicative and/or falsely attributed comments: (1) The submission process should be restructured so that individuals sign on to the comments of other individuals rather than submitting their own unique comment, and (2) Commentors should be allowed the option of verifying their identity when submitting a comment. These would help reduce the harm caused by both types of these comments and would be expected to be embraced by all affectedinterests: the agencies, the public, and the third-party organizations driving the proliferation of mass comments
Legal Positivism as a Theory of Law’s Existence: A Comment on Margaret Martin’s Judging Positivism
Get PDFThis comment critically examines the conception of legal positivism that informs Margaret Martin’s interesting and multilayered challenge against the substance and method of this intellectual tradition. My central claim is that her characterization of the substantive theory of legal positivism sets aside a more fundamental and explanatory prior dimension concerning the positivist’s theory of the existence of legal systems and legal norms. I also argue that her understanding of the positivist’s descriptive methodology as a nonnormative project is too demanding and overlooks both the relationships between law and morality recognized by contemporary legal positivists and the pivotal distinction between internal and external inquiries. These clarifications provide resources to begin to address some of Martin’s objections against the Razian project
The Complexities of Conscience: Reconciling Death Penalty L aw with Capital Jurors’ Concerns
Get PDFJurors exercise unique legal power when they are asked to decide whether to sentence someone to death. The Supreme Court emphasizes the central role of the jury’s moral judgment in making this sentencing decision, noting that it is the jurors who are best able to “express the conscience of the community on the ultimate question of life or death.” Manylower courts nevertheless narrow the range of admissible evidence at the mitigation phase of a capital trial, insisting on a standard of legal relevance that interferes with the jury’s ability to exercise the very moral judgment the Supreme Court has deemed essential.
Combining moral theory and original empirical evidence, this Article breaks new ground by linking these to a legal framework that gives full effect to the Supreme Court’s vision of the jury. Aided by a novel dataset of federal capital jury verdict forms, this Article focuses on three types of evidence frequently excluded in state and federal courts: the impact of the defendant’s execution on loved ones, co-participant sentences, and the government’s negligent facilitation of the murder.
The data show that jurors consistently find all three forms of evidence highly relevant to their mitigation deliberations. Further, two of these—execution impact evidence and co-participant sentences—have a statistically significant correlation with the jurors’ sentencing decision. This Article’s empirical and moral account of juror behavior strongly supports expanding the admissibility of this evidence to reflect the Supreme Court’s evolution in defining the relevance of mitigating evidence as a moral—rather than legalistic—question, appropriately recognizing the jury’s normative role