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Automating Processing and Intake in the Institutional Repository with Python
Get PDFThe Charles B. Sears Law Library at the University at Buffalo School of Law recently completed a seven-month project to load the entire backfile of the school\u27s six law journals onto its Digital Commons repository. The vast majority went fairly quickly, but some of the early volumes required a large amount of additional processing.
For its first 22 volumes, the Buffalo Law Review covered current legal developments through case notes, including 14 years of in-depth coverage of the previous year\u27s New York Court of Appeals term. These case notes provide a contemporary review of the development of New York law through the 1950s and 1960s. Unfortunately, these case notes were trapped in large files that contained every case note for a single issue. Additionally, there was no indexing to help users find individual case notes. For the library to make these notes available individually, 100 PDF files would have to be split into almost 1,600 articles, and metadata created for each.
In the past, this processing would have been completed by multiple librarians and student workers. Right now, however, the libraries are facing severe staffing shortages and budget shortfalls. So, instead, through the power of Python, one faculty scholarship librarian was able to split and upload all 1,600 articles within six weeks. Using Python and a few free libraries, the library built a small suite of tools that were used to scan each large file, pull metadata from its embedded text, split the PDFs, and output everything into Digital Commons upload format.
In this session, you will learn about useful Python libraries for this type of project, the workflows used, problems encountered and their solutions, if any. You will also learn about the code structure used and how you can use this in your own repository projects. This session will be useful to any IR manager, whether using Digital Commons or another platform, who has or might have resources needing similar processing. The session does not assume previous Python programming experience, as the presenter had none before starting the project. Some coding knowledge will be helpful to someone embarking on a similar project, but is not necessary
Decarcerating America: The Opportunistic Overlap Between Theory and (Mainly State) Sentencing Practice as a Pathway to Meaningful Reform
Get PDFCriminals engender no community sympathy and have no political capital. This is part of the reason that the United States has the highest prison population on earth, and by a considerable margin. Incarceration levels grew four-fold over the past forty years. Despite this, America is now experiencing an unprecedented phenomenon whereby many states are now simultaneously implementing measures to reduce prison numbers. The unusual aspect of this is that the response is neither coordinated nor consistent in its approach, but the movement is unmistakable. This ground up approach to reducing prison numbers suffers from the misgiving that it is an ineffective solution to a complex issue. While prison numbers are declining, it is at a glacial rate. Pursuant to current trends, it would take five decades to reach incarceration levels that are in keeping with historical levels in the United States, and which are in line with prison numbers in most other countries. The massive growth in prison numbers during the latter half of the twentieth century was a result of a coordinated tough on crime strategy, spawned by the War on Drugs and the implementation of harsh mandatory sanctions. The response to these policy failings must be equally coordinated and systematic in order to be effective.
This Article provides the theoretical and empirical framework that can be used by lawmakers to tap into the community appetite to reduce prison numbers to make changes that are efficient and normatively sound, and that will significantly accelerate the decarceration process. In broad terms, this Article proposes a bifurcated system of sentencing, whereby sexual and serious violent offenders are imprisoned while other offenders (such as those who commit property, immigration, and drug offenses) are dealt with by other forms of sanctions. The changes will especially benefit African Americans and Hispanics, given that they are incarcerated at disproportionately high levels. The empirical evidence also suggests that the proposed reforms will not result in an increased crime rate
Crafted from Whole Cloth: Reverse Stash-House Stings and the Sentencing Factor Manipulation Claim
Get PDFKenneth Flowers is currently serving a mandatory minimum sentence of 120 months imprisonment stemming from a conviction of conspiracy to possess with intent to distribute five or more kilograms of cocaine. While the ten-year prison sentence is very real, the five-kilograms of cocaine is not, and never was. Mr. Flowers was caught-up in one of the elaborate and overused “reverse stash-house sting” operations employed by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (“ATF”).
Mr. Flowers’ story is one of many similar cases resulting from the government operation conducted by the ATF known as a reverse stash-house sting operation. The ATF’s reverse stash-house stings developed in the late 1980s to combat a rise in professional robbery crews targeting stash-houses. The operations have grown extremely controversial in recent years because they “empower law enforcement to craft offenses out of whole cloth.”
This dubious imbalance of power in the hands of the government spurred the creation of the court-created constitutional doctrine of sentencing factor manipulation. Sentencing manipulation is a violation of the Due Process Clause. “Sentencing factor manipulation occurs ‘where government agents have improperly enlarged the scope or scale of [a] crime.’” When a court determines the government has engaged in such manipulation, the court has the “power to impose a sentence below the statutory mandatory minimum as an equitable remedy.
This Comment proposes adopting a modified sentencing factor manipulation claim that can be brought by defendants in reverse stash-house sting cases. Part I explains how a reverse stash-house sting is conducted and briefly examines why the reverse stash-house stings are becoming more and more disfavored in federal courts. Part II describes the historical and doctrinal underpinnings of the sentencing factor manipulation claim, including a close examination of the entrapment defense, the due process based outrageous government conduct claim, and the structure of sentencing in the federal courts. Part III examines the current state of the sentencing factor manipulation claim across the federal circuit courts. Finally, Part IV discusses why the sentencing factor manipulation claim is so relevant to reverse stash-house sting cases, distinguishes other defenses and claims that are less applicable, and proposes a version of the sentencing factor manipulation claim to be adopted
\u3cem\u3eNof Kdumim:\u3c/em\u3e Remaking the Ancient Landscape in East Jerusalem’s National Parks
Get PDFThis article explores two national parks in East Jerusalem and their legal administration as the focus of contradictory and complementary attempts at preservation, colonization, and normalization. Drawing on in-depth interviews with, and observations of, officials from the Israel Nature and Parks Authority and others, I expose the Judaizing of the landscape in Jerusalem. Nature never stands for itself; it is always an echo of a human presence and, in this case, of a Jewish past and its modern reunion. The project of imagining the natural landscape as one that embodies an ancient past—what Israeli officials have referred to in our interviews as nof kdumim—and the contemporary Jewish people as those who hold the key to its revival as such, is a central aspect of Israel’s colonial dispossession agenda in East Jerusalem and a prerequisite to the land becoming Jewish in practice. Focusing on the perspectives of Israel’s nature officials, this article highlights not only the imaginary but also the legal technologies of erasing and remaking the national park landscape and the tensions between personal and collective, inclusion and exile, and memory and erasure that it inhabits. Arguably, while the identity of the Jewish settler as a nature lover who has returned to her lost Indigenous land is strengthened by the ancient biblical landscape of nof kdumim, the Palestinian is only granted authenticity and Indigeneity when she does not engage in what Israel perceives as “refugee camp” landscaping, and when she is willing to practice traditional forms of farming (or adam ba’har) so as to normalize this place as a universal tourist recreation site. Even then, however, the Palestinian’s labor goes to support orientalist environmental imaginaries. The natural landscape of East Jerusalem is thus recruited, only to discover that it has always been Jewish
TPP and Environmental Regulation
Get PDFPublished as Chapter 8 in Megaregulation Contested: Global Economic Ordering After TPP, Benedict Kingsbury, David M. Malone, Paul Mertenskötter, Richard B. Stewart, Thomas Streinz & Atsushi Sunami, eds.
This article examines the environment-related provisions of the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPP) to assess how and how much they contribute to a larger megaregulatory program for the Asia-Pacific region. The TPP calls for ‘high levels’ of environmental protection and effective enforcement; incorporates duties from several multilateral environmental agreements; adds new provisions addressing several important environmental problems; mandates administrative best practices; promotes corporate social responsibility and the use of voluntary certification systems; and provides implementation mechanisms for most of these provisions ranging from Party negotiations to committee processes and binding arbitration. On the whole, it promotes a model of environmental regulation consistent with that of most OECD countries. The resulting movement toward cross-border regulatory alignment is likely to make member state environmental programs increasingly legible and navigable for transnational business actors. Alignment dynamics are likely to contribute to increased economic and political integration through implementation of common administrative techniques, increasing communication and idea-sharing among mandated committees and resulting networks of officials, and increased trade and regulatory interactions across member states. The TPP’s environmental regulatory program is quite different from China’s current model, and seems likely to provide an important arena for engaging and countering Chinese policies. While the TPP’s environmental provisions are likely to spur improved environmental regulation in some member countries, they do not point toward a governance system capable of controlling the environmental degradation brought by continuingly intensifying production and trade.https://digitalcommons.law.buffalo.edu/book_sections/1375/thumbnail.jp
Governance Interactions in Sustainable Supply Chain Management
Get PDFPublished as Chapter 3 in Transnational Business Governance Interactions: Enhancing Regulatory Capacity, Ratcheting up Standards, and Empowering Marginalized Actors, Stepan Wood, Rebecca Schmidt, Errol Meidinger,Burkard Eberlein, and Kenneth W. Abbot, eds.
Supply chains are a major site of transnational business governance, and yet their dynamics and effectiveness are usually more assumed than interrogated in regulatory governance discourse. The very term ‘chain’ implies a more determinist and simplistic understanding of supply relationships than is empirically supportable. Supply chains in practice are complex, dynamic, and highly variable networks. Based on peer-group presentations by more than sixty supply chain professionals, this chapter analyzes sustainable supply chain management practices in terms of the Transnational Business Governance Interactions framework. It discusses possible refinements of the framework and suggests that sustainable supply chain management (1) is likely to make modest contributions to improving governance capacity, (2) may or may not ratchet up standards, and (3) may help protect marginalized parties, but is focused on better using the existing power of lead firms in supply chains.https://digitalcommons.law.buffalo.edu/book_sections/1378/thumbnail.jp
All Costs Have a Right
Get PDFFrom Eleven Things They Don’t Tell You About Law & Economics: An Informal Introduction to Political Economy and Law.
Many legal scholars have critiqued the dominant law and economics paradigm. However, important work is all too often neglected because it is not popularized in an accessible form. This Article features experts who synthesize their key insights into memorable and concise vignettes. Our 11 Things project is inspired by the work of the Cambridge economist Ha-Joon Chang, who distilled many facets of his work into a book called 23 Things They Don’t Tell You About Capitalism. That book was a runaway success, translated for markets around the globe, because it challenged conventional economic reasoning with a series of short and memorable analyses and narratives that translated academic research into accessible language.
A project like Chang’s can also inform economic analysis of law. We believe that law and economics pedagogy would benefit from a shift in focus. Scholars are developing increasingly data-driven and empirical research, while too many casebooks and teaching approaches covering the first-year U.S. law school curriculum remain mired in toy models and simplistic accounts of economic life. This Article features critical insights that “they” (politicians, bureaucrats, and, all too frequently, first-year professors and casebook authors) tend to neglect in their understanding of commercial life. Each piece critically explores a facet of the theoretical foundations of law and economics. They connect contemporary developments in policy research to classical economic analysis of law. They bridge the gap between scholarship and pedagogy, introducing students, practitioners, and policymakers to political economy as a vital alternative in policy analysis
Anti-Sanctuary and Immigration Localism
Get PDFA new front in the war against sanctuary cities has emerged. Until recently, the fight against sanctuary cities has largely focused on the federal government\u27s efforts to defund states like California and cities like Chicago and New York for resisting federal immigration enforcement. Thus far, localities have mainly prevailed against this federal anti-sanctuary campaign, relying on federalism protections afforded by the Tenth Amendment\u27s anticommandeering and anticoercion doctrines. Recently, however, the battle lines have shifted with the proliferation of state-level laws that similarly seek to punish sanctuary cities. States across the country are directly mandating local participation, and courts thus far have upheld those state policies. These laws, like Texas\u27s S.B. 4, prohibit local sanctuary policies and impose severe punishments on the cities and officials that support them. This new state-versus-local terrain has doctrinal, political, and normative implications for the future of local government resistance to immigration enforcement. These implications have thus far been undertheorized in immigration-law scholarship. This Essay seeks to change that.
This Essay is the first to focus on this emerging wave of state anti-sanctuary laws. In so doing, it makes three contributions. First, descriptively, the Essay documents the upsurge of anti-sanctuary laws that have appeared across the United States and explains how they differ from prior anti-sanctuary laws. Second, doctrinally, it argues that the passage of these laws nudges sanctuary cities to uncharted legal territory in immigration law--localism. Under conventional localism principles, state anti-sanctuary laws are in a position to more fully *838 quash local sanctuary policies and effectively conscript local officials into federal immigration enforcement. However, the draconian structure of state anti-sanctuary laws provides a unique context in which to advance what we call “immigration localism” claims and protect three distinct interests that concern local governments: structural integrity, accountability, and local democracy. Third, normatively, this Essay contends that immigration localism provides a more accurate descriptive and theoretical account of how current immigration enforcement operates and promotes community engagement with immigration enforcement. Specifically, the reorientation toward localism accounts for the powerful role that cities play in immigration enforcement and decenters the federal government\u27s dominant role in that enforcement. To be sure, this Essay recognizes that casting a theoretical gaze toward local discretion may end up emboldening the most exclusionary impulses of localities and supporting local anti-sanctuary policies. In the long run, however, local discretion in immigration enforcement is likely to better serve the interests of noncitizens and citizens alike