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Online Student Group Work
No full textCollaboration and group work can be a very important part of a student\u27s law school experience, even online. This presentation will provide hints and tips that writing and research faculty can use to foster and encourage safe collaboration and connection among students in an online environment, where collaboration often includes sharing some written work. The presentation will also put some of these collaborative practices into action
Developing Effective Visual Aids
No full textPowerPoint presentations are ubiquitous in live class instruction. As professors have moved their courses online, some have placed even more of an emphasis on slides. But an invisible narrator reading over slides is far from the most effective way to deliver a lecture or develop a remote rapport with students. This presentation will start by summarizing best practices for developing slide decks for any format using the growing body of cognitive science research on developing effective visual aids. From there, we\u27ll discuss techniques to maximize your slides for use in both synchronous and asynchronous online lectures
Live Conferencing Online
No full textIn the very recent past, live conferences-when a student brings a draft writing to you for feedback right then and there-usually involved several sheets of paper, a table or desk in your office, and maybe a pen or pencil for you to write feedback. This presentation will explore the many considerations of taking live conferences on line, including: How do you arrange to receive the draft to be live critiqued? Should you type comments during the conference? Should you review the draft using the share-screen function? This presentation will be of interest to any legal writing professor, whether they\u27re novices or more experienced at giving live feedback, or merely have an interest in holding live conferences
Knowing How to Know: Secondary Liability for Speech in Copyright Law
Get PDFContributory copyright infringement has long been based on whether the defendant, with knowledge of the infringing activity, induced, caused, or materially contributed to another\u27s infringing conduct. But few court opinions or scholarly articles have given due consideration to what it means to know of someone else\u27s infringing conduct, particularly when the unlawfulness at issue cannot truly exist until a legal judgment occurs. How can one know, in other words, that a court or jury will deem a particular use infringement rather than de minimis or fair use? At best, contributory defendants engage in a predictive exercise--in some cases, a more certain one, to be sure, but a predictive exercise nonetheless. To recognize this is not a mere semantic excursion: once a decision maker has determined that infringement has occurred, it is more likely, through hindsight bias, to determine that a defendant knew of this infringement at the relevant time, despite the realities of monitoring and assessing content.
Drawing on both the legal and epistemological literature, this Article recommends a better framing for the issue of knowledge in contributory infringement doctrine--an approach that has implications not only for copyright law but for the regulation of online content more generally
Candidate Privacy
Get PDFIn the United States, we have long accepted that candidates for public office who have voluntarily stepped into the public eye sacrifice claims to privacy. This refrain is rooted deep within the American enterprise, emanating from the Framers\u27 concept of the informed citizen as a bedrock of democracy. Voters must have full information about candidates to make their choices at the ballot box. Even as privacy rights for ordinary citizens have expanded, privacy theorists and courts continue to exempt candidates from privacy protections. This Article suggests that two disruptions warrant revisiting the privacy interests of candidates. The first is a changing information architecture brought on by the rise of the internet and digital media that drastically alters how information about candidates is collected and circulated. The second is a shift in who runs for office. As women and minorities--targets of the worst forms of harassment--increasingly throw their hats in the ring, this Article argues that competing democratic values should challenge previous assumptions about candidate privacy. Far from suggesting easy answers, this Article offers a framework for courts to weigh candidate privacy interests in a more nuanced way, drawing on vetting principles for aspirants to other positions of public trust. While there are good reasons candidates should have far less privacy than ordinary citizens, the reflexive denial of candidate privacy must have its limits if we care about nourishing our evolving democracy
Janus-Faced Judging: How the Supreme Court is Radically Weakening Stare Decisis
Get PDFDrastic changes in Supreme Court doctrine require citizens to reorder their affairs rapidly, undermining their trust in the judiciary. Stare decisis has traditionally limited the pace of such change on the Court. It is a bulwark against wholesale jurisprudential reversals. But, in recent years, the stare decisis doctrine has come under threat.
With little public or scholarly notice, the Supreme Court has radically weakened stare decisis in two ways. First, the Court has reversed its long-standing view that a precedent, regardless of the quality of its reasoning, should stand unless there is some special, practical justification to overrule it. Recent decisions instead claim that “poor reasoning” in a prior decision justifies overruling cases. Second, the Court has discredited older precedents. The Court has claimed such older decisions have less weight because they may have violated individual rights during their life span.
The radical weakening of stare decisis presents a grave threat to legal stability. Justices can always find reasoning they believe is “poor” in prior decisions, which they can also claim have long violated citizens’ rights. Under this formulation, stare decisis provides little restraint against changing course. It also opens the door to “wave theories” of stare decisis, whereby new Justices seeking rapid change can claim fidelity to a weak version of stare decisis early in their careers, only to suggest a stronger version later to protect their own decisions.
This weakening of stare decisis has deep analytical flaws that would allow perpetual changes to legal doctrine based simply on the current Justices’ preferences. The Court must not accept the alarming effects this movement would have on legal stability, doctrinal consistency, and judicial legitimacy
The Case Against Prosecuting Refugees
Get PDFWithin the past several years, the U.S. Department of Justice has pledged to prosecute asylum-seekers who enter the United States outside an official port of entry without inspection. This practice has contributed to mass incarceration and family separation at the U.S.–Mexico border, and it has prevented bona fide refugees from accessing relief in immigration court. Yet, federal judges have taken refugee prosecution in stride, assuming that refugees, like other foreign migrants, are subject to the full force of American criminal justice if they skirt domestic border controls. This assumption is gravely mistaken.
This Article shows that Congress has not authorized courts to punish refugees for illegal entry or reentry. While largely taken for granted today, the idea that refugees may be prosecuted for such acts is in tension with the full text, context, and purpose of the Immigration and Nationality Act. It is also inconsistent with traditional canons of statutory interpretation, such as the Charming Betsy canon, the canon on constitutional avoidance, and the rule of lenity. Therefore, federal prosecutors should abandon refugee prosecution, and federal courts should hold that the criminal prohibitions on illegal entry and reentry do not apply to refugees
Punishing Pill Mill Doctors: Sentencing Disparities in the Opioid Epidemic
Get PDFConsider two pill mill doctors who flooded the streets with oxycodone and other dangerous opioids. The evidence against both doctors was overwhelming. They each sold millions of opioid pills. Both doctors charged addicted patients hundreds of dollars in cash for office visits that involved no physical examinations and no diagnostic tests. Instead, the doctors simply handed the patients opioids in exchange for cash. To maximize their income, both doctors conspired with street dealers to import fake patients — many of them homeless — so that the doctors could write even more prescriptions. Both doctors made millions of dollars profiting off the misery of people addicted to opioids. Even though juries convicted both doctors of similar criminal charges, they received drastically different sentences. The first doctor was sentenced to five years, while the second doctor received a thirty-five-year sentence.
This Article reviews twenty-five of the worst opioid pill mill doctors to be sentenced in the last five years, and it details drastic sentencing disparities in the federal system. In more than half the cases, judges departed well below the Federal Sentencing Guidelines to impose sentences that were decades less than would be expected.
The sentencing variations in pill mill cases are not driven by traditional explanations such as the trial penalty or the defendant’s criminal history. Instead, the sentencing variations are explained primarily by the age of the doctors. Many pill mill doctors are in their sixties and seventies, and judges appear to be tailoring their sentencing decisions to ensure that older doctors will not spend the rest of their lives in prison. Additionally, prosecutors face an uphill battle in proving the drug quantity against white-collar doctors (rather than street dealers) who can claim that some of their prescriptions were legitimate. This Article documents the difficulty of equitably punishing pill mill doctors, as well as the significance of age in sentencing older, white-collar offenders