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California Public Defense Workloads and Staffing
No full textThis report assesses the current workloads and staffing of California public defense providers. The report concludes that California’s public defense attorneys are almost universally burdened by workloads that far exceed nationally recommended standards. Additionally, compared to district attorneys’ offices in the same jurisdictions, public defender offices typically have 20-45% fewer attorneys.
This report also details how public defense providers in California also lack the appropriate support staff – investigators, social workers, paralegals, and administrative assistants – necessary to efficiently and effectively represent their clients. At their current workload and staffing levels, public defense attorneys simply cannot do all that their job requires. As a result, public defense attorneys across California are forced to skip or delay critical work for some clients in order to focus on other clients’ cases. California’s less-populous, more rural counties, often have greater attorney vacancies, which exacerbate these problems.
The obligation to provide constitutionally adequate public defense services lies with the state. California stands almost alone among states in failing both to create public defense standards and to provide sufficient funding to ensure that every accused person receives effective assistance of counsel. This report recommends that the state take immediate action to support county-based public defense systems and ensure that they can deliver the constitutionally-adequate representation that every Californian deserves.https://scholar.smu.edu/deasoncenter/1018/thumbnail.jp
Judge–Scholar Collaboration and the Second Amendment
No full textLegal scholarship is overly abstract and theoretical, making it unhelpful to judges and lawyers. That, at least, is the classic critique from the bench. When it comes to the Second Amendment, however, a different pattern has emerged: judges consistently cite law review articles and look to the academy for guidance. Most recently, in United States v. Rahimi, some Justices went further, implicitly inviting more scholarly work to help the Court answer open questions raised by its novel methodological approach to the Second Amendment. This Article explores this aberrant trend.
We raise several explanations for the distinctive scholarly role in Second Amendment jurisprudence, including the Amendment’s unique aspects as well as the role of legal movements in facilitating the Amendment’s development. Faced with a lack of judicial precedent on both the right to keep and bear arms and originalism-in-practice, law review articles often can be more helpful than past opinions. Beyond scholarship’s utility in a new area of law, we suggest that a related phenomenon—the gun rights and conservative legal movements’ trifold success at facilitating the rise of the individual Second Amendment right, popularizing originalism as a methodology, and elevating originalist judges to the bench—is an important part of the story. For a halfcentury, organizations focused on achieving both a robust right to bear arms and a conservative vision of the Constitution have become more prominent and have closely associated with both scholars and judges. If, in the usual telling, judges look askance at scholarship, this specific area of law might present an exception since it has been a joint project from the beginning.
The Article concludes that the judge–scholar collaboration that has characterized Second Amendment case law is likely to continue. Moreover, it could have ramifications far beyond the right to keep and bear arms, including for other rights that may be on the cusp of transformation and for other legal movements seeking to emulate the strategies that ushered in modern Second Amendment law
Global Pathways: Exploring Careers in International Law
No full textThe State Bar of Texas International Law Section and The SMU Rowling Center of Business Law & Leadership Present Global Pathways: Exploring Careers in International Law. Discover your future in international law and connect with experts who can guide you on the path to success! Panelists: Cynthia Rigney, BT Americas, Inc. Daniel Avila, Reed Smith LLP., van Castaneda, Cacheaux, Cavazos & Newton Eric Hinton, The SMU Rowling Center for Business Law & Leadership Demetra Koelling, On2It Cybersecurity (Moderator
Can Machine Learning Prevent Human Trafficking? Using Data and Technology to Tailor Policies and Programs Toward Vulnerable Populations in Your Community
Get PDFThis presentation will investigate how to use data and technology to prevent human trafficking in communities, before it starts. It will explore the opportunity to utilize a novel machine learning approach to identify local risk factors to guide collaborative, data-oriented prevention programs. Surprising findings from a case study will be shared that challenge existing assumptions on the key drivers of human trafficking
Shame on You! The Effect of Shame on Christian Female Leaders and Implications for the Organizations they Lead
Get PDFShame on you! These three words evoke an immediate emotional response in most people. But for female Christian leaders, the impact of shame often extends beyond mere emotion. Some theological distortions have historically constrained female leadership, creating dissonance between embracing God-given talent and navigating institutional barriers. This dissertation examines the pervasive influence of shame on Christian female leaders in both ecclesiastical and secular organizational contexts. Through qualitative case studies and theological analysis, it is demonstrated that shame functions not simply as a ubiquitous emotional response but as a systemic barrier that distorts women\u27s experience of vocational development and divine calling. The study reveals that theological developments concerning gender roles—especially those emerging during the Reformation and codified in Western Evangelicalism—have fostered environments in which women are constrained by shame, as organizational structures encode gendered expectations into seemingly neutral practices, leading to persistent internal conflict and external resistance. The research establishes that addressing this phenomenon requires both theological reformation and organizational transformation—retrieving Scripture\u27s affirmation of women\u27s leadership while simultaneously dismantling shame-inducing institutional practices. This integrated approach creates pathways for women to exercise their leadership gifts without the burden of shame while fostering organizational cultures where all leaders can flourish as equal image-bearers
Investigating Women\u27s Provisioning Efforts in the Ethnoarchaeological Record of Central African Forest Foragers
No full textPrior studies on contemporary hunter-gatherer diets relied on observational techniques, which alone cannot capture the entirety of what people eat. Furthermore, existing scholarship in this realm often focuses on men as providers while overlooking women’s efforts. This is despite indications that women substantially contribute as well as long-standing debates about the role of gendered segregation of labor and how women’s and men’s family provisioning goals may differ. Thus, questions remain about what people eat as well as who is providing the food consumed. This dissertation reports the results of an ethnoarchaeological project that investigated the impact of hunter-gatherer women’s provisioning efforts and the diets of women, men, and children to provide much-needed insight about what people actually consume with an approach that centered women and used an independent measure of diet.
This study was conducted among the Central African Bofi and Aka. Among these populations a hunting and gathering lifestyle remains important, with women and men often cooperating and engaging in gender-specific food procurement labor tasks daily. Data were collected over multiple field visits spanning the wet and dry season to address several key questions: Do members of the group eat more meat (acquired mostly by men) or foraged food items (acquired mostly by women)? Who is provisioning the children? What do the diets of nuclear families suggest about women’s versus men’s foraging goals? This dissertation used a multi-method approach to assess various predictions and expectations about the role of women’s provisioning efforts on the diets of the group at the population, extended family, and nuclear family level using a conceptual framework derived from Human Behavioral Ecology with the underlying foundation that women’s foraging goals align with family provisioning.
By integrating ethnographically derived data with biomolecular analyses of hair to examine independent measures of diet (i.e., stable isotope analysis) and stress (i.e., cortisol analysis), this work provides greater insight into what people were actually eating, and thus potentially who provided the food consumed. The results of this study led to several conclusions about the Bofi and Aka forager’s diets: 1) women provided most of the food consumed by women and children resulting in a similar diet, while men likely provided most of their own food and consumed a more distinct diet higher in protein, 2) seasonality played a large role in the composition of the diet, women’s and men’s contributions, and possibly the provisioning of children, and 3) a gendered difference in diet exists among both adults and children. Ultimately, this work suggests that women’s provisioning efforts have an impact on the group’s diets at various levels, with strong support for a claim that women’s foraging goals align more so than men’s with family provisioning
eMortgage and Crypto-Mortgage in Home Finance
Get PDFMost home mortgage loans today are documented on physical paper, but they are increasingly closed as eMortgages. The move to electronic documents is inevitable and will ultimately be a positive change for lenders and borrowers. However, additional regulation is needed to address issues raised by electronic home mortgage closings and the “crypto-mortgage,” a mortgage loan with the obligation evidenced by or tethered to a non-fungible token.
Lenders have traditionally required that home mortgage loans be evidenced by a wet-signed paper promissory note to gain the advantages and the certainty of Article 3 of the Uniform Commercial Code (UCC) governing negotiable instruments. However, delivery and storage of promissory notes is expensive and inefficient. More than twenty years ago, state and federal statutes enabled an electronic equivalent to the negotiable promissory note, called a transferable record. More recently, states have begun to adopt the 2022 revisions to the UCC, including new Article 12 of the UCC, which enables a new type of electronic record that may evidence a mortgage loan and that facilitates crypto-mortgage architecture.
This Article is the first to provide a comprehensive comparison of the traditional paper mortgage loan, the transferable record eMortgage loan, and the Article 12 electronic mortgage loan and is the first to consider the crypto-mortgage. The Article explores the advantages and disadvantages of a move to electronic residential mortgage loan documentation, including the crypto-mortgage, with a focus on the homeowner. Consumers may be less likely to read and understand electronic loan documents, but electronic documents can be designed to increase understanding. In addition, the law governing negotiable promissory notes and their electronic equivalent, transferable records, protects lenders from certain defenses to payment at the borrower\u27s expense; Article 12, on the other hand, leaves borrower defenses in place. Finally, storage and registration of eMortgages, registration using blockchain technology, and the crypto-mortgage raise new security questions. To address these issues, this Article recommends adoption of the 2022 revisions to the UCC, use of the Article 12 mechanism rather than the transferable record, abrogation of the holder in due course doctrine for home mortgage loans, regulation of closing procedures designed to consider electronic closings, and further study and regulation of security