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The Rise of the Resistance: Evaluating California\u27s Approach to Restorative Justice Practices in Public Education
Get PDFNational Security or National Origin? The Implications of Florida’s Alien Land Law Under the Federal Fair Housing Act
No full textFlorida Governor Ron DeSantis signed House Bill 1355 and its companion Senate Bill 264 into law on May 8, 2023. This so-called New Alien Land Law restricts the land and property ownership of seven “countries of concern,” including China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, Syria, Venezuela, and Cuba. Similar legislation has been introduced in California, New York, Texas, Louisiana, South Carolina, and Alabama, among other states. Despite the Act’s guise to safeguard our national security interests, the Act’s implementation and enforcement will not only be inherently discriminatory, but will also reverse decades of progress made in fair housing within the United States. Through the codification of the Act, DeSantis propagated the erroneous idea that nationality is indicative of a propensity to be a national security threat. This dangerous narrative cultivates an environment of exclusion and marginalization in Florida and throughout the United States.
The primary objective of this Essay is to expose the illegality of the Florida Alien Land Law, and like legislation, under the Federal Fair Housing Act. A critical examination of this legislation is necessary in order to refute the harmful rhetoric perpetuated by its proponents and to discredit the Act’s purported rationale. Through an analysis of the Federal Fair Housing Act, and its protections against national origin housing discrimination, this Essay will examine the discriminatory impact of Florida’s New Alien Land Law. An investigation of the Act’s underlying motives will further evidence the ways in which its provisions will facilitate discrimination, both explicitly and implicitly. Consequently, this Essay illustrates that legislation, such as the Florida New Alien Land Law, is antithetical to the principles espoused by the Fair Housing Act and serves only to cultivate sentiments rooted in fear and xenophobia
Shortlisted: A Conversation Between Judge Diane Wood, Renee Knake Jefferson, and Hannah Brenner Johnson
Get PDFThis article includes an edited excerpt from the introduction to Shortlisted: Women in the Shadows of the Supreme Court and a discussion with the book\u27s authors led by Judge Diane Wood, a senior judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit. They discuss the book, the women who were passed over for seats on the Court, and the lessons their stories offer — for women judges and the legal profession as a whole
The Case for Pausing any Immediate Embrace of the Social Inflation Argument for Legal System Reforms
Get PDFThis paper brings a critical eye to the current conversation about social inflation, reaching the conclusion that the current calls for legal system reform--whether that be controls on attorney advertising, clamping down on litigation financing, revisiting of fee recovery rules, or other similar reform proposals--currently lack the empirical support and analytical comprehensiveness for. regulators and legislators to act with confidence that the requested reforms will do more good than harm. In a variety of States, insurance premiums are rising faster than general inflation, some insurers are becoming insolvent, and some insurers are leaving markets entirely. Insurers are pointing to social inflation as a major cause. Social inflation is the terminology for the assertion that lawyers, litigation financers, contractors, and other opportunists including perhaps policyholders themselves, are increasingly causing insurers to overpay claims and incur unwarranted LAE, often in litigation settings where the problem is exacerbated by gullible jurors and changing societal attitudes toward businesses and insurance companies. This paper explores several potential concerns with the arguments for legal system reform. Three concerns in particular are whether the literature adequately not only models the possible benefits to insurers of legal system reforms, but also the possible harm to consumers; whether the literature adequately explains why the proposed reforms are likely to be more successful than prior reform efforts; and whether there is yet sufficient development of the social inflation argument to act on it.. This paper concludes that so far, there is not enough data for a regulator or legislator to confidently embrace further legal system reform. The reforms may be advisable. But it is too soon to tell, and there is significant risk that the reforms would do more harm than good
LegalBench: A Collaboratively Built Benchmark for Measuring Legal Reasoning in Large Language Models
No full textThe advent of large language models (LLMs) and their adoption by the legal community has given rise to the question: what types of legal reasoning can LLMs perform? To enable greater study of this question, we present LegalBench: a collaboratively constructed legal reasoning benchmark consisting of 162 tasks covering six different types of legal reasoning. LegalBench was built through an interdisciplinary process, in which we collected tasks designed and hand-crafted by legal professionals. Because these subject matter experts took a leading role in construction, tasks either measure legal reasoning capabilities that are practically useful, or measure reasoning skills that lawyers find interesting. To enable cross-disciplinary conversations about LLMs in the law, we additionally show how popular legal frameworks for describing legal reasoning—which distinguish between its many forms—correspond to LegalBench tasks, thus giving lawyers and LLM developers a common vocabulary. This paper describes LegalBench, presents an empirical evaluation of 20 open-source and commercial LLMs, and illustrates the types of research explorations LegalBench enables
Using a “Bystander Bounty” to Encourage the Reporting of Workplace Sexual Harassment
Get PDFSexual harassment has become a fact of the modern workplace – something that society laments and regrets, but that rarely shocks the conscience when it comes to light. In fact, both the least and most surprising aspect about workplace sexual harassment is the number of individuals who are aware of it occurring: For every Harvey Weinstein, Matt Lauer, and Louis CK, there have been countless observers who knew about their depravity and who did nothing to stop their behavior. In this way, one obvious approach for reducing harassment at work seems clearly to involve mobilizing these bystanders – encouraging those who witness this misconduct to come forward and report the wrongdoing. Yet for a variety of reasons, bystanders often (quite rationally) choose to remain silent.This article suggests a novel approach for overcoming the forces inhibit bystanders from speaking out. In the context of financial crimes, the law has successfully encouraged bystander reporting by applying a bounty system that provides significant financial rewards to those who report the wrongdoing that they observe. Indeed, those who have observed financial wrongdoing have reaped millions of dollars in rewards, presumably overcoming whatever reluctance they once may have felt about disclosing the misdeeds of colleagues and associates. This article suggests applying a similar bounty system to workplace sexual harassment: It proposes awarding bystanders a piece of the recovery when their reports of observed workplace sexual harassment culminate into successful lawsuits against the perpetrators of this misconduct.Blowing the whistle on wrongdoing – harassment or otherwise – comes rife with countless concerns for those who consider speaking out. Giving such bystanders a financial incentive to come forward has worked in other contexts to override this reluctance. Perhaps the same can be true for those who observe sexual harassment at work, providing a much-needed step towards reducing this scourge on the workplace
The Unnatural Disaster of Insurance, Underinsurance, and Natural Disasters
Get PDFThis article presents a novel data set describing the frequency of materially inadequate homeowner insurance in the event of a total loss. For decades, after a natural disaster, large percentages of homeowners who have lost their homes report suffering a second devastating loss — that, entirely to their surprise, they are vastly underinsured. These reports provocatively suggest that a large majority of all insured homes in the United States — not just homes destroyed by a natural disaster—might be profoundly, unknowingly, and unintentionally underinsured. Insurance companies reject this possibility. Insurers posit that underinsurance is rare, that other than after natural disasters it may be almost unheard of, and that no matter when it occurs, homeowners are at best complicit. Until now, there has not been robust data that could resolve insurers\u27 and insureds\u27 competing narratives. The novel data set presented in this article may end the ambiguity of data on the frequency of and predominant cause of underinsurance. The new data describes that the point-of-sale algorithms insurers ubiquitously use to estimate how much it would cost to rebuild the insured home, and homeowners then almost inevitably rely upon to identify adequate policy coverage, persistently understate costs. By clarifying the cause of underinsurance, the novel data set also explains why underinsurance persists despite the collective desire of homeowners, insurers, and regulators that homes be fully insured. The data exposing the algorithm error rate heretofore only has been visible to insurers. This heretofore has left insurers with an untenable choice. An insurer who unilaterally corrects for the error also must unilaterally raise coverage and premiums, and so will be at a competitive disadvantage. But antitrust laws put insurers in legal peril if they act collectively. This article, after presenting the data and its implications, ends by proposing a new jurisprudential paradigm allowing insurers to profitably and successfully compete while resolving the ubiquity of homeowners being unwittingly underinsured
