13203 research outputs found
Sort by
Powerhouses: A Comparative Analysis of Blockchain-Enabled Smart Microgrids
Get PDFFor over a century, electricity in the United States has been generated and sold mainly by centralized powerplants. Although this model of power collection and distribution has many advantages, resiliency is a growing problem. Brittle infrastructure and growing complexity have made the nation’s power grid less reliable over the past twenty years. Some technologists believe the solution is to go small. In the past five years, small communities in the United States and overseas have built “micro-grids”—networks of roof-top solar panels that store electricity in communal banks of batteries, combined with software that allows homeowners and businesses to buy and sell this electricity from one another. The designers of these systems believe that the private sale of electricity among neighbors will carry substantial benefits for the public, including the potential to make electricity more reliable, resilient, and renewable.
A challenge stands in the way, however: how to effectively and securely govern electricity as a shared resource among neighbors. This symposium Article examines how well blockchain—the technology that brought the world Bitcoin—might help solve this problem by tracking electricity production and sales in a neighborhood. This Article examines this question through three case studies of blockchain-enabled microgrids in the United States, Europe, and Australia. We conclude that some types of blockchain technologies could help make the dream of a peer-to-peer energy commons a reality. Widespread adoption of this technology will require the support and cooperation of local, state, and federal regulators and lawmakers, however
Volume 1 (February 2021)
Get PDFA newsletter produced jointly by the Indiana University Maurer School of Law Office of Graduate Legal Studies and Office of International Programs
A Career of Service
No full textTim is a 1974 graduate of the Law School. He retired from the US Attorney’s Office in Indianapolis in 2011 after 23 years of service. He litigated violent crime, firearms, public corruption, white collar, and national security cases. When he retired he was First Assistant U.S. Attorney, and he had served as interim leader of the office three times during his 23 years--briefly in 1993, from 2000 to 2001, and again for more than three years from 2007 to 2010.
Tim started in the office in 1988, after working as a chief deputy prosecutor in Monroe County and a supervisory deputy prosecutor in the Marion County Prosecutor’s Office.
After stepping down from the U.S. Attorneys Office. Tim joined the Maurer School of Law as a distinguished adjunct professor, where for almost 10 years he taught a range of criminal law and procedure courses and helped spearhead the Bradley Fellows Program, including overseeing the unique Bradley externship program.https://www.repository.law.indiana.edu/coldcall/1009/thumbnail.jp
The Perils of Old and New in Sentencing Reform
Get PDFThis Essay turns attention from actuarial risk assessment tools as a reform to the inclination for a technical sentencing reform more broadly. When situated in the context of technical guidelines created to structure and regulate judicial discretion in the 1980s and beyond, the institutionalization of an actuarial risk assessment at sentencing is both an old and new idea. Both sentencing guidelines and actuarial risk assessments raise conceptual and empirical questions about sentencing law and policy. This Essay drills down on two conceptual issues—equality and selective incapacitation—to highlight that actuarial risk assessments as a reform raise recurring questions about sentencing, even as social perspectives on resolving those questions are shifting. Rather than using the “old” nature of the questions as evidence that tools should proliferate; however, this Essay urges critical reflection on the turn toward the technical in the present day, in the face of mass incarceration. It calls for expanding the methodological scope of critiques about actuarial risk tools as sentencing reform going forward. I thank the Annual Survey of American Law and NYU School of Law for the opportunity to reflect on these issues in the context of a symposium celebrating the work of Professor Stephen Schulhofer.
This contribution unfolds in four parts. Part I introduces actuarial risk tools as a sentencing reform. Part II complicates the perception that the tools are “new” by framing this reform in the context of the turn toward judicial sentencing guidelines as a reform in the 1980s. Part III considers how recurring issues of equality and incapacitation obscure social transformations related to expansion of the carceral state between implementation of sentencing guidelines and proliferation of actuarial tools in the present day. Part IV asserts that the framing of “old” and “new” in current scholarship about actuarial risk tools as a sentencing reform is detrimental. It encourages expanding methodological approaches that inform scholarship on this type of reform going forward
The COVID-19 Pandemic and Bar Performance: Magnifying Adversities, Stress, and Disparities Among Bar Test-Takers
Get PDFDistinguished Commentary column
Lack of Punishment Doesn\u27t Fit the Crime: America\u27s Tepid Response to Bias-Motivated Crime
No full textProfessor Bell\u27s contribution is Chapter 2, in volume 85 of this irregular series, pp. 29-48.
VOLUME ABSTRACT:
Austin Sarat (ed.) Studies in Law, Politics, and Society (Bingley, UK: Emerald Publishing, 2021). Volume 85.
Built on contributions from an interdisciplinary and expert collection of scholars, topics covered in this volume include the patterns of death penalty bill introductions across all active death penalty states in the USA from 1999 to 2018 (the so-called \u27era of abolition\u27); the myriad factors contributing to America\u27s limited police and persecutorial response to bias-motivated hate crimes; the complex ways in which the Batman and Joker graphic novels legitimize and challenge the countersubversive politics of American law and order through their portrayal of vigilante justice; the role of social media companies in the regulation of online hate speech; and a socio-legal analysis of gender-based victimization, misogyny and the \u27hate crime paradigm\u27 in England and Wales. Through its valuable contribution to our understanding of the nexus between hatred and the law, this volume is essential reading for legal scholars worldwide.https://www.repository.law.indiana.edu/facbooks/1242/thumbnail.jp
