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Confirm Rachel Bloomekatz to the Sixth Circuit
Get PDFNow that the United States Senate is convening after the July Fourth holiday, the upper chamber must promptly appoint Rachel Bloomekatz to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit. The nominee, whom President Joe Biden selected in May 2022, provides remarkable experiential, gender, and ideological expertise that she deftly realized in litigating high-profile gun control, environmental, and other significant cases in federal appellate courts and district courts. Over fifteen years, the nominee has reached law’s pantheon across a broad spectrum from extremely prestigious clerkships with Justice Stephen Breyer and particularly distinguished federal court and state court jurists to robustly participating in many suits for the powerful global law firm Jones Day. The opening that the nominee would fill has been vacant for months. Thus, the Senate needs to rapidly approve the exceptionally competent, mainstream nominee
Elevating Justice Institute Program Guide
Get PDFOn March 9, 2023, the University of Richmond Law Library hosted the Elevating Justice Institute in our Moot Courtroom. The day-long event provided collaborative sessions for participants to work in conjunction with presenters to explore topics and techniques in delivering legal services. Speakers included two state judges as well as several leaders in the Access to Justice movement. More than 30 people participated in the event, including librarians, law students, judges, attorneys and a variety of advocates active in Access to Justice.
The program guide provides biographical information about Institute speakers and planners, together with visual inspiration for a creative and inclusive event. The Elevating Justice Institute was held in conjunction with the Southeastern Association of Law Libraries, which covers thirteen states and other regions.https://scholarship.richmond.edu/conferencematerials/1000/thumbnail.jp
Redefining Youth: The Case for Applying The Principles of Miller v. Alabama to Criminal Cases Involving Adults in Late Adolescence
Get PDFIn 2012, in Miller v. Alabama, the United States Supreme Court held it unconstitutional to impose a mandatory sentence of life without parole on children because such a sentence fails to adequately account for a child’s developmental stage or ability to weigh long-term consequences. Children are fundamentally different from adults, making them more susceptible to lack of self-regulation, poor decision making, and peer pressure. In Miller, the Court found that these aspects of children’s behavior made children less culpable than adults.
Psychological studies have demonstrated that adolescence is more protracted than previously recognized. Profound malleability of the brain characterizes the period between ages ten and twenty-five. This malleability often results in changes in behavior, unanticipated reactions, and poor decision-making in these individuals. However, scientific findings support the contention that this same malleability allows adolescents to rehabilitate, making a case for rapid positive change.
Individuals between eighteen and twenty-one years old can be considered to have entered a period known as “late adolescence,” a time more akin to adolescence than adulthood. Late adolescence may help explain why criminality in young adults dramatically decreases around the time they reach age twenty-two and continues to decline until their mid-twenties. This article argues that courts should apply Miller when sentencing late adolescents. Therefore, courts should extend the ban on mandatory life without parole to youth who committed a crime before turning twenty-one.
I\u27ve been struck by the upside-down priorities of the juvenile justice system. We are willing to spend the least amount of money to keep the kid at home, more to put him in a foster home and the most to institutionalize him.
-Marian Wright Edelma
Ending Race-Based Pretextual Stops: Strategies For Eliminating America\u27s Most Egregious Police Practice
Get PDFPretextual policing is the practice of stopping motorists or pedestrians for minor offenses like traffic infractions in hopes of learning that the person stopped has committed a more serious crime. Pretextual policing is also the main reason Black Americans are so much more likely than white Americans to be subjected to encounters with law enforcement. Shockingly, even in its most explicitly racist form, pretextual policing does not violate the Fourth Amendment’s proscription against unreasonable searches and seizures. In fact, police can pull a driver over merely because he is Black without violating the Fourth Amendment, so long as the officer points to one of the hundreds of traffic laws most drivers violate every day as the objective basis for initiating the encounter. According to the Supreme Court, the subjective motivations of a police officer for conducting a stop are entirely irrelevant.
During the 2020 special session of the Virginia General Assembly, the Commonwealth of Virginia passed landmark legislation eliminating many of the most commonly used pretexts, such as exhaust noise, objects hanging from the rearview mirror, tinted windows, jaywalking, and marijuana odor. Since doing so, many other states and localities have sought to pass similar reforms, recognizing the inordinate power police possess to do their jobs in a discriminatory manner without accountability. This article discusses the history of pretextual policing and urges policymakers and advocates to identify and pursue reforms to limit pretextual policing without jeopardizing true public safety
User Error: Regulatory Failures to Properly Address Technological Issues in Business and Taxation
Get PDFTechnological changes in business, both in how business is conducted and the services it may provide, have demonstrated failures by regulatory bodies to accurately address and properly understand these issues. From the Wayfair decision on sales tax, to California’s Assembly Bill 5 distorting the definition of “employee,” to President Reagan legislating computer fraud based on a White House viewing of WarGames, executives, legislatures, and courts have relied on a forced approach to understanding and regulating technology: doing is better than understanding. The approach has relied on two false assumptions: (i) technological advancements are only different methods of conventional business; ride sharing is simply a digital way to hail a cab at the street corner; the gig economy is just parttime or a stopgap measure for those who cannot find full-time employment; ecommerce is the digital door-to-door salesman, and (ii) technological innovation necessitates innovative solutions when existing law already covers the issues. A technological educational awakening must occur amongst those seeking to regulate it. While others have written about the odd outcomes of regulation in regards to particular laws or court cases, this paper aims to illustrate how the failures to understand emerging technology are systemic within governmental entities. The paper analyzes failures to understand technology through three different examples: from Ronald Reagan’s Computer Fraud and Abuse Act of 1986, South Dakota vs. Wayfair, and California’s Assembly Bill 5. In each of these instances, government actors have failed to understand how and what the technology is doing. Instead of seeing a developing or emerging technology as an innovation and taking steps to foster it, it is erroneously and contradictorily viewed and regulated as a digital version of an already existing business dynamic, yet is addressed by requiring new laws. That is, by viewing these technologies as merely modern versions of preexisting business practices or products, they have been regulated as if they are as well by creating modern new versions of existing laws. This paper discusses how the regulated technologies should be viewed in the context of their innovation rather than a normative pigeonhole. Bringing these examples together offers a more complete perspective of the issue facing emerging technologies. They cannot be viewed and treated as a transformed predecessor rather than a creator of a new business model where existing law and tradition allowed the innovation to come to fruition and still have the necessary effect given proper understanding of the underlying technology
Reproductive Health Care Data Free or For Sale: Post-Roe Surveillance and the Three Corners of Privacy Legislation Needed
Get PDFConditions will be harsher now for women than before Roe v. Wade for one key reason: We live in a surveillance state. While reproductive health care will continue to be a political hot button, one way to manage some of the fallout from Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization is by placing over-due limits on state surveillance to protect the politically uncontroversial expectation of privacy for personal data. Specifically, measures are needed to protect the privacy of health care data, and, in particular, reproductive health care data. Currently, law enforcement can obtain such data not only through failings in existing legislation but also via the ample digital breadcrumbs that fall outside any regulatory construct, including data obtainable for “free” by subpoenas, orders, warrants, and geofence warrants; and data “for sale” by data brokers, including sensitive geolocation information and data from fertility apps. Given the perfect storm of readily accessible troves of private digital information alongside a panoply of inconsistent state solutions, this Article urges that federal legislation is needed to provide privacy safeguards for reproductive health care data that provides “three corners” of protection in the digital era. The first corner defines health care data to include a specific carve-out for reproductive health care data. The second corner provides the substantive curb of prohibiting data brokers from selling this reproductive health care data. The third corner adds a necessary procedural protection: Because there is no other kind of health care data with the broad potential to subject a patient to criminalization, reproductive health care data that would not be obtainable without a warrant should not be admissible as evidence to criminalize the individual. Setting such a federal floor to limit law enforcement’s ability to mine private data for evidence of abortion, criminalize women, and, disproportionately, criminalize women of color, is more critical than ever in the surveillance state
Mill\u27s Harm Principle: A Study in the Application of \u27On Liberty\u27
Get PDFEnglish philosopher and political economist John Stuart Mill argued that people learn by choosing: this is how they become creative and productive individuals. For this reason, and because he felt that individuals are typically the most capable people to make their own choices, Mill was highly skeptical of restrictions on choice placed by a third party, such as the state.
Mill famously separated actions into two categories: (1) self-regarding actions that do not affect others; and (2) other-regarding actions that do affect, and may harm, others. In the former category he placed thought and discussion, tastes and pursuits, and association, and these were to be entirely unrestrained (On Liberty, pp. 224-25).1 On Liberty is especially concerned with other-regarding actions, which might impose harm on others, since it is here that social control might “rightfully” be exercised over the individual
Effects of experimental warming on floral scent, display and rewards in two subalpine herbs
No full textBackground and Aims
Floral volatiles, visual traits and rewards mediate attraction and defence in plant–pollinator and plant–herbivore interactions, but these floral traits might be altered by global warming through direct effects of temperature or longer-term impacts on plant resources. We examined the effect of warming on floral and leaf volatile emissions, floral morphology, plant height, nectar production, and oviposition by seed predators. Methods
We used open-top chambers that warmed plants in the field by +2–3 °C on average (+6–11 °C increase in daily maxima) for 2–4 weeks across 1–3 years at three sites in Colorado, USA. Volatiles were sampled from two closely related species of subalpine Ipomopsis with different pollinators: Ipomopsis aggregatassp. aggregata, visited mainly by hummingbirds, and Ipomopsis tenuituba ssp. tenuituba, often visited by hawkmoths. Key Results
Although warming had no detected effects on leaf volatiles, the daytime floral volatiles of both I. aggregata and I. tenuituba responded in subtle ways to warming, with impacts that depended on the species, site and year. In addition to the long-term effect of warming, temperature at the time of sampling independently affected the floral volatile emissions of I. aggregata during the day and I. tenuituba at night. Warming had little effect on floral morphology for either species and it had no effect on nectar concentration, maximum inflorescence height or flower redness in I. aggregata. However, warming increased nectar production in I. aggregata by 41 %, a response that would attract more hummingbird visits, and it reduced oviposition by fly seed predators by ≥72 %. Conclusions
Our results suggest that floral traits can show different levels of plasticity to temperature changes in subalpine environments, with potential effects on animal behaviours that help or hinder plant reproduction. They also illustrate the need for more long-term field warming studies, as shown by responses of floral volatiles in different ways to weeks of warming vs. temperature at the time of sampling
Asking Clarification Questions to Handle Ambiguity in Open-Domain QA
No full textAmbiguous questions persist in open-domain question answering, because formulating a precise question with a unique answer is often challenging. Previous works have tackled this issue by asking disambiguated questions for all possible interpretations of the ambiguous question. Instead, we propose to ask a clarification question, where the user’s response will help identify the interpretation that best aligns with the user’s intention. We first present CAmbigNQ, a dataset consisting of 5,653 ambiguous questions, each with relevant passages, possible answers, and a clarification question. The clarification questions were efficiently created by generating them using InstructGPT and manually revising them as necessary. We then define a pipeline of three tasks—(1) ambiguity detection, (2) clarification question generation, and (3) clarification-based QA. In the process, we adopt or design appropriate evaluation metrics to facilitate sound research. Lastly, we achieve F1 of 61.3, 25.1, and 40.5 on the three tasks, demonstrating the need for further improvements while providing competitive baselines for future work