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Explaining the Recent Homicide Spikes in U.S. Cities: The \u27Minneapolis Effect\u27 and the Decline in Proactive Policing
Get PDFRecently major cities across the country have suffered dramatic spikes in homicides. These spikes are remarkably large, suddenly appearing, and widespread. At this rate, 2020 will easily be the deadliest year in America for gun-related homicides since at least 1999, while most other major crime categories are trending stable or slightly downward.This article attempts to explain why so many cities have seen extraordinary increases in murder during the summer of 2020. A close analysis of the emerging crime patterns suggests that American cities may be witnessing significant declines in some forms of policing, which in turn is producing the homicide spikes. Crime rates are increasing only for a few specific categories—namely homicides and shootings. These crime categories are particularly responsive to reductions in proactive policing. The data also pinpoint the timing of the spikes to late May 2020, which corresponds with the death of George Floyd while in police custody in Minneapolis and subsequent anti-police protests—protests that likely led to declines in law enforcement. The thesis of this article is that the recent spikes in homicides have been caused by a “Minneapolis Effect,” similar to the earlier “Ferguson Effect.” Specifically, law enforcement agencies have been forced to divert resources from normal policing to patrolling demonstrations. And even as the anti-police protests have abated, police officers have scaled back on proactive or officer-initiated law enforcement, such as street stops and other forms of policing designed to prevent firearms crimes. If this thesis is correct, it is reasonable to estimate that, as a result of de-policing during June and July 2020, approximately 710 additional victims were murdered and more than 2,800 victims were shot. Of course, this estimate relies on various assumptions, and further research on the issues surrounding the homicide spikes should be an urgent priority. If this article’s thesis about a Minneapolis Effect is correct, an important implication is that policymakers in major cities should proceed cautiously before taking step to “defund” the police in ways that might reduce proactive policing that is important in preventing gun violence
Zoning Cyberspace: Protecting Privacy in the Digital Upside Down
Get PDFOver fifty years ago, Charles Reich posited that we should extend property protections to what he would call “government largess”: that array of interests—from licenses to welfare benefits—that often form the bases for one’s economic existence in the modern world. Reich considered such protections essential to the preservation of individual autonomy, the independence that is critical to a functioning democracy. Today, our most personal information and even our thoughts, as reflected in our online activities and digital existence, are subject to “private largess.” Private entities possess information central to the identity of those individuals who utilize their services. This information exists in a digital “upside down,” to borrow a phrase from popular culture: an almost parallel universe or shadow world where our most intimate details are open to inspection and acquisition by third parties without our informed consent. Indeed, only a relatively weak set of institutions stand in the way, if they offer any resistance at all, to the sharing of such information by these entities in ways that undermine what I refer to throughout this piece as the integrity of identity: what should be a protected sphere of personal interests, desires, affiliations, and even our beliefs that make up the self. As we face calls for greater surveillance in the throes of the novel coronavirus (SARSCoV- 2) crisis, concerns that privacy protections will further erode loom large. Moreover, any crisis-intervention measures may never be rolled back when the acute crisis dissipates.
While much privacy scholarship focuses on the personal, individual, and private rights such risks to privacy entail, I will focus on the dangers these threats pose to democracy by undermining the integrity of identity and the collective goods that democracy produces. In a landmark article, Calabresi and Melamed argued that we should protect different entitlements through those rules that produce desired results in society, including solving collective action problems. They would classify these different approaches as either property, liability, or alienability rules. This Article draws from and builds upon the work of Reich, Calabresi, and Melamed to argue that, as in several property law contexts, from the mortgage market to zoning, where we use what I call “hybrid” rules— rules that combine elements of property, liability and alienability approaches—to solve collective action problems, we should see the problem of privacy in the digital world as a collective action problem that requires similar, hybrid solutions. Indeed, this Article argues for a form of what I call digital zoning that utilizes all three approaches in the Calabresi and Melamed taxonomy through hybrid rules to help preserve privacy, autonomy, and self-determination in the digital world
Legal Terms of Use and Public Genealogy Websites
Get PDFPublic genealogy websites, to which individuals upload family history, genealogy, and sometimes individual genetic data, have been used in an increasing number of public health, epidemiological, and genetic studies. Yet there is little awareness among researchers of the legal rules that govern the use of these online resources. We analyzed the online Terms of Use (TOU) applicable to 17 popular genealogy websites and found that none of them expressly permit scientific research, while at least 13 contain restrictions that may limit or prohibit scientific research using data obtained from those sites. In order to ensure that researchers who use genealogy and other data from these sites for public health and other scientific research purposes do not inadvertently breach applicable TOUs, we recommend that genealogy website operators consider revising their TOUs to permit this activity
Family Law by the Numbers: The Story That Casebooks Tell
Get PDFThis Article presents the findings of a content analysis of 86 family law casebooks published in the United States from 1960 to 2019. Its purpose is to critically assess the discipline of family law with the aim of informing our understandings of family law’s history and exposing its ideological foundations and consequences. Although legal thinkers have written several intellectual histories of family law, this is the first quantitative look at the field.The study finds that coverage of marriage and divorce in family law casebooks has decreased by almost half relative to other topics since the 1960s. In contrast, pages dedicated to child custody and child support have increased, more than doubling their relative share. At the same time, the boundaries of family law appear to remain quite stubborn. Notwithstanding sustained efforts by family law scholars and educators to restructure the field of family law so that it considers additional domains of law affecting families (such as tax, business, employment, health, immigration, and government benefits), the core of the academic field of family law has remained relatively static in the past 60 years. Marriage, divorce, child custody, and child support continue to dominate the topics presented in family law casebooks, representing 55% to 75% of their content since the 1960s
Financial Terms in License Agreements
Get PDFThis chapter in the forthcoming casebook Intellectual Property Licensing and Transactions: Theory and Practice (2020, forthcoming), discusses the financial terms of IP licensing agreements including fixed payments, running royalties, sublicensing income, milestone payments, equity compensation and cost reimbursement, as well as most-favored and audit clauses. Numerous areas of recent controversy are addressed including the establishment of royalty rates through the entire market value rule (EMVR) versus the smallest salable patent practicing unit (SSPPU) rule, royalties for bundled rights, rules of thumb discredited by the courts, royalty escalation clauses and more. Examples are drawn primarily from biotechnology, high-tech and copyright licensing practice
Circumventing the Crime Victims\u27 Rights Act: A Critical Analysis of the Eleventh Circuit\u27s Decision Upholding Jeffrey Epstein\u27s Secret Non-Prosecution Agreement
Get PDFWhether crime victims have rights before formal criminal charges are filed has recently come to the fore in one of the most publicized criminal cases in recent memory. For more than twelve years, victims of Jeffrey Epstein’s sex trafficking organization have attempted to invalidate a non-prosecution agreement (NPA) entered between Epstein and federal prosecutors. The victims have argued that because prosecutors deliberately concealed the NPA from them, the prosecutors violated the federal Crime Victim’s Rights Act (CVRA). On April 14, 2020, a divided panel of the Eleventh Circuit entered a surprising ruling, rejecting the victims’ argument. The panel refused to find a CVRA violation, reasoning that because the Government never filed federal charges, the CVRA was never triggered. On August 7, 2020, the full Eleventh Circuit vacated the earlier panel decision and agreed to rehear the case en banc. This article critiques the earlier panel decision and explains why the Eleventh Circuit en banc should proceed in the opposite direction. Under the now-vacated panel decision, “secret” justice was permitted, depriving crime victims in the Eleventh Circuit of any CVRA rights until the Government formally files charges. This would have created perverse incentives for the Government to negotiate secret agreements within the Eleventh Circuit rather than elsewhere, such as in the adjoining Fifth Circuit. This article concludes that the Eleventh Circuit en banc should recognize that the CVRA extends rights to crime victims even before charges are filed. The article also urges Congress to clarify and amend the CVRA to ensure that secret NPAs are not permitted in future federal criminal cases and, more broadly, to protect crime victims during federal criminal investigations
Simplified Courts Can\u27t Solve Inequality
Get PDFState civil courts struggle to handle the volume of cases before them. Litigants in these courts, most of whom are unrepresented, struggle to navigate the courts to solve their problems. This access-to-justice crisis has led to a range of reform efforts and solutions. One type of reform, court simplification, strives to reduce the complexity of procedures and information used by courts to help unrepresented litigants navigate the judicial system. These reforms mitigate but do not solve the symptoms of the larger underlying problem: state civil courts are struggling because they have been stuck with legal cases that arise from the legislative and executive branches’ failure to provide a social safety net in the face of rising inequality. The legal profession and judiciary must step back to question whether the courts should be the branch of government responsible for addressing socioeconomic needs on a case-by-case basis
From Health Policy to Stigma and Back Again: The Feedback Loop Perpetuating the Opioids Crisis
Get PDFBetween 1999 and 2017, almost 400,000 people died from opioid overdoses, and since 2001, the opioid crisis has cost the U.S. more than 1 trillion dollars. In late 2018, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary opined that the country was “beginning to turn the tide” in responding to the crisis. Secretary Azar’s positive statements were based on preliminary CDC data that showed a national decline of 2.7 percent in drug overdose deaths from October 2017 to May 2018. However, data still show over half the states posting an increase in overdose deaths with a concentration of higher death rates in the upper Midwest and Appalachia. Recent sobering data from CDC, also showed a national decline in life expectancy for the third year in a row. A 2018 McKinsey report argued that the number of persons suffering from opioid use disorder (“OUD”) is likely to be an underestimate with the actual number being between four and six million persons. Even if the most optimistic projections about opioid overdose deaths proved correct, we will still face new dangers in fentanyl cocktails, as it is mixed with other street or diverted drugs such as Methamphetamine, cocaine, or benzodiazepines. Neither is there any evidence that we are now better prepared for the next addiction crisis
Constitutional Environmental Law, or, The Constitutional Consequences of Insisting that the Environment Is Everybody\u27s Business
Get PDFConstitutional environmental law has become a recognized and institutionalized specialty within environmental law, an acknowledgement of the pervasive interactions between the U.S. Constitution and the federal environmental statutes that go well beyond the normal constitutional underpinnings of federal administrative law. This Article posits that constitutional environmental law is the result of Congress consciously deciding that environmental protection is everybody’s business — specifically, from Congress’s that states should participate in rather than be preempted by federal environmental law, that private citizens and organizations should help to enforce the statutes, and that private land and water rights are necessary components of national environmental protection. Nevertheless, despite almost five decades of constitutional environmental litigation and scholarship, the federal courts had never recognized environmental rights within the U.S. Constitution until 2016, raising the possibility that constitutional environmental law may soon assume another dimension
Depriving Our Veterans of Their Constitutional Rights: An Analysis of the Department of Veterans Affairs’ Practice of Stripping Veterans of Their Second Amendment Rights and Our Nation’s Response
Get PDFThis Article does not argue that veterans who have been adjudicated mentally incompetent by a court after a hearing or have been involuntarily committed to a mental health facility should be permitted to purchase or possess firearms. However, this Article does compare the VA’s determination of “financial incompetency” to other determinations of “mental defectiveness,” demonstrating that the VA’s standards do not rise to the level of “adjudicat[ing] [the veteran] a mental defective” in a manner sufficient for him to be stripped of his constitutional rights. This Article also argues that including veterans determined financially incompetent for VA purposes on a list of persons unable to exercise their Second Amendment rights is an unconstitutional deprivation of these rights which must be remedied for all affected veterans, past and future