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Category Archives: Courts

DOJ is suing to make sure women who need medically necessary abortions can actually get them

Vox: “A month after the Supreme Court’s decision overruling Roe v. Wade, it’s unclear whether many patients with dangerous pregnancies can receive medically necessary abortions. Some women have traveled to other states for lifesaving care because doctors in their home state feared prosecution. Others were left to bleed by their health care providers who feared… Continue Reading

The Datafication of Law: How Technology Encodes Carceral Power and Affects Judicial Practice in the United States

Rothschild Elyassi, Gil, The Datafication of Law: How Technology Encodes Carceral Power and Affects Judicial Practice in the United States (April 10, 2022). Law and Social Inquiry, Vol. 47, No. 1, 2022, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=4080216 “This inquiry explores how data analyses about US Federal sentences have transformed sentencing practice beginning in the mid-1980s. I… Continue Reading

Understanding Criminal Justice Innovations

Ryan, Meghan J., Understanding Criminal Justice Innovations (June 14, 2022). Journal of Law & Innovation (2022 Forthcoming), SMU Dedman School of Law Legal Studies Research Paper No. 562, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=4136813 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4136813 “Burgeoning science and technology have provided the criminal justice system with the opportunity to address some of its shortcomings. And the… Continue Reading

Policing Reimagined

Via LLRX – Policing Reimagined – The thesis of Albert Chang’s paper is the metaverse presents a unique opportunity for effective police reforms. Developers, data scientists and legal sector experts working within the metaverse may be able to implement changes more efficiently than Congress as they are not subject to constitutional constraints. Chang advocates a position… Continue Reading

These Companies Know When You’re Pregnant—And They’re Not Keeping It Secret

Gizmodo identified 32 brokers selling data on 2.9 billion profiles of U.S. residents pegged as “actively pregnant” or “shopping for maternity products.” “A Gizmodo investigation into some of the nation’s biggest data brokers found more than two dozen promoting access to datasets containing digital information on millions of pregnant and potentially pregnant people across the… Continue Reading

Study finds Wikipedia influences judicial behavior

MIT News: “Mixed appraisals of one of the internet’s major resources, Wikipedia, are reflected in the slightly dystopian article “List of Wikipedia Scandals.” Yet billions of users routinely flock to the online, anonymously editable, encyclopedic knowledge bank for just about everything. How this unauthoritative source influences our discourse and decisions is hard to reliably trace.… Continue Reading

Will the Biggest Publisher in the United States Get Even Bigger?

The New York Times – “When the largest publisher in the country, Penguin Random House, struck a deal in the fall of 2020 to acquire its rival Simon & Schuster, publishing executives and antitrust experts predicted that the merger would draw intense scrutiny from government regulators. The merger would dramatically alter the literary landscape, shrinking… Continue Reading

Justice Department investigating data breach of federal court system

Politico: “House Judiciary Committee Chair Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.) told fellow lawmakers that “three hostile foreign actors” attacked the U.S. Courts’ document filing system as part of a breach in early 2020 causing a “system security failure.” The comments — at a committee hearing on oversight of the Justice Department’s National Security Division — were the… Continue Reading

New LibGuide tracks response to the Roe v. Wade Dobbs v. Jackson decision

“I’ve created a new LibGuide to compile federal statements/actions to track the response to the Roe v. Wade/Dobbs v. Jackson decision. I’m being a bit more selective with this guide than some earlier guides, but please feel free to suggest resources I may have omitted or missed.” [Kelly L. Smith, Government Information Librarian, Librarian for… Continue Reading

The Default Tech Settings You Should Turn Off Right Away

The New York Times – “These controls, which are buried inside products from Apple, Google, Meta and others, make us share more data than we need to…Apple, Google, Amazon, Meta and Microsoft generally want us to leave some default settings on, purportedly to train their algorithms and catch bugs, which then make their products easier… Continue Reading

John Roberts Was Lobbying Kavanaugh to Save Roe. Then the Draft Opinion Leaked

Rolling Stone – A new report says the leak, which conservatives insist was the work of a rogue liberal, actually helped get Roe overturned: “Immediately after the draft Supreme Court decision to overturn Roe v. Wade was released, conservatives began bleating about how the leak was the work of a nefarious liberal clerk who wanted… Continue Reading

Roe V. Wade Under Attack: Choosing Procedural Doctrines Over Fundamental Constitutional Rights

Grossi, Simona, Roe V. Wade Under Attack: Choosing Procedural Doctrines Over Fundamental Constitutional Rights (April 2022). Loyola Law School, Los Angeles Legal Studies Research Paper No. 2022-04, 13 ConLawNOW 39 (2022), Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=4096417 “This Article details the Texas litigation on abortion rights in and out of the U.S. Supreme Court in 2021 and… Continue Reading