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Category: Current CLR Print Vol.

Article

The Right to a Glass Box: Rethinking the Use of Artificial Intelligence in Criminal Justice

Brandon L. Garrett & Cynthia Rudin

L. Neil Williams, Jr. Distinguished Professor of Law, Duke University School of Law and Faculty Director, Wilson Center for Science and Justice, Earl D. McLean, Jr. Professor of Computer Science, Electrical and Computer Engineering, Statistical Science, Mathematics, and Biostatistics & Bioinformatics, Duke University. 

Artificial intelligence (“AI”) increasingly is used to make important decisions that affect individuals and society. As governments and corporations use AI more pervasively, one of the most troubling trends is that developers so often design it to be a “black box.” Designers create AI models too complex for people to understand or they conceal how…

Apr 2024

Article

Excuse 2.0 

Yehonatan Givati, Yotam Kaplan & Yair Listokin

Sylvan M. Cohen Professor at Hebrew University Law School, Professor at Hebrew University Law School, Deputy Dean and the Shibley Family Fund Professor of Law at Yale Law School. 

Excuse doctrine presents one of the great enigmas of contract law. Excuse allows courts to release parties from their contractual obligations. It thus stands in sharp contrast to the basic principles of contract law and adds significant uncertainty to contract adjudication. This Article offers a crucial missing perspective on the doctrine of excuse: the view…

Apr 2024

Article

Forced Robot Arbitration 

David Horton

Martin Luther King Jr. Professor of Law, University of California, Davis, School of Law. 

 

Recently, advances in artificial intelligence (“AI”) have sparked interest in a topic that sounds like science fiction: robot judges. Researchers have harnessed AI to build programs that can predict the outcome of legal disputes. Some countries have even begun allowing AI systems to resolve small claims. These developments are fueling a fascinating debate over whether…

Apr 2024

Note

Collective Disagreement: The Uneasy Interaction of the FLSA and FRCP 4(k) After Bristol-Myers Squibb

Ronahn Clarke

J.D. Candidate, Cornell Law School, 2024; B.A., Philosophy and Classical Civilization, Colby College, 2021. 

 

Across the country, due to a circuit split over the meaning of Federal Rule of Civil Procedure (“Rule”) 4(k), federal courts are enforcing the Fair Labor Standards Act (“FLSA”) inconsistently. This Note argues that, under the current state of the law, Rule 4(k) must be read to apply to out-of-state opt-in employee-plaintiffs’ claims and FLSA…

Apr 2024

Note

Dependent Contractors? The Case for Giving Non-Competes a Central Role in Worker-Classification Tests Under Federal Law

Cameron Misner

 J.D. Candidate, Cornell Law School, 2024; B.A. in Political Science, University of Indianapolis, 2021. 

As legal commentators and policymakers have taken greater notice of the harms that covenants not to compete (“noncompetes”) cause workers, they have offered numerous policy proposals seeking to curb those harms. Indeed, the Federal Trade Commission proposed an outright ban on non-competes on January 5, 2023. None of these policy proposals have yet become law…

Apr 2024

Article

Perceptions of Justice in Multidistrict Litigation: Voices from the Crowd

Elizabeth Chamblee Burch, Fuller E. Callaway Chair of Law, University of Georgia School of Law & Margaret S. Williams, Adjunct Faculty, Johns Hopkins University

With all eyes on criminal justice reform, multidistrict litigation (MDL) has quietly reshaped civil justice, undermining fundamental tenets of due process, procedural justice, attorney ethics, and tort law along the way.  In 2020, the MDL caseload tripled that of the federal criminal caseload, one out of every two cases filed in federal civil court was…

Nov 2022

Article

Remote Work and the Future of Disability Accommodations

Arlene S. Kanter, Laura J. and L. Douglas Meredith Professor of Teaching Excellence (2005–07), Syracuse University; Bond, Schoeneck and King Distinguished Professor of Law (2011–13); Director, Disability Law and Policy Program; Director, International Programs, Syracuse University College of Law

When the Americans with Disabilities Act was originally enacted in 1990, and later amended in 2008, technology had not yet advanced to where it is today. In the past decade, sophisticated computer applications and programs have become commonplace. These advances in technology, have enabled millions of employees to work from home since the onset of…

Nov 2022

Article

Discredited Data

Ngozi Okidegbe, Associate Professor of Law & Assistant Professor of Computing and Data Science, Boston University

Jurisdictions are increasingly employing pretrial algorithms as a solution to the racial and socioeconomic inequities in the bail system. But in practice, pretrial algorithms have reproduced the very inequities they were intended to correct. Scholars have diagnosed this problem as the biased data problem: pretrial algorithms generate racially and socioeconomically biased predictions because they are…

Nov 2022

Note

Websites, Wellness, and Winn-Dixie: Telehealth Accessibility During COVID-19 and Beyond

Peyton B. Brooks, J.D., Cornell Law School, 2023

During the COVID-19 pandemic, people with disabilities struggled to find proper access to health care. According to a report by the disability services organization Easterseals, approximately forty-six percent of those who had used Easterseals services lost access to health care between the beginning of the public health emergency in March 2020 and April 2021. Furthermore,…

Nov 2022

Note

Judicial Discretion Across Jurisdictions: McGirt’s Effects on Indian Offenders in Oklahoma

Emily N. Harwell, J.D., Cornell Law School, Class of 2022

Oklahoma’s exercise of criminal jurisdiction over crime committed on tribal reservations remained unchecked until 2020. In McGirt v. Oklahoma, the Supreme Court held that the Muscogee Creek Nation’s reservation had in fact never been disestablished and remains in existence today. In doing so, the Court restored criminal prosecution authority to tribal and federal courts. McGirt…

Nov 2022