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Mariana Oliver & Matthew B. Kugler Discussions of surveillance practices within U.S. law enforcement agencies often suggest that police departments have ready access to a wide range of high-tech tools. To date, however, most of the empirical evidence regarding police surveillance has come from either qualitative case studies of cities or surveys of the largest departments. While these studies have shed light on the surveillance capacities of large police departments located in larger jurisdictions, our current understanding of police surveillance is limited by a lack of empirical data on police departments in smallerjurisdictions. This study fills this gap by using data…

Kevin Cope, Ilya Somin, & Alexander Stremitzer Does the U.S. Constitution guarantee a right to a vaccine passport? In the United States and elsewhere, vaccine passports have existed for over a century, but became politically divisive as applied to COVID-19. A consensus has emerged among legal experts that vaccine passports are usuallyconstitutionally permissible. Yet there has been almost no serious analysis about whether a vaccine passport can be a constitutional right: whether a government is constitutionally obligated to exempt fully vaccinated people from many liberty-restricting measures. We argue that, based on existingprecedent, the government may indeed be constitutionally required to exempt…

Rebecca Tsosie  I am honored to give the Canby Lecture for 2020, and I thank Patty Ferguson-Bohnee and Kate Rosier for their leadership of the Indian Legal Program and for inviting me today. I’m delighted to return, even in a virtual space, to the Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law at Arizona State University (ASU). This was my academic home for over twenty-two years, and I owe so much to this law school and its amazing faculty, past and present. In particular, I honor Judge Canby, who first taught Federal Indian law at ASU in the early days of the…

Felix Mormann & Milica Mormann  Capital markets are cast as both villain and hero in the climate playbill. The trillions of dollars required to combat climate change leave ample room for heroics from the financial sector. For the time being, however, capital continues to flow readily toward fossil fuels and other carbon-intensive industries. Drawing on the results of an empirical study, this Article posits that ratings of corporate climate risk and governance can help overcome pervasive information asymmetries and nudge investors toward more climate-conscious investment choices with welfare-enhancing effects.  Full Article.

Joseph Avery  In 2018, an autonomous Uber vehicle hit and killed a pedestrian. Although  autonomous, the vehicle was not driverless: the onboard artificial intelligence (AI) had handed off control to a safety driver at the last second. “Handed off”—a just-launched National Highway Traffic Safety Administration investigation into Tesla is focusing on this very issue. After all, like many socio-technical systems, semi- and fully autonomous vehicles are designed so that decision-making can be handed off from a machine to a human operator. This is worrisome because decades of human factors research have shown that people perform poorly under such conditions. When…

Alanna Ostby Since 1791, the Constitution of the United States has guarded the rights of the criminal defendant. Those rights include the right to an attorney, the right to a speedy trial, the right to confront witnesses against him—and the list continues. Perhaps most notably the Constitution provides that “no person shall be . . . deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.” The Supreme Court has interpreted “due process” to include several freestanding rights, among them the right to be presumed innocent until proven guilty, the right to an impartial tribunal, and the right to…

Gideon Cionelo Maria stood outside her apartment, where she lived with her three youngchildren, scanning the packet of papers just handed to her by the process server. Although each page was littered with words and phrases she did not understand, the few she did comprehend made it clear that she was being sued by her credit card company. Maria had never been sued before nor had she ever heard of the Maricopa County Justice Court. But more importantly, this lawsuit was unexpected. Maria made most of her minimum payments, and she thought the credit card company had agreed to defer…

Kole Lyons Consider the stories of two bakers: Bryan, a small business owner, who has developed his affinity for baking into a livelihood, and Jim, an employee working in his local grocery store’s bakery department. . . . Full Article.

Shayna Frieden On March 13, 2020, just after midnight, three plain-clothed officers broke down Breonna Taylor’s door with a battering ram to execute a search warrant. Breonna Taylor was in bed with her boyfriend, Kenneth Walker. Believing someone had broken in, Walker fired one shot from his licensed handgun, hitting an officer in the leg. The three officers immediately discharged thirty-two rounds, killing Breonna Taylor with six of those shots. Full Article.

John M. Yun App stores have become the subject of controversy and criticism within antitrust. For instance, app developers such as Spotify and Epic Games (creator of Fortnite) allege that Apple’s 30% cut of all sales in the App Store violates the antitrust laws and is indicative of monopoly power. The claim is that iPhone users are locked into Apple’s walled garden iOS platform, which frees Apple to engage in misconduct in the App Store “aftermarket” to the detriment of users and app developers. Full Article.