The Missing Interest: Enforcing a Child’s Right to Public Education

Access to Data as Access to Justice

The SCALES Project: Making Federal Court Records Free

Settlement as Construct

Lawyerless Litigants, Filing Fees, Transaction Costs, and the Federal Courts

Prosecutorial Data Transparency and Data Justice

Felony Disenfranchisement and Voter Turnout: Randomized Trials in Iowa and Washington

By: Alexander Billy, J.J. Naddeo, Neel U. Sukhatme | September 1, 2024

Prior to the 2022 midterm elections, we conducted large-scale randomized controlled trials in Iowa and Washington aimed at increasing voter turnout among newly enfranchised individuals with past felony convictions. Alongside national and grassroots partners, we designed and implemented experiments to ascertain the effectiveness of alternative outreach mechanisms, including targeted mailers and digital ads. We did not detect statistically significant or economically meaningful effects on voter registration or turnout; most observed effects were precise nulls. The absence of measured impact is likely attributed to low digital engagement with our online ads as well as extensive voter outreach already conducted by our local partners prior to the study. Our evidence highlights the importance of context in voter outreach efforts, as the political and legal environment in Iowa and Washington differed significantly from other regions where similar interventions had previously shown success.

Prosecutorial Data Transparency and Data Justice

By: Caitlin Glass, Kat M. Albrecht, Perry Moriearty | September 1, 2024

The U.S. criminal legal system is notoriously racialized. Though Black and Latinx people make up less than 30% of U.S. residents, they constitute more than 50% of the nearly two million people currently in U.S. prisons and jails. For decades, research has indicated that one group of decision-makers has had an outsized influence on these numbers: prosecutors. From whom to charge to what sentences to recommend, no actor plays a greater role in determining who goes to prison in this country. Highly subjective and lacking in formal guidance and accountability, prosecutorial decisions are especially vulnerable to racial bias. They are also cloaked in secrecy. Data about how and why prosecutors make decisions often does not exist or is shielded from public view. As a result, it has been nearly impossible to determine the extent to which prosecutors’ decisions contribute to racial disproportionality in the criminal legal process, let alone whether such decisions are the product of racial bias.

This Essay argues that prosecutors’ offices must collect, maintain, and publish standardized data on the bases of their charges, declinations, plea offers, and resolutions if we are to ever understand and address vectors of racial bias in the criminal legal system. Contextualizing this “call for data” within two case studies—one on the racialized impact of felony murder and accomplice liability murder laws and the other on the California Racial Justice Act—we demonstrate how prosecutorial data transparency would enable researchers, advocates, and policymakers to better identify and remediate racial bias in decision-making. Data transparency would also promote prosecutorial accountability both internally and externally.

Legislative efforts to implement data transparency must address privacy and surveillance concerns, especially since prosecutorial data transparency would expand a carceral source of information. At the same time, the consequences of data opacity are already shaping case outcomes. In this way, data transparency provides one remedy for currently unchecked systems, and serves as a step towards data justice.

Lawyerless Litigants, Filing Fees, Transaction Costs, and the Federal Courts: Learning from SCALES

By: Judith Resnik, Henry Wu, Jenn Dikler, David T. Wong, Romina Lilollari, Claire Stobb, Elizabeth Beling, Avital Fried, Anna Selbrede, Jack Sollows, Mikael Tessema, Julia Udell | September 1, 2024

Two Latin phrases describing litigants—pro se (for oneself) and in forma pauperis (IFP, as a poor person)—prompt this inquiry into the relationship between self-representation and requests for filing fee waivers. We sketch the governing legal principles for people seeking relief in the federal courts, the sources of income of the federal judiciary, the differing regimes to which Congress has subjected incarcerated and nonincarcerated people filing civil lawsuits, and analyses enabled by SCALES, a newly available database that coded 2016 and 2017 federal court docket sheets. This Essay’s account of what can be learned and of the data gaps demonstrates the challenges of capturing activities in federal lawsuits and the burdens, unfairness, and inefficiencies of current federal court waiver practices.

Nw. U. L. Rᴇᴠ.