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Several experts predict that autonomous vehicles will become mainstream in the next few decades. Although autonomous vehicles will have massive implications for law enforcement, the technology has received little to no attention in criminal procedure and policing scholarship. This Essay introduces a new vector into the nascent law and policy discourse on autonomous vehicles and policing—de-escalation and officer safety. Although largely overlooked in this discourse, officer safety is a crucial topic given its powerful role in shaping officer training, departmental policies, and Fourth Amendment law. This Essay argues that autonomous vehicles and their included technologies (for instance, sensory technology, real-time high definition (HD) mapping, and network connectivity systems) have promise to decrease possibilities for escalation during vehicle stops in at least five ways: (1) vehicles will be programmed to follow traffic rules, making traffic stops much less common; (2) sensory technology will prevent vehicles from hitting other vehicles or persons, decreasing motor vehicle assaults against officers; (3) driver’s license requirements could be eliminated, taking the enforcement of driver’s license laws out of the hands of police; (4) DUI law reforms could abolish the need for officers to conduct DUI stops, investigations, or arrests; and (5) sensory technology in vehicles will reduce investigations associated with hit-and-run offenses, and will simplify accident investigations overall. This Essay explores how these potential changes have vast implications for Fourth Amendment law, officer training, and law enforcement policy on motor vehicle stops.

Author

Assistant Professor of Law, University of Arkansas School of Law, Fayetteville. I am thankful for the helpful discussions and suggestions from Maureen Carroll, Beth Colgan, Andrew Crespo, Mary Fan, Andrew Ferguson, Brenner Fissell, Sharon Foster, Will Foster, Brian Gallini, Carol Goforth, Sara Gosman, Aya Gruber, Rachel Harmon, Wes Henricksen, Alex Lee, Cynthia Lee, Jill Lens, Jonathan Marshfield, Jonathan Masur, Tiffany Murphy, Cyndi Nance, Alex Nunn, Susannah Pollvogt, Laurent Sacharoff, David Schwartz, Joanna Schwartz, Nadav Shoked, Annie Smith, Seth Stoughton, Alan Trammell, and Ekow Yankah. I am grateful for the feedback that I received at the Northwestern/Penn/Stanford Junior Faculty Forum for Law and STEM, the Law of the Police Conference at the University of South Carolina School of Law, CrimFest 2018, ABA-AALS 2018 Criminal Justice Section Academic Roundtable, and faculty workshops at Northwestern Pritzker School of Law, Brooklyn Law School, and Cardozo Law School. Thank you to the editors and staff of the Northwestern University Law Review Online for their careful edits and suggestions.

Copyright 2019 by Jordan Blair Woods

Cite as: Jordan Blair Woods, Autonomous Vehicles and Police De-escalation, 114 Nw. U. L. Rev. Online 74 (2019), https://scholarlycommons.law.northwestern.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1272&context=nulr_online&preview_mode=1&z=1568047211.

Denaturalization is back. In 1967, the Supreme Court declared that denaturalization for any reason other than fraud or mistake in the naturalization process is unconstitutional, forcing the government to abandon its aggressive denaturalization campaigns. For the last half century, the government denaturalized no more than a handful of people every year. Over the past year, however, the Trump Administration has revived denaturalization. The Administration has targeted 700,000 naturalized American citizens for investigation and has hired dozens of lawyers and staff members to work in a newly created office devoted to investigating and prosecuting denaturalization cases. Using information gathered from responses to Freedom of Information Act requests, legal filings, and interviews, this Essay is the first to describe the Trump Administration’s denaturalization campaign in detail. The Essay then situates denaturalization within the Trump Administration’s broader approach to immigration. Under a policy known as “attrition through enforcement,” the Trump Administration has sought to discourage immigration and encourage “self-deportation.” Although attrition through enforcement is typically described as a method of persuading unauthorized immigrants to leave the United States, the denaturalization campaign and other Trump Administration initiatives suggest that the same approach is now being applied to those with legal status.

Author

Professor of Law, American University Washington College of Law. I received valuable comments on this paper from Jill Family, Alexandra Lahav, Jayesh Rathod, Juliet Stumpf, and the participants in the IV CINETS Conference at Queen Mary University of London and the GLOBALCIT Annual Conference at the European University Institute. Special thanks to Melina Oliverio for her excellent research assistance.

Copyright 2019 by Amanda Frost

Cite as: Amanda Frost, Alienating Citizens, 114 Nw. U. L. Rev. Online 48 (2019), https://scholarlycommons.law.northwestern.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1271&context=nulr_online&preview_mode=1&z=1565049425.

Over the last few years, I have demonstrated how modern business-entity statutes, particularly LLC statutes, can give software the basic capabilities of legal personhood, such as the ability to enter contracts or own property. Not surprisingly, this idea has been met with some resistance. This Essay responds to one kind of descriptive objection to my arguments: That courts will find some way to prevent the results I describe either because my reading of the business-entity statutes would take us too far outside our legal experience, or because courts will be afraid that robots will take over the world, or because law is meant to promote human (versus nonhuman) rights. As I demonstrate in this essay, such objections are not correct as a descriptive matter. These arguments make moral and policy assumptions that are probably incorrect, face intractable line-drawing problems, and dramatically overestimate the ease of challenging statutorily valid business structures. Business-entity law has always accommodated change, and the extensions to conventional law that I have identified are not as radical as they seem. Moreover, the transactional techniques I advocate for would likely just need to succeed in one jurisdiction, and regardless, there are many alternative techniques that, practically speaking, would achieve the same results.

116 out of 136. That is the number of white men who have served on the eighty-two-year-old committee responsible for creating and maintaining the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure. The tiny number of non-white, non-male committee members is disproportionate, even in the context of the white-male-dominated legal profession. If the rules were simply a technical set of instructions made by a neutral set of experts, then perhaps these numbers might not be as disturbing. But that is not the case. The Civil Rules embody normative judgments about the values that have primacy in our civil justice system, and the rule-makers—while expert—are not apolitical actors. This Essay argues that the homogeneous composition of the Civil Rules Committee, not only historically, but also today, limits the quality of the rules produced and perpetuates inequality. The remedy to this problem is straightforward: appoint different people to the Committee. To be sure, the federal civil rulemaking process is but one small part of where and how gender and racial identity matter. Even still, this Essay argues that the Civil Rules Committee members, the Judiciary, and the Bar should demand that the civil rulemaking Committee cease being #SoWhiteMale.

A recent wave of scholarship argues that judges often fail to comply with binding rules or precedent and sometimes apply overturned laws. Scholars have hypothesized that the cause of this “judicial noncompliance” may be flawed litigant briefing that introduces mistakes into judicial decisions—an idea this Essay calls the “Litigant Hypothesis.” The Essay presents a preliminary study aimed at exploring ways of testing the validity of the Litigant Hypothesis. Employing an empirical analysis that exploits recent amendments to Federal Discovery Rule 26, this Essay finds that the strongest predictor of noncompliance in a dataset of discovery decisions is indeed faulty briefs. This study concludes that the Litigant Hypothesis of noncompliance may have explanatory value.

Independent craft breweries contributed approximately $68 billion to the national economy last year. However, an arcane regulatory scheme governs the alcohol industry in general and the craft beer industry specifically, posing both obstacles and benefits to independent craft brewers. This Essay examines regulations that arguably infringe on free speech: namely, commercial speech regulations that prohibit alcohol manufacturers from purchasing advertising space from retailers. Such regulations were enacted to prohibit undue influence and anticompetitive behavior stemming from vertical and horizontal integration in the alcohol market. Although these regulations are necessary to prevent global corporate brewers from dominating the craft beer market at the expense of independent craft beer and consumer choice, evolving commercial speech doctrine threatens to invalidate them due to a trend towards increased protections for commercial speech. Without these regulations, and many others like them, nothing would restrain global corporate brands from engaging in illegal pay-to-play conduct to regain lost market share and force independent craft beer from the shelves and tap handles.