This Note examines the potential efficacy of artificial intelligence ("AI") as a tool in contractformation and negotiation through theory-driven analysis and an empirical research study. As AI has become increasingly skilled and produced more accurate results over the past few years, legal minds have speculated that it could prove useful in a variety of legal settings. These applications range from brief and motion writing in a litigation space to contract drafting and negotiation in a transactional environment. However, applying AI to legal contracting and negotiation raises contract law concerns about the "meeting of the minds" necessary to form a legally binding contract, equity issues arising from prevalent "algorithmic discrimination" by AI and the ethics of enforcing AI-created deals, and accuracy problems given AI's tendency to "hallucinate," or confidently provide incorrect or fabricated answers to question prompts. These hurdles indicate thatAI may not be able to overcome the unique challenges that arise in the legal profession, such as client confidentiality, fiduciary duties, and ethical or emotional dilemmas. Additionally, this Note includes an empirical study that tested whether ChatGPT tends to favor certain types of clients over others when tasked with assisting them in the negotiation of a commercial real estate lease. The study's findings suggest that ChatGPT discriminates against individuals as clients by recommending renegotiation less frequently and to a smaller extent than when advising small private corporations, large public corporations, and nonprofit organizations. Finally, this Note discusses implications for future applications of AI technology in contract drafting, formation, and negotiation, concluding that AI technology is best suited for clerical and administrative tasks rather than those requiring legal judgment.
This Article is the first scholarly work to identify and describe the experience of sleep deprivation in prison—an experience that, although an inherent feature of prison life, has gone almost entirely unnoticed even by those legal scholars, advocates, and policymakers committed to ensuring humane carceral conditions. Drawing on original data from interviews with people who served time in prisons all over the country, it maps the multiple overlapping conditions that routinely prevent the incarcerated from getting anything close to adequate sleep. Sleep is a basic human need, as fundamental to human survival and adequate human functioning as access to food, water, and shelter. Yet this Article’s findings are unambiguous: chronic sleep deprivation is an intrinsic part of prison life, as constitutive of the carceral penalty as are crowded conditions, grossly inadequate medical care, inedible food, and the ongoing risk of physical and sexual assault. After providing a brief overview of the sleep science, the findings of which make plain the physical and psychological damage caused by insufficient sleep, the Article provides a rich sociological account of the experience of trying to sleep in prison. Drawing on the accounts of interview subjects, it identifies ten distinct causes of sleep deprivation inside: five concrete conditions (fiercely uncomfortable beds, hunger, extremes of heat and cold, noise, and excessive light) and five “meta-conditions” (fear of violence, trauma, poverty, overly intrusive rules enforcement, and daily humiliation). This Article then considers some of the normative implications of the phenomenon explored here, including what the reality of sleep deprivation in prison means for our understanding of prisons and of carceral punishment, the prospects for Eighth Amendment conditions claims grounded in sleep deprivation, and the policy challenges likely to confront efforts to address this problem.
Retributivism dominates American criminal punishment theory. Stated simply, retributivism requires that an individual receive a proportionate amount of punishment for a moral wrong inflicted upon society. It is widely known that retributivism originates in ancient Jewish law and religious custom. What is less widely understood is that the cultural practices at the heart of retributivism also allowed space for communal absolution. In other words, after individuals were punished or held accountable for crimes or sins, there was typically a societal atonement practice where society was able to purge those crimes or cleanse the societal slate of the wrongs, so they did not continue to burden society. One such practice was the scapegoat ritual in ancient Jewish law where a goat was sent away from society to symbolize the community being cleansed as a group from their sins. Those sins were now banished, and the community could start afresh again. These sorts of group cleansing rituals were commonplace among many ancient cultures. And while American criminal punishment is based largely on retributivism, there is no corollary for an atonement practice, where crimes are periodically removed to restore society. Without an absolution-or cleansing-incarceration has burdened the United States criminal system for the last forty years-with no end in sight. This Article introduces a concept in criminal theory and public policy called "systemic absolution," which considers whether cleansing of crime could create a theoretically comprehensive criminal law theory that might reduce the endemic state of mass incarceration plaguing contemporary America. Systemic absolution is a societal cleansing and forgiveness of crime, that occurs periodically through legislative, executive, or judicial branch functions. It does not require personal forgiveness, which remains a separate matter between victims and defendants, but instead addresses a less explored area-societal forgiveness or absolution. Several examples of systemic absolution include periodic sentencing reductions, automatic deferred adjudication and expungements, and safeguarding judicial review of sentencing. This new theoretical framework restores the missing corollary to retributivism to create a comprehensive criminal punishment theory that provides a path for reducing incarceration and unburdening society from the weight of decades of crime.
In 2023, Los Angeles County was called the "wage theft capital of the nation," with up to $28 million stolen from workers every week. This form of theft especially places low-income workers at risk; 80% of low-wage Los Angeles County workers reportedly experience wage theft. In spite of this vast problem, however, government agencies tasked with the enforcement of wage theft have been overworked and underfunded. The under-resourcing of government agencies results in short-staffed labor offices, prolonging the time it takes to resolve wage theft claims and increasing the likelihood that victims of wage theft either drop their claim or fail to raise a claim at all. To address this problem in Los Angeles City, deputization by the Los Angeles Office of Wage Standards could extend authority to worker centers-community-based workers' rights organizations-to support the enforcement of wage theft. The Los Angeles Municipal Code could grant worker centers the power to advise workers on their rights, inspect employer records for wage violations, and ultimately expand the enforcement of the issue and thereby reduce wage theft. This Note provides the first analysis of deputization within this space and at this depth, introducing new legal analysis and proposing a new enforcement tool with which to address the massive issue of wage theft.
In a post-#MeToo workplace, harassment remains pervasive, and harassment law still fails to provide protection for the harms experienced by many workers-particularly those in the most vulnerable jobs. Even when reform efforts are introduced through legislation, courts, and agency guidance, it often does not provide greater power, autonomy, and dignity to women in ways that would more meaningfully protect them from workplace abuse. We are the first to create a database of state legislation, including over three thousand bills, that allows us to empirically analyze the extent to which lawmakers comprehensively address harassment following the rise of the #MeToo movement. We assess comprehensiveness by examining how responsive legislation is to existing gaps in legal protection during the five years following the 2017 tweet that took #MeToo activism global, relative to the 2016 baseline period. We found that states introduced a wide breadth of reforms to combat harassment and gender inequality, including some changes that address longstanding gaps in legal protection. Gaps persist, however, and in some cases worsened post #MeToo. Going forward, reform efforts by state legislatures-and all legal stakeholders-will prove most effective if they move away from narrow conceptions of sexual harassment and follow the voice of workers, pursuing a broad, multi-layered agenda
A sharp rise in illegal child labor and an influx of unaccompanied migrant children into the United States combined to dominate headlines in 2023. Despite federal authorities placing migrant children in sponsor care, reports detailed such children being exploited in hazardous occupations across the country, with some losing their lives. An aging patchwork of federal immigration and labor laws and underfunded enforcement agencies have left an incredibly vulnerable subset of children at risk of exploitation or worse, and congressional action is needed to ensure that sponsored children are properly cared for and kept out of hazardous workplaces. While the federal government's processing of unaccompanied children and illegal child labor have been separately examined by scholars, there is a glaring lack of scholarship on how the gaps in the immigration system and federal labor law combine to put unaccompanied minors at a greater risk of labor exploitation. This Note argues that the federal government must comprehensively update existing immigration and labor laws and increase interagency coordination to lower the risk of labor exploitation for unaccompanied children. If the United States wants to fulfill a humanitarian mission of caring for unaccompanied children, it must take responsibility for every child's wellbeing throughout their immigration journeyby taking a whole-of-government approach to the problem.
This Note analyzes the recent trend of criminalizing homelessness in the United States. The first half discusses homelessness through the lens of American exceptionalism as a comparative tool. Comparing America to its international peers helps us better understand why America's response to homelessness has become increasingly punitive. In doing so, the Note makes a novel contribution to American exceptionalism literature in applying the concept to homelessness. Specifically, it shows that while American homelessness rates are not unusually high, American shelter rates are unusually low relative to other western democracies. The Note shows this by combining national homelessness reports into a single dataset and document. The second half of the Note discusses current constitutional doctrine relating to homelessness, focusing on City of Grants Pass v. Johnson. This section uses the first half's analysis to show why, contrary to the Supreme Court's decision, the Ninth Circuit's ruling was, at its core, correct on a legal and sociological level in applying status crimes doctrine to homelessness. In doing so, the Note builds on others' defenses of the Ninth Circuit's ruling by both adding to those legal arguments and bolstering them with a sociological grounding, offering a new way of thinking about status crimes in general and homelessness in particular. The Note mounts a defense not only of now-outdated homelessness constitutional doctrine, but also of a shift in American political culture that recognizes homelessness as a product of social circumstances rather than individual failure. Such a change is a necessary prerequisite for curbing, on legal and political levels, America's intensifying trend of criminalizing homelessness, the first step in bringing America in line with its peers and actually solving homelessness.
