How would society react to “the Watcher,” a technology capable of efficiently, unerringly, and immediately reporting the perpetrator of virtually every crime? This Essay treats that speculative question as an opportunity to explore the relationship between governmental surveillance and criminal justice. The resulting argument is unabashedly fictional but draws attention to pressures that may influence the real world. For instance, the Watcher casts doubt on perfect surveillance’s ability to improve the law, supports judicial attentiveness to substantive law when reviewing rules of investigation, and suggests that legislative control might displace prosecutorial discretion. The Watcher also draws attention to the relationship between surveillance and regulatory intricacy, as well as to ways of preserving human mercy within automated criminal justice.
Evidence law controls what information will be admissible in court and when, how, and by whom it may be presented. It shapes not only the trial...
A crucial first step in addressing intimate-image abuse is its proper conceptualization. Intimate-image abuse amounts to a violation of intimate...
We live in a golden age of student surveillance. Some surveillance is old school: video cameras, school resource officers, and tip lines. Old-school...
A resilience agenda is an essential part of protecting national security in a digital age. Digital technologies impact nearly all aspects of everyday...
Cyber stalking involves repeated, often relentless targeting of someone with abuse. Death and rape threats may be part of a perpetrator’s playbook...
Fifty years ago, federal and state lawmakers called for the regulation of a criminal justice “databank” connecting federal, state, and local agencies...
Large language models (LLMs) now perform extremely well on many natural language processing tasks. Their ability to convert legal texts to data may...
This chapter provides an overview of computational text analysis techniques used to study judicial behavior and decision-making. As legal texts become...
On January 1, 2022, the most radical change to the American jury in at least thirty-five years occurred in Arizona: peremptory strikes, long a feature...
Generative AI is already beginning to alter legal practice. If optimistic forecasts prove warranted, how might this technology transform judicial...
Working hand-in-hand with the private sector, largely in a regulatory vacuum, policing agencies at the federal, state, and local level are acquiring...
This article argues that the fact that an action will compound a prior injustice counts as a reason against doing the action. I call this reason The...
Berryessa et al. (2022) consider how prior experience as a criminal prosecutor may influence judicial behaviour, but their concerns about prior...
For several days, former President Donald Trump and his 18 co-defendants in a Georgia election interference case trickled into the Fulton County Jail...
Virginia adopted a risk assessment to help determine sentencing for sex offenders. It was incorporated as a one-way ratchet toward higher sentences...
Courts routinely use low cash bail as a financial incentive to ensure that released defendants appear in court and abstain from crime. This can create...
We examined how the presentation of risk assessment results and the race of the person charged affected pretrial court actors’ recommendations to...