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ShadowHawk posted:This may sound a little naive but is it really so hard to have a system where court opinions are digital documents, post-publication changes are stored in version control systems, and citations are actual links? I agree, we need to store SCOTUS opinions on the blockchain. I'll go start the wiki.
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May 27, 2014 12:01
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ShadowHawk posted:This may sound a little naive but is it really so hard to have a system where court opinions are digital documents, post-publication changes are stored in version control systems, and citations are actual links? Westlaw and Lexis are two private companies who, for a fee, provide electronic versions of court opinions with citations being hyperlinked to other electronic versions of whatever is being cited (cases, statutes, secondary legal sources). The only thing not included are pre-physical print publication alterations, but as the NYTimes article made clear, these companies are provided a head's up about such alterations and therefore at least the changes will be made. Which leads me to believe that Westlaw/Lexis could actually create a before/after feature if it wanted for those opinions which are altered.
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May 27, 2014 12:56
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The simple way would be just make the extant non-public change log public. They already said that it exists, but it isn't released. Publish that.
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May 27, 2014 14:13
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Discendo Vox posted:Enh, I don't know enough about jurisprucence in Canada to know if the same standards should still apply. At a minimum, the decision is providing a full narrative of the case, and it's got a clearer format and structure. I like those features, and I've observed them in UK decisions too. The extensive factual and background recital makes more sense- and I understand it's a normal feature of cases in that system. The use of the first person is disconcerting, but can have merits in maintaining the limited identity of the court. What exactly in the decision should I be objecting to? If you're referring to the stuff at the end, yeah, I'd like less of that, but the different format practices make it harder to avoid because the judge recounts their in-person actions. I just thought his contempt for Meads (and the OPCA people in general) fairly radiated off the screen when I was reading it, but that might be me projecting a wee bit. ShadowHawk posted:This may sound a little naive but is it really so hard to have a system where court opinions are digital documents, post-publication changes are stored in version control systems, and citations are actual links? "We've been doing it this way for a long time and nothing too awful has happened that we've deigned to officially notice so why don't you take yer fancy compooter mochines and git"
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May 27, 2014 16:28
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Munkeymon posted:"We've been doing it this way for a long time and nothing too awful has happened that we've deigned to officially notice so why don't you take yer fancy compooter mochines and git" Nah, the problem is that Westlaw and Lexis share a virtual monopoly on the practice, and make insane amounts of money by charging exorbitant rates for lawyers to access their databases. They lobby against changes that publicize and make finding the caselaw easy.
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May 27, 2014 19:06
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ayn rand hand job posted:I agree, we need to store SCOTUS opinions on the blockchain. You do realize that a wiki is an example of a content-revision system that is publically available while supporting millions of editors, right? It's an absolutely trivial problem to track revisioning in documents. Tools like "git" or "subversion" are widely used in the publishing world, and SCOTUS already uses them. This is 100% a matter of making the change logs public.
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May 27, 2014 19:14
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ErIog posted:The important thing to remember is that the SCOTUS process is loving old, and it only became practical recently to make entire edit histories available to the public. Keeping every revision on paper in perpetuity as some are suggesting they should have been doing is madness. I can find the documents recording and certifying the installation, repair, certification and so on for every one of the millions of parts on a 747. We could do this before computers were cheap and easy. That's for each and every plane. If that could be done decades ago, it would be trivial for SCOTUS. EDIT: If it's the case that it simply needs to be public, then it's even more ridiculous.
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May 27, 2014 19:15
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Paul MaudDib posted:You do realize that a wiki is an example of a content-revision system that is publically available while supporting millions of editors, right? Is D&D now official a humor free zone?
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May 27, 2014 19:19
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Solkanar512 posted:I can find the documents recording and certifying the installation, repair, certification and so on for every one of the millions of parts on a 747. We could do this before computers were cheap and easy. That's for each and every plane. If that could be done decades ago, it would be trivial for SCOTUS. As Discendo Vox said the problem isn't that it needs to be public, the problem is that the government is allowing private industry to extract rents from the documents. Somebody making money off something is always a bigger hurdle than technical complexity.
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May 27, 2014 19:19
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Solkanar512 posted:I can find the documents recording and certifying the installation, repair, certification and so on for every one of the millions of parts on a 747. We could do this before computers were cheap and easy. That's for each and every plane. If that could be done decades ago, it would be trivial for SCOTUS. Yep, I can look at the documents down to the person machining/assembling the parts, the tolerances of the tools they used to measure those parts, the chemical/mechanical properties of every material used to make those parts and every time a part deviates in any way at all from the stated definitions
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May 27, 2014 19:48
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Kennedy has joined the "not soulless assholes" side in Hall v. Florida, holding that the execution of someone resides in the margin of error to be determined mentally deficient is unconstitutional.
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May 27, 2014 21:27
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UberJew posted:As Discendo Vox said the problem isn't that it needs to be public, the problem is that the government is allowing private industry to extract rents from the documents. Do you think the government should ban west law and lexis from republishing opinions that are made public? What about Google Scholar? Fast case? You did know that federal court decisions are generally publicly available from the courts themselves, right? At worst, a nominal PACER fee away. They (west law and lexis) extract rents not by publishing decisions but by providing search and support functionality with the decisions as raw material. (Even there, Google is cutting into their business.)
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May 27, 2014 22:39
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Kalman posted:Do you think the government should ban west law and lexis from republishing opinions that are made public? What about Google Scholar? Fast case? You did know that federal court decisions are generally publicly available from the courts themselves, right? At worst, a nominal PACER fee away. No, obviously banning is inappropriate. The government should be providing that search and support functionality (functionality that is widespread, well-understood and not particularly expensive to implement) for the public interest. Obviously doing so would just happen to destroy those companies as a side effect, which is one reason it doesn't happen. To provide just one example of how this is a compelling public interest (since I work in corrections, it's the one I'm most familiar with): we live in a country where most of the wrongfully convicted have to do their own legal research for their appeals*. e: In a lot of cases from books and writing the appeals with a pencil because there are even worse hurdles in place for a lot of institutions, but nonetheless. atelier morgan fucked around with this message at 23:06 on May 27, 2014 |
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May 27, 2014 23:00
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Kalman posted:Do you think the government should ban west law and lexis from republishing opinions that are made public? What about Google Scholar? Fast case? You did know that federal court decisions are generally publicly available from the courts themselves, right? At worst, a nominal PACER fee away. The systems you describe are either not considered valid for citation, are inaccurate, or they just don't exist. A lot of caselaw never gets digitized once you get below federal level. UberJew posted:No, obviously banning is inappropriate. The government should be providing that search and support functionality (functionality that is widespread, well-understood and not particularly expensive to implement) for the public interest. Obviously doing so would just happen to destroy those companies as a side effect, which is one reason it doesn't happen. UberJew is exactly correct here. The current legal publication system is fractured and poorly maintained- and Westlaw/Lexis profit from aggregating this system and publishing it. As such, they have a vested interest in maintaining its ruinous state. Things used to be even worse- iirc Lexis is a relatively recent entrant into the legal database market, and it used to be a de facto monopoly. Even so, these companies have little reason to innovate, and the result is that the law is placed behind a paywall that can cost thousands of dollars to access with a single text search. Uberjew mentions the wrongfully convicted, but in practice, everyone who can't afford or reach a lawyer has to do their own legal research, wrongfully convicted or not, plaintiff or defendant. The costs of legal database access also inflate the cost of access to legal representation, which is one of the many pressures making the current legal system unjust. What frustrates me about this is that it's an example of inappropriate privatization of a public good that's more central to the nation than any sewage system- it's the law itself, the thing citizens are supposed to abide by, that is placed out of their reach and rendered less functional by the de facto privaization of database management. It's also incredibly inefficient and subject to error, like the NYT article that started this discussion indicates. The modernization and standardization of our legal databases is the single lowest hanging fruit for justice system reform in this country. It would alleviate pressure on a wide range of problems in how the current justice system operates. I would be easy to do and there's no meaningful policy counterargument. It's not even been politicized! I feel as if changing it would be a real no-brainer. Discendo Vox fucked around with this message at 23:28 on May 27, 2014 |
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May 27, 2014 23:16
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The problem is, West and Lexis already have aggregated over 200 years of jurisprudence. That's where the bread and butter is. I can pull up either search engine and look at obscure state appellate court decisions from the late 1700s. I know that isn't relevant to most cases, but it certainly is in some. Not to mention their systems for determining the follow on status of various court precedents. Being able to quickly see how many times a case is cited by other cases is handy as can be.
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May 28, 2014 02:20
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OK so the government should just nationalize them both and provide them as a free service, problem solved.
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May 28, 2014 02:31
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TinTower posted:Kennedy has joined the "not soulless assholes" side in Hall v. Florida, holding that the execution of someone resides in the margin of error to be determined mentally deficient is unconstitutional. Be sure to read Alito's dissent if you think you might be suffering from hypotension.
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May 28, 2014 07:08
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I'm going to go ahead and thrown down the gauntlet and state that I think that all the decisions issued yesterday were rightly decided. (I assume the lack of posts is because most folks similarly agree with the results, or don't really care about the particular case.) 1. Hall v. Florida: Under the 8th Amendment, determining whether someone is mentally incompetent to be punished with death cannot be determined only by a single, determinative factor (a hard IQ cut-off). 2. Plumhoff v. Rickard: Police can use deadly force, insofar as necessary to contain an ongoing threat to public safety, to stop a high-speed pursuit that has put people's lives in danger, without violating the 4th Amendment. 3. Wood v. Moss: Secret Service can move groups of protestors in a manner that protects the safety of the President so long as such strategic decisions are not motivated by viewpoint based discrimination, without violating the 1st Amendment. 4. Michigan v. Bay Mills Indian Community: Tribal sovereign immunity is, in a lot of ways, a mirror image of State sovereign immunity -- that is, up until Congress acts to limit Tribal sovereign immunity. (As a side note, Congress has much more power to limit Tribal sovereign immunity than State sovereign immunity.) Thus, just as Tribes cannot sue States as a matter of course, States cannot sue Tribes as a matter of course.
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May 28, 2014 12:56
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Doesn't Hall v. Florida lower the standards? Since IQ is no longer a hard cutoff, couldn't a lower IQ plus some aggravating factors allow a person with an IQ of 60 to be executed? Or has it been framed that there is a lower bound on the IQ requirement, but the upper bound is fuzzy? Also, not surprised to see the 6th Circuit reversed again. Allaniis fucked around with this message at 13:50 on May 28, 2014 |
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May 28, 2014 13:47
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Allaniis posted:Doesn't Hall v. Florida lower the standards? Since IQ is no longer a hard cutoff, couldn't a lower IQ plus some aggravating factors allow a person with an IQ of 60 to be executed? Or has it been framed that there is a lower bound on the IQ requirement, but the upper bound is fuzzy? Well the case was about someone with an IQ of 71 so...
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May 28, 2014 14:23
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Green Crayons posted:2. Plumhoff v. Rickard: Police can use deadly force, insofar as necessary to contain an ongoing threat to public safety, to stop a high-speed pursuit that has put people's lives in danger, without violating the 4th Amendment. This seems to have been building for some time (e.g., Scott v. Harris). Is there any bright-line in sight or do we expect the circumstances in which shooting a fleeing subject (and any of his passengers) is acceptable to continue to expand until it essentially includes all car chases? I find it particularly troubling given that violation of state law or police policy by an officer does change the constitutional standard (Virginia v. Moore and to a lesser extent Heien v. North Carolina), so the question of when police can shoot citizens has been effectively removed from the political discourse.
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May 28, 2014 17:06
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hobbesmaster posted:Well the case was about someone with an IQ of 71 so... The case held unconstitutional a law setting a lower bound of 70, in a case brought by someone with an IQ of 71. It's pretty clear what the message to take away from that is, and it isn't that the Court thought Hall should be executed. (I'm with Crayons, from a cursory read these all seem to be good decisions or at least correct decisions.)
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May 28, 2014 17:16
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KernelSlanders posted:This seems to have been building for some time (e.g., Scott v. Harris). Is there any bright-line in sight or do we expect the circumstances in which shooting a fleeing subject (and any of his passengers) is acceptable to continue to expand until it essentially includes all car chases? I find it particularly troubling given that violation of state law or police policy by an officer does change the constitutional standard (Virginia v. Moore and to a lesser extent Heien v. North Carolina), so the question of when police can shoot citizens has been effectively removed from the political discourse. The ruling essetially does apply to all car chases, because high-speed car chases put innocent lives in danger basically by definition. That's why it's generally (though sadly, not universally) considered bad practice for cops to engage in them unless the person in the car is considered to pose a major threat to life if allowed to escape - it's far better to let people get away for petty traffic offenses (the original stop was for a burned-out headlight) than to engage in a prolonged, high-speed car chase that endangers everyone on or near the road and drives the suspect to even riskier behavior. The SCOTUS ruling amounts to judicial permission to execute anyone who runs from the police using a car, regardless or the initial crime or estimated threat level, because doing so can always be construed to endanger innocent lives.
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May 28, 2014 18:57
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Main Paineframe posted:The ruling essetially does apply to all car chases, because high-speed car chases put innocent lives in danger basically by definition. That's why it's generally (though sadly, not universally) considered bad practice for cops to engage in them unless the person in the car is considered to pose a major threat to life if allowed to escape - it's far better to let people get away for petty traffic offenses (the original stop was for a burned-out headlight) than to engage in a prolonged, high-speed car chase that endangers everyone on or near the road and drives the suspect to even riskier behavior. The SCOTUS ruling amounts to judicial permission to execute anyone who runs from the police using a car, regardless or the initial crime or estimated threat level, because doing so can always be construed to endanger innocent lives. This was already the case though.
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May 28, 2014 19:10
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hobbesmaster posted:This was already the case though. Well, it's certainly more clear now, and apparently whether a situation poses a "grave risk to the public" isn't even a factual question to be resolved at trial. My bigger issue though, is that appropriate force seems to be judicially determined. Am I correct that even if there were political will to do so, a state could not set higher threshold if they wanted to? I guess I'm a little unclear where qualified immunity comes from. Could a state revoke it for state officials by statute if it so chose?
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May 28, 2014 21:02
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With respect to individual liberties: - States can always set more limits on government action than what the Constitution allows. The Constitution acts as a floor of acceptable government conduct. - States can never set more limits on private action than what the Constitution allows. The Constitution acts as a ceiling of acceptable government restriction of private conduct. So a state legislature could pass a law that prohibits law enforcement officers from using deadly force against a fleeing vehicle if there was the political will to do so, and there would be no challenge to that law under the federal Constitution. edit: qualified immunity comes from the imagination of the judicial branch, and protects individual government officials from personal liability unless if (1) there was a constitutional violation (2) of a right that was clearly established when the violation occurred. Barf. Qualified immunity doesn't really intersect with a State's ability to set a higher standard of government conduct, it's just a doctrine that establishes the analytical framework to determine whether a government official can be held liable to an individual for the violation of that individual's constitutional rights. As it's a creation of the federal judicial branch, state legislatures could not alter the doctrine under the Supremacy Clause principles. I think Congress could actually do so, since it's essentially federal common law, and common law is always subject to change by the corresponding (in this case, federal) legislature. Green Crayons fucked around with this message at 21:24 on May 28, 2014 |
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May 28, 2014 21:18
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Qualified immunity could be withdrawn by the state, because it exists as an extension of state immunity, which is waivable.
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May 28, 2014 21:33
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Although I see the similarities between sovereign and qualified immunity, and perhaps a shared English origin, I've never understood qualified immunity as being waivable by the State itself merely because it extends from the State's sovereign immunity. A State's sovereign immunity is a constitutional principle. An individual's qualified immunity is a common law principle because the federal judiciary thinks it's good policy. What have I missed?
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May 28, 2014 21:54
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Green Crayons posted:- States can always set more limits on government action than what the Constitution allows. The Constitution acts as a floor of acceptable government conduct. Ok, follow up question: if the hypothetical state above were to impose sanctions on an officer who violates the above deadly force prohibition, would that be of the sort of limit on government that is permissible or the sort of limit on individual that is not?
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May 29, 2014 04:12
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Well, let's look it at it this way: what provision of the federal Constitution would you propose a "sanctions on an officer who violates the above deadly force prohibition" violates?
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May 29, 2014 04:23
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I don't know, but if you asked me what provision of the federal constitution grants officers qualified immunity, I'd have to draw a blank on that one as well. After all 18 USC 1983 is a statutory provision that imposes liability on individual officers and doesn't say anything about qualified immunity, yet there it is. Now, I'll grant that we've gotten pretty far from Plumhoff v. Rickard given that the Court said that conduct didn't violate the constitution (thus not imposing 1983 liability).
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May 29, 2014 04:50
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I didn't mean it as a trick question. A law can be challenged under multiple portions of the Constitution, and can be challenged by government officials in their capacity as a private individual. So while a state statute penalizing a LEO from firing into a car may be constitutional insofar as the Fourth Amendment is concerned (the 4A setting a floor of acceptable government conduct), that statute might simultaneously be unconstitutional because it restricts some constitutional right of the LEO as a private individual. For example, a LEO might claim that such a statute violates his Fourteenth Amendment right to due process or equal protection or something like that. In this manner, he's claiming that the law goes beyond the ceiling set forth by the Constitution to the extent it has negative consequences for him as a private individual. The problem in this hypothetical, though, is that I don't really see a cognizable claim for a LEO to state that such a law violates one of his constitutional rights.
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May 29, 2014 14:21
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Thanks, that's a bit clearer. Incidentally, this appears to not be completely hypothetical, although I'm a bit ashamed to repost this link from a certain GBS thread:NBC News posted:Seattle police officers are fighting back against new city rules on the use of force, claiming in a federal lawsuit that the policies are putting them and the public at risk. http://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/seattle-police-sue-stop-new-limits-force-n117031 Skimming the complaint the officers' claims seem to be a self defense right under 2A, a right to use lethal force under an "objectively reasonable" standard from the 4th (this one makes no sense to me), and an independent right to use all force allowed under the 4th amendment that they claim is independent from the government's interest.
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May 29, 2014 15:35
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KernelSlanders posted:Thanks, that's a bit clearer. Incidentally, this appears to not be completely hypothetical, although I'm a bit ashamed to repost this link from a certain GBS thread: So if they win this lawsuit the city will be violating the terms of the various settlements and have to pay a fuckton of money, likely to result in layoffs in the police force?
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May 29, 2014 16:18
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Discendo Vox posted:Nah, the problem is that Westlaw and Lexis share a virtual monopoly on the practice, and make insane amounts of money by charging exorbitant rates for lawyers to access their databases. They lobby against changes that publicize and make finding the caselaw easy. I just went to a small talk by one of the key server architects at lexis, and whereas the point of the talk was that his data was secure, the implication that what their company does procedurally is non-trivial was definitely conveyed. What I didn't hear is that Lexis is lobbying against the implementation of software solutions like theirs in a public domain- where would I go to confirm this? "XYZ is lobbying for IJK" is usually accepted out of hand as probably true, but in this case I got the impression that it wasn't necessary or even wanted, as they were offering a whole suite of services for indexing and categorizing this information. edit: quoted the wrong mention of Lexis. double edit: Looking at my notes, I went to a talk from a different legal document handler, but the question still stands, I suppose. Pythagoras a trois fucked around with this message at 16:45 on May 29, 2014 |
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May 29, 2014 16:27
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KernelSlanders posted:Skimming the complaint the officers' claims seem to be a self defense right under 2A, a right to use lethal force under an "objectively reasonable" standard from the 4th (this one makes no sense to me), and an independent right to use all force allowed under the 4th amendment that they claim is independent from the government's interest. I haven't read the complaint. Just pulling from your descriptions: - The right to self defense under the 2A is interesting, and theoretically feasible. As in, it makes conceptual sense that they're saying they have a personal 2A right to self defense, and the government cannot take that away from them. - The "right" to use lethal force under the 4A is not a personal right for each LEO. The 4A simply allows government officials the ability to take such action. So, yes, a LEO has the ability to use lethal force in certain circumstances without violating the 4A. No, that does not translate into the 4A protecting the LEO's ability to use such lethal force from government regulation. - Argument 2 spills over into this Argument 3: basically, they're claiming that 4A gives them a personal right to act in a certain manner as a government official that the government cannot infringe upon. This makes no sense as a conceptual matter, and is a novel legal theory that is not supported by any case law that I'm aware of.
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May 30, 2014 19:53
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Green Crayons posted:This makes no sense as a conceptual matter, and is a novel legal theory that is not supported by any case law that I'm aware of. So it will get 5 votes at the Supreme Court but the Chief Justice will still vote against the officers on a completely different unforeseen theory? 
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May 30, 2014 20:10
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Green Crayons posted:- The right to self defense under the 2A is interesting, and theoretically feasible. As in, it makes conceptual sense that they're saying they have a personal 2A right to self defense, and the government cannot take that away from them. I mean, it seems a bit confusing and nonsensical. But maybe I'm missing something.
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May 30, 2014 20:18
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Cheekio posted:I just went to a small talk by one of the key server architects at lexis, and whereas the point of the talk was that his data was secure, the implication that what their company does procedurally is non-trivial was definitely conveyed. Employees of the company aren't going to tell you that they do this. And if it's a server architect, they probably have no idea what the executive-level approach to these things is. If this were someone from Lexis working on server architecture, he's probably thinking of LexisNexus, which, together with WestlawNext, represents the relatively new "cadillac" version oftheir database system- more bells and whistles, much more expensive. These represent the first improvements or innovations in the databases essentially since their conception, and they were created almost entirely in response to each other and the slow emergence of nonprofit, free to use databases. Lexis and West depend on the fact that other database systems aren't considered trustworthy. People ultimately pay for their services because there's nowhere else to go. If the government actually made their caselaw accessible (and the government is fully capable of performing the same storage, indexing, revision and monitoring tasks that the private corps are), then there would be very little to draw people to these companies.
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May 30, 2014 20:23
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GlyphGryph posted:Maybe I'm missing something, but if this was upheld... or if things are, from what I'm understanding you're saying, already the case, that the government can manage its employees in ways that violate their contractual rights, doesn't that mean the government couldn't fire employees for saying stupid poo poo on the job since it would be a violation of the first? While I don't really know the case the comparison doesn't necessarily follow, since the personal right to free speech isn't greatly impaired by not being able to exercise it fully on the job and wearing the uniform of an organization you're representing, any more than personal reproductive rights entitle you to have sex on the desk when you feel like it. These are things you can absolutely do later, on your own time and separate from the organization employing you. A right to self-defense by contrast is reactive in nature, more akin to a right to emergency care. If you need to exercise it at all, it won't be at a time and place of your choosing, so you can't be expected to plan around your work schedule. Saying "not on the job" for that is a much more meaningful restriction on the personal right.
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May 30, 2014 20:43
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