Faculty Bibliography
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This Article analyzes constitutional concerns presented by the use of risk-assessment technology in the criminal justice system, and how courts can best address them. Focusing on due process and equal protection, this Article explores avenues for constitutional challenges to risk-assessment technology at federal and state levels and outlines how instruments might be retooled to increase accuracy and accountability while satisfying constitutional standards.
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In 1946, William K. Wimsatt and Monroe C. Beardsley argued, in their classic essay, “The Intentional Fallacy,” that critics interpreting a literary work should cast aside pursuit of the author’s intent. “The poem belongs to the public,” they wrote, because “it is embodied in language, the peculiar possession of the public.” The New Criticism, a movement that dominated the academic study of literature in mid-century, asserted that only close analysis of the words and structure of the text—not external knowledge about the author, politics, morality, or a reader’s feelings—was the key to understanding its meaning. Salvatore Eugene Scalia, a professor of Italian literature at Brooklyn College, was an adherent of this theory. He also advocated for “literalness” in reading and translation, to avoid “yielding to the temptation” to follow one’s own language’s conventions in interpreting the words of the text. The New Criticism fell from prominence in the nineteen-eighties, but its impact became discernible in another field, through Professor Scalia’s only child, who was appointed to the Supreme Court in 1986, the same year that the elder Scalia died. Justice Antonin Scalia became the country’s most important expositor of textualism, the influential method of legal interpretation wherein “the text is the law, and it is the text that must be observed,” regardless of what lawmakers may have intended in passing the law. Since the nineteen-eighties, textualism has been favored by legal conservatives—but, in more recent decades, its focus on the words of a text has become influential with liberal judges, too. Last Monday, under the shadow of Antonin Scalia, who died in 2016, the current conservative Justices aired their strife over his textualist legacy in Bostock v. Clayton County, a landmark gay-and-transgender-rights case.
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This spring, the coronavirus pandemic has upended college and university life, as campus classes, dormitories, and social activities have been abruptly displaced by online instruction. As exams and graduation ceremonies proceed virtually this month, some schools are announcing plans to cancel or delay the fall semester or to run it partly or entirely online. On May 6th, amid this chaos and uncertainty, Betsy DeVos’s Department of Education issued its regulations on Title IX, which impose new legal requirements on how schools must conduct their discipline processes for sexual harassment and assault. Immediately, prominent civil-rights attorneys expressed outrage. Catherine Lhamon, the chair of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights and the assistant secretary for civil rights in Obama’s Education Department, tweeted that DeVos is “taking us back to the bad old days . . . when it was permissible to rape and sexually harass students with impunity.” Fatima Goss Graves, the president and C.E.O. of the National Women’s Law Center, wrote, “We refuse to go back to the days when rape and harassment in schools were ignored and swept under the rug.” In a statement, Nancy Pelosi called the new regulations “callous, cruel and dangerous, threatening to silence survivors and endanger vulnerable students in the middle of a public health crisis.” It was unclear, however, precisely what aspects of the regulations were so extreme and alarming.
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A truth that burst into public view with #MeToo in 2017 was that sexual exploitation in its many forms has been ubiquitous and experienced largely by women. So anyone following the story of #MeToo could hardly find it shocking that, after a promising primary season with a record number of excellent female candidates, the first Presidential election since the movement’s rise has come down to a race between two men who have both been accused of sexual assault. Tara Reade has accused Joe Biden of sexually assaulting her twenty-seven years ago, and several women have accused him of unwanted touching. More than a dozen women have accused Donald Trump of sexual assault and misconduct, and he has bragged on tape about grabbing women’s genitals. It is unlikely that the Democratic Party will abandon their only candidate who remains in the race, and who leads Trump in polls. So many liberals, who are justifiably desperate to turn the page on the horrors of Trump’s Presidency, are grasping at the world of difference between Trump and Biden—and viewing Reade’s sexual-assault allegation more skeptically than #MeToo has allowed in recent times. This moment may prove to be a pivotal chapter of #MeToo, which marks its more mature reckoning with its deeper goals. And, in fact, there is a no more fitting person to embody that development than Biden, whose long career has repeatedly positioned him at the levers of power in the government’s responses to sexual violence.
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Sex robots are here. Created specifically to allow individuals to simulate erotic and romantic experiences with a seemingly alive and present human being, sex robots will soon force lawmakers to address the rise of digisexuality and the human-robot relationship. The extent to which intimacy between a human and robot can be regulated depends on how we characterize sex with robots--as a masturbatory act, an intimate relationship, or nonconsensual sexual contact-- and whether sexual activity with robots makes us see robots as more human or less human. A robot sex panic may be driven primarily by the idea that robots are servile by nature. Critics argue that an inherently nonreciprocal dynamic between humans and robots will translate into exploitative relationships that may fuel abuse of human partners, or that sex robots may further social isolation and retreat from human intimacy. Conversely, sex robots may function as safe--and otherwise unavailable--sexual and emotional outlets for those who may otherwise harm others. They may even train individuals to be more respectful in human relationships. At this point, we do not know how our relationships with robots will inform our relationships with humans, for better or for worse. This Essay explores the consequences of sex robots on society and argues that questions of how sex robots will improve or worsen humans' treatment of one another is the key to regulation to come. What is clear is that sex robots will require us to grapple with our vulnerabilities in relationships, reconsider fundamental rights, and question what it means to be intimate and to be human.
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From the start, the Trump Administration seized on Title IX as an area in which to reverse the Obama Administration’s positions. Under Betsy DeVos, the Department of Education has rescinded more than twenty Obama-era policy guidelines on anti-discrimination laws, including ones that protected transgender students from discrimination and allowed them to use gender-segregated facilities of their choice. It has also cancelled policies that supported schools’ use of affirmative action, outlined disabled students’ rights, and attempted to curb racial disparities in elementary and secondary schools, based on research showing that minority students are punished for misconduct at higher rates than their behavior warrants. These revocations have rightly provoked concern that DeVos is turning her back on vulnerable students.
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Jeannie Suk Gersen, Nancy Gertner, and Janet Halley, professors at Harvard Law School, have issued a Comment on the Department of Education’s Proposed Rule on Title IX enforcement. The authors write: “We strongly support vigorous enforcement of Title IX to ensure that students enjoy educational programs and activities unburdened by sexual harassment.” They argue that “sanctions for sexual harassment should apply only under a clear definition of wrongful conduct and after a process that is fair to all parties.” With these dual objectives in mind, the Comment reviews the Department of Education’s Proposed Rule and agrees with some aspects and disagrees with others. The authors agree (with some suggested amendments) with the Rule’s treatment of the burden of proof, the rejection of the single-investigator model, and the requirement of a live hearing process. They argue that the rules they endorse do not undermine the critical goal of enforcing Title IX. They express serious concerns about the provisions on cross examination and the definition of sexual harassment, and propose revisions that will be more protective of complainants. The Comment strongly objects to provisions encouraging schools to file complaints when they have multiple allegations against a single potential respondent but no formal complainant: the inquiry there should be refocused on the threat of harm and take into account the complainants’ as well as the respondents’ interests. The three professors say that they “strongly object to the deliberate indifference standard for schools’ ultimate responsibility to respond to sexual harassment.” Gersen, Gertner and Halley have researched, taught, and written on Title IX, sexual harassment, sexual assault, and feminist legal reform. They were three of the signatories to the statement of twenty-eight Harvard Law School professors, published in the Boston Globe on October 15, 2014, that criticized Harvard University’s newly adopted sexual harassment policy as “overwhelmingly stacked against the accused” and “in no way required by Title IX law or regulation.”
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When I was a young girl, the careers I dreamed of — as a prima ballerina or piano virtuoso — involved performing before an audience. But even in my childhood ambitions of life on stage, no desire of mine involved speaking. My Korean immigrant family prized reading and the arts, but not oral expression or verbal assertiveness — perhaps even less so for girls. Education was the highest familial value, but a posture of learning anything worthwhile seemed to go together with not speaking. My incipient tendency to raise questions and arguments was treated as disrespect or hubris, to be stamped out, sometimes through punishment. As a result, and surely also due to natural shyness, I had an almost mute relation to the world. It was 1L year at Harvard Law School that changed my default mode from “silent” to “speak.” Having always been a student who said nothing and preferred a library to a classroom, I was terrified and scandalized as professors called on classmates daily to engage in back-and-forth dialogues of reasons and arguments in response to questions, on subjects of which we knew little and on which we had no business expounding. What happened as I repeatedly faced my unwelcome turn, heard my voice, and got through with many stumbles was a revelation that changed my life. A light switched on. Soon, I was even volunteering to engage in this dialogue, and I was thinking more intensely, independently, and enjoyably than I ever had before. Eventually, learning through speaking, reasoning, questioning, and revising in conversation with others became a way of life that I treasure and try to cultivate in students. As a law professor over the past decade, I have seen students experience their own epiphanies and transformations in relation to the law school classroom. But I know that some students viscerally dislike the pedagogy that typifies law school, viewing it as outdated and oppressive, and even reporting ill effects on their sense of equality, identity, and well-being. And critiques of law school teaching that point to a disproportionate adverse impact on the educational experience of women and minorities are of special concern to me — as a feminist, a teacher, and the first Asian woman to have been tenured at the school that formed my legal mind and opened my greatest opportunities. This Essay on the occasion of Harvard Law School’s bicentennial is a reflection on the present connections and contradictions between our inherited pedagogical traditions, the desires and needs of students in a diverse law school, and aspirations for law graduates in a changing world today.
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In 2015, Laura Kipnis, a film-studies professor at Northwestern University, published a polemic in The Chronicle of Higher Education titled “Sexual Paranoia Strikes Academe.” Kipnis argued that students’ sense of vulnerability on campus was expanding to an unwarranted degree, partly owing to new enforcement policies around Title IX, which prohibits sex discrimination at educational institutions that receive federal funds. The new Title IX policies on sexual misconduct which were then sweeping campuses perpetuated “myths and fantasies about power,” Kipnis wrote, which enlarged the invasive power of institutions while undermining the goal of educating students in critical thinking and resilience. “If you wanted to produce a pacified, cowering citizenry, this would be the method,” she concluded.
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An essay by Jeannie Suk Gersen. Over the summer, anticipation over what the Education Department might do about campus sexual assault heightened as the Education Secretary, Betsy DeVos, held high-profile meetings with groups advocating for the interests of universities, sexual-assault victims, and accused students—including one men’s-rights group accused of harassing women online. DeVos’s civil-rights head, Candace Jackson, alarmingly, told the Times that “90 percent” of campus accusations are over drunk or breakup sex. As the new school year began in earnest, widespread fears of a “rollback” of Title IX enforcement accompanied DeVos’s long-awaited policy speech, which was delivered on Thursday, at George Mason University.
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Four feminist law professors at Harvard Law School have called on the U.S. Department of Education to revise the previous Administration’s policies on sexual harassment and sexual assault on campus. In a memo submitted to the Education Department yesterday, they set out an agenda of fairness for all students, accusers and accused. In recent years the Education Department has pressured colleges and universities to adopt overbroad definitions of wrongdoing that are unfair to both men and women, and to set up procedures for handling complaints that are deeply skewed against the accused and also unfair to accusers. Janet Halley and Jeannie Suk Gersen, Elizabeth Bartholet, and Nancy Gertner are professors at Harvard Law School who have researched, taught, and written on Title IX, sexual harassment, sexual assault, and feminist legal reform. They were four of the signatories to the statement of twenty-eight Harvard Law School professors, published in the Boston Globe on October 15, 2014, that criticized Harvard University’s newly adopted sexual harassment policy as “overwhelmingly stacked against the accused” and “in no way required by Title IX law or regulation.” Janet Halley said “The college process needs legitimacy to fully address campus sexual assault. Now is the time to build in respect for fairness and due process, academic freedom, and sexual autonomy.” The professors submitted to the Education Department a memorandum entitled “Fairness for All Students under Title IX.”
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Since the nineties, the share of Asians in Harvard’s freshman class has remained stable, while the percentage of Asians in the U.S. population has more than doubled.
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