By Evan K. Rose

This paper uses administrative employment and conviction data to evaluate laws that restrict access to job seekers’ criminal records. Convictions generate decreases in employment and earnings, partly due to shifts toward lower-paying industries less likely to check criminal histories. However, a 2013 Seattle law barring employers from examining job seekers’ records until after an initial screening had negligible impacts on ex-offenders labor market outcomes. The results are consistent with employers deferring background checks until later in the interview process or ex-offenders applying only to jobs where clean records are not required, a pattern supported by survey evidence.

Journal of Labor Economics, 2021

By Robert J. Spitzer

Since the Supreme Court’s ruling in 2022 that recast the basis for judging the constitutionality of contemporary gun laws according to the existence of historical analogs, all manner of laws have been subject to court challenge, including those that restrict gun access to those under the age of twenty-one. To date, federal courts have split on this question. Given this new, history-based standard for judging the constitutionality of current weapons laws, this article examines the historical record pertaining to how the age of majority was defined in our past and how that pertains to the history of laws that restricted minors’ access to firearms and other weapons. This article offers the most extensive assessment of state laws and local ordinances from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to be found to date. In addition, it includes a new and extensive excavation of a wide range of college and university codes in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that limited or barred students from having weapons from that time period, the nature and extent to which has not been identified or reported before. All of this information supports the conclusion that the broadly accepted age of majority during this time period was twenty-one.

Rutgers Law Review, Vol. 76, 2024

By Tom R. Tyler

My scholarly career has centered around articulating and testing a model of legitimacy-based law and governance. In recent decades, that model has achieved considerable success in shaping the way legal authority is understood and exercised. At the same time the legitimacy of legal, political, and social institutions and authorities has declined, raising questions about the future viability of a legitimacy-based model. In this review, I discuss the ascension and potential decline of legitimacy-based governance and outline alternative models of authority that may emerge in the twenty-first century. Three issues are addressed: whether there are ways to reinvigorate legitimacy-based law and governance; whether social norms, moral values, or ideologies are viable alternative forms of authority; and whether it is better to accept that no single form of authority works best in all situations and theories should focus on identifying the contingencies under which different forms of authority are most desirable.

Annu. Rev. Law Soc. Sci. 2023. 19:1–17

By Kate Weisburd

In virtually all areas of law, the home is the ultimate constitutionally protected area, at least in theory. In practice, a range of modern institutions that target private life—from public housing to child welfare—have turned the home into a routinely surveilled space. Indeed, for the 4.5 million people on criminal court supervision, their home is their prison, or what I call a “carceral home.” Often in the name of decarceration, prison walls are replaced with restrictive rules that govern every aspect of private life and invasive surveillance technology that continuously records intimate information. While prisons have always been treated in the law as sites of punishment and diminished privacy, homes have not. Yet in the carceral home people have little privacy in the place where they presumptively should have the most. If progressive state interventions are to continue, some amount of home surveillance is surely inevitable. But these trends raise a critical, underexplored question: When the home is carceral, what is, or should be, left of the home as a protected area? This Article addresses that question. Descriptively, it draws on a fifty-state analysis of court supervision rules to reveal the extent of targeted invasions of intimate life in the name of rehabilitation or an alternative to prison, rendering the home a highly surveilled space. Normatively, it argues that allowing this state of affairs with no corresponding adaptations in legal doctrine is untenable. With the home no longer sacred and no limiting principle to take its place, millions of people are left with no meaningful protection from government surveillance, even (or especially) in their home. Left unchecked, the carceral home further entrenches the precise racial, economic, disability, and gender inequities that often inspire reform efforts. Instead, as this Article recommends, privacy and security must be recognized as positive entitlements separate from physical homes

103 B.U. L. Rev. 1879 (2023