I’m humbled and honored to receive an award for Outstanding Contribution to Teaching Development from the University of Alabama Teaching Academy. I’m extraordinarily grateful for my time as a Faculty Fellow there over the past two years. I have learned a ton and met so many amazing teachers.

I’m humbled and honored to receive the Dean Thomas Christopher Award for service to Alabama Law School. It’s an incredible privilege to get to work with amazing students and colleagues.

Fiscally Restraining Criminal Lawmaking is under submission to law journals now. Please send it to your favorite journal editors. Or your least favorite😁. We examine how legislative process could make costs more salient in criminal law, hopefully prompting greater deliberation about benefits too.

My article Look What You Made Me Do is now published in Washington & Lee Law Review: papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers..... I argue that criminal process flattens the narrative of crime into one of solely individual actors making bad choices, and it coerces defendants into telling that story.

Definitely wish our law school offered state con law.

State Court Report@statecourtreport.org · last yr.

RESOURCE ALERT📌 Wish your law school offered a course in state constitutional law? State Court Report's @skess108.bsky.social put together this must-read compilation of our top explainers on how state courts and constitutions work. Consider it your “State Constitutions 101.”

Hot off the presses! In conjunction with @nacdl.org, I’ve written a report that examines criminal restitution in the federal system. The report debunks prevailing myths about restitution & presents recommendations for reform. www.nacdl.org/Document/Emp... 1/2

NACDL - Empty Pockets and Empty Promises: How Federal Restitution Law Fails Everyone

Criminal restitution is intended to have dual goals: victim compensation and offender punishment. The way criminal restitution operates in practice gives short shrift to compensating the average victi...

nacdl.org

Even *if* you accept Stephen Miller’s (textually, historically, and morally indefensible) claim that undocumented immigrants are not entitled to due process, you’d *still* need due process to ensure that the individuals at issue are, in fact, undocumented. His argument fails even on its own terms.

I posted a draft of Look What You Made Me Do to SSRN: papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers..... I argue that criminal procedure coerces defendants into embracing the narrative that their crime was solely their bad choice. That narrative obscures important systemic factors like trauma, addiction, and poverty.

I’m excited to report that Look What You Made Me Do is now forthcoming in Washington & Lee Law Review.

Via @annabjournalist.bsky.social: The Alabama House of Representatives Thursday gave final approval to a bill extending paid parental leave to all state and education employees staring July 1, sending the bill to Gov. Kay Ivey.

Gov. Kay Ivey says she will sign parental leave bill for state employees, educators • Alabama Reflector

The bill would give eight weeks of paid leave to a woman who gives birth or suffers a miscarriage, and two weeks to a father.

alabamareflector.com

A really interesting project that’s currently under submission, for the journal editors out there.

Sharon Brett@sharonbrett.bsky.social · 2y ago

Feels ridiculous to share this given its tangential relation to everything happening in the world, but my latest article, Standing in the Dark, is up on SSRN. papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

BTW, feel free to highlight this submission for your favorite law review editors. Or even your least favorite. It has been 2.5 weeks and no offers yet. Is this cycle moving slowly for others too?

Russell Gold@profrgold.bsky.social · 2y ago

Look What You Made Me Do is currently under submission to law journals. Here’s the abstract.

Look What You Made Me Do is currently under submission to law journals. Here’s the abstract.

Building a large langauge model trained on the Alabama Code is a great resource, but we ought to be careful to understand that it still won’t tell us everything about Alabama law. news.ua.edu/2024/11/arti...

Positioning UA for an AI Future

The University of Alabama is taking steps to ensure The University and its students are positioned at the forefront of the AI wave.

news.ua.edu

Re-reading Bostock on the eve of tomorrow's big trans healthcare case at SCOTUS, I think the law's defenders have their work cut out to explain why Gorsuch's reasoning there doesn't apply to TN's ban on puberty blockers & cross-sex hormones for trans youth. Three points...

I hope President Biden also uses his clemency power to aid those who also faced a criminal justice system unfairly stacked against them - but do not have the name recognition, connections or privilege of his son (or even of those two turkeys). theappeal.org/biden-commut...

U.S. Reps Urge Biden to Use Clemency to Correct “Extreme Use of Incarceration”

U.S. Congressmembers, including Ayanna Pressley, say Joe Biden should grand pardons and commutations before Donald Trump takes office.

theappeal.org

Thrilled to share that our client, Manuel Cucuta, was released yesterday after serving nearly three decades in prison. Just in time for his first Thanksgiving with family in 27 years. law.wisc.edu/newsletter/F...

Wisconsin Innocence Project Client Manuel Cucuta Released After 27 Years in Prison | University of Wisconsin Law SchoolSite iconsUniversity logo that links to main university websitefacebooktwitteryo...

law.wisc.edu

Do you know about social science that you think criminal defense attorneys should be incorporating into their arguments? Have you written a criminal defense motion incorporating social science? If so, please help us create a national network. Upload your studies and motions to datafordefenders.org

I’m growing a bit tired of hearing about the Republican “trifecta.” It overlooks Republican control of the federal courts and the Supreme Court in particular. “Quadfecta” seems clumsier but more apt.

Coverage of the really important law reform work my fantastic colleague Fred Vars has been doing. www.thetrace.org/2024/11/donn...

To Prevent Suicide, States Want to Let People Ban Themselves From Buying Guns

The suicide prevention measure is one of the few areas of gun policy where Republicans and Democrats can agree.

thetrace.org

I feel very fortunate that I got to work with Ted O. on a couple of very high-profile cases. This is also where I admit that I was quite junior and we had many layers of lawyers between us on those teams.

Anthony Michael Kreis@anthonymkreis.bsky.social · 2y ago

Sad news. Ted Olson dies at 84. www.washingtonpost.com/obituaries/2...

As crazy as it sounds to create a new agency to rein in agencies, if you had to pick one guy to destroy an organization, Musk was a sensible choice.

This is a disaster.

Mark Trachtenberg@marktrachtenberg.bsky.social · 2y ago

It is very disappointing that Biden apparently will leave 10 district court vacancies in the Fifth Circuit unfilled, and that doesn’t even include another vacancy about to be created by Judge Rosenthal’s imminent taking of senior status.

The Price of Criminal Law is my latest full-length article: papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers..... I argue that budget discipline provides a critically important constraint on criminal law and consider what democratically accountable budgeting would look like in criminal law.

The essay that Kay Levine and I wrote, Exoneration Finance, is now published: papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cf… in NYU Law Review Online. We explain how litigation finance can improve access to counsel for wrongful conviction proceedings.