171 - 180 of 873 results for: LAW

Client: Rachel Louise Snyder, author of "No Visible Bruises" ( https://www.globalgrit.com/). The Stanford Criminal Justice Center at Stanford Law School is partnering with the award-winning journalist Rachel Louise Snyder on "The Regilla Project: Creating a National Census on Women Imprisoned for Killing their Abusers." The research studies the frequency with which women are imprisoned for killing their abusers. Spring 2022 research entails the following protocols: 1. Surveying women who are currently serving sentences at CCWF prison (in Chowchilla, CA) where relevant intimate partner violence was involved. 2. Analyzing and aggregating responses from returned surveys. 3. Researching how the cases of women currently incarcerated for murder and manslaughter were written about in the press, and whether intimate partner violence was included as a circumstance. 4. Undertaking qualitative research of formerly incarcerated survivors to document their reentry pathways, including challenges and successes. Collecting and making this data available will shed important light on the nature of the female correctional population, the largest growing segment of the U.S. prison population, and might guide policy discussions on charging, sentencing, prison programming, parole and reentry policies and decisions. The results may also inform laws regarding self-defense and other affirmative defenses, and strategies for addressing domestic violence. After the term begins, students accepted into the course can transfer from section (01) into section (02) which meets the R requirement, with consent of the instructor. Elements used in grading: Attendance, Performance, Class Participation, Written Assignments, Final Paper. CONSENT APPLICATION: To apply for this course, students must complete and submit a Consent Application Form available on the SLS website (Click Courses at the bottom of the homepage and then click Consent of Instructor Forms). See Consent Application Form for instructions and submission deadline.

Client: Stanford-MIT Healthy Elections Project (healthyelections.org). The administrative challenges local officials are confronting in the 2020 election are unprecedented in U.S. history. As the primary elections reveal, the COVID-19 pandemic threatens our democracy as much as it threatens public health. Jurisdictions around the country are scrambling to deal with massive shifts to mail balloting, polling place closures, and loss of poll workers. Students in this policy lab will investigate the measures state and local officials are taking to protect their elections from the effect of the pandemic. Students will research, write and/or update policy memos on election preparedness in battleground states, work with our partners to recruit poll workers to reduce the risk of polling place closures due to poll worker shortages, prepare materials for voter outreach and education, and help ensure polling place safety. After the election, students will assess the success of various aspects of the administration of the election, and, in the winter term, produce a detailed post-mortem group report. All students will produce team-based policy memos and internal presentations to be integrated into the final report. This policy lab will continue over two quarters with a small subset of students from the fall term selected to join the winter research team. The winter quarter will focus on finalizing the research and work product initiated in the fall term. Students from all disciplines are welcome to apply (including undergraduates). However, preference will be given to current team members of the Stanford-MIT Healthy Elections Project and those with experience in election law and policy. We especially welcome applications from students in the law, public policy, political science, and design disciplines, and from those with strong writing and editing skills. Students taking the course for R credit can take the course for either 2 or 3 units (Section 02), depending on paper length. The Fall term class meets remotely each week on Wednesdays, 4:15-6:15 p.m. Winter term TBD. Elements used in grading: Attendance, Performance, Class Participation, Written Assignments, Final Paper. CONSENT APPLICATION: To apply for this course, students must complete and submit a Consent Application Form available on the SLS website (Click Courses at the bottom of the homepage and then click Consent of Instructor Forms). See Consent Application Form for instructions and submission deadline. We are accepting applications on a rolling basis through 9/14, but recommend that students apply early.

The Stanford Criminal Justice Center and Stanford Center for Racial Justice at Stanford Law School are co-sponsoring this project to assess concrete ways to shift particular responsibilities from police departments to other agencies and organizations. We will explore whether there are policy possibilities lying at the intersection of the community policing movement - which advocated shifting police departments away from "chasing 911 calls" - and current calls to "defund" the police by shifting to other other agencies functions now performed by armed, uniformed officers. In particular, we will consider proposals to shift mental health response, school discipline, traffic enforcement, and homeless services away from armed, uniformed officers. What kinds of agencies should shoulder these responsibilities? How should the transfer be accomplished? We will also ask how these policy changes relate to, complement, or compete with other possible approaches to police reform and the transformation of public safety. Should such changes be part of an overall effort to shrink the footprint of police departments, to change the nature of what police departments do, or both? How, if at all, should changes in police budgets be used to drive reform? Elements used in grading: Attendance, Performance, Class Participation, Written Assignments, Final Paper. CONSENT APPLICATION: To apply for this course, students must complete and submit a Consent Application Form available on the SLS website (Click Courses at the bottom of the homepage and then click Consent of Instructor Forms). See Consent Application Form for instructions and submission deadline. This course will meet on Tuesdays from 2:00-4:00 pm.

Client: Stanford Law School. Deliverables: Resources for national DEI database for law schools, final summary report. Law schools, other professional schools, and institutions of higher education all around the country have been reevaluating their structure, mission, curricula, pedagogy, hiring and admissions practices, climate, and other elements of academic life with the goal of ascertaining how best to promote a more just, fair, inclusive, and diverse environment for learning. Students, staff, administrators, and faculty have created listservs and other informal platforms to share ideas and resources, but to date there has been no single research-based platform that gathers cutting edge and canonical work on the wide range of potentially relevant topics to guide and provide structure to the design of reforms or support advocacy on DE&I issues. Stanford Law School and the Robert Crown Library have launched a beta version of the first national clearinghouse to index research of this kind. This policy lab provides interested students an opportunity to expand the index, help develop and implement standards for curation, incorporate feedback from users, engage in policy discussions about iterative design, and develop frameworks for assessment of the project. The primary work plan involves deepening the available research on a number of topics including: 1L and advanced doctrinal pedagogy, critical race theory, other critical approaches to law, cultural competence and cultural humility in training for law and other service professions, professional judgment, assessments of DE&I training in the private and public sector, published templates for university DE&I reforms, principles of academic freedom, global innovations in DE&I theory, as well as interdisciplinary research on anti-racism, implicit bias and other forms of cognitive bias, viewpoint discrimination, micro-aggression, trauma, and stereotype threat. Students will work with Prof. Norman W. Spaulding and reference librarians at the law school. There may also be opportunity to work with students, staff, administrators, and faculty at other law schools and other university departments. Elements used in grading: Attendance, Performance, Class Participation, Written Assignments. CONSENT APPLICATION: To apply for this course, students must complete and submit a Consent Application Form available on the SLS website (Click Courses at the bottom of the homepage and then click Consent of Instructor Forms). See Consent Application Form for instructions and submission deadline.

Virtually every public policy has causes and consequences beyond those that are intended or immediately visible. This is true of criminal law policies that use algorithmic predictions of flight before trial; environmental policies involving greenhouse gas emissions and conventional pollutants; and social and health policies that address homelessness, institutional racism, and the distribution of Covid vaccines, to name just a few examples. The causes of the problems that these policies seek to address are complex. As a result, these policies often fail and sometimes have unintended adverse consequences. "Systems thinking" is a framework that describes the web of associations in which such policies reside, with the goals of understanding the multiple causes of problems and designing policies that lead to stable, positive changes. Understanding systems thinking and systems change is a core skill for policy makers. This course continues the work of a similar Policy Lab in spring 2021 in helping create an online course for use by future students that illustrates the main concepts of systems thinking (including stocks and flows, balancing and reinforcing loops, and systems archetypes) and systems change using real-world case studies. After several introductory classes devoted to learning these concepts and learning how to use the web-based systems mapping tool, Kumu, students will work on systems design projects for eventual inclusion in the online course. Grading is on the Mandatory P/R/F scale and takes into consideration attendance, participation, and collaboration; quality of the case studies and presentations. Although there is no bright line between two and three units, the number of units should reflect the amount of time you devote to the course. Relevant variables are: 1. The complexity of a case study and its attendant system diagrams, including how much research needs to go into developing it; 2. Whether, in addition to a case study, you develop a module dealing with a systems archetype. If you work with a partner, it's probably best if the two of you are taking the course for the same number of credits you are so that work is divided equitably. There are no prerequisites for enrollment in the Policy Lab, and students in any academic program with knowledge or strong interests in legal, environmental, social, and health policies are welcome. Elements used in grading: Attendance, Performance, Class Participation, Written Assignments, and Final Paper. CONSENT APPLICATION: To apply for this course, students must complete and submit a Consent Application Form available on the SLS website (Click Courses at the bottom of the homepage and then click Consent of Instructor Forms). See Consent Application Form for instructions and submission deadline.

Client: Lift Our Voices, https://www.liftourvoices.org/. In recent years, a large fraction of U.S. employers--including many leading law firms -- have required their employees to sign contracts containing mandatory arbitration clauses and "non-disclosure agreements" (NDAs). Available research suggests that more than 60 million American workers are bound by these arbitration clauses, which require employees who have any type of legal claim arising out of their work or workplace to waive their right to trial and resolve their claims, on an individual basis, in private arbitration. Traditionally, arbitration takes place behind closed doors, and the details of the employee's claim (and employer's response), any evidence presented to the arbitrators, the proceedings themselves and the ultimate outcome are confidential. Moreover, employees who are offered monetary settlements to resolve their arbitration claims -- or lawsuits, for those who were not compelled to arbitrate under a contractual provision -- are typically required to sign NDAs as a condition of receiving compensation. As a result of arbitration and NDAs, information about wrong-doing in the workplace -- even egregious wrong-doing -- never becomes public, arguably diminishing the ability of the legal system to deter harmful behavior. Moreover, with claims resolved individually, in private, and settlements protected by NDAs, it is impossible to detect a pattern of wrongful behavior and to hold wrongdoers to account in the public square. These consequences seem particularly problematic in claims arising from gender discrimination, particularly sexual harassment. Secrecy also prevents us from discovering whether women of color or low-income women of all colors are particularly disadvantaged by mandatory arbitration and NDAs. The expanding use of mandatory arbitration and NDAs in employment claims has evoked considerable controversy and legislation has been introduced at both the national and state level to prohibit the inclusion of these clauses in employment contracts. However, the legislation has yet to move forward on the national level and whether state statutes will withstand challenge is currently unclear. Moreover, there is little systematic evidence of the consequences of mandatory arbitration and NDAs, leaving both supporters and opponents to rely on anecdotes. There is little hard information on the numbers of employees covered by arbitration contracts or how this varies by industry sector and employee gender, race, ethnicity or socio-economic characteristics. Importantly we do not know how the existence of these contracts affects men and women's willingness to bring their claims to their employers' attention or how claiming varies by race, ethnicity or employee status. Nor do we know how pursuing claims for gender discrimination, including sexual harassment, affects claimants' future career trajectories. The Client for this policy lab, Lift Our Voices, was co-founded by women's rights advocates and broadcast journalists Gretchen Carlson and Julie Roginsky. Ms. Carlson's sexual harassment suit against powerful former Fox News chairman and CEO Roger Ailes helped pave the way for the #metoo movement. Roginsky left Fox after settling a lawsuit for sexual harassment and discrimination against Fox News, its former co-president Bill Shine and Ailes. To learn more about Lift Our Voices, go to https://www.liftourvoices.org/ The goal of this practicum is to produce objective empirical evidence -- both quantitative and qualitative -- that can be used in Life Our Voices and others' advocacy activities regarding mandatory arbitration and NDAs, including advocacy -- if the data support this -- that argues in favor of restricting or precluding mandatory arbitration and NDAs in some or all circumstances. In Spring 2021 students in this practicum met with Gretchen Carlson and Julie Roginsky to identify the questions for which empirical evidence would be most useful for policy reform advocacy. Based on these discussions and their review of relevant commentary, the students decided to break up into two teams, each of which would design a research project. Project 1 will interview plaintiff and defense lawyers to develop a better understanding of the incentives for victims of sexual harassment and sexual assault to sign non-disclosure agreements. Project 2 will interview corporate legal counsel in corporations (and potentially law firms) that have abandoned mandatory pre-dispute arbitration contract clauses to develop a better understanding of why these companies and firms abandoned arbitration and what have been the outcomes for the organizations to date. At the end of the spring quarter, each team prepared a memorandum outlining the issues that their team focused on and reviewing the relevant case law and recent statutory reforms. In addition, each team prepared a data collection protocol including draft questionnaires and lists of potential interviewees. The data collection protocols were informed by informal discussions with SLS faculty who are knowledgeable about these issues as well as a few outside advisers. The goals of the fall quarter are to implement these research designs, collect and analyze data and prepare white papers to share with the clients. Early in the quarter, students will meet with Mss. Carlson and Roginski to discuss policy developments since the spring and may revise the spring quarter students' research designs in response. The Canvas page for the fall practicum includes the memoranda and other materials the students produced in the spring quarter. Students interested in registering for the fall practicum should review these materials, keeping in mind that they are free to elaborate on them if they wish and if new policy developments suggest this would is appropriate. If a sufficient number of students register for the practicum one or more related projects may be added to our agenda. Elements used in grading: Attendance, Performance, Class Participation, Written Assignments. CONSENT APPLICATION: To apply for this course, students must complete and submit a Consent Application Form available on the SLS website (Click Courses at the bottom of the homepage and then click Consent of Instructor Forms). See Consent Application Form for instructions and submission deadline.

Clients: California Native American Tribes, prescribed burn associations, federal legislative and executive branch decision makers. Wildfire has emerged as one of the most pressing biodiversity, air pollution and public health threats in the Western United States. Advancing land stewardship at sufficient scale to substantially improve the resilience of western forests to fire is critical to reducing wildfire risks and air pollution exposure for the tens of millions that live downwind. Communities are under threat as never before from catastrophic wildfire. Electric utilities face enormous challenges even as they strive to decarbonize their systems. In short, solving for wildfire resilience is an enormous technical and regulatory challenge. In this course, students will learn the basics of the wildfire policy debate in the west with a focus on California. Lectures will focus on both scientific and legal aspects of the challenge. In addition, students will work in groups on legal and regulatory analysis aimed at supporting better decision making on wildfire at the state and federal level. Students will work in partnership with postdocs and legal fellows on their group projects and may have the opportunity to present the results of their work to both clients and policymakers. The course is intended for students interested in multi-disciplinary approaches to public policy problems. No background in either the Clean Air Act, federal land management or wildfire policy is required. Students will engage in weekly lectures and discussions of wildfire science and policy, including student presentations and guest lectures by scientists, practitioners and policymakers. Students will also meet each week with Professors Sivas and Wara, and other members of the teaching team, in working sessions to discuss progress on team projects. Students may present the results of their research to California legislative and executive branch staff engaged in developing new approaches to wildfire policy. Elements used in grading: Attendance, Performance, Class Participation, Written Assignments, Final Paper. Students enrolled in Section 02 (with instructor consent) will be required to meet the Law School's R paper requirements. CONSENT APPLICATION: To apply for this course, students must complete and submit a Consent Application Form. In answering the application questions, "what skills do you bring to this class" and "what skills do you want to develop," students should also answer the following questions: What is your program of study at Stanford? What experiences and interests do you have relating to smoke or wildfire (including those that might relate to public health, community resilience, insurance, and tribal approaches to wildfire management)? Have you taken other wildfire related coursework? What interests you about policy in this field? What topics relating to smoke and wildfire would you like to learn (more) about? What type of work would you like to be involved in (e.g., drafting white papers/policy briefs, technical or scientific reports, etc.)? Do you have any specific technical skills (Machine learning based methods, GIS, legal research) that may be applicable to project based work? The Consent Application Form can be found at: SLS Registrar https://registrar.law.stanford.edu/. See Consent Application Form for additional instructions and submission deadline. We will be accepting applicants past the registrar's deadline. All interested applicants can register on the course offerings webpage or e-mail the course instructors if the deadline has passed. This course is cross-listed with the Doerr School of Sustainability ( SUSTAIN 329).

Client: Stanford University Office of the Provost, https://provost.stanford.edu. From the increasingly tense dynamics of the classroom and workplace to those of social media, our values and relationships are constantly being challenged. The array of conflict resolution policies, practices, and systems on Stanford's campus support our community in reestablishing guiding principles and addressing instances of harm and intolerance. Such processes are an act of community caretaking as we build healthier environments for our students, staff, and faculty. While these processes are critical to the wellbeing of Stanford, the structure and decentralization of the University often makes it difficult for conflict resolution practitioners to effectively communicate across campus, guide community members to the appropriate process, identify where services are being replicated or missing, compare data, and share best practices. On the other hand, this type of decentralization and subsequent independence provides practitioners an opportunity to creatively design meaningful processes for those they serve. This policy lab seeks to evaluate the benefits and possibilities of increased partnership between Stanford's conflict resolution practitioners/processes. It takes into consideration the multiple policies, practices, and systems across Stanford's campus and explores the study and application of dispute system design, mediation, and community-based restorative justice and peacemaking. Over the course of the quarter, students will analyze related policy and theory as well as conduct interviews, focus groups, and surveys of relevant parties at Stanford and peer institutions. Students will be challenged to think critically about innovative pathways for conflict resolution in a complex environment with multiple groups of stakeholders whose day-to-day lives, education, and careers are influenced by these conflict resolution processes. Specifically, students will be separated into teams and asked to generate reports which answer the following questions: 1. Would greater unification across Stanford's conflict resolution policies, practices, and systems be useful in building more consistent and effective processes? How do these benefits weigh against those derived from our current, independent conflict resolution processes? 2. Should data on conflict resolution at Stanford be collected in a more uniform way across the university? If so, what information must be collected and how should relevant parties then share this data across campus? 3. How do the structure and data collection mechanisms of Stanford's conflict resolution processes compare to peer institutions? What lessons can we learn from these peer institutions and what would be useful to implement at Stanford? Stanford's Office of the Provost serves as the client for this policy lab. Students will frequently engage with conflict resolution practitioners across the University and at peer institutions to develop their final reports. These recommendations will be presented by students to the client at the end of the quarter and then considered by the Office of the Provost for future implementation at the University. This policy lab seeks law students and graduate and well-qualified undergraduate students in programs such as sociology, CSRE, political science, psychology, philosophy, and others. The lab seeks graduate students from the law, education, and business schools, and from Sociology and other fields that emphasize peace studies and/or conflict resolution. After the term begins, students accepted into the course can transfer, with consent of the instructor, from section (01) into section (02), which meets the R requirement Students enrolled in Section 01 will be graded H/P/R/F in Autumn Quater and MP/R/F in Spring Quarter. Students approved to take the course for R-credit will be graded H/P/R/F. Elements used in grading: Attendance, Performance, Class Participation, Written Assignments, Final Paper. CONSENT APPLICATION: To apply for this course, students must complete and submit a Consent Application Form available on the SLS website (Click Courses at the bottom of the homepage and then click Consent of Instructor Forms). See Consent Application Form for instructions and submission deadline.

Client: DrawCongress.org. The 2021-22 redistricting cycle will determine for the subsequent decade whether congressional and legislative elections will be free and fair or whether they will be inherently biased in favor of one party. With remaining ambiguity over federal partisan gerrymandering claims removed with the Supreme Court's decision in Rucho v. Common Cause (2019), parties in control of the redistricting process will seek now, as previously, to use their power to craft district lines to their advantage. Lawyers will continue to litigate claims based on race discrimination, malapportionment, and state constitutional grounds, and courts may be placed in the position of drawing districts themselves when parties cannot agree on a plan. However, we know from previous cycles that the most important time to affect the redistricting process is in the frenzied year when lines are being drawn. Groups dedicated to redistricting in the public interest must be mobilized now to ensure that congressional and legislative boundaries reflect concerns other than those held by the incumbents drawing the lines. The Stanford Public Interest Redistricting Project (or DrawCongress.Org) will perform a unique role in the 2021-2022 redistricting process. It will both influence the redistricting process in various states and serve as a benchmark against which incumbent-drawn plans can be judged by courts, the media, and the public at large. By creating and displaying a series of nonpartisan, legally defensible plans for all 435 U.S. House districts, the project will illustrate how communities can be represented and, unlike with incumbent-drawn plans, will justify decisions made among the various tradeoffs that inevitably confront line drawers. As with the 2011-2012 redistricting cycle when this project was housed at Columbia Law School, DrawCongress.Org will serve an educational and advocacy mission. This policy lab trains law students as the next generation of redistricting experts who will then draw a series of plans to be placed on a website. Each plan will be accompanied by a report, modeled on Professor Persily's reports when he serves as a Special Master for redistricting disputes, which will explain the considerations in drawing the particular plan, justify the decisions that are made, and explain why the plan complies with applicable law. Accompanying each plan will be a block equivalency file, which will allow courts, legislators, journalists, or any other interested party to recreate the plan should they wish to deploy it in "the real world." In addition, for the first time, the website will also welcome submissions from outside of Stanford if they comply with the requirements for each plan that is included. The experience with this project ten years ago demonstrated how much attention a well-planned, nonpartisan outside redistricting effort can attract. Plans drawn as part of this project were submitted to legislatures, mentioned by courts, and depicted in numerous publications. (See Adam Liptak's 2011 profile on the project at https://tinyurl.com/y8yon5u5) In drawing a nonpartisan map for all of Congress, this new effort will command attention from decision makers engaged in the 2021 redistricting process. Attendance, Performance, Class Participation, Written Assignments, Final Paper. CONSENT APPLICATION: To apply for this course, students must complete and submit a Consent Application Form available at https://law.stanford.edu/education/courses/consent-of-instructor-forms/. See Consent Application Form for instructions and submission deadline.