William & Mary Bill of Rights Journal, Volume 30

The Bill of Rights Journal’s newest issue is here! The table of contents is below. Read all of this issue’s articles and notes. All content is also available at Hein, Lexis, EBSCO, Westlaw, and the W&M Repository.

The BORJ 2021 Symposium explores how AI systems, and the algorithms that create them, come into conflict with the concepts of civil rights, both in the U.S. and abroad.

The Symposium kicks off with four pre-recorded podcasts: Cybersecurity as a Proxy for National Defense, Regulation of AI to Protect Citizens’ Rights, Algorithms & Free Speech, and Facial Recognition. You can listen to these in-depth conversations on your own.

We invite you to participate in the live Q&A session held on March 6 from 10:30 a.m. – 12:30 p.m. (EST). You will have the opportunity to ask your questions directly to speakers and participate in a larger conversation about algorithms and the Bill of Rights.

Register for the live Q&A > 

• “Looking at the interplay between courts and politicians through the lens of social psychology, as Roznai has done, can fuel our imagination regarding the toolkit that the former might use when coming up against undue pressure.” Maartje De Visser, Prevention is Better than Cure: Rethinking Court Behavior & Design
• “[C]ourts can engage in principled decision-making while also utilizing elements of judicial strategy. The problem of Roznai’s anti-bully theory is that he focuses on the moment of the final confrontation. However, similar to democratic erosion, the court response can also be an incremental process.” Šimon Drugda, Who will Help Judges Save the Redheads?
• “When Yaniv Roznai recommends courts that are being bullied to go on with ‘business as usual,’ he gives good advice to the judges. Inaction, being frozen by the look of the snake only shows the bully that the pressure works. Court presidents can speak out when there is a direct threat, but defensive overreaction can too easily be denounced as a political move.” Schnutz Rudolf Dürr, Who will save the Redheads? a reply to Yaniv Roznai’s Anti-Bully Theory
• “Yaniv Roznai’s contributions to the debates on formal constitutional change and judicial review of amendments are undeniable. . . . Who will Save the Redheads? constitutes a new stage in his scholarly interest on the matter, and this time, the perspective taken is closer to that of judicial politics and the literature on courts and democratization rather than of constitutional theory. . . . Roznai’s article is a useful addition to the literature engaging with a strategic perspective on what courts can do to enforce relevant democratic principles in scenarios of authoritarian, hybrid regimes or political systems that are experiencing an authoritarian turn or a sort of democratic decay.” Sergio Verdugo & Vicente F. Benítez-R., One Size Does Not Fit All Courts: A Commentary on “Who will Save the Redheads? Towards an Anti-Bully Theory of Judicial Review and Protection of Democracy”

Named among the leading student-edited constitutional law journals by Washington and Lee’s law library, the William & Mary Bill of Rights Journal is published in four issues per annual volume, adding almost 1,400 pages to the Institute’s scholarly corpus each year. Containing both student-edited professional articles and student-written notes, staff membership is open to all interested students, but the competition for admission is intense.

Each year, as the Institute sponsors symposia on topics of contemporary constitutional significance, leading scholars from around the nation assemble at the School of Law to present papers and debate their merits. Subsequently, these papers are published in the Journal, making these symposia one of the most significant academic forums for the publication of scholarship on the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.