Legal briefs

Crime

The Washington, D.C. Sentencing Commission released a report recently that explains why there were over a thousand carjackings in D.C. last year, two-thirds of which were armed. The report found that 79% of adults arrested with illegal guns in D.C. walk away without a felony conviction. In 2023, the D.C. U.S. Attorney’s office declined to prosecute 33% of the arrests for felony gun possession. Of the remaining 77% of arrests that were charged, 37% of those were later dismissed. Over half of the few remaining cases were pled down to misdemeanors. Thus, only 21% of armed felony arrests resulted in a felony conviction. Not good enough.   

More crime

This week, the board student editors for the Columbia Law Review wrote a letter to the law school administrators requesting that final exams be cancelled and that all students receive passing grades. This is necessary, they say, because the “violence” they have witnessed on campus has left them “irrevocably shaken” and “unable to focus and highly emotional.” What violence, you ask? In the last couple of weeks, pro-Palestine protestors formed an encampment on campus, targeted Jewish students, and eventually took over and occupied a campus building. Campus administrators took a sympathetic approach to the protestors’ cause, which allowed the situation to escalate. This is not the violence that has so terribly disturbed the law students, however. No, the “violence” they are talking about is the “police clad in riot gear” who were, eventually, called in to get control of the situation. It seems that these future lawyers become so distraught over the sight of criminals being arrested that they cannot perform basic legal reading and writing afterward. What are they going to do when they enter the real world?      

Still more crime

Also this week, thirteen federal judges wrote Columbia Law School advising that they will no longer accept law clerks from the school. The Judges write that, “since the October 7 terrorist attacks by Hamas, Columbia University has become ground zero for the explosion of student disruptions, antisemitism, and hatred for diverse viewpoints on campuses across the nation.” They go on to say that they, “have lost confidence in Columbia as an institution of higher education,” and “we will not hire anyone who joins the Columbia University community.”

Other

In 1998, researchers from Princeton University started something called the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study. As part of the study, they interviewed and collected data on the families of 5,000 children from large cities born between 1998 and 2000. They intentionally overrepresented children born to single mothers in the sample by a margin of three to one. After amassing the original sample, researchers re-interviewed the subjects when the children were age 1, 3, 5, 9, 15 and 22.

None of the data were made public.

Then, in 2017, the researchers created a competition called The Fragile Families Challenge and invited social scientists from across the world to have access to the data collected in the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study. The social scientists were given access to all the data on the families from the child’s birth through age nine. They were denied access to the age fifteen data. They were then asked to develop analytical models that would crunch the ages zero to nine data to predict what the age fifteen data said about the children. There were six domains created. Based on the available information from birth to age nine, could the scientists predict the following at age fifteen: grade-point average of the child; a measure of the child’s grit; whether the household had experienced eviction; the material hardship of the household; whether the primary caregiver had lost a job; and whether the primary caregiver had participated in a job training program.

It turns out that despite having access to vast amounts of data, and using the most sophisticated machine-learning algorithms, the scientists’ predictions were largely no better than chance. Life is just too complicated. And, as the great philosopher, Yogi Berra, once said, “predictions are difficult to make, especially about the future.”

Thank you, Judex readers. Please share and encourage your friends to subscribe!