Bellow Scholars Program Report on Projects

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Session Type: AALS Programs

Session Capacity: N/A

Location: Marriott St. Louis Grand

Room: Majestic B

Floor: Second Floor, Conference Plaza

This session featuring the 2023-24 Bellow Scholars will use their current research projects to explore different empirical methodologies suited for research by clinical legal educators. It is intended to be useful for any clinicians conducting or considering empirical research projects.

The Bellow Scholars Program recognizes and supports empirical research projects designed to improve the quality of justice in communities, enhance the delivery of legal services, and promote economic and social justice. The Program supports projects that use empirical analysis as an advocacy tool and involve substantial collaboration between law and other academic disciplines.

Moderators: Nermeen Arastu, City University of New York School of Law, and Alina Ball, University of California College of the Law, San Francisco

Edward W. De Barbieri, Albany Law School
Lawmakers and Economic Othering

This project advances the novel argument that the sources of capital influence where Opportunity Zone investment companies locate. It gathers empirical evidence about the types of Opportunity Zone investors, their location, and draws possible inferences/conclusions about resident outcomes based on the data gathered. Professor De Barbieri’s research seeks to establish that excluding companies with a specific social mission, which are more likely to locate in designated zones regardless of their source of capital, companies raising funds from outside investors are more likely to be located outside of designated zones. By contrast, companies using their own funds—wealthy families, corporations, and others—tend to locate in Opportunity Zones at greater rates. This finding may have implications for the types of construction projects invested in, whether local residents are engaged in the project selection process, and whether the lives of Opportunity Zone residents improve following project completion. Thus, in enacting reforms, Congress ought to consider the source of capital in ensuring investments have the greatest benefit for Opportunity Zone residents.

Neha Lall, University of Baltimore School of Law
Working for Pay, or Paying for Work?

Since the ABA lifted the prohibition on paid externships in 2016, an increasing number of law schools have begun allowing students to receive compensation for externship placements. Yet the legal academy remains divided on the issue. While law schools increasingly recognize the need to create an equitable and accessible learning environment for today’s financially-strapped law students, they remain concerned about whether the pedagogical value of field placement courses can be maintained when students are being paid. This project will study University of Baltimore School of Law’s externship program, which began allowing paid externships in the Fall of 2022 after an extensive deliberative process. Professor Lall analyzes, from a student perspective, how students are factoring pay into their externship placement decision-making process, which students are benefiting from pay, and how those benefits have affected the quality of their overall educational experience. This data will advance national conversations about paid externships in legal education beyond mere speculation, and can be instructive to employers re-examining their policies on paying student interns.

Aaron Littman, University of California, Los Angeles School of Law
If You Build It

This project will evaluate sheriffs’ and their deputies’ decision-making at the intersection of their law enforcement and detention operations. Using recent data about the stop, search, and arrest practices of sheriffs’ offices in several states, as well as data about jail crowding levels, bedspace contracting rates, and deputy staffing allocations for each county in these jurisdictions, Professor Littman analyzes whether sheriffs’ deputies become more aggressive on the street when there are empty beds in their jails and do so less when their overfilled jails are sending detainees elsewhere at great expense. The project explores the contours of the relationship between sheriffs’ jailing and policing functions, addressing the questions: how do patrol dispatchers become aware of booking levels at the jail; how do the relative statuses of detention and patrol assignments affect how many and which deputies are assigned to each, and what they are paid; and what distinctions are drawn in use-of-force standards and training between these two contexts?

Maneka Sinha, University of Maryland, Francis King Carey School of Law
Challenging Automated Suspicion

This project explores whether courts meaningfully address the reliability of policing technologies in Fourth Amendment reasonable suspicion and probable cause determinations. The Supreme Court has consistently pronounced that the information provided to or observed by law enforcement to justify a search or seizure must be reliable. Increasingly, police rely on technology to determine whether crimes are occurring and who is responsible for them. Through an analysis of hundreds of state and federal opinions, Professor Sinha aims to determine what approaches, if any, courts take to address the reliability of policing technologies in assessing the legality of searches and seizures; how frequently courts decline to address the reliability of policing technologies in such assessments; whether courts’ approaches to addressing policing technology reliability comply with the Fourth Amendment; and whether courts’ approaches are well tailored to meaningfully assess the reliability of the methodologies in question.

Madalyn Wasilczuk, University of South Carolina School of Law
The New Red Record

This project seeks to understand where, why, and how people die behind bars in South Carolina, as well as the policies and procedures that might be implicated by in-custody deaths. As prison scholar Sharon Dolovich has written, we rarely think about those behind bars, instead “mark[ing incarcerated individuals] out for erasure from the public consciousness.” This project disrupts the opacity of prisons that creates and sustains a permanent underclass in American society by highlighting the need for more information on deaths in custody. Building on Professor Wasilczuk’s January 2023 report documenting 777 deaths in custody in South Carolina from 2015-2021, this project examines gaps in South Carolina FOIA law that shield deaths and their causes from public view, explores alternative avenues for obtaining death records, and offers mechanisms to protect the lives of incarcerated people.