Browsing by Subject "law"
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Item Digital Punishment: The Production and Consequences of Online Crime Reporting(2015-07) Lageson, SarahThis dissertation is a mixed methods study of the production, dissemination and effects of digital crime reporting, such as mug shot websites, crime blogs, Facebook crime watch pages, and Twitter crime update accounts. These websites post arrest records and booking photos before individuals are charged or convicted, but they remain online indefinitely. This dissertation asks big questions about data privacy, criminal justice and punishment through three qualitative studies: 1) the murky world of citizen journalism within the specific context of crime news; 2) the sociolegal framework of case law in this area and how social actors interpret this law, and; 3) the empirical effects of these records for those who appear on the websites, speaking to broader social, civic, and psychological consequences. At its core, this study argues that the internet has elevated crime and punishment to the center of daily life, routine activities, and American culture more than ever before. Within this framework, I make three concrete arguments: First, I argue that these websites operate as a new form of social control strategies by fostering a fear of crime and publicizing transgressions. Importantly, publishers are non-state actors who engage in a meaning-making process by focusing on crime and therefore feeling they have a direct impact on crime. Second, I argue that the ambiguity around the legality of these sites produces new forms of consciousness around our rights to public information and freedom of speech. Finally, I argue these sites constitute novel forms of punishment in the widespread nature of the reporting, in heightening the variety and levels of crimes publicly punishable, and by permanently archiving these punishment symbols in digital spaces. Empirically, I find digital criminal histories are characterized by their scope, breadth, availability, and permanence. These websites post arrest records, full names, and booking photos before individuals are charged with or convicted of a crime, yet they remain online indefinitely. These websites are often produced by amateurs who use crime as a method to address broader social issues. These sites appeal to consumers by providing access to real-time crime information allowing them to feel they have an active role in crime prevention without directly interacting with the criminal justice system. There are consequences to these practices, particularly in the spread of erroneous and dismissed records. While criminal history data changes rapidly at the jurisdictional level, there does not exist a system to ensure corresponding updates are made online. These crime websites thus constitute a new form of punishment: They culminate in a curated and searchable online history, which is often unknown to the website subject until they face consequences of these records. These records communicate powerful signals of guilt by attaching a criminal label to millions of arrestees, simultaneously introducing a host of social and psychological consequences.Item Digitizing Difference: Fraudulence, Gender Non-Conformity, and Data(2019-03) Mackenzie, LarsThis dissertation explores how fraudulence shapes contemporary trans life. It examines the impacts of software design, law, and policy on trans and gender non-conforming people, arguing that social expectations about the stability of sex, gender, and identity systematically devalue the lives of trans and gender non-conforming people with particularly harmful impacts in the financial and healthcare sectors. Further, it demonstrates that incongruent or gender non-conforming data wields significant and dangerous power in an era of data-driven decision-making and present alternative approaches towards challenging these paradigms.Item Governing Habitual Drunkards: Guardianship, Life Insurance, and the Medico-Legal History of Compulsive Drinking in Nineteenth-Century America(2021-10) Korostyshevsky, DavidDuring the nineteenth century, the habitual drunkard became a problematic kind of person who required medical and legal attention. Growing anxieties about compulsive drinking coalesced around the terminology of habitual drunkenness, a concept that captured the sense that alcohol caused compulsion. Religious temperance reformers, many of whom were physicians, defined habitual drunkenness as an artificial appetite, a physiological condition of habituation in which the drinker lost the physical capacity for control over drinking. Non-medical actors such as civil courts and life insurers also took up the quest to define, detect, and discipline the habitual drunkard. When intoxicated heads of households neglected their families and estates, civil courts placed them under guardianship, a legal status that recognized habitual drunkenness as a form of mental incapacity. Guardianship also abridged the habitual drunkard’s property and contract rights. In a parallel vein, life insurers sought to avoid insuring habitual drunkards through medical screening and the inclusion of temperance clauses into their policy contracts. Both courts and life insurers worked to apply generalized definitions of habitual drunkenness to specific individuals before them. In both contexts, a combination of public and private actors navigated a complex combination of scientific and medical knowledge about alcohol, religious temperance ideologies about drunkenness as sin, and changing legal doctrine regarding mental capacity as they governed and disciplined compulsive drinkers. In the adjudication of guardianship cases and in life insurers’ quest to exclude drinkers, non-medical actors established habitual drunkenness as a serviceable—albeit contested, inchoate, and often ambiguous—medico-legal category.Item The Law of Signatures(Peter Lang Publishing, Inc., 1992) Hancher, MichaelIn criticizing J. L. Austin's theory of speech acts, Jacques Derrida and Jonathan Culler have argued, in part, that Austin misunderstands how signatures function. They claim that he ignores the essentially formal and "iterable" structure of a signature -- a structure that betrays the absence of any subjective consciousness on the part of the signer. I argue that their concept of iterability does not fully apply to this case. Rather, legal practice in England and the United States countenances a wide range of variation for signatures, variation that is consistent with and legitimized by Austinian assumptions about personal agency. The fact that the legal situation is somewhat different in France may explain the structure of Derrida's argument.Item Parole Rules in the United States: Conditions of Parole in Historical Perspective, 1956-2020(2020-11-16) Wiggins, Benjamin A.; Rhine, Edward E.; Mitchell, Kelly L.; Crye, Bree; Tu, Robin L.; ; benwig@umn.edu; erhine3997@aol.com; crye0010@umn.edu; tu000011@umn.edu; mitch093@umn.edu; Wiggins, Benjamin A.; University of Minnesota University Libraries; University of Minnesota Department of History; University of Minnesota School of LawData set of six censuses of standard conditions of parole that have been conducted between 1956 and 2020.Item Trees and Minnesota Law: A Layperson's Guide(University of Minnesota Extension, 2008) Stromme, Lorrie