Behavioral ethics, the study of how and why people make ethical and unethical decisions, has come into its own. Following a meteoric rise over the last decade, the discipline has grown to occupy a distinct space within business ethics. What sets it apart is a focus not on the normative question of how individuals should act when facing ethical business quandaries ”the province of moral…

Lying somewhere in the murky waters of constitutionality, the independent government agency has risen in the last century to be a favored tool of Congress to address complex policy issues. For instance, following the 2008 financial crisis, the Dodd-Frank Act established the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), an independent government agency that centralized oversight of…

The following (fictional) opinion of the (fictional) Zootopia Supreme Court of the (fictional) State of Zootopia is designed to highlight one particularly interesting issue raised by Solon Barocas and Andrew Selbst in Big Data’s Disparate Impact. Their article discusses many ways in which data-intensive algorithmic methods can go wrong when they are used to make employment and other sensitive…

Do voters have a First Amendment right to take ballot selfies? In the 2016 presidential election, it was illegal in eighteen states for voters to take photos with their completed ballots. Some of these laws are over 100 years old. In this post, I consider the state of the law regarding prohibitions on ballot selfies and how the Supreme Court might evaluate pending challenges to them…

In his first months in office, President Donald Trump has used executive action in a multitude of policy areas. He instituted a ban on entry into the United States from seven Muslim-majority countries for ninety days, elevated his chief political strategist to the National Security Council, and fast-tracked the construction of the Keystone XL Pipeline. Although President Trump’s pace of…