Violence risk assessment routinely takes place in criminal sentencing, in the civil commitment of people with mental disorder, and in the commitment of sexually violent predators. In the past, courts rarely have had to confront the legitimacy of using specific risk factors for violence, because actuarial instruments with scientific validity at assessing violence risk did not exist. Now they do. Among the empirically valid risk factors risk factors that are candidates for inclusion on these instruments are those that pertain to what the person is (age, gender, race/ethnicity, and personality), what the person has (major mental disorder, personality disorder, and substance abuse disorder), what the person has done (prior crime and violence), and what has been done to the person (being raised in a pathological family environment and being physically victimized). This Article argues that in criminal law, with its emphasis on blameworthiness for actions taken, the use of scientifically valid risk factors is properly constrained to those that simultaneously index blameworthiness, i.e., to the defendant’s prior criminal conduct. In law authorizing the involuntary civil hospitalization of people with mental disorder—a legal determination in which blameworthiness plays no part—the use of violence risk factors should be unconstrained, except for the use of classifications subject to strict Equal Protection scrutiny, which here is limited to the individual’s race or ethnicity. Finally, if commitment as a sexually violent predator is properly categorized as civil commitment, the use of violence risk factors in implementing such commitments should parallel the use of violence risk factors in traditional civil commitment. Disagreement with the substantive merits of sexually violent predator statutes does not justify depriving those statutes of the only kind of evidence—empirically-validated actuarial violence risk assessment—that can effectuate their controversial goals.
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Chevron Step Zero
The most famous case in administrative law, Chevron U.S.A. v. Natural Resources Defense Council, Inc., has come to be seen as a counter-Marbury, or even a McCulloch v. Maryland, for the administrative state. But in the last period, new debates have broken out over Chevron Step Zero — the initial inquiry into whether Chevron applies at all. These debates are the contemporary location of a longstanding dispute between Justice Scalia and Justice Breyer over whether Chevron is a revolutionary decision, establishing an across-the-board rule, or instead a mere synthesis of preexisting law, inviting a case-by-case inquiry into congressional instructions on the deference question. In the last decade, Justice Breyer’s case-by-case view has enjoyed significant victories. Two trilogies of cases — one explicitly directed to the Step Zero question, another implicitly so directed — suggest that the Chevron framework may not apply (a) to agency decisions not preceded by formal procedures and (b) to agency decisions that involve large-scale questions about agency authority. Both of these trilogies threaten to unsettle the Chevron framework, and to do so in a way that produces unnecessary complexity for judicial review and damaging results for regulatory law. These problems can be reduced through two steps. First, courts should adopt a broader understanding of Chevron’s scope. Second, courts should acknowledge that the argument for Chevron deference is strengthened, not weakened, when major questions of statutory structure are involved.
Predictive Decisionmaking
In this Article, Professor Abramowicz identifies a regulatory strategy that he calls “predictive decisionmaking” and provides a framework for assessing it. In a predictive decisionmaking regime, public or private decisionmakers make explicit predictions, often of future legal decisions, rather than engage in normative analysis. Several scholars, particularly in recent years, have offered proposals that fit within the predictive decisionmaking paradigm, but have not noted the connection among these proposals. The Article highlights four different mechanisms on which predictive decisionmaking regimes may rely, including predictive standards, accuracy incentives, partial insurance requirements, and information markets. After identifying several advantages that predictive decisionmaking strategies may have over nonpredictive alternatives, the Article identifies several potential problems with predictive decisionmaking, and develops a simple analytical framework for assessing predictive decisionmaking proposals.