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An economist  from MIT reports that robots are replacing middle class jobs.

In his report, Autor says that a leading explanation for the disappearance of the middle class is “ongoing automation and off-shoring of middle-skilled ‘routine’ tasks that were formerly performed primarily by workers with moderate education (a high school diploma but less than a four-year college degree).” Routine tasks, he explains, are ones that “can be carried out successfully by either a computer executing a program or, alternatively, by a comparatively less-educated worker in a developing country.”

The culprit, in other words, is technology. The hard truth—and you don’t see it addressed in news reports—is that the middle class is disappearing in large part because technology is rendering middle-class skills obsolete.

Ludditism FTW! So I suppose we should start destroying robots to lower unemployment?

Unsurprisingly, this article decays into a praise of Marxism.

If this polarization continues, a whole cohort of people who expected to be middle class—or at least financially stable—might find themselves living a very different reality. Then they might start asking questions about why they are in that position. If it gets increasingly hard to pretend that the average liberal-arts degree prepares a student for a decent job, there may be broader support for a sober assessment of our education system, and the reforms it needs. If the skills and talents that are truly financially rewarding become harder and harder to acquire, people who would never consider themselves students of Marx might start questioning whether, given the circumstances, it still makes sense to pay people based solely on the demand for their skills in a marketplace that would be demanding very few skills.

If market forces and increased automation leave the average person without any prospects for a decent job, we may have the chance—or perhaps even the moral obligation—to recast the opportunity to do meaningful work not merely as a privilege, but as something everyone deserves.

Right. People should be paid based on what they deserve, not based on the demand of what they can produce. They terk er jerbs!!!!

New Jersey Judge told he can’t moonlight as a stand up comedian. The Judge has appealed this decision to NJ Supreme Court. So we’ve got a Situation.

And why can’t he moonlight? This should be a Jersey thing.

The Harlan Institute launched FantasySCOTUS.org about two weeks ago. We have nearly 50 classes across the country signed up, and hundreds of kids playing the game. One of the coolest features of FantasySCOTUS is the class blogs. In addition to making predictions, students are asked to prepare analytical responses to a series of questions we posed in our lesson plans about each case. Here are two such great posts on Snyder v. Phelps (see here and here). I am seriously kvelling.

When we started this project, we had the simple, yet ambitious goal to teach students about the Supreme Court and raise awareness about the Constitution. Reading these blog posts makes it all worth it. I am so happy to be part of such a wonderful program, and I can’t wait to help spread the message. Please check out our web site, and consider making a donation, however small. We offer all of our services to students at no cost, and are funded solely by private donations. Many thanks.

I have often wondered when this standard arose, and whether it was constitutionally required. Professor Jonakait posts an interesting article to SSRN titled Finding the Original Meaning of American Criminal Procedure Rights: Lessons from Reasonable Doubt’s Development that addresses this an other questions. First, here is the abstract:

Lessons can be learned about finding the original meaning of American criminal procedure rights by an examination of the development of the reasonable doubt standard. This is for a number of reasons. First, the status of the reasonable doubt standard seems secure. No debate questions the constitutional requirement that an accused can only be convicted if the crime is proven beyond a reasonable doubt. The standard’s original meaning can be explored uncolored by the partisanship often engendered when present seekers of original meaning hope to define a new contour to a constitutional guarantee. Furthermore, serious scholars have studied the reasonable doubt standard’s early development and its original meaning, purposes, and intent.

An examination of those scholarly sources, methods, and conclusions provides a number of valuable insights that should affect the search for finding the original meaning of other American criminal procedure guarantees. These are first that the seeker of original meaning of evolved criminal procedure rights has to go beyond traditional legal sources and explore the broader epistemological developments in religion, philosophy, and science that affected the development of the right. Second, conclusions about original meaning drawn primarily from English and other European sources can be misleading without a consideration of American developments. What might seem like a sound conclusion when English sources are examined may look suspect when viewed in the light of American developments. Finally, the reasonable doubt scholarship reveals that definitive conclusions about the original meaning of American constitutional rights will often be impossible to find both because the necessary American record is absent and because evolved rights never really had a definitive original meaning.

To the reasonable doubt standard, the article has an interesting footnote sketching its pedigree as recounted by several Supreme Court cases:

(“The requirement that guilt of a criminal charge be established by proof beyond a reasonable doubt dates at least from our early years as a Nation.”) See also Apodaca v. Oregon, 406 U.S. 404, 411 (1972), where Justice White, writing for the plurality stated, “As the Court noted in the Winship case, the rule requiring proof of crime beyond a reasonable doubt did  not crystallize in this country until after the Constitution was adopted.” White continued that scholars had concluded that “the requirement of proof beyond a reasonable doubt first crystallized in the case of Rex v. Finny, a high treason case tried in Dublin in 1798. . . . Confusion about the rule persisted in the United States in the early 19th century . . . ; it was only in the latter half of the century . . . that American courts American courts began applying it in its modern form in criminal cases.” Id. at 412 n. 6. See also Victor v. Nebraska, 511 U.S. 1, 8 (the 1850 formulation of the standard by Massachusetts Chief Justice Shaw in Commonwealth v. Webster, 59 Mass. 295, 320 (1850) “is representative of the time” when American courts began applying the standard in its modern form.)

Additionally, I did not realize this, but the article argues that the reasonable doubt standard actually made convictions easier, as the predecessor standard inquired whether a jury had any doubt (whether reasonable or not).

The eighteenth century produced no uniform instruction about the burden of persuasion, but most frequently, Morano maintained, judges stated that jurors should acquit “if they had any doubt of the accused’s guilt.”14 This was not a new standard but only “crystallized the standard of persuasion that had been applied in English criminal trials for centuries.”15 And this burden, he stressed, “did not require that a doubt be ‘reasonable’ or ‘rational’ to be a sufficient basis for an acquittal.”16

The first known legal use of the reasonable doubt standard was at the trial following the Boston Massacre! Because it was developed in the United States, the author argues, perhaps we should be looking to American, rather than British thought to help define this concept from an originalist perspective.

The available historical record, however, does find that the first use of the reasonable doubt standard was in the 1770 Boston trial. This has great importance in considering the origins of the rule. It means that we cannot presuppose that America simply inherited the standard from English law.27 We have to consider the possibility that it developed in America before it did in England; indeed, the available historical record indicates precisely that. Consequently, we cannot assume that if we understand the origins of the English standard, we truly understand the original meanings and purposes of the American one. It is, of course, possible that similar currents in both places produced the standard in each. If so, understanding the development of the English standard aids in understanding the American development, but certainly, assertions about the birth of the English reasonable doubt standard should also be examined under an American light to test their likely validity for understanding the American origins of the rule. And such an examination reveals that some claims about reasonable doubt’s development look dubious when American conditions and developments are considered.

This is not really an article about originalism, and doesn’t really offer a single view of what the reasonable doubt standard meant, or should mean. Rather, it traces an interesting history of how early Americans viewed this proof.

Last month I noted that the Chilean Mine Collapse reminded me of the Case of the Speluncean Explorers. With the miners rescued, today the WSJ Law Blog links to a piece from the Canadian newsweekly Macleans commenting on some of the legal implications of the trapped miners.

[T]hat does not change the fact that the trapped miners are living in what amounts to a mini society of their own. All sorts of problems could arise in such a cramped space, from disputes over the allocation of food and medical supplies to rules over respect for privacy to procedures for dealing with crimes like theft or assault. If sovereignty is defined by the ability to exercise a monopoly over the use of force, then whatever legal authority currently exists in the San Jose mine, it is not the Chilean government.

Were the miners relegated to their own state of nature? If so, were they able to establish their own social compact? I think this case is somewhat distinguishable from Lon Fuller’s classic law review article in that the miners had constant contact–and perhaps more important constant replenishment of supplies–with the outside world. Though they were far removed, the order of civilization remained. Fascinating thought experiment nonetheless.