Aesthetics for the Public Good: The Fifth Amendment’s Takings Clause and Development Restriction Policies
The Takings Clause specifies that one whose property is taken by the government for public use is entitled to just compensation, but it fails to specify further details regarding its implementation. Chief among concerns of policymakers and property owners alike, the Takings Clause fails to specify how to determine whether an imposition by the government on one’s private property might constitute a compensable taking.
Published on October 17, 2024
Digital Privacy in the Age of Surveillance: Re-evaluating the Fourth Amendment
With the rise of digital technology, the boundaries of privacy and government surveillance are increasingly blurred. This article explores how the Fourth Amendment is applied to digital privacy, examining recent court cases and proposing a framework for protecting individual privacy in an era of pervasive surveillance.
Published on September 5, 2024
Artificial Intelligence and Liability: Who Pays When Algorithms Make Mistakes?
As artificial intelligence systems are deployed in high-stakes scenarios, questions around accountability and liability emerge. This article discusses the legal implications of AI errors, analyzing who is responsible and how liability should be determined when machines make life-impacting mistakes.
Published on August 12, 2024
The Amherst College Law Review (ACLR) was born out of the desire to foster undergraduate scholarship in the liberal arts. Among our peers, the ACLR stands alone for its interdisciplinary approach to the study of law.
Given the ever-changing nature of our society, students of law encounter a host of new, troubling, and intriguing questions including, but not limited to, increasing inequality, salience of technology, and neoliberal globalization. These questions cannot be fully posed, much less answered, within the scope of conventional legal training and/or the traditional social sciences.
The mission of the ACLR is to pose these questions and to strive to answer them with the nuance, clarity, probity, and rigor provided by the liberal arts tradition. This journal brings the best scholarship of the contemporary humanities to bear on the most difficult and urgent juridical problems of our time.