While it was only the final, fatal traffic stops of black drivers Sandra Bland and Philando Castille that made headlines, both drivers had long suffered in America’s racist system of traffic policing. Both had been frequently stopped and harassed by police for minor violations, issued tickets, and then overwhelmed by traffic fine debt and license suspensions.

For years, Urban Dictionary has been thought of as nothing more than a fun, if not crude, website frequented by middle schoolers looking for colorful new ways to insult their friends or refer to NSFW topics. But it is 2022. We are living in a time when the ridiculous has become credible. Where the joke is reality. Internet culture is mainstream culture. And in these modern, changing times, Urban Dictionary has been pulled out of middle school and dropped into the American Court system. Judges across the nation are turning to Urban Dictionary for the definitions of slang terms that appear in litigation.

The Mayor of New York City and union representatives gather periodically to define a new contract for the NYPD. New York City taxpayers are noticeably absent when police contracts are negotiated despite the fact that the police budget is funded entirely through taxpayer dollars. What occurs during contract negotiations is undisclosed to the public, and only the final, ratified contract is available for New Yorkers to examine. Therefore, the public is left blind as to what or how their representatives are negotiating at these closed-door meetings as government representatives make and reject offers without public criticism.

In times of hardship, it becomes tempting to shift a problem onto someone else; the legislation that came out of the Covid-19 pandemic demonstrated this exact tendency. In response to the economic disruption caused by Covid-19, Congress passed the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (“CARES”) Act. The Paycheck Protection Program (“PPP”) is section 1102 of the CARES Act. It aims to provide relief to small businesses in the form of a loan that can be forgiven by spending loan funds on certain types of business expenses. Although the CARES Act provides unemployment benefits, the PPP is also positioned to act as an unemployment office. By heavily emphasizing a business’s requirement to spend on payroll costs to obtain loan forgiveness (no matter the need, or lack thereof, for labor), the government essentially pushes the unemployment problem away from itself, and forces struggling small business owners to deal with it instead.

In March 2021, a gunman opened fire on three massage parlors in Atlanta, Georgia, killing eight people. Six of the victims were Asian women. In the shooting’s aftermath, many of us found ourselves wondering whether the women he killed were prostitutes or victims of sex trafficking. But when we find ourselves wondering whether victims of violence were involved in sex work, we should ask ourselves why. If the women he murdered gave one type of massage over another, would that make them less deserving of our sympathy? What if they were sex workers, but not by choice? If they weren’t sex workers, would we feel bad that the media portrayed them as such?

Tom Petty and Michael Jackson have more in common than being internationally known recording artists; both of their lives tragically ended as a result of prescription drug overdoses. Petty was prescribed several prescription medications to deal with a hip injury, while Jackson was prescribed medication to combat insomnia. While Tom Petty’s doctor was neither charged nor investigated in connection with Petty’s death, it was a different story with Michael Jackson’s doctor, Dr. Conrad Murray. Dr. Murray was charged with and eventually convicted of involuntary manslaughter following Jackson’s death, and served two years in prison.

The EEOC has found that about a quarter of sexual harassment complaints came from the service sector, which is dominated by low-wage, female workers. Many low-wage jobs are disproportionally held by women of color or immigrants. These women also often face intersectional disadvantages —burdens posed by race, national origin, gender identity, and other characteristics beyond gender alone — that may trigger biased treatment. Despite these findings, women’s movements like the #MeToo movement have failed to include the experiences of low wage workers, women of color, undocumented immigrants, and other segments of minority communities. Worse yet, many of these workers are not legally protected from sexual harassment.

However, unknown to the travelers, there are two individuals not trying to catch a train, but rather trying to smuggle a 3D-printed firearm through security. They are two reporters from The Mail on Sunday, and in an effort to bring awareness to the dangers of 3D-printed firearms, they downloaded the Liberator blueprints online, bought a 3D-printer, printed the 16-part pistol, purchased a common nail you would find at a hardware store to act as the firing pin, and successfully smuggled the pistol parts onto a crowded Eurostar heading to Paris.

80,260,092 and 983,237. Respectively, these are the numbers of reported COVID-19 cases and deaths in the United States. The effects of COVID-19 impact people who contracted the disease, families who lost someone, and people at risk who have been in isolation for over one year. One group who has been heavily affected by the pandemic is healthcare professionals. Healthcare workers were thrown into the frontlines without proper equipment, including PPE, and, at one point during the height of the pandemic, they also did not have enough ICU beds and ventilators. Because healthcare workers lacked medical equipment, they were more likely to contract COVID-19, which reduced the “quality and quantity of care available.”

The future of a domestic terrorism law will be determined within the coming months. Although there is still debate regarding promulgation and scope, domestic terrorism legislation would serve as a significant step in the right direction to protect national security.

The global pandemic has both increased the demand for contactless biometric technologies and pushed for innovation in this industry. This increase in demand and innovation of biometric technology has amplified the inherent data privacy concerns in the technology, making the need for a national biometric law evident.

The NCAA is the omnipotent organization that runs college athletics in the United States. The NCAA and its member college and university athletic departments raked in a whopping $18.9 billion dollars in 2019. The college athletes are the revenue generators and the labor. Without the college athletes, the NCAA would not exist. Yet, college athletes receive no compensation. While college basketball and football players are predominately black, NCAA executives, athletic directors, coaches, media personalities, and television producers are overwhelmingly white. Thus, the unpaid black athletes make extraordinary sums of money for wealthy white men who reap the spoils of a grossly exploitative system

Hoda Muthana, a woman who willingly became an ISIS bride, is not likely to inspire much sympathy in the US. The State Department asserted that Hoda was not a citizen, despite that she was born in the United States and that the State Department had previously recognized her as a citizen. As non-citizens, neither Hoda nor her son Adam had the right to return to the US; they remain in a Syrian detention camp with other former ISIS brides and their children. Few American citizens will shed tears over an ISIS bride losing her citizenship. However, it should disturb all of us how easily – and how quickly – it happened.

“I got 99 problems and arbitration panel diversity is one!” This is what famous rapper Jay-Z probably felt like changing his song lyrics to when he experienced, first-hand, the lack of diversity amongst arbitrators in the arbitration system. Jay-Z had a dispute that arose out of a deal previously made, which had a mandatory arbitration agreement forcing parties to settle the dispute in arbitration with the service provider AAA to facilitate the arbitration. When it came time to select 3 arbitrators, out of a 200-name list, only 3 names were considered people of color, and one of them had a conflict of interest making them ineligible to sit on the neutral panel. It is not a true choice if there are not enough diverse arbitrators to choose from and it is important to recognize the possible affect that a lack of diverse arbitrators sitting on a neutral panel can have on a binding decision, which is why tacking the issue of diversity among arbitrators is essential.

In 2019, the Power Five FBS football conferences generated over $2.9 billion in revenue. The Big Ten Conference generated more than a quarter of that total, leading all over conferences in revenue generated at over $780 million. While the NCAA is in the process of evaluating rule changes that would allow student-athletes to engage in certain sponsorship agreements, student-athlete compensation has historically been limited to academic scholarships. But while both salaries and in-kind payments have increased significantly for coaches, "pay" to student-athletes has remained capped.

Almost 70% of adults in the United States used Facebook in 2018. Interestingly, Facebook does not charge any of its 2.45 billion active users for access to its platform, but instead generates revenue by collecting and analyzing personal data to sell targeted advertisements. This enormous user base is the foundation of the company’s dominance in the social-networking industry. Indeed, Facebook-owned companies account for 90% of all time spent on social-networking sites. As a result, nearly 84% of all online social advertisement spending is paid to Facebook.

Let’s face it: social media is political.

Based on a study by Pew Research Center, if you log onto your favorite social media site – Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, etc. – and scroll through your newsfeed for two to five minutes, there is a 93% chance you will see at least one political post.

And this raises one big question: Is it good or bad that social media is so political?

According to the National Inventory of Collateral Consequences of Conviction, there are an astonishing 44,778 collateral consequences stemming from criminal convictions. The ubiquity of these consequences mean that a guilty plea rarely involves only probation or a prison sentence; a guilty plea often affects voting rights, employment, housing, public assistance, and citizenship. In the context of sex offenses, a criminal charge and subsequent guilty plea can bar individuals from public and private housing, bar them from homeless shelters, and prohibit them from living in many communities.

Imagine you’re working as an Uber driver, committed to working 65 hours a week, and the only other form of income you rely on is from the occasional car repairs you do for neighbors, which only occurs three or four times a month. You have been working extra hours to pay off credit card debt. Unexpectedly, your driver account is deactivated without notice or reason. You attempt to reach a person on the phone to file a complaint, but there’s no answer. Working as an independent contractor, you realize you are left without any of the protections afforded to employees under state, federal, or local laws. You have no retirement plan, health insurance, or money saved for your children’s college tuition. What do you do?

The United States criminal justice system currently holds “almost 2.3 million people.” Out of the 2.3 million people incarcerated, 612,100 are held in state jails. Out of those 612,000 inmates, 462,000 have not been convicted of any crime. Shockingly, only 24% of those being held in state jails have actually been convicted of a crime. Statistically, over “74% of people held by jails [have not been] convicted of any crime” and are being held in pre-trial detention.