The perils of incrementalism

National emergency funding of border wall is unconstitutional

The Constitutional Limits of Private Surveillance

Fourth Amendment Anxiety

Plausible Cause": Explanatory Requirements in the Age of Powerful Machines

Fourth Amendment Fiduciaries

The University of Connecticut (UConn) is one of America’s top 20 public universities, according to U.S. News & World Report. It is home to more than 31,000 students, 1,300 faculty, 230,000 proud alumni, and a handsome husky named Jonathan.

The University has fourteen schools and colleges: Agriculture and Natural Resources, Business, Dental Medicine, Education, Engineering, Fine Arts, Law, Liberal Arts and Sciences, Medicine, Nursing, Pharmacy, and Social Work. Students can choose from eight undergraduate bachelor's degrees with 102 possible majors, as well as seventeen graduate/doctoral degrees and five professional degree programs (MD, JD, etc.).

UConn's main campus in Storrs is admitting the highest-achieving freshmen in University history. Student diversity continues to increase, as does the number of honors students, valedictorians and salutatorians who consistently make UConn their top choice. It's a great time to be a Husky!

University of Connecticut

Kiel Brennan-Marquez teaches courses in constitutional law, evidence, and law and technology. His research focuses on the nature of human judgment and the role of courts—especially in the criminal context—in the age of big data and algorithmic decision-making. He also writes about policing and over-criminalization (often as they intersect with new technology), as well as jurisprudential theory and epistemology. Among all these research themes, the unifying thread is an interest in the way the legal system organizes and processes information, from surveillance and data collection to the use of data by law enforcement authorities before and during trial. His most recent article, a work-in-progress entitled Very Broad Laws, was selected for presentation at the Yale-Harvard-Stanford Junior Faculty Forum.

Professor Brennan-Marquez did his undergraduate work at Pomona College, where he majored in Religious Studies, with an emphasis in philosophy. His senior thesis—the longest in the history of the department—focused on the relationship between theories of belief and capitalism. He received his law degree from Yale, and he served as a clerk to the Hon. Shira A. Scheindlin of the Southern District of New York (retired), who presided over Floyd v. NYC, the challenge to New York City's now-reformed stop-and-frisk program. Before joining the UConn faculty, Prof. Brennan-Marquez taught at New York University Law School and the Georgetown University Law Center.

The Fourth Amendment

Policing

Over-Criminalization

Law and Technology

Constitutional Law

Evidence

Big Data and Algorithmic Decision-Making

Criminal Procedure

The Cybersecurity 202: Parler scrape puts some Capitol rioters in legal jeopardy

Could the Government Get a Search Warrant for Your Thoughts?

Professor and William T. Golden Scholar

Ethics of AI Handbook
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto, March 1-2, 2019;
http://ethics.utoronto.ca

Kiel Brennan-Marquez, "Fair Notice" in the Age of Big Data

“Probable cause” is not about probability. It is about plausibility. To determine if an officer has the requisite suspicion to perform a search or seizure, what matters is not the statistical likelihood that a “person, house, paper or effect” is linked to criminal activity. What matters is whether criminal activity provides a convincing explanation of observed facts. For an inference to qualify as plausible, an observer must understand why the inference follows; she must be able to explain its relationship to the facts. Probable inferences, by contrast, do not require explanations. An inference can be probable—in a predictive sense, based on past trends—without a human observer understanding what makes it so.

In many cases, plausibility and probability overlap. An inference that accounts for observed facts is often likely to be true, and vice versa. But there is an important sub-set of cases in which the two properties pull apart, raising deep questions about the underpinnings of Fourth Amendment suspicion: inferences generated by predictive algorithms. In this Article, I argue that casting suspicion in terms of plausibility, rather than probability, is both more consistent with established law and crucial to the Fourth Amendment’s normative integrity. Before law enforcement officials may intrude on private life, they must explain why they believe wrongdoing has occurred. This “explanation-giving” requirement has two key virtues. First, it facilitates governance; we cannot effectively regulate what we do not understand. Second, it allows judges to consider the “other side of the story”—the innocent version of events a suspect might offer on her own behalf—before warranting searches and seizures. In closing, I connect these virtues to broader themes of democratic theory. In a free society, legitimacy is not measured solely by outcomes. The exercise of state power must be explained—and the explanations must be responsive both to the democratic community writ large and to the specific individuals whose interests are infringed.

Bio:
Kiel Brennan-Marquez is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Information Law Institute at New York University and a Visiting Fellow at the Information Society Project at Yale Law School. His main research interest is how technological evolution, especially related to big data, is reshaping the judicial process. Recently, his scholarship has focused on the rise of “data-driven policing,” and the way changes in the collection and use of information by law enforcement force us to rethink the normative foundations of procedure and evidence law. Kiel holds a B.A. in philosophy and religious studies from Pomona College, and a J.D. from Yale Law School. He clerked for the Honorable Shira A. Scheindlin of the Southern District of New York, who presided over Floyd v. City of New York, the widely-publicized challenge to the NYPD’s (now reformed) stop-and-frisk program.

CITP Luncheon Speaker Series: Kiel Brennan-Marquez – Plausible Cause

Select Inquiry Type