Faculty Publications

Despite the ever-growing number of exonerations in the U.S.— and the corresponding surge in scholarly interest in wrongful convictions in recent years—research on the carceral experiences of wrongfully-convicted persons remains strikingly limited. In this essay, we draw on in-depth interviews with 15 exonerated men to explore the moral dimensions of the experience of wrongful imprisonment. We argue that imprisonment entails what we refer to as “coerced moral degradation,” whereby innocent men’s self-preservation efforts in prison require them to feign being—and at times actually become— morally worse people. We argue that these findings speak to the fundamental question of what the law is for, and, further, that the coerced moral degradation that the men experienced in prison provides a compelling basis for conservative and progressive scholars to find some common ground on the moral purpose of the law.

In the spring of 2020, the Idaho legislature passed a bill that effectively precludes transgender girls and women (from kindergarten through college) from joining female athletic teams. Idaho Governor Bradley Little signed the Fairness in Women’s Sports Act into law in late March 2020. The law’s title suggests that it should be understood as an effort to expand “fairness.” The presumptive beneficiaries are cisgender (i.e., nontransgender) girls and women on school athletic teams who, the law suggests, should not have to compete against transgender girls and women. However, the assumptions underlying the law’s responses to transgender women and girls hoping to join sports teams are so flawed as to suggest animus. The right of girls and women to fairness in school sports is protected by Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972. Protecting fairness for cisgender females cannot, however, serve as a pretext for excluding transgender athletes from sports teams, especially if fair accommodations can be crafted.

It is commonplace to observe that digital technologies facilitate our access to information on a scale unimaginable in previous eras, leading many to call this the "Information Age." The vaunted advantages of unprecedented data flow obscure a dark corollary: the more modes of engaging with data are available to a people, the more modes are available for manipulating them. Whether through social media, blogs, email, newspaper headlines, or doctored images and videos, the public is indeed bombarded by information, and much of it is misleading or outright false. Much of it, in fact, is propaganda. As the methods for manipulating mass audiences continue to multiply, a clear understanding of the concept of propaganda has never been more relevant.

This Article constructs a precise, novel account of propaganda, incorporating notable scholarly insights into the concept as well as the overlooked lessons of the law's fragmented efforts to regulate it.