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Verses Turned To Verdicts: Ysl Rico Case Sets A High-Watermark For The Legal Pseudo-Censorship Of Rap Music, Nabil Yousfi

Seattle University Law Review

Whichever way you spin the record, rap music and courtrooms don’t mix. On one side, rap records are well known for their unapologetic lyrical composition, often expressing a blatant disregard for legal institutions and authorities. On the other, court records reflect a Van Gogh’s ear for rap music, frequently allowing rap lyrics—but not similar lyrics from other genres—to be used as criminal evidence against the defendants who authored them. Over the last thirty years, this immiscibility has engendered a legal landscape where prosecutors wield rap lyrics as potent instruments for criminal prosecution. In such cases, color-blind courts neglect that rap …

Same Crime, Different Time: Sentencing Disparities In The Deep South & A Path Forward Under The Fourteenth Amendment, Hailey M. Donovan

Seattle University Law Review

The United States has the highest incarceration rate of any country in the world. The American obsession with crime and punishment can be tracked over the last half-century, as the nation’s incarceration rate has risen astronomically. Since 1970, the number of incarcerated people in the United States has increased more than sevenfold to over 2.3 million, outpacing both crime and population growth considerably. While the rise itself is undoubtedly bleak, a more troubling truth lies just below the surface. Not all states contribute equally to American mass incarceration. Rather, states have vastly different incarceration rates. Unlike at the federal level, …

A Synthesis Of The Science And Law Relating To Eyewitness Misidentifications And Recommendations For How Police And Courts Can Reduce Wrongful Convictions Based On Them, Henry F. Fradella

Seattle University Law Review

The empirical literature on perception and memory consistently demonstrates the pitfalls of eyewitness identifications. Exoneration data lend external validity to these studies. With the goal of informing law enforcement officers, prosecutors, criminal defense attorneys, judges, and judicial law clerks about what they can do to reduce wrongful convictions based on misidentifications, this Article presents a synthesis of the scientific knowledge relevant to how perception and memory affect the (un)reliability of eyewitness identifications. The Article situates that body of knowledge within the context of leading case law. The Article then summarizes the most current recommendations for how law enforcement personnel should—and …

Conceptualizing Legal Childhood In The Twenty-First Century, Clare Huntington, Elizabeth S. Scott

Faculty Scholarship

The law governing children is complex, sometimes appearing almost incoherent. The relatively simple framework established in the Progressive Era, in which parents had primary authority over children, subject to limited state oversight, has broken down over the past few decades. Lawmakers started granting children some adult rights and privileges, raising questions about their traditional status as vulnerable, dependent, and legally incompetent beings. As children emerged as legal persons, children’s rights advocates challenged the rationale for parental authority, contending that robust parental rights often harm children. And a wave of punitive reforms in response to juvenile crime in the 1990s undermined …

Judicial Education, Private Violence, And Community Action: A Case Study In Legal Participatory Action Research, Kristin (Brandser) Kalsem

Faculty Articles and Other Publications

In this Article, I present a case study of a legal PAR project involving judicial training on best practices in domestic violence cases. This judicial education project started over coffee and waffles, involved an award-winning documentary film Private Violence, and resulted in the training of more than 375 judges on best practices developed from two years of collaborative research conducted by a community action group. In 2014, I coauthored an article titled It's Critical: Legal Participatory Action Research with my colleague Emily Houh. In this piece, we introduced legal scholars to the field of PAR, including its origins, complementary relationship …

Predictive Neglect And "Unfit" Mothers - When Having A Mental Illness Means The State Takes Your Child, Amelia Lyte

DePaul Journal of Women, Gender and the Law

No abstract provided.

The Strange Life Of Stanley V. Illinois: A Case Study In Parent Representation And Law Reform, Josh Gupta-Kagan

Faculty Publications

This Article helps describe the growth of parent representation through an analysis of Stanley v. Illinois—the foundational Supreme Court case that established parental fitness as the constitutional lynchpin of any child protection case. The Article begins with Stanley’s trial court litigation, which illustrates the importance of vigorous parental representation and an effort by the court to prevent Stanley from obtaining an attorney. It proceeds to analyze how family courts applied it (or not) in the years following the Supreme Court’s decision and what factors have led to a recent resurgence of Stanley’s fitness focus.

Despite Stanley’s requirement that states prove …

Denying The Dyad: How Criminalizing Pregnant Use Harms The Baby, Taxpayers And Vulnerable Women, Melissa Ballengee Alexander

Faculty Articles

No abstract provided.

Impact Of The “Nirbhaya” Rape Case: Isolated Phenomenon Or Social Change?, Tina P. Lapsia

Honors Scholar Theses

In December 2012, a twenty-three year old college student, who was given the pseudonym “Nirbhaya” (“fearless”), was fatally gang-raped on a private bus in Delhi, India, galvanizing the country to swiftly adopt new legislative measures and catapulting the issue of violence against women in India into the international spotlight. Although assault and rape cases have made India infamous for its high volume of crimes against women, the reaction to this particular incident was much different from before. This paper investigates whether the governmental and societal responses represent social change, as indicated by changing attitudes towards violence against women in India. …

How Law Shapes Experiences Of Parenthood For Same-Sex Couples, Nicholas K. Park, Emily Kazyak, Kathleen S. Slauson-Blevins

Department of Sociology: Faculty Publications

Gay, lesbian, and bisexual (GLB) parents are increasingly common and visible, but they face a number of social and legal barriers in the United States. Using legal consciousness as a theoretical framework, we draw on data from 51 interviews with GLB parents in California and Nebraska to explore how laws impact experiences of parenthood. Specifically, we address how the legal context influences three domains: the methods used to become parents, decisions about where to live, and experiences of family recognition. Law and perception of the law make some pathways to parenthood difficult or unattainable depending on state of residence. Parents …

Defaults And Choices In The Marriage Contract: How To Increase Autonomy, Encourage Discussion, And Circumvent Constitutional Constraints, Andrew Blair-Stanek

Touro Law Review

No abstract provided.

The Newest Jim Crow And The Incarceration Of Black Males, Edward Earl Bell

Dr. Edward E. Bell

Black males are in jail. Are "we" to blame? The New Jim Crow is alive.

Collaboration And Coercion: Domestic Violence Meets Collaborative Law, Margaret B. Drew

Faculty Publications

‘Collaboration and Coercion’ addresses the systemic and individual concerns that arise when family members that have experienced abuse enter into the collaborative law process. A form of alternative dispute resolution, collaborative law is a method of resolving disputes without engagement of the legal system. The author addresses the structural and cultural difficulties that survivors of abuse encounter throughout the process as well as the ethical concerns that are raised when collaborative practitioners accept cases where the parties have a history of coercion within the intimate relationship.

Fortuity And Forensic Familial Identification, Natalie Ram

All Faculty Scholarship

On July 7, 2010, Los Angeles police announced the arrest of a suspect in the Grim Sleeper murders, so called because of a decade-long hiatus in killings. The break in the case came when California searched its state DNA database for a genetic profile similar, but not identical, to the killer’s. DNA is inherited in specific and predictable ways, so a source-excluding partial match might indicate that a close genetic relative of the matching offender was the Grim Sleeper. California’s apparent success in this case has intensified interest in policymaking for source-excluding partial matching. To date, however, little information about …

That Guy's A Batterer!: A Scarlet Letter Approach To Domestic Violence In The Information Age, Elaine M. Chiu

Faculty Publications

Despite the remarkable reliance on the Internet as a source of information, we have yet to fully take advantage of it in our movement against domestic violence. Information is used as a weapon in the battle against domestic violence in several limited ways. Yet there is still more we can do with information and, specifically, the Internet, in combating domestic violence. The Scarlet Letter proposal seeks to empower potential victims of domestic violence with information so that they themselves can make choices that will avoid years of suffering and abuse. The idea is to allow public access to the data …

Beyond The Polemics: Realistic Options To Help Divorcing Families Manage Domestic Violence, Elayne E. Greenberg

Faculty Publications

Children, adult survivors, and their batterers who remain engaged in violence, even after they live apart, are living legacies of the historical perniciousness of domestic violence, a legacy that must change. True, over the past thirty years the politicization of domestic violence has raised public awareness, spurred legislative reforms, and propelled court innovations. However, the children, survivors, and batterers who still live domestic violence after divorce know all too well that all of our political advancements, legal victories, court innovations, and social awareness have not stopped the violence they live within their day-to-day lives. For many of these families, an …

Addressing Domestic Violence Through The Law: A Guide To - The Protection Of Women From Domestic Violence Act, 2005, Saumya Uma

Dr. Saumya Uma

Confronting The Agency In Battered Mothers, Elaine M. Chiu

Faculty Publications

Despite the progress of the last three decades, the American public and even feminists remain caught in a web of ambivalence and contradictory attitudes and beliefs about battered women. Are battered women traumatized victims who suffer at the hands of their individual abusers and from the systemic failures of a male-dominated culture? Are they, therefore, unable to save themselves or their children? In contrast, are these women survivors who manage to protect themselves as best they can under uniquely difficult circumstances? Do they deserve recognition for their efforts, or do battered women somehow contribute to or exacerbate their own abuse …

Another Weapon For Combating Family Violence: Prevention Of Animal Abuse, Charlotte Lacroix

Animal Law Review

Dr. Lacroix discusses the correlation between different forms of family violence and suggests that family pets are just an­other victim. Dr. Lacroix proposes that stronger animal an­ticruelty laws may be part of the solution to reducing family violence because they enhance the likelihood of detection of an offender's abusive behavior.

A Constitutional Right Of Religious Exemption: An Historical Perspective, Philip A. Hamburger

Faculty Scholarship

Did late eighteenth-century Americans understand the Free Exercise Clause of the United States Constitution to provide individuals a right of exemption from civil laws to which they had religious objections? Claims of exemption based on the Free Exercise Clause have prompted some of the Supreme Court's most prominent free exercise decisions, and therefore this historical inquiry about a right of exemption may have implications for our constitutional jurisprudence. Even if the Court does not adopt late eighteenth-century ideas about the free exercise of religion, we may, nonetheless, find that the history of such ideas can contribute to our contemporary analysis. …

The Parent-Child Privileges: Hardly A New Or Revolutionary Concept, Wendy Meredith Watts

William & Mary Law Review

No abstract provided.