Digital Commons Network^™

International Human Rights Law: A Development Overview And Domestic Application Within The U.S. Criminal Justice System, William D. Auman

North Carolina Central Law Review

No abstract provided.

The Constitutionality And Morality Of Civilly Committing Violent Sexual Predators, Alexander D. Brooks

Seattle University Law Review

This Article will address four major substantive constitutional and moral challenges to the Washington Sexually Violent Predator statute. The first is that the statute provides for unacceptable preventive detention contrary to American tradition and law. The second is that the terminology used to identify the mental condition of sexually violent predators is vague and meaningless, resulting in inaccurate and unfair applications and lacking in uniformity. The third objection is that the treatment program necessarily relies on a false assumption that efficacious treatment is available and argues that without efficacious treatment the statute must fail. Fourth, the confinement involved, which theoretically …

Confronting Violence: In The Act And In The Word, David Boerner

Seattle University Law Review

In this Symposium Article, the author narrates his experience as a member of the Task Force to create Washington’s Sexually Violent Predator Civil Commitment Law.

Corporate Culpability Under The Federal Sentencing Guidelines, Jennifer Moore

Faculty Scholarship

This Article examines the use of corporate culpability in the Federal Sentencing Guidelines and addresses three major questions: In light of the traditional unimportance of culpability in corporate criminal law, is corporate culpability an appropriate concern of the Guidelines? If so, how is corporate culpability best conceptualized? Finally, how do the Guidelines understand corporate culpability, and how close do they come to embodying this most satisfying theory? Part I of the Article discusses the principal reasons why culpability has been important at the trial and sentencing of individual criminals, and argues that similar reasons justify concern with culpability in the …

Editor's Preface: Predators And Politics: The Dichotomies Of Translation In The Washington Sexually Violent Predators Statute, Nancy Watkins Anderson, Kenneth W. Masters

Seattle University Law Review

No abstract provided.

Limits On The State's Power To Confine "Dangerous" Persons: Constitutional Implications Of Foucha V. Louisiana, James W. Ellis

Seattle University Law Review

This Article does not attempt a complete analysis of all the constitutional implications of Foucha,nor does it attempt to provide a definitive answer to the question of the constitutionality of Washington's sexual predator statute. Rather, because Foucha addressed important due process and equal protection questions relevant to the Washington statute, the Article is an attempt to analyze the case's basic constitutional holdings and discussion on the issue of state deprivation of physical liberty.

Washington's Sexually Violent Predator Law: A Deliberate Misuse Of The Therapeutic State For Social Control, John Q. La Fond

Seattle University Law Review

This Article will demonstrate that the Washington legislature deliberately chose to abuse the medical model of involuntary commitment for treatment in order to achieve lifetime preventive detention. In so doing, the legislature violated fundamental constitutional principles that underlie our system of social care and control and safeguard individual liberty.

Washington's Sexually Violent Predators Statute: Law Or Lottery? A Response To Professor Brooks, John Q. La Fond

Seattle University Law Review

In this Symposium Article, the author responds to Alexander D. Brooks, The Constitutionality and Morality of Civilly Committing Violent Sexual Predators, article.

The Politics Of Sexual Psychopathy: Washington State's Sexual Predator Legislation, Stuart Scheingold, Toska Olson, Jana Pershing

Seattle University Law Review

What are the principles that guide this return to indeterminacy? Taken at face value, rehabilitation would seem to be the goal of the civil commitment provisions that make avail- able a treatment program to cure and reintegrate sexual offenders. Of course, rehabilitation was unequivocally rejected by determinate sentencing reformers, who considered it both discriminatory and ineffective.6 An alternative interpretation is that the sexual predator provisions lead in an incapacitative direction-that is, they are designed to predict which offenders are so dangerous that they must be more or less permanently institutionalized to protect the society. Either way, the sexual predator legislation …

So What's In A Name? A Rhetorical Reading Of Washington's Sexually Violent Predators Act, J. Christopher Rideout

Seattle University Law Review

In this Article, I will examine this socially constitutive function of narratives in the enactment of Washington State's Sexually Violent Predators Act.'0 This Act is a prime recent example of how social narratives-in this case, narratives of violence, pain, and outrage-lie behind the official language of the law. As Winter would point out, narrative was the vehicle that prompted legal change. The question for this Article, however, is what happens once the story has been recast into another form, here that of a statute? How well do the immediacy of the details and the authorial voice of the story lend …

The Need For An International Criminal Court In The New International World Order, Christopher L. Blakesley

Scholarly Works

Any inquiry into the merits of an international criminal court must start with resolving three basic issues:

1. Can the tribunal improve international cooperation in law enforcement, add to the capabilities of the various nations in matters of international criminal law, or contribute in any incremental way to the solution of international and transnational criminal law problems by improving the current practice and enhancing the effectiveness of all concerned?

2. Will the recommended system have a better or equal chance of operating as effectively as the best existing systems of national criminal justice?

3. Will the recommended system improve efficiency …

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. …