Digital Commons Network^™

Inmate Assistance Programs: Toward A Less Punitive And More Effective Criminal Justice System, Erkmen G. Aslim, Yijia Lu, Murat C. Mungan

Faculty Scholarship

High recidivism rates in the United States are a well-known and disturbing problem. In this article, we explain how this problem can be mitigated in a cost-effective manner through reforms that make greater use of humane methods that help inmates rather than using more punitive measures.

We focus on Inmate Assistance Programs (IAPs) adopted by many states. Some of these programs provide inmates with valuable skill sets to utilize upon their release while others are geared towards treating mental health and substance use disorder problems. IAPs are likely to reduce recidivism by lowering ex-convicts’ need to resort to crime for …

Charging Abortion, Milan Markovic

Faculty Scholarship

As long as Roe v. Wade remained good law, prosecutors could largely avoid the question of abortion. The Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization has now placed prosecutors at the forefront of the abortion wars. Some chief prosecutors in antiabortion states have pledged to not enforce antiabortion laws, whereas others are targeting even out-of-state providers. This post-Dobbs reality, wherein the ability to obtain an abortion depends not only on the politics of one’s state but also the policies of one’s local district attorney, has received minimal scrutiny from legal scholars.

Prosecutors have broad charging discretion, …

Outlawing Corporate Prosecution Deals When People Have Died, Peter Reilly

Faculty Scholarship

Two Boeing 737 MAX aircraft crashes, occurring less than five months apart in 2018 and 2019, resulted in 346 deaths—possibly the deadliest corporate crime in U.S. history. The United States Department of Justice (DOJ) used an alternative dispute resolution tool called a deferred prosecution agreement (DPA) to resolve criminal charges against Boeing and to immunize the company’s senior-level managers from prosecution. In the end, the company admitted to engaging in the criminal behavior, paid a monetary fine, and agreed to cooperate fully with the government—meaning there would be no courtroom trial, no formal adjudication of guilt, and no possibility of …

A Public Technology Option, Hannah Bloch-Wehba

Faculty Scholarship

Private technology increasingly underpins public governance. But the state’s growing reliance on private firms to provide a variety of complex technological products and services for public purposes brings significant costs for transparency: new forms of governance are becoming less visible and less amenable to democratic control. Transparency obligations initially designed for public agencies are a poor fit for private vendors that adhere to a very different set of expectations.

Aligning the use of technology in public governance with democratic values calls for rethinking, and in some cases abandoning, the legal structures and doctrinal commitments that insulate private vendors from meaningful …

A Perfect Storm For Legal Education: Privatization, Polarization, And Pedagogy, Rachel F. Moran

Faculty Scholarship

Today, the legal profession faces new challenges to its integrity and legitimacy due to technological change, rising political polarization, and a stratified bar. In this Article, I first explore how technological innovations are undermining lawyers’ claims to a unique monopoly based on expert professionalism. These technologies are designed to transform routinized law practice in ways that improve efficiency. With little focus on attorneys’ obligations to serve the greater good, technology entrepreneurs emphasize practical advantages over traditional forms of representation. These proponents promise reduced costs and superior results through a single-minded commitment to market dynamics. Those promises in turn depend on …

A Crazy Quilt: Infanticide In The United States, Susan Ayres

Faculty Scholarship

This chapter builds on previous research to present a sampling of cases in the US, primarily in the twenty-first century, in order to show the harshness and disparity in criminal charges, defences and sentences. The broad term ‘infanticide’ is used for child-murder cases, and the more specific term ‘neonaticide’ is used for the killing of a child in the first 24 hours after birth. This chapter also describes the more recent use of genetic genealogy to solve cold cases of neonaticide. It concludes by considering how the absence of an infanticide offence and expanded defences results in an incoherent, unjust …

The Ever-Shifting Ground Of Pretrial Detention Reform, Jenny E. Carroll

Faculty Scholarship

In the past six decades, pretrial detention systems have undergone waves of reform. Despite these efforts, pretrial jail populations across the country continue to swell. The causes of such growth in jail populations are difficult to pinpoint, but some are more readily apparent: Fear over rising crime rates, judicial reluctance to release accused persons, and monetary burdens associated with release have all contributed to increased detention pretrial across criminal legal systems in the United States. This article examines various pretrial detention reform efforts and highlights the need for greater research in the area.

Policing Protest: Speech, Space, Crime, And The Jury, Jenny E. Carroll

Faculty Scholarship

Speech is more than just an individual right—it can serve as a catalyst for democratically driven revolution and reform, particularly for minority or marginalized positions. In the past decade, the nation has experienced a rise in mass protests. However, dissent and disobedience in the form of such protests is not without consequences. While the First Amendment promises broad rights of speech and assembly, these rights are not absolute. Criminal law regularly curtails such rights—either by directly regulating speech as speech or by imposing incidental burdens on speech as it seeks to promote other state interests. This Feature examines how criminal …

Latinas In The Legal Academy: Progress And Promise, Raquel E. Aldana, Emile Loza De Siles, Solangel Maldonado, Rachel F. Moran

Faculty Scholarship

The 2022 Inaugural Graciela Oliva ́rez Latinas in the Legal Academy (“GO LILA”) Workshop convened seventy-four outstanding and powerful Latina law professors and professional legal educators (collectively, “Latinas in the legal academy,” or “LILAs”) to document and celebrate our individual and collective journeys and to grow stronger together. In this essay, we, four of the Latina law professors who helped to co-found the GO LILA Workshop, share what we learned about and from each other. We invite other LILAs to join our community and share their stories and journeys. We hope that the data and lessons that we share can …

Mass E-Carceration: Electronic Monitoring As A Bail Condition, Sara Zampierin

Faculty Scholarship

Over the past decade, the immigration and criminal legal systems have increasingly relied on electronic monitoring as a bail condition; hundreds of thousands of people live under this monitoring on any given day. Decisionmakers purport to impose these conditions to release more individuals from detention and to maintain control over individuals they perceive to pose some risk of flight or to public safety. But the data do not show that electronic monitoring successfully mitigates these risks or that it leads to fewer individuals in detention. Electronic monitoring also comes with severe restrictions on individual liberty and leads to harmful effects …

Immigration Law's Missing Presumption, Fatma Marouf

Faculty Scholarship

The presumption of innocence is a foundational concept in criminal law but is completely missing from quasi-criminal immigration proceedings. This Article explores the relevance of a presumption of innocence to removal proceedings, arguing that immigration law has been designed and interpreted in ways that disrupt formulating any such presumption to facilitate deportation. The Article examines the meaning of “innocence” in the immigration context, revealing how historically racialized perceptions of guilt eroded the notion of innocence early on and connecting the missing presumption to persistent associations between people of color and guilt. By analyzing how a presumption of innocence is impeded …

The Legal Ethics Of Family Separation, Milan Markovic

Faculty Scholarship

On April 6, 2018, the Trump administration announced a “zero tolerance” policy for individuals who crossed the U.S. border illegally. As part of this policy, the administration prosecuted parents with minor children for unlawful entry; previous administrations generally placed families in civil removal proceedings. Since U.S. law does not allow children to be held in immigration detention facilities pending their parents’ prosecution, the new policy caused thousands of children to be separated from their parents. Hundreds of families have yet to be reunited.

Despite a consensus that the family separation policy was cruel and ineffective, there has been minimal focus …

Defeating De Facto Disenfranchisement Of Criminal Defendants, Neil Sobol

Faculty Scholarship

In a democracy, voting is not only an important civic duty but also a right that governments owe to their citizens. However, by operation of law, forty-eight states deny voting rights to individuals based on criminal convictions. Activists and scholars attack de jure disenfranchisement as an improper collateral consequence that disproportionately impacts people of color. Although recent years show substantial reforms to reenfranchise defendants, an estimated 5.17 million defendants remained ineligible to vote in 2020.

While efforts to address de jure disenfranchisement remain necessary, a problem that has received considerably less attention is the de facto disenfranchisement of criminal defendants …

Opening The Virtual Window: How On-Line Processes Could Increase Access To Justice In The Criminal Legal System, Cynthia Alkon, Amy Schmitz

Faculty Scholarship

This article explores the potential of technology to improve access to justice (A2J) in criminal courts, specifically for nonviolent misdemeanor cases. Despite a push for innovation in courts, criminal courts have been slow to embrace change and technological innovation due to factors like constitutional constraints and funding limitations. This article argues that criminal courts need "virtual windows" alongside traditional "brick and mortar doors" to enhance A2J. It proposes a problem-solving approach focusing on misdemeanor cases, a high-volume category where technology can have a significant impact. The paper highlights the importance of ensuring defendants make "knowing and intelligent" pleas despite the …

Climate Choice Architecture, Felix Mormann

Faculty Scholarship

Personal choices drive global warming nearly as much as institutional decisions. Yet, policymakers overwhelmingly target large-scale industrial facilities for reductions in carbon emissions, with individual and household emissions a mere afterthought. Recent advances in behavioral economics, cognitive psychology, and related fields have produced a veritable behavior change revolution. Subtle changes to the choice environment, or nudges, have improved stake-holder decision-making in a wide range of contexts, from healthier food choices to better retirement planning. But the vast potential of choice architecture remains largely untapped for purposes of climate policy and action. This Article explores that untapped potential and makes the …

Designing For Justice: Pandemic Lessons For Criminal Courts, Cynthia Alkon

Faculty Scholarship

March 2020 brought an unprecedented crisis to the United States: COVID-19. In a two-week period, criminal courts across the country closed. But, that is where the uniformity ended. Criminal courts did not have a clear process to decide how to conduct necessary business. As a result, criminal courts across the country took different approaches to deciding how to continue necessary operations and in doing so many did not consider the impact on justice of the operational changes that were made to manage the COVID-19 crisis. One key problem was that many courts did not use inclusive processes and include all …

Letting Offenders Choose Their Punishment?, Gilles Grolleau, Murat C. Mungan, Naoufel Mzoughi

Faculty Scholarship

Punishment menus allow offenders to choose the punishment to which they will be subjected from a set of options. We present several behaviorally informed rationales for why punishment menus may serve as effective deterrents, notably by causing people to refrain from entering a calculative mindset; reducing their psychological reactance; causing them to reconsider the reputational impacts of punishment; and reducing suspicions about whether the act is enforced for rent-seeking purposes. We argue that punishment menus can outperform the traditional single punishment if these effects can be harnessed properly. Our observations thus constitute a challenge, based on behavioral arguments, to the …

Algorithmic Governance From The Bottom Up, Hannah Bloch-Wehba

Faculty Scholarship

Artificial intelligence and machine learning are both a blessing and a curse for governance. In theory, algorithmic governance makes government more efficient, more accurate, and more fair. But the emergence of automation in governance also rests on public-private collaborations that expand both public and private power, aggravate transparency and accountability gaps, and create significant obstacles for those seeking algorithmic justice. In response, a nascent body of law proposes technocratic policy changes to foster algorithmic accountability, ethics, and transparency.

This Article examines an alternative vision of algorithmic governance, one advanced primarily by social and labor movements instead of technocrats and firms. …

Regional Immigration Enforcement, Fatma Marouf

Faculty Scholarship

Regional disparities in immigration enforcement have existed for decades, yet they remain largely overlooked in immigration law scholarship. This Article theorizes that bottom-up pressure from states and localities, combined with top-down pressures and policies established by the President, produce these regional disparities. The Article then provides an empirical analysis demonstrating enormous variations in how Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s twenty-four field offices engage in federal enforcement around the United States. By analyzing data related to detainers, arrests, removals, and detention across these field offices, the Article demonstrates substantial differences between field offices located in sanctuary and anti-sanctuary regions, as well as …

Criminal Court System Failures During Covid-19: An Empirical Study, Cynthia Alkon

Faculty Scholarship

How did the criminal legal system respond to the early months of pandemic in 2020? This article reports the results of a unique national survey of judges, defense lawyers, and prosecutors that gives a snapshot of how the criminal legal system responded to the COVID-19 in the first five chaotic months. Criminal courts in the United States rely on in-person proceedings and formal and informal in-person communications to manage caseloads. The survey results detail, in ways not previously fully understood, how crucial these in-person communications are and how ill-prepared the criminal courts and legal professionals were to deal with the …

Proxy Crimes, Piotr Bystranowski, Murat C. Mungan

Faculty Scholarship

“Proxy crimes” is a phrase loosely used to refer to conduct that is punished only as a means to target other harmful conduct. Many criminal law scholars find the criminalization of this type of conduct unjustifiable from a retributivist perspective, while others note that proxy criminalization can contribute to mass incarceration and overcriminalization. Given the importance of these problems, a systematic analysis of proxy crimes, currently absent in the criminal law literature, is needed.

In this article, we provide a comprehensive analysis of proxy crimes by (i) surveying the existing literature and identifying gaps in prior analyses, (ii) proposing a …

What The Pandemic Taught Us: The Health Care System We Have Is Not The System We Hoped We Had, William M. Sage

Faculty Scholarship

The United States spends nearly twice as much per capita on medical care as any other country. The United States has the world’s most advanced biomedical technologies, sophisticated hospitals, and skilled health professionals. The United States has a national public health body, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), that is generally considered the world’s leader in infectious disease detection and response. Nonetheless, the United States suffered among the world’s worst COVID-19 disease burdens and outcomes, inflicting largely avoidable harm on patients, health professionals, and the broader community.

Why this happened is clearly important. But that it happened is …

Law Review And Finding A Place In The Academy, Jenny E. Carroll

Faculty Scholarship

Membership on the Texas Law Review created opportunities for me, taught me a lot about editorial processes, and served as a reminder that I was a law outsider. The last of these is the focus for this essay, not because it is the most important or because it stands alone (it doesn’t), but because I believe there are other rooms in which to reminisce fondly about law review. Here, I want to speak more honestly about my experience because that experience, as an outsider, has influenced me most as a scholar, teacher, and advocate.

Beyond Bail, Jenny E. Carroll

Faculty Scholarship

From the proliferation of community bail funds to the implementation of new risk assessment tools to the limitation and even eradication of money bail, reform movements have altered the landscape of pretrial detention. Yet little attention has been paid to the emerging reality of a post-money bail world. With monetary bail an unavailable or disfavored option, courts have come to rely increasingly on non-monetary conditions of release. These non-monetary conditions can be problematic for many of the same reasons that money bail is problematic and can inject additional bias into the pretrial system.

In theory, non-monetary conditions offer increased opportunities …

Covid-19 Relief And The Ordinary Inmate, Jenny E. Carroll

Faculty Scholarship

As scholars and advocates have lamented the deficiencies of remedies pre- and post-conviction for the extraordinary, the “ordinary” are not saddled with slow and deficient remedies -- they have none. This Essay explores this absence of such relief for those unable to make an extraordinary claim during the COVID-19 public health crisis of 2020. For the ordinary men, women, and children held in custody in 2020 and beyond, pretrial detention and sentencing laws make no exception in the face of a potentially fatal contagion or the public health crisis it creates. Yet, the pandemic highlights the reality that systematic flaws …

How To Be A Better Plea Bargainer, Cynthia Alkon, Andrea Kupfer Schneider

Faculty Scholarship

Preparation matters in negotiation. While plea bargaining is a criminal lawyer’s primary activity, the value of this skill is discounted by law schools and training programs. A systemic model can be used to improve plea bargaining skills. This Article offers a prep sheet for both prosecutors and defense attorneys and explains how each element of the sheet specifically applies to the plea bargaining context. The prep sheet is designed as a learning tool so that the negotiator can learn from the sheet and then make their own. The sheet highlights important considerations such as understanding the interests and goals of …

Visible Policing: Technology, Transparency, And Democratic Control, Hannah Bloch-Wehba

Faculty Scholarship

Law enforcement has an opacity problem. Police use sophisticated technologies to monitor individuals, surveil communities, and predict behaviors in increasingly intrusive ways. But legal institutions have struggled to understand—let alone set limits on—new investigative methods and techniques for two major reasons. First, new surveillance technology tends to operate in opaque and unaccountable ways, augmenting police power while remaining free of meaningful oversight. Second, shifts in Fourth Amendment doctrine have expanded law enforcement’s ability to engage in surveillance relatively free of scrutiny by courts or by the public. The result is that modern policing is not highly visible to oversight institutions …

Bargaining Without Bias, Cynthia Alkon

Faculty Scholarship

In this article, to work towards decreasing bias in plea bargaining, I propose a structural fix and an individual fix to these core problems. The structural fix is that prosecutors' offices should adopt policies for blind assessment of cases when the first plea offer is made. All indicia of race or ethnicity (including names and neighborhoods) should be removed when prosecutors review a case and make the initial plea offer. This would help prosecutors focus on the facts and their evidence when making a plea offer and prevent bias in decision making. However, it is not realistic to expect that …

Transparency's Ai Problem, Hannah Bloch-Wehba

Faculty Scholarship

A consensus seems to be emerging that algorithmic governance is too opaque and ought to be made more accountable and transparent. But algorithmic governance underscores the limited capacity of transparency law—the Freedom of Information Act and its state equivalents—to promote accountability. Drawing on the critical literature on “open government,” this Essay shows that algorithmic governance reflects and amplifies systemic weaknesses in the transparency regime, including privatization, secrecy, private sector cooptation, and reactive disclosure. These deficiencies highlight the urgent need to reorient transparency and accountability law toward meaningful public engagement in ongoing oversight. This shift requires rethinking FOIA’s core commitment to …

A Scapegoat Theory Of Bivens, Katherine Mims Crocker

Faculty Scholarship

Some scapegoats are innocent. Some warrant blame, but not the amount they are made to bear. Either way, scapegoating can allow in-groups to sidestep social problems by casting blame onto out-groups instead of confronting such problems—and the in-groups’ complicity in perpetuating them—directly.

This Essay suggests that it may be productive to view the Bivens regime’s rise as countering various exercises in scapegoating and its retrenchment as constituting an exercise in scapegoating. The earlier cases can be seen as responding to social structures that have scapegoated racial, economic, and other groups through overaggressive policing, mass incarceration, and inequitable government conduct more …