Digital Commons Network^™

Will The New Roberts Court Revive A Formalist Approach To Fourth Amendment Jurisprudence?, Roger Antonio Tejada

UC Law Constitutional Quarterly

While all Chief Justices leave behind distinctive periods of judicial thought and practice, the quantitative and qualitative data presented in this article show that the Roberts Court in particular stands out in the development of Fourth Amendment precedent. The key cases that shaped the search and seizure doctrine before and during his rise show that, contrary to what many may expect, Chief Justice Roberts will likely oversee limited, pro-defendant decisions that could grant additional legitimacy to the Court’s crime-control jurisprudence. On the other hand, the new Justices’ voting records and writings suggest that there are several potential coalitions that could …

A Cross-Clinic Collaboration: How An Amicus Brief Helped Create Judicial Recognition Of Adultification Bias In Juvenile Sentencing, Jessica Levin

UC Law SF Journal on Gender and Justice

No abstract provided.

Final Form, Ellen M. Slatkin

UC Law SF Journal on Gender and Justice

No abstract provided.

A Path Toward Race-Conscious Standards For Youth: Translating Adultification Bias Theory Into Doctrinal Interventions In Criminal Court, Jessica Levin

UC Law SF Journal on Gender and Justice

This article demonstrates how advocates can leverage empirical literature regarding adultification bias to craft doctrinal interventions that recognize and remedy the disproportionately harsh treatment of Black youth in the juvenile and adult criminal legal system. Through case examples, all of which I litigated in the Civil Rights Clinic at Seattle University School of Law, I demonstrate how adultification bias was used to explain the racial disproportionality in the transfer of young people to adult court for prosecution, as well as the harshness of the sentences received by young people in both juvenile and adult court. These cases provide roadmaps for …

Injustice Anywhere: A Comparative Law Analysis Of Saudi Arabia’S Criminal Justice System, Cooper C. Millhouse

UC Law SF International Law Review

A narrow understanding of other nations’ judicial systems begets unsupported assumptions about the way a justice system should operate. While many western commenters have publicized the failures of Middle Eastern societies to protect individual rights, much of the existing literature fails to analyze the legal structures which perpetuate injustice and the motivations that keep the institutions in place. This article illuminates the goals Saudi Arabia’s justice system, inspects how those goals parallel the goals of other common law and civil law systems, and evaluates whether Saudi Arabia’s system is able to effectively accomplish its aims.

This article argues that Saudi …

The Purpose And Practice Of Precedent: What The Decade Long Debate Over Stare Decisis Teaches Us About The New Roberts Court, Russell A. Miller

UC Law Constitutional Quarterly

The Supreme Court’s tectonic decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health upended the Doctrine of Substantive Due Process by radically reinterpreting the doctrine of stare decisis. The Court’s established practice regarding stare decisis should have operated to preserve the fifty-year-old abortion jurisprudence. But we should have seen this change coming. Although there has been an intense and involved debate over the purpose and practice of precedent for generations, that debate shifted at the beginning of 2018. Four approaches to stare decisis emerged along a continuum, from complete abandonment of the doctrine and incremental erosion to modernized adherence to precedent. This …

Editor-In-Chief’S Forward, Zoë Grimaldi

UC Law Constitutional Quarterly

No abstract provided.

Politicians The Founders Warned You About, Neil Fulton

UC Law Constitutional Quarterly

Many articles have explored the Founders’ intentions regarding the constitutional text. Much less attention has focused on the Founders’ ideas regarding the traits needed of the leaders in a constitutional republic. The Constitution focuses on governing structures, many of which relate to the electoral process. The Constitution does not spell out the ideal traits of the leaders elected pursuant to those processes. Nonetheless, the Founders possessed clear views about the virtues and qualifications that ideal political leaders required. Indeed, the Founders issued warnings about certain archetypal political figures who, because of their flagrant disregard of the ideal virtues and qualifications, …

Getting Off Off-Duty: The Impact Of Dobbs On Police Officers’ Private Sexual Lives, Joshua Arrayales

UC Law Constitutional Quarterly

Upon its leak and subsequent official release, the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization shocked and worried the nation. Overnight, the Court overturned forty-nine years of precedent. Those forty-nine years of overturned precedent not only implicate the ability to obtain abortion, but also the ability to engage in relationships, marry, make decisions about our own body, and keep our personal lives private. As a result, many advocates worry about the status of fundamental rights since many of those rights relied on the now overturned cases Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey as well as …

The Inadmissibility Of Victim Impact Evidence, Fernanda Gonzalez

UC Law Constitutional Quarterly

Currently, 41% of inmates on death row in the United States are Black, even though Black people make up only 13.6% of the total population in the country. Additionally, the data has repeatedly shown that states that do not have the death penalty have lower murder rates than states that do. Despite these disparities, more than half of states in the United States continue to allow capital punishment in some form as an alternative to a life sentence. These disparities were further exacerbated by the Supreme Court’s decision in Payne v. Tennessee, which allowed prosecutors to introduce victim impact evidence …

A Good “Idea” With No Clear Plan: The Lack Of Uniformity In Evaluating Compliance With The Idea’S Least Restrictive Environment Provision Has Led To Arbitrary Segregation Of Children With Disabilities Across The United States, Alexis Cherry

UC Law SF Journal on Gender and Justice

The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (“IDEA”) states that students with disabilities are to be provided with a free appropriate public education in the least restrictive environment. Despite this requirement, children with disabilities continue to face segregation in the education system across the country. Although there have been several lawsuits regarding proper placement of children with disabilities, the United States Supreme Court refuses to establish a uniform standard for lower courts to adopt. As a result, there are currently four different approaches—employed across ten different circuits—on how to determine whether a child has been placed in the least restrictive environment. …

Proving Actionable Racial Disparity Under The California Racial Justice Act, Colleen V. Chien, W. David Ball, William A. Sundstrom

UC Law Journal

Racial disparity is a fact of the United States criminal justice system, but under the Supreme Court’s holding in McCleskey v. Kemp, racial disparities—even sizable, statistically significant disparities—do not establish an equal protection violation without a showing of “purposeful discrimination.” The California Racial Justice Act (CRJA), enacted in 2020 and further amended in 2022, introduced a first-of-its-kind test for actionable racial disparity even in the absence of a showing of intent, allowing for relief when the “totality of the evidence demonstrates a significant difference” in charging, conviction, or sentencing across racial groups when compared to those who are “similarly situated” …

Comparing Reasons For Hate Crime Reporting Using Racialized Legal Status, Pamela Ho

UC Law Journal

In the past decade, Latinxs and Asians in the United States have experienced an increase in hate crime victimization. Previous research has identified correlations between hate crime reporting and race. However, few statistical studies examine the intersection of race, immigration status, and hate crime reporting. This Note explores how racialized legal status applies to Latinx and Asian communities respectively and how racialized legal status affects a hate crime victim’s decision to report the crime to police. This Note then sets forth some recommendations for increasing hate crime reporting rates by Latinx and Asian victims.

“Cancel Culture” And Criminal Justice, Steven Arrigg Koh

UC Law Journal

This Article explores the relationship between two normative systems in modern society: “cancel culture” and criminal justice. It argues that cancel culture—a ubiquitous phenomenon in contemporary life—may rectify deficiencies of over- and under-enforcement in the U.S. criminal justice system. However, the downsides of cancel culture’s structure—imprecise factfinding, potentially disproportionate sanctions leading to collateral consequences, a “thin” conception of the wrongdoer as beyond rehabilitation, and a broader cultural anxiety that “chills” certain human conduct—reflect problematic U.S. punitive impulses that characterize our era of mass incarceration. This Article thus argues that social media reform proposals obscure a deeper necessity: transcendence of blame …

Ai Proctoring: Academic Integrity Vs. Student Rights, Samantha Mita

UC Law Journal

Advancements in artificial intelligence (“AI”) and machine learning have found their way into the classroom. The use of artificial intelligence proctoring services (“AIPS”) has risen over the past few years with little consideration for the legal and ethical consequences of their implementation. Issues such as invasion of privacy and bias often get overlooked in favor of preconceived notions of fairness and infallibility associated with the concepts of AI and machine learning. These ethical concerns are especially magnified if AIPS are used in a K-12 setting. This Note, through a lens of AI ethics, recommends a two-pronged approach that creates an …

Community Accountability, M. Eve Hanan, Lydia Nussbaum

UC Law SF Journal on Gender and Justice

No abstract provided.

Can Restorative Justice Transform School Culture In California? Qualitative Research Shines A Little Light, Mary L. Frampton

UC Law SF Journal on Gender and Justice

No abstract provided.

Legal Violence And Restorative Justice, Julie Shackford-Bradley

UC Law SF Journal on Gender and Justice

No abstract provided.

Masthead

UC Law SF Journal on Gender and Justice

No abstract provided.

Gender Violence As Legacy: To Imagine New Approaches, Deborah M. Weissman

UC Law SF Journal on Gender and Justice

No abstract provided.

Impact Jurisdiction & Structural Investigations: The Key To The United States Prosecuting Human Rights Violators, Nick Wiley

UC Law Journal

Since the turn of the century, there has been an exponential rise in forcibly displaced persons and human rights violations. This rise has coincided with a series of acts that have removed the United States as a global leader in the fight for human rights. When President Biden took office, he stated his goal of returning the United States to being the global moral authority leader. To achieve this goal, the Biden Administration implemented a plan to address the human rights violations in Central America that are driving forcibly displaced persons to the U.S.-Mexico border seeking asylum. The plan, however, …

The Constitution’S Waning Enforceability: Constitutional Torts After Egbert & Vega, Bailey D. Barnes

UC Law Constitutional Quarterly

The 2021 term of the Supreme Court of the United States produced two opinions significantly dampening the future of constitutional tort actions, which are cases brought to remedy a government agent’s deprivation of an individual’s constitutional rights. First, in Egbert v. Boule, the Court refused to extend Bivens liability to an excessive force claim made against a United States Border Patrol Agent. Second, in Vega v. Tekoh, the Court contravened the traditional understanding of the Fifth Amendment’s Self-Incrimination Clause by preventing a § 1983 civil rights action against a sheriff’s deputy who procured an un-Mirandized statement from a criminal suspect. …

When Further Incarceration Is No Longer In The Interest Of Justice: Instituting A Federal Prosecutor-Initiated Resentencing Framework, Lydia Tonozzi

UC Law Journal

The dire state of the prison population in the United States has become common knowledge both at home and abroad. Mass incarceration in the United States has been caused by nearly four decades of retributive criminal justice policies that do little to reduce crime. This mass incarceration imposes a multitude of costs on American society, both financially and socially. Furthermore, congressional goals to reduce crime rates are necessarily undermined by punitive policies at the federal level. The history of California’s penal system during the same time frame parallels the federal history. Yet in 2017, California began to remedy this history …

Criminal Law: Cop Tracing, Jonathan Abel

The Judges' Book

No abstract provided.

Prison Litigation: Doctrine And Animus In California’S Covid-19 Prison Litigation, Hadar Aviram

The Judges' Book

No abstract provided.

The Artificially Intelligent Trolley Problem: Understanding Our Criminal Law Gaps In A Robot Driven World, Jake Feiler

UC Law Science and Technology Journal

Not only is Artificial Intelligence (AI) present everywhere in people’s lives, but the technology is also now capable of making unpredictable decisions in novel situations. AI poses issues for the United States’ traditional criminal law system because this system emphasizes mens rea’s importance in determining criminal liability. When AI makes unpredictable decisions that lead to crimes, it will be impractical to determine what mens rea to ascribe to the human agents associated with the technology, such as AI’s creators, owners, and users. To solve this issue, the United States’ legal system must hold AI’s creators, owners, and users strictly liable …

Felines In Carceral Facilities: A Call To Introduce Cat Visitation Rooms In Prisons, Nora Sullivan

UC Law Journal of Race and Economic Justice

No abstract provided.

Capital Punishment For Latine Populations, Morgan Zamora

UC Law Journal of Race and Economic Justice

No abstract provided.

Masthead

UC Law SF Journal on Gender and Justice

No abstract provided.

Formula Unjust: What Formula One Can Learn From The American Justice System To Improve Stewarding, Apratim Vidyarthi

UC Law SF Communications and Entertainment Journal

Formula One (F1), the highest form of motorsport, is one of the fastest-growing sports in the United States, attracting millions of viewers and billions of dollars in investment and prize money. But recent events in F1 have raised questions about the fairness of the sport. This Article contends that the current system of officiating creates unfair outcomes, because officials have overwhelming discretion to make pivotal decisions that significantly impact the outcome of races, and because penalties are applied inconsistently and cannot be appealed. Given the increased professionalization of F1 and the high financial stakes involved, these problems need to be …