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Criminal Justice, Inc., John Rappaport

Articles

No abstract provided.

The Constitutionality Of Income-Based Fines, Alec Schierenbeck

University of Chicago Law Review

In America, fines are typically imposed without regard to income. The result is a system that traps low-income offenders in a cycle of debt and jail while letting rich offenders break the law without meaningful financial consequence. One-sizefits-all fines also fail to meet basic goals of the justice system: to treat like offenders alike, punish the deserving, and encourage respect for the law. Elsewhere in the world, however, systems that assess fines based on earnings have been around for nearly one hundred years. The most common model—known as the “day fine”— scales penalties according to a person’s daily income. These …

In Defense Of Territorial Jurisdiction, Cody J. Jacobs

University of Chicago Law Review

As the story is traditionally told, the minimum contacts test introduced in International Shoe v Washington freed personal jurisdiction from the dark age of territorialism and gave courts the flexibility to expand the scope of personal jurisdiction to keep pace with modern society. While scholars have critiqued the minimum contacts test on a number of grounds, the narrative that the Territorial Model was inherently problematic—and that Shoe was a step in the right direction— has gone largely unchallenged.

This Article challenges that narrative and argues for a return to the Territorial Model. While Shoe is traditionally cast as a step …

Empirical Patterns Of Pro Se Litigation In Federal District Courts, Mitchell Levy

University of Chicago Law Review

Pro se litigants face a number of challenges when bringing civil litigation. One potential solution to these challenges, endorsed by members of the judiciary and the legal academy, is pro se reform at the trial court level: offering special services to pro se litigants in order to help them successfully navigate the legal system. This Comment offers the first publicly available empirical assessment of several pro se reform efforts thus far. The analysis shows that these pro se reforms have not succeeded in improving pro se litigants’ win rates at trial. This Comment thus suggests that, while pro se reforms …

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Reviewing Leniency: Appealability Of 18 Usc § 3582(C)(2) Sentence Modification Motions, Sarah E. Welch

University of Chicago Law Review

In ordinary circumstances, criminal defendants get only one shot at sentencing. But in a few cases, defendants have a second chance at a more lenient sentence. This Comment considers one of those circumstances: motions under 18 USC § 3582(c)(2) for sentence reduction after retroactive downward adjustment of the Sentencing Guidelines. Specifically, this Comment considers the circuit split over when those motions are appealable. Courts disagree about which statute governs appellate jurisdiction: the general jurisdictional statute permitting appeal of any final decision of a district court (28 USC § 1291) or the specific sentencing jurisdictional statute restricting appeal of otherwise final …

State Bureaucratic Undermining, Justin Weinstein-Tull

University of Chicago Law Review

Our federal rights are failing, and the inner workings of state government provide an explanation. States administer more federal rights than ever before; administering those rights requires intrastate coordination both horizontally (across cabinet-level state actors, agencies, and commissions) and vertically (with local governments like counties and towns). That coordination undermines federal law by creating bureaucratic barriers to full compliance. I unearth and identify three of these barriers—agency alienation, agency conflict, and role confusion—by surveying remedies in recent suits against state actors. These remedies take the form of choreography: they specify how internal state actors must work together to vindicate federal …

Righting Categorical Wrongs: A Holistic Solution To Rule 8(A)’S Same-Or-Similarcharacter Prong, Matthew Deates

University of Chicago Law Review

More than half of federal criminal defendants are charged with multiple offenses in a single indictment. These defendants are more likely to be convicted on at least one charge than defendants who receive separate trials for each charge. Joinder has been both lauded for increasing the efficiency of the federal criminal justice system and criticized for unfairly prejudicing criminal defendants. Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure 8(a) and 14 govern the joinder of offenses in the federal system. Rule 8(a) permits offenses of the “same or similar character” to be joined against a single defendant while Rule 14 allows district courts …

Rethinking Family-Court Prosecutors: Elected And Agency Prosecutors And Prosecutorial Discretion In Juvenile Delinquency And Child Protection Cases, Josh Gupta-Kagan

University of Chicago Law Review

Like criminal prosecutors, family-court prosecutors have immense power. Determining which cases to prosecute and which to divert or dismiss goes to the heart of the delinquency system’s balance between punishment and rehabilitation of children and the child protection system’s spectrum of family interventions. For instance, the 1990s shift to prosecute (rather than dismiss or divert) about 10 percent more delinquency cases annually is as significant a development as any other. Yet scholars have not examined the legal structures for these charging decisions or family-court prosecutors’ authority in much depth.

This Article shows how family-court prosecutors’ roles have never been fully …

Defining Flight Risk, Lauryn P. Gouldin

University of Chicago Law Review

Our illogical and too-well-traveled paths to pretrial detention have created staggering costs for defendants who spend unnecessary time in pretrial detention and for taxpayers who fund a broken system. These problems remain recalcitrant even as a third generation of reform efforts makes impressive headway. They are likely to remain so until judges, attorneys, legislators, and scholars address a fundamental definitional problem: the collapsing of very different types of behavior that result in failures to appear in court into a single, undifferentiated category of nonappearance risk. That single category muddies critical distinctions that this Article’s new taxonomy of pretrial nonappearance risks …

Legal Or Political Checks On Apex Criminality: An Essay On Constitutional Design, Aziz Huq

Articles

No abstract provided.

Apparent Fault, Aziz Huq, Genevieve Lakier

Articles

No abstract provided.

Why The Burger Court Mattered (Reviewing The Burger Court And The Rise Of The Judicial Right By Michael J. Graetz And Linda Greenhouse), David A. Strauss

Articles

No abstract provided.

Police Violence In The Wire, Jonathan Masur, Richard H. Mcadams

Articles

No abstract provided.

What Is Discriminatory Intent?, Aziz Huq

Articles

No abstract provided.

Collective Bargaining Rights And Police Misconduct: Evidence From Florida, Dhammika Dharmapala, Richard H. Mcadams, John Rappaport

Public Law and Legal Theory Working Papers

Growing controversy surrounds the impact of labor unions on law enforcement behavior. Critics argue that unions impede organizational reform and insulate officers from discipline for misconduct. Yet collective bargaining tends to increase wages, which could improve officer behavior. We provide quasi-experimental empirical evidence on the effects of collective bargaining rights on violent incidents of misconduct. Our empirical strategy exploits a 2003 Florida Supreme Court decision (Williams), which conferred collective bargaining rights on sheriffs’ deputies, resulting in a substantial increase in unionization among these officers. Using a Florida state administrative database of “moral character” violations reported by local agencies between 1996 …

Police Violence In The Wire, Jonathan Masur, Richard H. Mcadams

Public Law and Legal Theory Working Papers

Police brutality—the unsanctioned, unlawful use of force by police against unarmed (and often defenseless) civilians—is one of the recurring motifs of The Wire.¹ The violence occurs in a variety of settings: occasionally the victim of the police brutality has done something to precipitate it (though the brutality is never justified), but more often the violence is unprovoked and senseless. Some police are one-time wrongdoers; others are repeat offenders. Some officers participate in the actual beatings, while others only cover up for the actions of their fellow officers. But in sum, the violence is regular and recurring, if not omnipresent. …

Legality In Contemporary Chinese Politics, Taisu Zhang, Tom Ginsburg

Public Law and Legal Theory Working Papers

The picture of Chinese law that many Western scholars and commentators portray is an increasingly bleak one: since the mid-2000s, China has been retreating from legal reform back into unchecked authoritarianism. This article argues that, much to the contrary, Chinese politics have in fact become substantially more law-oriented over the past five years. The Chinese Communist Party under Xi Jinping has indeed centralized power and control to an almost unprecedented extent, but it has done this in a highly legalistic way, empowering courts against other state and Party entities, insisting on legal professionalism, and bringing political powers that were formerly …

Assessing The Empirical Upside Of Personalized Criminal Procedure, Matthew B. Kugler, Lior Jacob Strahilevitz

Public Law and Legal Theory Working Papers

Though personalization of law is often viewed as a new idea, pockets of criminal procedure already tolerate it. Many courts have held that Miranda warnings must be tailored when read to juveniles or people with limited English proficiency; a suspect’s age is necessarily part of the judicial calculus when determining whether the police’s questioning of her is a custodial interrogation; and some state courts consider a person’s demographic characteristics when deciding whether they have consented to a search. The question before us now is whether society should go further. Should the law of criminal procedure pay more attention to individual …

Legal Or Political Checks On Apex Criminality: An Essay On Constitutional Design, Aziz Z. Huq

Public Law and Legal Theory Working Papers

How should constitutional designers address the problem of apex criminality, or criminal actions by those elected or appointed to high positions in a national government? I offer three general observations about this difficult question of constitutional design. First, it is not at all clear that a constitutional designer ought to expend effort on creating accountability mechanisms to address apex criminality. Second, if a designer does choose to address the question, she must opt between two highly imperfect options—a ‘legal’ mechanism embedded in a nonpartisan body such as a prosecutor’s office, or a ‘political’ mechanism, which runs through an elected body …

Racial Equity In Algorithmic Criminal Justice, Aziz Z. Huq

Public Law and Legal Theory Working Papers

Algorithmic tools for predicting violence and criminality are being used more and more in policing, bail, and sentencing. Scholarly attention to date has focused on their procedural due process implications. My aim here is to consider these instruments’ interaction with the enduring racial legacies of the criminal justice system There are two competing lenses for evaluating the racial effects of algorithmic criminal justice: constitutional doctrine and emerging technical standards of “algorithmic fairness.” I argue first that constitutional doctrine is poorly suited to the task. It will often fail to capture the full range of racial issues that potentially arise in …

Criminal Justice, Inc., John Rappaport

Public Law and Legal Theory Working Papers

In the past decade, major retailers nationwide have begun to employ a private, for-profit system to settle criminal disputes, extracting payment from shoplifting suspects in exchange for a promise not to call the police. This Article examines what retailers’ decisions reveal about our public system of criminal justice and the concerns of the agents who run it, the victims who rely on it, and the suspects whose lives it alters. The private policing of commercial spaces is well known, as is private incarceration of convicted offenders. This Article is the first, however, to document how industry has penetrated new parts …

"We Only Spy On Foreigners": The Myth Of A Universal Right To Privacy And The Practice Of Foreign Mass Surveillance, Asaf Lubin

Chicago Journal of International Law

The digital age brought with it a new epoch in global political life, one neatly coined by Professor Philip Howard as the “pax technica.” In this new world order, government and industry are “tightly bound” in technological and security arrangements that serve to push forward an information and cyber revolution of unparalleled magnitude. While the rise of information technologies tells a miraculous story of triumph over the physical constraints that once shackled mankind, these very technologies are also the cause of grave concern. Intelligence agencies have been recently involved in the exercise of global indiscriminate surveillance, which purports to go …

Assessing The Empirical Upside Of Personalized Criminal Procedure, Matthew B. Kugler, Lior Jacob Strahilevitz

Coase-Sandor Working Paper Series in Law and Economics

Though personalization of law is often viewed as a new idea, pockets of criminal procedure already tolerate it. Many courts have held that Miranda warnings must be tailored when read to juveniles or people with limited English proficiency; a suspect’s age is necessarily part of the judicial calculus when determining whether the police’s questioning of her is a custodial interrogation; and some state courts consider a person’s demographic characteristics when deciding whether they have consented to a search. The question before us now is whether society should go further. Should the law of criminal procedure pay more attention to individual …

Collective Bargaining Rights And Police Misconduct: Evidence From Florida, Dhammika Dharmapala, Richard H. Mcadams, John Rappaport

Coase-Sandor Working Paper Series in Law and Economics

No abstract provided.