Digital Commons Network^™

Left Behind: How The Absence Of A Federal Vacatur Law Disadvantages Survivors Of Human Trafficking, Jessica Emerson, Alison Aminzadeh

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After a hamstring injury in October of 2004 forced her to surrender her athletic scholarship at St. John's University, Shamere McKenzie chose to spend her winter break working in order to save the money she needed to pay the remainder of her tuition. In January of 2005, Shamere met a man named Corey Davis, who expressed an interest in dating her. After getting to know him for several weeks, she eventually shared with him the challenges she was having earning the money she needed to continue her enrollment in college. Davis encouraged her to consider exotic dancing as a way …

Brief For Justice Richard J. Goldstone As Amicus Curiae In Support Of Petitioner, Sarah Paoletti

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Amicus curiae herein argue the present petition for a writ of certiorari should be granted as it rightly questions the very legitimacy of the military commission used to try Petitioner based on a theory of equality. International and comparative law further bolster Petitioner’s argument that the Military Commissions Act’s establishment of a segregated criminal justice system in which only non-citizens are subject to military commission jurisdiction violates the equal rights of Petitioner and all non-citizens subject to its jurisdiction.

Equality is a central principle undergirding human rights law that pre-dates the founding of the United Nations and the drafting of …

Brief Of Amici Curiae Of 11 Addiction Experts In Support Of Appellee, Gene M. Heyman, Scott O. Lilienfeld, Stephen J. Morse, Sally L. Satel

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This brief is a critique of the brain disease model and many supposed implications of that model. It begins with a brief history of the model and moves to a discussion of the motivations behind the characterization of addiction as a “chronic and relapsing brain disease.” We follow with an enumeration of fallacious inferences based upon the brain disease model, including the very notion that addiction becomes a “brain disease” simply because it has neurobiological correlates. Regardless of whether addiction is labeled a brain disease, the real question, we contend, is whether the behavioral manifestations of addiction are unresponsive to …

Tragedy, Outrage & Reform: Crimes That Changed Our World: 1983 – Thurman Beating - Domestic Violence, Paul H. Robinson, Sarah M. Robinson

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Can a crime make our world better? Crimes are the worst of humanity’s wrongs but, oddly, they sometimes do more than anything else to improve our lives. As it turns out, it is often the outrageousness itself that does the work. Ordinary crimes are accepted as the background noise of our everyday existence but some crimes make people stop and take notice – because they are so outrageous, or so curious, or so heart-wrenching. These “trigger crimes” are the cases that this book is about.

They offer some incredible stories about how people, good and bad, change the world around …

Conclusion: Trigger Crimes & Social Progress, Paul H. Robinson, Sarah M. Robinson

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Can a crime make our world better? Crimes are the worst of humanity’s wrongs but, oddly, they sometimes do more than anything else to improve our lives. It is often the outrageousness itself that does the work. Ordinary crimes are accepted as the background noise of everyday existence but some crimes make people stop and take notice – because they are so outrageous or so heart-wrenching.

This brief essay explores the dynamic of tragedy, outrage, and reform, illustrating how certain kinds of crimes can trigger real social progress. Several dozen such “trigger crimes” are identified but four in particular are …

Report Of The Delaware Criminal Law Recodification Project, Paul H. Robinson, Matthew Kussmaul, Ilya Rudyak, Criminal Law Research Group

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In 1973, during the “first wave” of American criminal law recodification efforts following the publication of the Model Penal Code, Delaware adopted a new criminal code. While it represented a dramatic improvement over the law it replaced, its initial clarity and utility were greatly diminished by subsequent piecemeal legislation. Delaware’s current criminal code is lengthy, inconsistent, and replete with duplicative and outdated offenses that impose disproportional punishments. This process of criminal code deterioration is not unique to Delaware and plagues other U.S. jurisdictions. In 2015, however, stakeholders in Delaware’s criminal justice system initiated a code revision process, commissioning the authors …

Are There Really "Plenty Of Shapiros Out There"? A Comment On The Courage Of Norma L. Shapiro, Reid K. Weisbord, David A. Hoffman

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Norma Levy Shapiro, a trailblazing United States District Court Judge whose tenure on the Philadelphia federal bench spanned nearly 40 years, died July 22, 2016. This memoriam, written by two former law clerks, reflects fondly on Judge Shapiro’s judicial courage to follow her conscience even when doing so required making deeply unpopular decisions. To illustrate, this memoriam examines three of Judge Shapiro’s most memorable cases from her notable prisoner litigation docket.

First, in Harris v. Pernsley, Judge Shapiro’s principled but polarizing decisions in the Philadelphia prison overcrowding litigation elicited a now-familiar brand of snark from one (tremendous! but imperfectly …

Pretrial Detention And Bail, Megan Stevenson, Sandra G. Mayson

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Our current pretrial system imposes high costs on both the people who are detained pretrial and the taxpayers who foot the bill. These costs have prompted a surge of bail reform around the country. Reformers seek to reduce pretrial detention rates, as well as racial and socioeconomic disparities in the pretrial system, while simultaneously improving appearance rates and reducing pretrial crime. The current state of pretrial practice suggests that there is ample room for improvement. Bail hearings are often cursory, with no defense counsel present. Money-bail practices lead to high rates of detention even among misdemeanor defendants and those who …

Neuroscience In Forensic Contexts: Ethical Concerns, Stephen J. Morse

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This is a chapter in a volume, Ethics Challenges in Forensic Psychiatry and Psychology Practice, edited by Ezra E. H. Griffith, M.D. and to be published by Columbia University Press. The chapter addresses whether the use of new neuroscience techniques, especially non-invasive functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and the data from studies employing them raise new ethical issues for forensic psychiatrists and psychologists. The implicit thesis throughout is that if the legal questions, the limits of the new techniques and the relevance of neuroscience to law are properly understood, no new ethical issues are raised. A major ethical lapse …

Strict Liability's Criminogenic Effect, Paul H. Robinson

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It is easy to understand the apparent appeal of strict liability to policymakers and legal reformers seeking to reduce crime: if the criminal law can do away with its traditional culpability requirement, it can increase the likelihood of conviction and punishment of those who engage in prohibited conduct or bring about prohibited harm or evil. And such an increase in punishment rate can enhance the crime-control effectiveness of a system built upon general deterrence or incapacitation of the dangerous. Similar arguments support the use of criminal liability for regulatory offenses. Greater punishment rates suggest greater compliance.

But this analysis fails …

Reproducing Gender And Race Inequality In The Blawgosphere, Jane C. Murphy, Solangel Maldonado

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The use of the Internet and other digital media to disseminate scholarship has great potential for expanding the range of voices in legal scholarship. Legal blogging, in particular, with its shorter, more informal form, seems ideal for encouraging commentary from a diverse group of scholars. This Chapter tests this idea by exploring the role of blogging in legal scholarship and the level of participation of women and scholars of color on the most visible academic legal blogs. After noting the predominance of white male scholars as regular contributors on these blogs, we analyze the relative lack of diversity in this …

Realizing Dispute Resolution: Meeting The Challenges Of Legal Realism Through Mediation, Robert Rubinson

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No abstract provided.

Another Look At The Need For Family Law Education Reform: One Law School's Innovations, Barbara A. Babb

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The pressing need to change family law education stems from increased numbers and types of family law matters before the courts, changing legal standards, and the evolution of family law practice. The Family Law Education Reform Project, the Families Matter Report, and the IAALS Family Bar Summit recommend that traditional family law education be supplemented to reflect the importance of a holistic blend of theory and practice. This involves expanding student clinical or experiential programs, incorporating interdisciplinary studies specific to the context of family law, and enhancing continuing legal education opportunities. As one law school example, the University of Baltimore …

Privacy, Poverty, And Big Data: A Matrix Of Vulnerabilities For Poor Americans, Mary Madden, Michele E. Gilman, Karen Levy, Alice Marwick

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This Article examines the matrix of vulnerabilities that low-income people face as a result of the collection and aggregation of big data and the application of predictive analytics. On one hand, big data systems could reverse growing economic inequality by expanding access to opportunities for low-income people. On the other hand, big data could widen economic gaps by making it possible to prey on low-income people or to exclude them from opportunities due to biases entrenched in algorithmic decision-making tools. New kinds of “networked privacy” harms, in which users are simultaneously held liable for their own behavior and the actions …

Rationing Criminal Justice, Richard A. Bierschbach, Stephanos Bibas

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Of the many diagnoses of American criminal justice’s ills, few focus on externalities. Yet American criminal justice systematically overpunishes in large part because few mechanisms exist to force consideration of the full social costs of criminal justice interventions. Actors often lack good information or incentives to minimize the harms they impose. Part of the problem is structural: criminal justice is fragmented vertically among governments, horizontally among agencies, and individually among self-interested actors. Part is a matter of focus: doctrinally and pragmatically, actors overwhelmingly view each case as an isolated, short-term transaction to the exclusion of broader, long-term, and aggregate effects. …

Law, Society, And Setsuo: Miyazawa’S Influence On Socio-Legal Studies, Eric A. Feldman

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What Setsuo has accomplished over these past 30 years is nothing short of remarkable. I can think of no other scholar within or outside of Japan who has had a greater impact on both the legal academic community and society more generally. Indeed, when Setsuo was still quite young he had already written a number of influential articles. But they turn out to represent only a fraction of his extraordinary output over the next years. In reflecting on Setsuo’s many achievements, I am particularly drawn to comment on three of them. First, his empirical and comparative law and society scholarship, …

Appraising The Progressive State, Herbert J. Hovenkamp

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Since it origins in the late nineteenth century, the most salient characteristics of the progressive state have been marginalism in economics, greatly increased use of scientific theory and data in policy making, a commitment to broad participation in both economic and political markets, and a belief that resources are best moved through society by many institutions in addition to traditional markets.. These values have served to make progressive policy less stable than classical and other more laissez faire alternatives. However, the progressive state has also performed better than alternatives by every economic measure. One of the progressive state’s biggest vulnerabilities …

Lessons From Ferguson And Beyond: Bias, Health, And Justice, Sidney D. Watson

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August 9, 2014, Michael Brown, an 18-year-old African American teen, killed by police in Ferguson, Missouri.

November 22, 2014, Tamir Rice, a 12-year-old African American child, killed by police in Cleveland, Ohio.

April 4, 2015, Walter Scott, a 50-year-old African American man, killed by police in Charlotte, North Carolina.

November 15, 2015, Jamar Clark, a 24-year-old African American man, killed by police in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

July 6, 2016, Philando Castile, a 32-year-old African American man, killed by police in Falcon Heights, Minnesota.

The list of Black men and women killed by police goes on and seems to grow by the …

A Comparison Of Defendants With Mental Illness Represented By Public Defenders And Private Attorneys: An Analysis Of Court-Ordered Pretrial Psychiatric Evaluations, Donald M. Linhorst, P. Ann Dirks-Lindhorst, Susan Mcgraugh, Lauren Choate, Sarah Riley

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This study compared the characteristics and court-ordered evaluation questions and responses among 4,430 defendants to determine if differences existed between those represented by public defenders and private attorneys when receiving trial competency or responsibility psychiatric evaluations from a state department of mental health. Defendants represented by public defenders were more likely to be younger, to have less education, to have psychotic disorders, to have a history of inpatient psychiatric treatment, to live in urban or rural counties, and to be jailed at the time of the evaluation. In addition, defendants represented by public defenders were less likely to have a …

The Italian Enlightenment And The American Revolution: Cesare Beccaria's Forgotten Influence On American Law, John Bessler

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The influence of the Italian Enlightenment—the Illuminismo—on the American Revolution has long been neglected. While historians regularly acknowledge the influence of European thinkers such as William Blackstone, John Locke and Montesquieu, Cesare Beccaria’s contributions to the origins and development of American law have largely been forgotten by twenty-first century Americans. In fact, Beccaria’s book, Dei delitti e delle pene (1764), translated into English as On Crimes and Punishments (1767), significantly shaped the views of American revolutionaries and lawmakers. The first four U.S. Presidents—George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison—were inspired by Beccaria’s treatise and, in some cases, read …

Restoring The Legitimacy Of Private Antitrust Enforcement, Robert H. Lande, Joshua P. Davis

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This is a draft chapter from the American Antitrust Institute's 2017 recommendations to the 45th President of the United States. It contains a brief but well-deserved defense of the benefits of private antitrust enforcement and a critique of the claims that private enforcement in the United States is excessive, that it leads to overdeterrence, and that the courts are plagued with widespread frivolous antitrust lawsuits. It also offer a number of specific recommendations for the new administration to implement in the private antitrust enforcement area, including:

* Educate the courts, the public, and federal and state legislatures about the virtues …

Dismantling The Trap: Untangling The Chain Of Events In Excessive Force Claims, Cara Mcclellan

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In the wake of repeated police shootings of unarmed Black men and women, police departments across the country are focusing on de-escalation. Yet federal courts reviewing Fourth Amendment excessive force violations are often unwilling to take into account how an officer’s pre-seizure conduct may have affected the need to use force during a civilian encounter. I argue that as part of the Graham v. Connor reasonableness analysis, courts reviewing excessive force claims should consider prior police conduct that impacted the need for force when the officer predictably causes the civilian to respond by employing an overly aggressive tactic. I provide …

An Administrative Right To Be Free From Sexual Violence? Title Ix Enforcement In Historical And Institutional Perspective, Karen M. Tani

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One of the most controversial administrative actions in recent years is the U.S. Department of Education’s campaign against sexual assault on college campuses. Using its authority under Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 (mandating nondiscrimination on the basis of sex in all educational programs and activities receiving federal funds), the Department’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR) has launched an enforcement effort that critics denounce as aggressive, manipulative, and corrosive of individual liberties. Missing from the commentary is a historically informed understanding of why this administrative campaign unfolded as it did. This Essay offers crucial context by reminding readers …

Root Cause Analysis: A Tool To Promote Officer Safety And Reduce Officer Involved Shootings Over Time, John Hollway, Calvin Lee, Sean Smoot

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This Article proposes the use of Root Cause Analysis (RCA) as a tool for reducing or preventing officer-involved shootings (OIS). RCA is a method of problem solving designed to identify core underlying factors that contributed to generate an undesirable outcome, organizational accident, or adverse event. Once these core underlying causative factors have been identified, participants in the system can fashion remedies that will prevent future occurrences of similar undesirable outcomes. RCA is part of a prospective, non-blaming “systems approach” to preventing error in complex human systems that has been successfully used to reduce errors in aviation, healthcare, manufacturing, nuclear power, …

Democratizing Criminal Law: Feasibility, Utility, And The Challenge Of Social Change, Paul H. Robinson

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The notion of “democratizing criminal law” has an initial appeal because, after all, we believe in the importance of democracy and because criminal law is so important – it protects us from the most egregious wrongs and is the vehicle by which we allow the most serious governmental intrusions in the lives of individuals. Given criminal law’s special status, isn’t it appropriate that this most important and most intrusive governmental power be subject to the constraints of democratic determination?

But perhaps the initial appeal of this grand principle must give way to practical realities. As much as we are devoted …

Seizing Family Homes From The Innocent: Can The Eighth Amendment Protect Minorities And The Poor From Excessive Punishment In Civil Forfeiture?, Louis S. Rulli

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Civil forfeiture laws permit the government to seize and forfeit private property that has allegedly facilitated a crime without ever charging the owner with any criminal offense. The government extracts payment in kind—property—and gives nothing to the owner in return, based upon a legal fiction that the property has done wrong. As such, the government’s taking of property through civil forfeiture is punitive in nature and constrained by the Eighth Amendment’s Excessive Fines Clause, which is intended to curb abusive punishments.

The Supreme Court’s failure to announce a definitive test for determining the constitutional excessiveness of civil forfeiture takings under …

The Downstream Consequences Of Misdemeanor Pretrial Detention, Paul Heaton, Sandra G. Mayson, Megan Stevenson

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In misdemeanor cases, pretrial detention poses a particular problem because it may induce otherwise innocent defendants to plead guilty in order to exit jail, potentially creating widespread error in case adjudication. While practitioners have long recognized this possibility, empirical evidence on the downstream impacts of pretrial detention on misdemeanor defendants and their cases remains limited. This Article uses detailed data on hundreds of thousands of misdemeanor cases resolved in Harris County, Texas — the third largest county in the U.S. — to measure the effects of pretrial detention on case outcomes and future crime. We find that detained defendants are …

Democratizing Criminal Law As An Abolitionist Project, Dorothy E. Roberts

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The criminal justice system currently functions to exclude black people from full political participation. Myriad institutions, laws, and definitions within the criminal justice system subordinate and criminalize black people, thereby excluding them from electoral politics, and depriving them of material resources, social networks, family relationships, and legitimacy necessary for full political citizenship. Making criminal law democratic requires more than reform efforts to improve currently existing procedures and systems. Rather, it requires an abolitionist approach that will dismantle the criminal law’s anti-democratic aspects entirely and reconstitute the criminal justice system without them.

Punishment, Liberalism, And Public Reason, Chad Flanders

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The article argues for a conception of the justification of punishment that is compatible with a modern, politically liberal regime. Section I deals with what some have thought are the obvious social interests society has in punishing criminals, and tries to develop those possible interests somewhat sympathetically. Section II suggests that many of those reasons are not good ones if punishment is regarded (as it should be) from the perspective of political philosophy. Social responses to bad things happening to people cannot be grounded in controversial metaphysical views about what is good for people or what people deserve, but many …

Ex Parte Seizures Under The Dtsa And The Shift Of Ip Rights Enforcement, Yvette Joy Liebesman

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The ex parte seizure provision of the Defend Trade Secrets Act is another step in a long line of legislation that shifts the costs of private enforcement to the public, which already has a toehold in copyright and trademark law. The ex parte provision — which is not incorporated into any state trade secret law — relieves rights owners of two “burdens.” First, it relieves the trade secret owner of the burden of actually having to compete in the marketplace. Second, it relieves the trade secret owner of the burden of the costs associated with the discovery process of a …