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Articles 1 - 24 of 24
Full-Text Articles in Entire DC Network
Criminal Law Exceptionalism, Benjamin Levin
Criminal Law Exceptionalism, Benjamin Levin
Publications
For over half a century, U.S. prison populations have ballooned and criminal codes have expanded. In recent years, a growing awareness of mass incarceration and the harms of criminal law across lines of race and class has led to a backlash of anti-carceral commentary and social movement energy. Academics and activists have adopted a critical posture, offering not only small-bore reforms, but full-fledged arguments for the abolition of prisons, police, and criminal legal institutions. Where criminal law was once embraced by commentators as a catchall solution to social problems, increasingly it is being rejected, or at least questioned. Instead of …
Victims’ Rights Revisited, Benjamin Levin
Victims’ Rights Revisited, Benjamin Levin
Publications
This Essay responds to Bennett Capers's article, "Against Prosecutors." I offer four critiques of Capers’s proposal to bring back private prosecutions: (A) that shifting power to victims still involves shifting power to the carceral state and away from defendants; (B) that defining the class of victims will pose numerous problems; C) that privatizing prosecution reinforces a troubling impulse to treat social problems at the individual level; and (D) broadly, that these critiques suggest that Capers has traded the pathologies of “public” law for the pathologies of “private” law. Further, I argue that the article reflects a new, left-leaning vision of …
Decarceration And Default Mental States, Benjamin Levin
Decarceration And Default Mental States, Benjamin Levin
Publications
This Essay, presented at “Guilty Minds: A Virtual Conference on Mens Rea and Criminal Justice Reform” at ASU’s Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law, examines the politics of federal mens rea reform legislation. I argue that current mens rea policy debates reflect an overly narrow vision of criminal justice reform. Therefore, I suggest an alternative frame through which to view mens rea reform efforts—a frame that resonates with radical structural critiques that have gained ground among activists and academics.
Common arguments for and against mens rea reform reflect a belief that the problem with the criminal system is one of …
Wage Theft Criminalization, Benjamin Levin
Wage Theft Criminalization, Benjamin Levin
Publications
Over the past decade, workers’ rights activists and legal scholars have embraced the language of “wage theft” in describing the abuses of the contemporary workplace. The phrase invokes a certain moral clarity: theft is wrong. The phrase is not merely a rhetorical flourish. Increasingly, it has a specific content for activists, politicians, advocates, and academics: wage theft speaks the language of criminal law, and wage theft is a crime that should be punished. Harshly. Self-proclaimed “progressive prosecutors” have made wage theft cases a priority, and left-leaning politicians in the United States and abroad have begun to propose more criminal statutes …
Women’S Votes, Women’S Voices, And The Limits Of Criminal Justice Reform, 1911–1950, Carolyn B. Ramsey
Women’S Votes, Women’S Voices, And The Limits Of Criminal Justice Reform, 1911–1950, Carolyn B. Ramsey
Publications
Deriving its vigor from the work of grassroots organizations at the state and local levels, the League of Women Voters (LWV) sought, in the first half of the twentieth century, to provide newly enfranchised women with a political education to strengthen their voice in public affairs. Local branches like the San Francisco Center learned from experience—through practical involvement in a variety of social welfare and criminal justice initiatives. This Article, written for a symposium commemorating the centennial of the Nineteenth Amendment, assesses the role of LWV leaders in California and especially San Francisco in reforming three aspects of the criminal …
Intersectionality In The Opioid Crisis: Anti-Black Racism And White, Pregnant, Opioid Users, Craig Konnoth
Intersectionality In The Opioid Crisis: Anti-Black Racism And White, Pregnant, Opioid Users, Craig Konnoth
Publications
No abstract provided.
Mens Rea Reform And Its Discontents, Benjamin Levin
Mens Rea Reform And Its Discontents, Benjamin Levin
Publications
This Article examines the debates over recent proposals for “mens rea reform.” The substantive criminal law has expanded dramatically, and legislators have criminalized a great deal of common conduct. Often, new criminal laws do not require that defendants know they are acting unlawfully. Mens rea reform proposals seek to address the problems of overcriminalization and unintentional offending by increasing the burden on prosecutors to prove a defendant’s culpable mental state. These proposals have been a staple of conservative-backed bills on criminal justice reform. Many on the left remain skeptical of mens rea reform and view it as a deregulatory vehicle …
Rethinking The Boundaries Of "Criminal Justice", Benjamin Levin
Rethinking The Boundaries Of "Criminal Justice", Benjamin Levin
Publications
This review of The New Criminal Justice Thinking (Sharon Dolovich & Alexandra Natapoff, eds.) tracks the shifting and uncertain contours of “criminal justice” as an object of study and critique.
Specifically, I trace two themes in the book:
(1) the uncertain boundaries of the “criminal justice system” as a web of laws, actors, and institutions; and
(2) the uncertain boundaries of “criminal justice thinking” as a universe of interdisciplinary scholarship, policy discourse, and public engagement.
I argue that these two themes speak to critically important questions about the nature of criminal justice scholarship and reform efforts. Without a firm understanding …
The Consensus Myth In Criminal Justice Reform, Benjamin Levin
The Consensus Myth In Criminal Justice Reform, Benjamin Levin
Publications
It has become popular to identify a “consensus” on criminal justice reform, but how deep is that consensus, actually? This Article argues that the purported consensus is much more limited than it initially appears. Despite shared reformist vocabulary, the consensus rests on distinct critiques that identify different flaws and justify distinct policy solutions. The underlying disagreements transcend traditional left/right political divides and speak to deeper disputes about the state and the role of criminal law in society.
The Article maps two prevailing, but fundamentally distinct, critiques of criminal law: (1) the quantitative approach (what I call the “over” frame); and …
The Chow: Depictions Of The Criminal Justice System As A Character In Crime Fiction, Marianne Wesson
The Chow: Depictions Of The Criminal Justice System As A Character In Crime Fiction, Marianne Wesson
Publications
Having been honored by a request to contribute to a Symposium honoring my talented friend Alafair Burke, I composed this essay describing the various ways the criminal justice system has been depicted in English-language crime fiction. This survey, necessarily highly selective, considers portrayals penned by writers from Dickens to Tana French. Various dimensions of comparison include the authors’ apparent beliefs about the rule of law (from ridiculously idealistic to uncompromisingly cynical), the characters’ professional perspectives (private detective, police officer, prosecutor, defense lawyer, judge, victim, accused), and the protagonists’ status as institutional insiders or outsiders or occupants of the uncomfortable middle. …
The Lgbt Piece Of The Underenforcement-Overenforcement Puzzle, Aya Gruber
The Lgbt Piece Of The Underenforcement-Overenforcement Puzzle, Aya Gruber
Publications
No abstract provided.
The Exit Myth: Family Law, Gender Roles, And Changing Attitudes Toward Female Victims Of Domestic Violence, Carolyn B. Ramsey
The Exit Myth: Family Law, Gender Roles, And Changing Attitudes Toward Female Victims Of Domestic Violence, Carolyn B. Ramsey
Publications
This Article presents a hypothesis suggesting how and why the criminal justice response to domestic violence changed, over the course of the twentieth century, from sympathy for abused women and a surprising degree of state intervention in intimate relationships to the apathy and discrimination that the battered women' movement exposed. The riddle of declining public sympathy for female victims of intimate-partner violence can only be solved by looking beyond the criminal law to the social and legal changes that created the Exit Myth.
While the situation that gave rise to the battered women's movement in the 1970s is often presumed …
The Juridical Structure Of Habitual Offender Laws And The Jurisprudence Of Authoritarian Social Control, Ahmed A. White
The Juridical Structure Of Habitual Offender Laws And The Jurisprudence Of Authoritarian Social Control, Ahmed A. White
Publications
No abstract provided.
Righting Victim Wrongs: Responding To Philosophical Criticisms Of The Nonspecific Victim Liability Defense, Aya Gruber
Righting Victim Wrongs: Responding To Philosophical Criticisms Of The Nonspecific Victim Liability Defense, Aya Gruber
Publications
Modern criminal law is intensely one-sided in its treatment of victims and defendants. Crime victims and criminal defendants do not enter the trial process on an equal moral footing. Rather, from the beginning victims are assumed blameless, truthful, and even beyond doubt, while defendants are guilty, not worthy of credence, and immoral. This one-sided view of victims, however, is a fiction. As any other people, victims differ in their characterizations. Some are indeed trustworthy, truthful, blameless and ultimately innocent. Others, however, are bad actors themselves, have memory failures, falsely identify, provoke, and even lie. Some victims are in fact, and …
The Ins And Outs, Stops And Starts Of Speedy Trial Rights In Colorado--Part Ii, H. Patrick Furman
The Ins And Outs, Stops And Starts Of Speedy Trial Rights In Colorado--Part Ii, H. Patrick Furman
Publications
This two-part article reviews the constitutional and statutory right to a speedy trial and discusses the case law interpreting that right. The first part was printed in July 2002.
See Part I at http://scholar.law.colorado.edu/articles/550/.
The Ins And Outs, Stops And Starts Of Speedy Trial Rights In Colorado--Part I, H. Patrick Furman
The Ins And Outs, Stops And Starts Of Speedy Trial Rights In Colorado--Part I, H. Patrick Furman
Publications
This two-part article discusses the constitutional right to a speedy trial and the basics of the speedy trial statute.
See Part II at http://scholar.law.colorado.edu/articles/551/.
Do Jury Trials Encourage Harsh Punishment In The United States?, William T. Pizzi
Do Jury Trials Encourage Harsh Punishment In The United States?, William T. Pizzi
Publications
No abstract provided.
Rule Of Law And The Limits Of Sovereignty: The Private Prison In Jurisprudential Perspective, Ahmed A. White
Rule Of Law And The Limits Of Sovereignty: The Private Prison In Jurisprudential Perspective, Ahmed A. White
Publications
No abstract provided.
Victims' Rights, Rule Of Law, And The Threat To Liberal Jurisprudence, Ahmed A. White
Victims' Rights, Rule Of Law, And The Threat To Liberal Jurisprudence, Ahmed A. White
Publications
No abstract provided.
Race And Criminal Justice, Richard B. Collins
Perceived Effectiveness Of The Chicago Crime Commission, 1980-1985: Insiders And Outsiders, Dennis Hoffman, Vincent J. Webb
Perceived Effectiveness Of The Chicago Crime Commission, 1980-1985: Insiders And Outsiders, Dennis Hoffman, Vincent J. Webb
Publications
This study examines the perceived effectiveness of the oldest and most famous citizens' crime commission in the United States--the Chicago Crime Commission.l The commission's effectiveness is measured by the perceptions of influential criminal justice decisionmakers and policymakers.
Book Review, Mark J. Loewenstein
The Politics Of Crime And Criminal Justice, Erika S. Fairchild, Vincent J. Webb
The Politics Of Crime And Criminal Justice, Erika S. Fairchild, Vincent J. Webb
Publications
This volume is about politics, crime, and criminal justice in the United States. As such, it reports on some of the fruits of an increasing amount of research that has been devoted to this topic in recent years. With the exception of one analytical essay on crime as an issue in American politics, all of the articles in the volume are based on original field research.
Graying Of The Professoriate Reconsidered: The Impact Of Demographics On Criminal Justice Education, Vincent J. Webb, Timothy S. Bynum, Jack R. Greene
Graying Of The Professoriate Reconsidered: The Impact Of Demographics On Criminal Justice Education, Vincent J. Webb, Timothy S. Bynum, Jack R. Greene
Publications
The demographic composition, especially the age structure of criminal justice faculty, is of interest to students in criminal justice education for a number of reasons. First, an overall assessment provides some gauge of the relative age of the faculty in the field. Second, observations of changes in the composition of the age structure over time provide insight into the aging process and attendant developmental process of the field itself. Third, age composition has a major impact on the job market for criminal justice faculty. This of course, in turn, partially determines career possibilities for neophytes in the field. It also …