Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®
- Discipline
-
- Law (406)
- Criminal Law (121)
- Constitutional Law (47)
- Criminal Procedure (41)
- Law and Society (36)
-
- International Law (32)
- Law and Gender (30)
- Law and Race (29)
- Courts (27)
- Civil Rights and Discrimination (24)
- Juvenile Law (24)
- Legal Education (24)
- Human Rights Law (22)
- Immigration Law (21)
- Other Law (20)
- Legal Ethics and Professional Responsibility (16)
- Health Law and Policy (15)
- Legal Profession (15)
- Law Enforcement and Corrections (14)
- Legal History (13)
- Sexuality and the Law (13)
- Evidence (12)
- Social and Behavioral Sciences (12)
- Judges (11)
- Litigation (11)
- Law and Psychology (10)
- Comparative and Foreign Law (9)
- Family Law (9)
- Jurisprudence (9)
- Military, War, and Peace (9)
- Institution
- Keyword
-
- Law (43)
- Criminal law (30)
- Criminal justice (23)
- International law (17)
- Race (17)
-
- Supreme Court (17)
- Constitutional law (16)
- Legal education (16)
- Government and politics (15)
- Ethics (13)
- Deportation (12)
- Due process (12)
- Immigration (12)
- Sentencing (12)
- Gender (11)
- Human rights (10)
- Children (9)
- International Criminal Court (9)
- International criminal law (9)
- Discrimination (8)
- Domestic violence (8)
- Law school (8)
- Plea bargaining (8)
- Prosecutorial discretion (8)
- Capital punishment (7)
- Criminal procedure (7)
- Incarceration (7)
- Juvenile justice (7)
- Prosecutors (7)
- Sixth Amendment (7)
- Publication Year
Articles 1 - 30 of 426
Full-Text Articles in Entire DC Network
When Commanders Decide: Military Prosecutorial Decision-Making In Sexual Assault Cases, Chris Cox
When Commanders Decide: Military Prosecutorial Decision-Making In Sexual Assault Cases, Chris Cox
Scholarly Works
Congress enacted legislation that went into effect in 2023, which transferred prosecutorial decision-making for serious cases, including sexual assault, from Commanders to military lawyers. While there is some research on the military’s criminal justice system that supports shifting the decision-making to military lawyers, there is a large body of research that suggests lawyers, too, suffer from similar impediments when handling decision-making for sexual assault cases. In the wake of this new amendment, it is important to continue assessing how the change will impact case processing, by first clearly understanding what was happening when Commanders had complete authority. This article explores …
Government Lawyers May Be Prime Candidates For College And University Presidencies, Patricia E. Salkin
Government Lawyers May Be Prime Candidates For College And University Presidencies, Patricia E. Salkin
Scholarly Works
With roughly 4,000 institutions of higher education in the United States, there is a body of literature on leadership in higher education and presidents have been studies and critiqued by biographers and by scholars, yet up until now there has been scarce attention to the documented trend of lawyers leading higher education. Within the subset of lawyer presidents, one major commonality is government law experience in their career prior to the campus presidency. This article explores the unique skills and leadership that government lawyers can offer colleges and universities and provides examples of presidents with former government experience at all …
Absolute Official Immunity In Constitutional Litigation, Michael L. Wells
Absolute Official Immunity In Constitutional Litigation, Michael L. Wells
Scholarly Works
Absolute official immunity blocks recovery for constitutional violations that occur in the course of legislative, judicial, prosecutorial, and testimonial functions, no matter how egregiously the officer has acted. The basic policy underlying the doctrine is that constitutional litigation will produce unacceptable social costs, mainly by discouraging officials from acting boldly and effectively in the public interest. It may be necessary to sacrifice the vindication of constitutional rights and deterrence of violations in some circumstances, but the Court’s broad function-based limits give too much weight to the costs of constitutional remedies and pays too little attention to the vindication and deterrence …
The Case For The Current Free Exercise Regime, Nathan Chapman
The Case For The Current Free Exercise Regime, Nathan Chapman
Scholarly Works
How the Supreme Court ought to implement the Free Exercise
Clause has been one of the most controversial issues in U.S. rights discourse
of the past fifty years. In Fulton v. City of Philadelphia, a majority of the
justices expressed dissatisfaction with the standard articulated in
Employment Division v. Smith, but they could not agree on what ought to
replace it. This Essay argues that focusing on whether to overrule Smith is a
distraction from the sensitive task of implementing the Free Exercise Clause.
This is not because Smith was “right,” but because (1) the history and
tradition are both …
Presuming Trustworthiness, Ronnell Anderson Jones, Sonja R. West
Presuming Trustworthiness, Ronnell Anderson Jones, Sonja R. West
Scholarly Works
A half-century ago, the U.S. Supreme Court often praised speakers performing the press function. While the Justices acknowledged that press reports are sometimes inaccurate and that media motivations are at times less than public-serving, their laudatory statements nonetheless embraced a baseline presumption of the value and trustworthiness of press speech in general. Speech in the exercise of the press function, they told us, is vitally important to public discourse in a democracy and therefore worthy of protection even when it falls short of the ideal in a given instance. Those days are over. Our study of every reference to the …
The Immigration Implications Of Presidential Pot Pardons, Jason A. Cade
The Immigration Implications Of Presidential Pot Pardons, Jason A. Cade
Scholarly Works
This Essay examines the immigration implications of President Joe Biden’s Proclamation on October 6, 2022, pardoning most federal and D.C. offenders who committed the offense of simple marijuana possession. A late twentieth century interpretive shift by the Board of Immigration Appeals holds that pardons only prevent deportation for certain criminal history categories, which do not include controlled substance offenses, and thus far lower federal courts have deferred to the agency’s approach.Nevertheless, according to the analysis I offer, President Biden’s cannabis pardons should be deemed fully effective to eliminate all immigration penalties. All of the immigrant pardon cases to reach the …
A Guide To Mireille Delmas-Marty's “Compass”, Diane Marie Amann
A Guide To Mireille Delmas-Marty's “Compass”, Diane Marie Amann
Scholarly Works
This essay appears as the Afterword (pp. 55-64) to a volume featuring an important work by the late Mireille Delmas-Marty (1941-2022) titled A Compass of Possibilities: Global Governance and Legal Humanism. A Collège de France de Paris law professor and one of the pre-eminent legal thinkers of her generation, Delmas-Marty and the essay’s author were longtime colleagues and collaborators. The volume contains an English translation of a 2011 lecture by Delmas-Marty, originally titled “Une boussole des possibles: Gouvernance mondiale et humanismes juridiques.” Amann’s essay surveys that writing, in a manner designed to acquaint non-francophone lawyers and academics with Delmas-Marty’s …
Community Accountability, M. Eve Hanan, Lydia Nussbaum
Community Accountability, M. Eve Hanan, Lydia Nussbaum
Scholarly Works
This Essay takes a close look at how the idea of community accountability is used in current transformative and restorative justice efforts, situating the concept within the history of delegalization, or a collection of different efforts to reclaim conflict resolution and public safety from the state. In fact, these efforts to reclaim the authority and means of redressing harm from legal systems may track earlier efforts to reclaim dispute resolution from the state. In Part I, we situate both transformative and restorative justice movements in the history of delegalization while noting essential differences between the objectives of these two reform …
Terror And Tenderness In Criminal Law, M. Eve Hanan
Terror And Tenderness In Criminal Law, M. Eve Hanan
Scholarly Works
The criminal legal system is at a crossroads. Calls for abolition are met with calls for modest adjustments or maintenance of the status quo. What frequently emerges from these polarities is a promise that police, prosecutors, judges, and other government actors will use their vast discretion to reduce the harmful excesses of criminal legal practices. Initiatives like “compassionate release,” “second look sentencing,” and the progressive prosecutor’s pledge to “charge with restraint” are examples of this promise to exercise discretion with care. In word choice and design, these discretionary reforms suggest tempering harsh criminal legal practices with leniency and individualized consideration—a …
“Cops Or Coaches?” The Statutory Role Of Juvenile Probation Officers In A Transformative Age, Justin Iverson, David S. Tanenhaus
“Cops Or Coaches?” The Statutory Role Of Juvenile Probation Officers In A Transformative Age, Justin Iverson, David S. Tanenhaus
Scholarly Works
For more than a century, juvenile justice proponents have had a difficult time precisely defining the proper role of the juvenile probation officer while simultaneously stressing that the juvenile probation department is the “workhorse” of the entire system. Existing literature largely focuses on which aspects of policing and social work these officers should embody while ignoring the foundational moorings in state statutes. This Article offers both a historical account of the rise of the juvenile probation officer and a thorough analysis of each state’s laws regarding peace officer status, employing authority, the power of arrest, and the power to carry …
A Fresh Start: Tennessee Attorneys, Judges, Law Students And Court Administrators Work Toward Justice For All, Joy Radice
Scholarly Works
No abstract provided.
The New Due Process: Fairness In A Fee-Driven State, Glenn Harlan Reynolds
The New Due Process: Fairness In A Fee-Driven State, Glenn Harlan Reynolds
Scholarly Works
Many parts of the criminal justice system are funded by revenue from "users" -- i.e., the accused, in the form of fines, fees, and forfeitures. Drawing on both existing Supreme Court authority and recent Court of Appeals decisions, we argue that a violation of due process exists when all participants in the criminal justice system, from police to court clerks, to prosecutors and judges, depend on revenues from pleas and convictions in order to function. Instead, we argue that due process demands that the criminal justice system be funded in ways that are not affected by the rate of arrest …
The Ballad Of Hicks Carmichael: Law, Music, And Popular Justice In Urban Appalachia, William Davenport Mercer
The Ballad Of Hicks Carmichael: Law, Music, And Popular Justice In Urban Appalachia, William Davenport Mercer
Scholarly Works
This article examines a rare folk ballad to revisit an 1888 Tennessee trial that newspapers referred to as the fastest in the country in which the death penalty was involved. If we look at this event using court records and newspapers, it tells a regrettably common story of a court under pressure from the populace skirting the protections of law. However, if we consider the trial as a performative endeavor, we can rightly consider other performative events, like folk songs, not as reflective of official events but as equivalents that help provide insight into the larger motives behind the court’s …
Schoolhouse Rap, Andrea L. Dennis
Schoolhouse Rap, Andrea L. Dennis
Scholarly Works
Rap on Trial, the treatment of rap music as evidence in the American criminal legal process, is well-documented and increasingly scrutinised. Research has shown that – with little restraint – police, prosecutors, probation officers and judges use rap lyrics to investigate, prosecute and punish individuals. Less noticed is that a similar phenomenon is occurring in the American K–12 educational system, which disciplines school-age youth who participate in rap culture and sometimes refers them to the juvenile or criminal legal systems for additional punishment. This article describes and analyses a small set of identified cases of this scenario, demonstrating that rap …
International Child Law And The Settlement Of Ukraine-Russia And Other Conflicts, Diane Marie Amann
International Child Law And The Settlement Of Ukraine-Russia And Other Conflicts, Diane Marie Amann
Scholarly Works
The Ukraine-Russia conflict has wreaked disproportionate harms upon children. Hundreds reportedly were killed or wounded within the opening months of the conflict, thousands lost loved ones, and millions left their homes, their schools, and their communities. Yet public discussions of how to settle the conflict contain very little at all about children. This article seeks to change that dynamic. It builds on a relatively recent trend, one that situates human rights within the structure of peace negotiations, to push for particularized treatment of children’s experiences, needs, rights, and capacities in eventual negotiations. The article draws upon twenty-first century projects that …
The Right To Counsel In A Neoliberal Age, Zohra Ahmed
The Right To Counsel In A Neoliberal Age, Zohra Ahmed
Scholarly Works
Legal scholarship tends to obscure how changes in criminal process relate to broader changes in society at large. This article offers a modest corrective to this tendency. By studying the Supreme Court’s right to counsel jurisprudence, as it has developed since the mid-70s, I show the pervasive impact of the concurrent rise of neoliberalism on relationships between defendants and their attorneys. Since 1975, the Court has emphasized two concerns in its rulings regarding the right to counsel: choice and autonomy. These, of course, are nominally good things for defendants to have. But by paying close attention to how the Court …
Perceptions Of Justice In Multidistrict Litigation: Voices From The Crowd, Elizabeth Chamblee Burch, Margaret S. Williams
Perceptions Of Justice In Multidistrict Litigation: Voices From The Crowd, Elizabeth Chamblee Burch, Margaret S. Williams
Scholarly Works
With all eyes on criminal justice reform, multidistrict litigation (MDL) has quietly reshaped civil justice, undermining fundamental tenets of due process, procedural justice, attorney ethics, and tort law along the way. In 2020, the MDL caseload tripled that of the federal criminal caseload, one out of every two cases filed in federal civil court was an MDL case, and 97% of those were products liability like opioids, talc, and Roundup.
Ordinarily, civil procedure puts tort plaintiffs in the driver’s seat, allowing them to choose who and where to sue, and what claims to bring. Procedural justice tells courts to ensure …
Remarks, Andrea L. Dennis
Remarks, Andrea L. Dennis
Scholarly Works
Over the course of one week, the Michigan Journal of Law Reform presented its annual Symposium, this year titled Reimagining Police Surveillance: Protecting Activism and Ending Technologies of Oppression. During this week, the Journal explored complicated questions surrounding the expansion of police surveillance technologies, including how police and federal agencies utilize their extensive resources to identify and surveil public protest, the ways in which technology employed by police is often flawed and disparately impacts people of color, and potential reforms of police surveillance technology. Before delving into these complicated questions, I presented remarks on the history of police surveillance in …
Modern Sentencing Mitigation, John B. Meixner Jr.
Modern Sentencing Mitigation, John B. Meixner Jr.
Scholarly Works
Sentencing has become the most important part of a criminal case. Over the past century, criminal trials have given way almost entirely to pleas. Once a case is charged, it almost always ends up at sentencing. And notably, judges learn little sentencing-relevant information about the case or the defendant prior to sentencing and have significant discretion in sentencing decisions. Thus, sentencing is the primary opportunity for the defense to affect the outcome of the case by presenting mitigation: reasons why the nature of the offense or characteristics of the defendant warrant a lower sentence. It is surprising, then, that relatively …
Bargaining For Abolition, Zohra Ahmed
Bargaining For Abolition, Zohra Ahmed
Scholarly Works
What if instead of seeing criminal court as an institution driven by the operation of rules, we saw it as a workplace where people labor to criminalize those with the misfortune to be prosecuted? I offer three different ways to think about labor in criminal court: (1) labor as a source of sociological value, (2) labor as an input that generates certain measurable outcomes, and (3) labor as a vehicle to advance abolitionist reforms. First, through their quotidian activities, criminal courts’ workers enact a practical philosophy that communicates lessons about who and how we value each other. Drawing on ethnographic …
Lessons From A Pandemic: Recommendations From The Georgia Tpo Forum For Strengthening Protections Against Domestic Violence, Christine M. Scartz, Sarah White, Jaime Boorman
Lessons From A Pandemic: Recommendations From The Georgia Tpo Forum For Strengthening Protections Against Domestic Violence, Christine M. Scartz, Sarah White, Jaime Boorman
Scholarly Works
A civil protective order in Georgia is commonly called a temporary protective order, or TPO. The Georgia TPO Forum (the Forum) is a collaborative effort among practitioners who are deeply passionate about ending domestic violence and minimizing its effects on victims.1 The Forum is made up of advocates and attorneys who work every day with people who need protection from violence. Members provide each other not only with suggestions and solutions to problems, but also a listening ear in a profession where another tragic case is always on its way. The Forum is also uniquely positioned to offer recommendations about …
The Lawyers Justice Corps: A Licensing Pathway To Enhance Access To Justice, Eileen Kaufman
The Lawyers Justice Corps: A Licensing Pathway To Enhance Access To Justice, Eileen Kaufman
Scholarly Works
The idea for establishing a Lawyers Justice Corps emerged out of efforts to solve a problem: how to license lawyers at a time when COVID-19 had expanded the need for new lawyers while also making an in-person bar exam dangerous, if not impossible. We-the Collaboratory on Legal Education and Licensing for Practice'-proposed the Lawyers Justice Corps to provide a different and better way of certifying minimum competence for new attorneys while at the same time helping to create a new generation of lawyers equipped to address a wide range of social justice, racial justice, and criminal justice issues. When implemented, …
Popular Enforcement Of Controversial Legislation, Randy Beck
Popular Enforcement Of Controversial Legislation, Randy Beck
Scholarly Works
Texas opted for popular enforcement of Senate Bill 8 (S.B. 8), prohibiting abortion once a fetal heartbeat can be detected. In an effort to prevent pre-enforcement judicial review, the legislature precluded enforcement of the statute by government officials. Instead, any member of the public may sue for statutory damages of at least $10,000 from any person who (1) performs an abortion violating the statute, (2) knowingly aids or abets such an abortion, or (3) “intends” to perform or aid and abet such an abortion.
The cause of action authorized by S.B. 8 is a “popular action,” a once common method …
Csec Treatment Courts: An Opportunity For Positive, Trauma-Informed, And Therapeutic Systems Responses In Family And Juvenile Courts, Emma Hetherington, Allison Dunnigan, Hannah Elias Sbaity
Csec Treatment Courts: An Opportunity For Positive, Trauma-Informed, And Therapeutic Systems Responses In Family And Juvenile Courts, Emma Hetherington, Allison Dunnigan, Hannah Elias Sbaity
Scholarly Works
In an effort to improve outcomes for CSEC (commercial and sexual exploitation of children) youth and to facilitate accurate identification of survivors through the implementation of multidisciplinary, survivor-focused responses, jurisdictions have increasingly looked towards treatment courts to serve as a model for prevention, intervention, diversion, and treatment. Juvenile and family courts are uniquely positioned to intervene in cases involving CSEC. Several jurisdictions have already created treatment courts to specifically address the needs of survivors and those at risk of CSEC, particularly those who are involved in the child welfare or juvenile justice systems. The goal of treatment courts for survivors …
How Do You Value A Victim? Victim Impact Statements In Military Sexual Assault Trials, Chris Cox
How Do You Value A Victim? Victim Impact Statements In Military Sexual Assault Trials, Chris Cox
Scholarly Works
This Article examines a timely and important issue — the use of Victim Impact Statements (VIS) in criminal trials and, more specifically, in military courts-martial. The right for victims of offenses to provide VIS has existed in the United States for approximately three decades. However, the military’s implementation of similar rights for victims has languished, with the advent of the right for a victim to provide a VIS having been implemented only within the last decade. Relying on legal precedent in the form of appellate case decisions and qualitative assessments of trial court records, this article explores the current state …
Surveilling Potential Uses And Abuses Of Artificial Intelligence In Correctional Spaces, Justin Iverson
Surveilling Potential Uses And Abuses Of Artificial Intelligence In Correctional Spaces, Justin Iverson
Scholarly Works
In section II, this paper will begin with an analysis of the development of AI, noting famous examples and establishing a baseline definition as a lens for the rest of this discussion. This paper will assess aspects of AI and machine learning to the extent it furthers our understanding of AI’s ability to collect data and make decisions. Some popular culture references will be brought into focus here to recognize storytelling’s ability to inspire and influence real-world scientific pursuits. Of preliminary importance, the AI we have both dreamed of and feared are certainly kept in mind as technology advances through …
How To Design An Antiracist State And Local Tax System, Francine J. Lipman
How To Design An Antiracist State And Local Tax System, Francine J. Lipman
Scholarly Works
Since the first ship of enslaved African people landed in Virginia in 1619, racist policies in institutions, systems, structures, practices, and laws have ensured inequity for people of color. These racist policies include every imaginable variant of injustice from slavery to lynching, to segregation, and to economic injustices, including those delivered through tax systems today. Although facially color-blind, tax systems have long empowered the explosion of white wealth and undermined wealth accumulation for Black families and communities of color. State and local tax systems, especially in the South, have deeply-rooted racist fiscal policies, including Jim Crow laws that continue to …
Coercive Control And The Limits Of Criminal Law, Courtney K. Cross
Coercive Control And The Limits Of Criminal Law, Courtney K. Cross
Scholarly Works
Domestic violence does not always include physical violence. While abusive relationships may be punctuated with physical violence, it is the dynamic of control that constitutes the crux of the abuse. This dynamic is characterized by behaviors designed to dominate, degrade, and discipline, including emotional and financial abuse, isolation, rulemaking, and surveillance. These nonviolent forms of abuse are collectively referred to as "coercive control," and their impact can be debilitating and devastating for survivors of domestic violence. Despite what we know about domestic violence, the criminal legal system focuses its efforts on discrete incidents or encounters between the abuser and the …
In-Person Or Via Technology?: Drawing On Psychology To Choose And Design Dispute Resolution Processes, Jean R. Sternlight, Jennifer K. Robbennolt
In-Person Or Via Technology?: Drawing On Psychology To Choose And Design Dispute Resolution Processes, Jean R. Sternlight, Jennifer K. Robbennolt
Scholarly Works
Covid-19 fostered a remote technology boom in the world of dispute resolution. Pre-pandemic, adoption of technical innovation in dispute resolution was slow moving. Some attorneys, courts, arbitrators, mediators and others did use technology, including telephone, e-mail, text, or videoconferences, or more ambitious online dispute resolution (ODR). But, to the chagrin of technology advocates, many conducted most dispute resolution largely in-person. The pandemic effectively put the emerging technological efforts on steroids. Even the most technologically challenged quickly began to replace in-person dispute resolution with videoconferencing, texting, and other technology. Courts throughout the world canceled all or most in-person trials, hearings, conferences, …
Comparative Rights To Counsel And Access To Justice: The American And Brazilian Approaches And Realities, Benjamin H. Barton, Fernanda Antunes Marques Junqueira, Flavio De Costa Higa
Comparative Rights To Counsel And Access To Justice: The American And Brazilian Approaches And Realities, Benjamin H. Barton, Fernanda Antunes Marques Junqueira, Flavio De Costa Higa
Scholarly Works
No abstract provided.