Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Spectre Of Justice: Russian Reform In The Courtrooms Of Dostoevsky And Tolstoy, Abby Moore

Senior Theses

The Great Reforms of Alexander II are regarded as transformative policies in the history of Tsarist Russia, drastically changing the empire’s social and political fabric. The judicial reforms of 1864 in particular addressed longstanding issues within the existing criminal justice system, yet they also liberalized the institution at large. Following in the West’s footsteps, the reforms introduced an unprecedented level of democracy into Russia’s courtroom. Among the critics of these changes were renowned authors Fyodor Dostoevsky and Leo Tolstoy, both of whom used the realm of fiction to explore their respective concerns with reformed Russian jurisprudence. Both authors bring distinct …

Searching Govinfo.Gov/, Bert Chapman

Libraries Faculty and Staff Presentations

This U.S. Government Publishing Office (GPO) database provides access to information legal, legislative, and regulatory information produced on multiple subjects by the U.S. Government. Content includes congressional bills, congressional committee hearings and prints (studies), reports on legislation, the text of laws, regulations, and executive orders and multiple U.S. Government information resources covering subjects from accounting to zoology.

“Genocide Of The Soviet People”: Putin’S Russia Waging Lawfare By Means Of History, 2018–2023, Anton Weiss-Wendt

Genocide Studies and Prevention: An International Journal

This article exposes the political underpinnings of the term “genocide of the Soviet people,” introduced and actively promoted in Russia since 2019. By reclassifying mass crimes committed by the Nazis and their accomplices against the civilian population—specifically Slavic—as genocide, Russian courts effectively engage in adjudication of the history of the Second World War. In the process, genocide trials, ongoing in twenty-five Russian provinces and five occupied Ukrainian territories, present no new evidence or issue new indictments, thus fulfilling none of the objectives of a standard criminal investigation. The wording of the verdicts, and a comprehensive political project put in place …

The Role Of Social Media In Raising Awareness Against Green Crimes : An Applied Study On Naif University Students, Munahi Bin Shari

Journal of Police and Legal Sciences

Social media platforms are considered among the most important modern tools for raising awareness against green crimes in the Arab world. These platforms have a significant impact on environmental awareness and the advancement of the nation through education and guidance. They play a vital role in influencing various segments of society and drawing attention to various environmental issues. This research aims to explore the role of social media in raising awareness against green crimes.

To achieve these objectives, the researcher employed a descriptive survey methodology and conducted a questionnaire survey among a sample of 591 students at Naif University in …

Judging Our New Judges: Why We Must Remove Artificial Intelligence From Our Courtrooms Now, Kieran Duffy Newcomb

Honors Theses and Capstones

In this paper, I explore some of the ways in which artificial intelligence might enhance the sentencing process through recidivism prediction technology. Notably, this technology can increase the accuracy of risk predictions and the speed with which sentencing decisions are reached. I then show, however, that the recidivism prediction technology is likely to turn into what data scientist Cathy O’Neil calls a Weapon of Math Destruction. The potential harmfulness of this technology is due not to the inherent nature of the technology, but the symbiotic relationship it will have with our already harmful criminal justice system. I argue that the …

Navigating Sexual Consent In Japan, Samara Mizutani Cesar

MSU Graduate Theses

Employing an exploratory sequential research design, including focus groups and an online survey, this thesis explores the factors influencing how Japanese people navigate the gray zones of sexual consent. This study not only addresses gaps in the literature on sexual consent but also provides a preliminary understanding of Japanese individuals’ perceptions, beliefs, behaviors, and experiences in ambiguous sexual interactions, which is particularly meaningful given Japan’s recent legal revisions and changing sociocultural landscape. Findings indicated the impact of traditional sexual scripts on consent perceptions, with gender and relationship norms contributing to the dismissal of sexual assaults within specific relationships. It was …

Exploring The Factors That Influence Female Offending In The U.S. And Mexico, Dana Villasenor

CMC Senior Theses

Hollywood has painted a picture of the criminal woman as a sexy, sneaky, and often psychotic female fatale. This is because men run Hollywood. Much like movies, research on why women offend had historically focused on men as their stellar. However, towards the turn of the century and with the disproportionate rise in female incarceration, literature caught up to the fact that women and men do not experience the same socialization, standards, or reality and, therefore, have different reasons for and ways of offending. This research explores those reasons for women in the U.S. and Mexico and paints the picture …

Book Review: Kings, Conquerors, Psychopaths: From Alexander To Hitler To The Corporation, Tim Bakken

Genocide Studies and Prevention: An International Journal

The book Kings, Conquerors, Psychopaths is a survey of a vast amount of human wrongdoing. It lays bare the motivations of aggressors who wish to subjugate nations or groups of people and corporate executives and government bureaucrats who make discretionary decisions that harm people. Along with cataloging mass killings by despots and soldiers, the book includes stories about Ponzi-schemers and the deaths of automobile drivers and passengers who were killed by vehicle defects known to the manufacturer. The book posits that “[p]owerful, elite forces are trying to force us backward toward a non-democratic state, one where power, wealth, and prerogative …

Is There Really Anything Wrong With That? An Aristotelian Analysis Of Duty, Luke J. Mcgrath

Honors College Theses

In the iconic Seinfeld series finale, Jerry, George, Elaine, and Kramer find themselves in a peculiar legal predicament when they mock a crime rather than intervene to help the victim. The show’s commitment to portraying reality, even in its finale, vividly demonstrates the potential consequences of a society lacking the legal obligation to aid others. This comical incident raises a thought-provoking question about the legitimacy of duty-to-act laws in the United States. This thesis examines the application of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics to the concept of duty-to-act laws and argues for the necessity and benefits of such laws in promoting a …

Whittle, Joseph Merle, B. 1933 (Mss 756), Manuscripts & Folklife Archives

MSS Finding Aids

Finding aid only for Manuscripts Collection 756. Correspondence and papers of Joseph M. Whittle, a Grayson County attorney who served as U.S. Attorney for the Western District of Kentucky from 1986-1993.

Book Review: Derviš M. Korkut: A Biography—Rescuer Of The Sarajevo Haggadah, Ehlimana Memišević

Genocide Studies and Prevention: An International Journal

At the beginning of 2020, the Sarajevo-based publishing house El-Kalem, released a biography of Derviš M. Korkut, a Bosniak hero, to whom Yad Vashem posthumously awarded Righteous among the Nations on December 14, 1994.

Winston Churchill's words, with which the author begins the biography—that the Balkans produce more history than they can handle—best describe the difficult times in which Korkut lived. For Korkut and his fellow Bosnians, these difficult times lasted from the beginning of the 20th century to its very end.

The book is based on exhaustive archival research and reconstructs Korkut’s life very precisely, while the concise overview …

The Juris Master: A Proposal For Reducing Excessive Public Defender Caseloads, Blake Comeaux

Senior Honors Papers / Undergraduate Theses

The US public defense system is underfunded, understaffed, and underdelivering on the Constitutional promises of the 6^th Amendment, the right to a fair and speedy trial. This state of our public defense system results in monstrous impacts for indigent defendants nationwide. Through indefinite delays in litigation, being abandoned in jail while sitting on waiting lists for public defenders, and being outright denied representation, indigent defendants are deprived of their rights. Beyond just defendant neglect, our current system puts immense strain on public defenders, prosecutors, and state budgets. In an attempt to combat this current state of affairs, this paper …

An Analysis Of Factors In The Policymaking Process That Enabled Prison Sentence Decreases Through The 2022 Organic Law Of Comprehensive Guarantee Of Sexual Freedom/La Ley Del Solo Sí Es Sí In Spain, Cambron Wade

Independent Study Project (ISP) Collection

To follow through on their ratification of the Istanbul Convention and public outcry after La Manada case, the Spanish Government passed the Organic Law of Comprehensive Guarantee of Sexual Freedom, also known as the law of only yes is yes (or la ley del solo sí es sí) - which came into effect on October 7, 2022. This law changed the Criminal Code by removing the distinction between sexual assault and sexual abuse, which previously caused victims to endure the difficult process of proving that there was violence and intimidation. By moving all sexual acts without consent under the category …

Case Law On American Indians, Thomas P. Schlosser

American Indian Law Journal

An update on American Indian case law from September 2021-October 2022.

Women’S Sexuality And The State: A Beginning Look At Virginity’S Relationship To The Law, Ariana Strieb

Senior Projects Spring 2023

This is a beginning look at the relationship the state has with women's sexuality in the United States, specifically looking at how virginity animate the way rape trials are prosecuted.

Muslim Prisoner Litigation: An Unsung American Tradition (Introduction), Spearit

Book Chapters

For most Americans, “prison jihad” may sound frightening and conjure images of religious militants, bearded, turbaned, and under the spell of foreign radical networks…. While this may be the immediate impression, there is nothing like that happening in American prisons. However, there has been a different type of jihad taking place, one that is real and identifiable. This is not the sensational jihad of headline media; rather, this jihad is uneventful and quiet by comparison and has persisted since the 1960s with hardly any public notice.

Despite little attention and recognition, Muslims in prison occupy a unique spot in the …

_Not That Bad_: Lessons Women Learn In A Rape Culture, Sydney J. Selman

Pursuit - The Journal of Undergraduate Research at The University of Tennessee

In 2018, Roxane Gay assembled an anthology that addresses the severity of rape, rejecting the common belief that some sexually violent acts, compared to others, are not that bad. This collection, titled Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture, compiles pieces from thirty different authors and sheds light on how the notion of not that bad contributes to a broader structural social problem involving sexual violence. This social problem, known as rape culture, is commonly defined as a culture that normalizes sexual violence and blames victims of sexual assault (“What is Rape Culture?”). In other words, rape culture …

Police Cartoon Series: Between Learning And Awareness Of Deviance And Crime (Comparative Study), Khawlah Al-Tkhayneh, Arwa Alchamali, Marwa Nazar

Journal of Police and Legal Sciences

This study aimed at detecting the impact of watching police cartoon series introduced by different communication channels, such as TV, YouTube, etc. on children's behaviour by conducting a comparative study between two well-known police cartoon series in order to identify which one of them behaved based on promoting children's awareness about delinquency and crime and which one used the educational method about crime and delinquency (intentionally and unintentionally) as well as identifying the most prominent differences between the methods of introducing the cartoon series in each series. In order to achieve the study objectives, the researchers used the comparative approach …

Mass Violence, Environmental Harm, And The Limits Of Transitional Justice, Rachel Killean, Lauren Dempster

Genocide Studies and Prevention: An International Journal

The relationship between the environment and mass violence is complex and multi-faceted. The effects of environmental degradation can destabilize societies and cause conflict. Attacks on the environment can harm targeted groups, and both mass violence and subsequent transitions can have harmful environmental legacies. Given this backdrop, it is notable that the field of transitional justice has paid relatively little attention to the intersections between mass violence and environmental degradation. This article interrogates this inattention and explores the limitations and possibilities of transitional justice as a means of addressing the environmental harms associated with mass violence. The article makes four key …

Death By A Thousand Cuts? Green Tech, Traditional Knowledge, And Genocide, Regina Menachery Paulose

Genocide Studies and Prevention: An International Journal

Traditional Knowledge is a system of knowledge that is passed down through generations of Indigenous and Ethnic Minority Peoples throughout the world. A subset of Traditional Knowledge is Traditional Ecological Knowledge. These knowledge systems are incorporated throughout various international instruments and are considered vital to ways of life for Indigenous and Ethnic Minority Peoples. The author examines the elimination of Traditional Knowledge as a result of green technology. With discussions surrounding ways to obtain “net zero” in response to climate change, the author (re)introduces the notion that the irresponsible push for carbon zero technologies has a horrendous impact on the …

Poetic Justice: Connecting The Modern American Prosecutor To Her Rhetorical Roots, Michael Caves

All Dissertations

Poetic Justice: Connecting the Modern American Prosecutor to her Rhetorical Roots explores the gap between rhetoric and the American prosecutor, to eventually advocate for a more creative, inventive trial practice for prosecutors that embraces the spirit and methods of narrative, poetics, and Ulmeric mystories, with the prosecutor’s unique ethical obligations forming the basis of a new prosecutor’s rhetoric. This research opens with an autoethnographic account of the author’s own path to criminal prosecution, to give the reader a sense of the author’s ethos, to identify the shortcomings of rhetorical training in law school pedagogy, and to outline the rhetorical …

Walking Back The System Trope: Reimagining Incarceration And The State Through A Spatial Theory Approach, Cody Hunter

All Dissertations

This dissertation critiques the systems theory approach to incarceration policy, practice, and research and proposes a rhetorically informed spatial theory approach as an alternative. Offering a non-hierarchical complexity theory as a bridge between systems and space, I then integrate rhetorical listening as a strategy for navigating and operationalizing our proposed spatial theory approach. I then apply our proposed methodology to archival research, focusing on the South Carolina Penitentiary as a case study, and offer two heuretic experiments to explore the range of this methodology for archival research. I also explore potential applications of this rhetorically informed spatial theory approach in …

Zinā In The Criminal Legislation Act (1999-2000): An Evaluation Of The Implication For Muslim Women's Right In Nigeria, Paul Orerhime Akpomie

Theses and Dissertations

The research engages in an exploration of human rights in Islam. Human rights issues are then contrasted with international law positions. The data gotten is then used for investigating women’s human rights issues in Shariʾa penal tradition regarding zinā (adultery) in Nigeria. The re-emergence of Sharia penal codes adopted by 12 Northern states in Nigeria in 1999 as an operative Islamic law has sparked concerns about rulings amounting to stoning to death in several cases of zinā. These events raised concerns about Shariʾa penal traditions’ legality and relationship with other legal traditions operational in Nigeria, a secular political space. …

Against The Death Penalty, Charles Jessup

Student Research Submissions

My thesis is an argument against the death penalty. Given that public support for the death penalty in America is at a half-century low (according to the Pew Research Center), the timing could not be more appropriate to examine the death penalty. This research project had a two-step approach: first, ethical theory-based arguments for and against the death penalty were examined. Following that ethical theory-based examination, real-world statistics were applied to these theories to test where they stand in modern society. The findings contained in this research project point to a clear reality that the death penalty in America is …

Hip Hop And The Law : Presented By Intellectual Property Law Association 03/31/2022, Roger Williams University School Of Law

School of Law Conferences, Lectures & Events

No abstract provided.

"With All The Majesty Of The Law": Systemic Racism, Punitive Sentiment, And Equal Protection, Darren L. Hutchinson

Faculty Articles

United States criminal justice policies have played a central role in the subjugation of persons of color. Under slavery, criminal law explicitly provided a means to ensure White dominion over Blacks and require Black submission to White authority. During Reconstruction, anticrime policies served to maintain White supremacy and re-enslave Blacks, both through explicit discrimination and facially neutral policies. Similar practices maintained racial hierarchy with respect to White, Latinx, and Asian-American populations in the western United States. While most state action no longer explicitly discriminates on the basis of race, anticrime policy remains a powerful instrument of racial subordination. Indeed, social …

Muslims In Prison: Advancing The Rule Of Law Through Litigation Praxis, Spearit

Articles

Islamic ideas about justice and equality directly informed the development of prison law jurisprudence in the United States. Since the early 1960s, when federal courts began to hear claims by state prisoner-petitioners, Muslims began to look to courts to establish Islam in prison and inaugurated an ongoing campaign for civil rights. The trend is significant when considering Muslims represent a relatively small percentage of the American population. Decades of persistent litigation by Muslims in courts have been integral to developing the prisoners’ rights movement in America. The Muslim impact on prison law and culture is an underappreciated phenomenon that involves …

Undemocratic Crimes, Paul H. Robinson, Jonathan C. Wilt

All Faculty Scholarship

One might assume that in a working democracy the criminal law rules would reflect the community’s shared judgments regarding justice and punishment. This is especially true because social science research shows that lay people generally think about criminal liability and punishment in consistent ways: in terms of desert, doing justice and avoiding injustice. Moreover, there are compelling arguments for demanding consistency between community views and criminal law rules based upon the importance of democratic values, effective crime-control, and the deontological value of justice itself.

It may then come as a surprise, and a disappointment, that a wide range of common …

The Criminogenic Effects Of Damaging Criminal Law’S Moral Credibility, Paul H. Robinson, Lindsay Holcomb

All Faculty Scholarship

The criminal justice system’s reputation with the community can have a significant effect on the extent to which people are willing to comply with its demands and internalize its norms. In the context of criminal law, the empirical studies suggest that ordinary people expect the criminal justice system to do justice and avoid injustice, as they perceive it – what has been called “empirical desert” to distinguish it from the “deontological desert” of moral philosophers. The empirical studies and many real-world natural experiments suggest that a criminal justice system that regularly deviates from empirical desert loses moral credibility and thereby …

Criminal Law’S Core Principles, Paul H. Robinson

All Faculty Scholarship

Modern criminal law scholars and policymakers assume they are free to construct criminal law rules by focusing exclusively on the criminal justice theory of the day. But this “blank slate” conception of criminal lawmaking is dangerously misguided. In fact, lawmakers are writing on a slate on which core principles are already indelibly written and realistically they are free only to add detail in the implementation of those principles and to add additional provisions not inconsistent with them. Attempts to do otherwise are destined to produce tragic results from both utilitarian and retributivist views.

Many writers dispute that such core principles …