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Full-Text Articles in Law
Certain Certiorari: The Digital Privacy Rights Of Probationers, Daniel Yeager
Certain Certiorari: The Digital Privacy Rights Of Probationers, Daniel Yeager
Faculty Scholarship
In a recent oral argument, a judge on the California Court of Appeal told me they had "at least 50" pending cases on the constitutionality of probation conditions authorizing suspicionless searches of digital devices. As counsel of record in three of those cases, I feel positioned to comment on this hot topic within criminal law. My intention here is less to reconcile California's cases on suspicionless searches of probationers' digital devices than to locate them within the precedents of the United States Supreme Court, which is bound before long to pick up a case for the same purpose.
Stuffed Deer And The Grammar Of Mistakes, Daniel B. Yeager
Stuffed Deer And The Grammar Of Mistakes, Daniel B. Yeager
Faculty Scholarship
Impossible attempts were first officially recognized as non-criminal in 1864, the idea being that a person whose anti-social bent poses no appreciable risk of harm is no criminal.
To reassure myself the subject doesn’t “smell of the lamp,” I tapped “impossibility” into Westlaw, which designated nearly 1500 criminal cases as on point, 900 or so more recent than 1999. Impossible attempts thus turn out to be not merely a professorial hobby horse, but instead, expressive of a non-trivial tension between risk-taking and harm-causing within the very real world of criminal litigation.
Although it is now hornbook that impossible attempts are …