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Articles 1 - 30 of 373
Full-Text Articles in Law
Foreword: The Legal Profession And Social Change, Atinuke O. Adediran, Bruce A. Green
Foreword: The Legal Profession And Social Change, Atinuke O. Adediran, Bruce A. Green
Fordham Law Review
Fordham University School of Law’s Stein Center for Law and Ethics has collaborated with the Fordham Law Review every year since the late 1990s to encourage, collect, and publish scholarly writings on different aspects of the legal profession, including its norms, regulation, organization, history, and development—that is, on themes relating to what law schools loosely call “legal ethics.” The legal profession is an important subject of study for legal scholars, among others. Although one U.S. Supreme Court Justice, himself a former law professor, airily derided legal ethics as the “least analytically rigorous . . . of law-school subjects,” we dispute …
Community Responsive Public Defense, Alexis Hoag-Fordjour
Community Responsive Public Defense, Alexis Hoag-Fordjour
Fordham Law Review
This colloquium asks us to consider how social change is influencing the legal profession and the legal profession’s response. This Essay applies these questions to organizing around criminal injustice and the response from public defenders. This Essay surfaces the work of four innovative indigent defense organizations that are engaged with and duty-bound to the communities they represent. I call this “community responsive public defense,” which is a distinct model of indigent defense whereby public defenders look to their clients and their clients’ communities to help shape advocacy, strategy, and representation.
Methodologically, this Essay relies primarily on qualitative interviews with leaders …
Regulating The Public Defender Identity, Irene Oritseweyinmi Joe
Regulating The Public Defender Identity, Irene Oritseweyinmi Joe
Fordham Law Review
The public defender institution has trouble meeting its mission. This is partly because, despite the specific and clear purpose of representing indigent defendants in criminal proceedings, public defender offices rely on various centering principles to meet this objective. The institution falters if it chooses a centering principle that unwittingly complicates its ability to meet the institution’s central mission. For public defender leaders tasked with developing and maintaining an institutional identity for a particular office, neither legal nor professional regulations supply the type of considerations that guarantee that an adopted identity will comply with core institutional responsibilities. This project seeks to …
Extraordinary Punishment: Conditions Of Confinement And Compassionate Release, Meredith B. Esser
Extraordinary Punishment: Conditions Of Confinement And Compassionate Release, Meredith B. Esser
Fordham Law Review
People experience severe forms of harm while incarcerated, including medical neglect, prolonged solitary confinement, sexual and physical violence, and a host of other ills. But civil rights litigation under the Eighth Amendment—the most common vehicle through which people seek to redress these harms—presents significant practical and doctrinal barriers to incarcerated plaintiffs. Most notably, the Eighth Amendment’s “deliberate indifference” standard asks not whether a person has been harmed, but instead requires plaintiffs to demonstrate a criminally reckless mental state on the part of prison officials. Further, Eighth Amendment remedies are limited to damages or injunctions, which may not adequately redress a …
Charging Abortion, Milan Markovic
Charging Abortion, Milan Markovic
Fordham Law Review
As long as Roe v. Wade remained good law, prosecutors could largely avoid the question of abortion. The Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization has now placed prosecutors at the forefront of the abortion wars. Some chief prosecutors in antiabortion states have pledged to not enforce antiabortion laws, whereas others are targeting even out-of-state providers. This post-Dobbs reality, wherein the ability to obtain an abortion depends not only on the politics of one’s state but also the policies of one’s local district attorney, has received minimal scrutiny from legal scholars.
Prosecutors have broad charging discretion, …
No More Nixon: A Proposed Change To Rule 17(C) Of The Federal Rules Of Criminal Procedure, Norah Senftleber
No More Nixon: A Proposed Change To Rule 17(C) Of The Federal Rules Of Criminal Procedure, Norah Senftleber
Fordham Law Review
Today, the standard for subpoenas under Rule 17(c) of the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure, espoused in United States v. Nixon, provides for limited, almost useless, pretrial subpoena power for criminal defendants. When subpoenaing a third party, a defendant must show (1) relevancy, (2) admissibility, and (3) specificity for documents that they have not yet gained access to. This narrow scope of Rule 17(c) has long engendered criticism from judges, scholars, and practitioners alike. Yet, Rule 17(c) has not been changed, either by judicial opinion or amendment.
Following years of criticism, the Advisory Committee on Criminal Rules (“Advisory Committee”) …
Confronting Carpenter: Rethinking The Third-Party Doctrine And Location Information, Charlie Brownstein
Confronting Carpenter: Rethinking The Third-Party Doctrine And Location Information, Charlie Brownstein
Fordham Law Review
The third-party doctrine enables law enforcement officers to obtain personal information shared with third parties without a warrant. In an era of highly accessible technology, individuals’ location information is consistently being transmitted to third parties. Due to the third-party doctrine, this shared information has been available to law enforcement, without the individual knowing or having an opportunity to challenge this availability. Law enforcement has utilized this doctrine to obtain comprehensive information regarding individuals’ whereabouts over long periods of time.
The U.S. Supreme Court recently limited the reach of the third-party doctrine regarding location data held by cellphone providers. However, this …
Children Are Constitutionally Different, But Life Without Parole And De Facto Life Sentences Are Not: Extending Graham And Miller To De Facto Life Sentences, Ellen Brink
Fordham Law Review
Under the U.S. Supreme Court’s current juvenile sentencing jurisprudence, a juvenile may legally receive a prison sentence of hundreds of years without parole in instances in which a sentence of life without parole would be unconstitutional. This illogical state of affairs is the result of the Court’s silence on whether its holdings in Graham v. Florida and Miller v. Alabama, which together limit the availability of juvenile life without parole sentences, also apply to so-called de facto life sentences. De facto life sentences are lengthy term-of-years sentences that confine offenders to prison for the majority, if not the entirety, …
Proceedings At An Impasse: Appealing Fugitive Disentitlement Orders Of International Defendants Under The Collateral Order Doctrine, Parker Siegel
Proceedings At An Impasse: Appealing Fugitive Disentitlement Orders Of International Defendants Under The Collateral Order Doctrine, Parker Siegel
Fordham Law Review
The doctrine of fugitive disentitlement allows federal courts to decline to entertain a defendant’s claims when that defendant is deemed a fugitive from justice. Once disentitled, defendants cannot seek relief from the judicial system until they submit to the court’s jurisdiction. But complications emerge when federal district courts disentitle non–U.S. citizens who reside outside of the United States, who are indicted for alleged misconduct committed abroad, and who attempt to dismiss charges while remaining in their home countries. Federal circuit courts of appeals are split on whether such defendants can appeal from a fugitive disentitlement ruling without submitting to the …
Criminalizing Threats Against Schools: A Divergence Of Mens Rea And Punishment Severity In Recent State Legislation, Max Kaufman
Criminalizing Threats Against Schools: A Divergence Of Mens Rea And Punishment Severity In Recent State Legislation, Max Kaufman
Fordham Law Review
School shootings occur on a regular basis in the United States. Fear of the next school shooting leads schools to take any potential threat of violence seriously, but responding to a threat can be extremely disruptive to a school’s operations and the community that it serves. In the last five years, nine state legislatures have attempted to deter these threats by specifically criminalizing threats of violence against schools.
Despite the proximity in time in which these states enacted school threat statutes, these laws diverge in two important ways: First, the nine statutes employ several different mens rea requirements. Second, these …
Dual Sovereignty In The U.S. Territories, Emmanuel Hiram Arnaud
Dual Sovereignty In The U.S. Territories, Emmanuel Hiram Arnaud
Fordham Law Review
This Essay examines the emergence and application of the "ultimate source" test and sheds light on the dual sovereign doctrine’s patently colonial framework, particularly highlighting the paternalistic relationship it has produced between federal and territorial prosecutorial authorities.
First Amendment Speech Protections In A Post-Dobbs World: Providing Instruction On Instructional Speech, Samantha Mitchell
First Amendment Speech Protections In A Post-Dobbs World: Providing Instruction On Instructional Speech, Samantha Mitchell
Fordham Law Review
In its June 2022 opinion, Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the U.S. Supreme Court overruled Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey, thus revoking the constitutional right to abortion. As states continue to pass laws outlawing abortion to varying degrees, not only has Dobbs led to uncertainty for medical professionals and those who might want to seek an abortion, but it has also prompted questions for internet users across the world. May an organization or an individual post instructions on the internet regarding how to obtain an abortion if a resident of a …
Bastions Of Independence Or Shields Of Misconduct?: Increasing Transparency In Judicial Conduct Commissions, Katarina Herring-Trott
Bastions Of Independence Or Shields Of Misconduct?: Increasing Transparency In Judicial Conduct Commissions, Katarina Herring-Trott
Fordham Law Review
No abstract provided.
Carceral Deference: Courts And Their Pro-Prison Propensities, Danielle C. Jefferis
Carceral Deference: Courts And Their Pro-Prison Propensities, Danielle C. Jefferis
Fordham Law Review
Judicial deference to nonjudicial state actors, as a general matter, is ubiquitous, both in the law and as a topic of legal scholarship. But “carceral deference”—judicial deference to prison officials on issues concerning the legality of prison conditions—has received far less attention in legal literature, and the focus has been almost entirely on its jurisprudential legitimacy. This Article contextualizes carceral deference historically, politically, and culturally, and it thus adds a piece that has been missing from the literature. Drawing on primary and secondary historical sources and anchoring the analysis in Bourdieu’s field theory, this Article is an important step to …
Closing The Door On Permanent Incorrigibility: Juvenile Life Without Parole After Jones V. Mississippi, Juliet Liu
Closing The Door On Permanent Incorrigibility: Juvenile Life Without Parole After Jones V. Mississippi, Juliet Liu
Fordham Law Review
In April 2021, the U.S. Supreme Court decided Jones v. Mississippi, its latest opinion in a line of cases addressing when, if ever, a child should be sentenced to life in prison with no hope of parole or release. Although Jones purported to resolve division among lower courts over the findings that a sentencing court must make about a child defendant’s character and prospects for reform and rehabilitation, the decision will likely lead to further disagreement among courts.
This Note argues that although the Supreme Court’s jurisprudence has protected children from harsh sentences, it has also opened a Pandora’s …
The Prison Mailbox Rule: Can Represented Incarcerated Litigants Benefit?, Nico Corti
The Prison Mailbox Rule: Can Represented Incarcerated Litigants Benefit?, Nico Corti
Fordham Law Review
In 1988, the U.S. Supreme Court created the “Prison Mailbox Rule,” which assesses the timeliness of incarcerated litigants’ filings based on the day they hand them to prison authorities. The rule reduces the structural barriers to filing while imprisoned. Although Houston v. Lack highlighted the unique challenges that pro se incarcerated litigants face, the Prison Mailbox Rule’s subsequent federal codifications did not limit its benefits to pro se litigants, despite purportedly “reflecting” the Houston decision. Federal circuit courts of appeal today are split on whether represented people in prison can benefit from the Prison Mailbox Rule, leaving both litigants and …
The Impermissibility Of Police Deception In Juvenile Interrogations, Gina Kim
The Impermissibility Of Police Deception In Juvenile Interrogations, Gina Kim
Fordham Law Review
Although perjury is a criminal offense in all states and a felony in many, law enforcement may routinely lie to suspects during interrogations. This widespread, judicially authorized practice consists of interrogators making false promises of leniency that the suspect will receive a lighter sentence in exchange for a confession, and making misrepresentations about the evidence against the suspect. Police deception in interrogations becomes even more problematic when used against juvenile suspects because the psychological vulnerability of minors may lead them to succumb to deceptive pressures and even to falsely confess.
This Note explores the debate surrounding the use of police …
Sentencing After Stash Houses: Addressing Manipulation Of The Federal Sentencing Guidelines, Elizabeth Foy Gudgel
Sentencing After Stash Houses: Addressing Manipulation Of The Federal Sentencing Guidelines, Elizabeth Foy Gudgel
Fordham Law Review
In the realm of undercover work, law enforcement has broad discretion to define the contours of a criminal offense. Due to quantity-based provisions in the Federal Sentencing Guidelines, federal agents or their informants may coerce an individual into a higher sentencing range by escalating their behavior to align with mandatory minimums or quantifiable offense levels. Because this type of offense is police-initiated, law enforcement has discretion to select the individuals subject to these tactics and influence their eventual sentences. The defenses of sentencing entrapment and sentencing manipulation are meant to combat this discretion. However, these defenses are rarely invoked successfully …
Does Brady Apply To Supervised Release Revocation Hearings?, Alex Breindel
Does Brady Apply To Supervised Release Revocation Hearings?, Alex Breindel
Fordham Law Review
Many federal offenders face a term of supervised release upon leaving prison. The successor to the federal parole system, supervised release places conditions upon individuals’ freedom. Violation of a condition may result in revocation of release and reimprisonment. To revoke release, the government must prove to a judge by a preponderance of the evidence that a violation occurred. At this proceeding, known as a “revocation hearing,” the individual may contest the alleged violation and present their own evidence.
Under Brady v. Maryland and its progeny, due process requires the government to disclose material exculpatory evidence to criminal defendants. This Note …
Decarceration's Inside Partners, Seema Tahir Saifee
Decarceration's Inside Partners, Seema Tahir Saifee
Fordham Law Review
This Article examines a hidden phenomenon in criminal punishment. People in prison, during their incarceration, have made important—and sometimes extraordinary—strides toward reducing prison populations. In fact, stakeholders in many corners, from policy makers to researchers to abolitionists, have harnessed legal and conceptual strategies generated inside the walls to pursue decarceral strategies outside the walls. Despite this outside use of inside moves, legal scholarship has directed little attention to theorizing the potential of looking to people on the inside as partners in the long-term project of meaningfully reducing prison populations, or “decarceration.”
Building on the change-making agency and revolutionary ideation inside …
Police Vehicle Searches And Racial Profiling: An Empirical Study, Griffin Edwards, Stephen Rushin
Police Vehicle Searches And Racial Profiling: An Empirical Study, Griffin Edwards, Stephen Rushin
Fordham Law Review
In 1981, the U.S. Supreme Court held in New York v. Belton that police officers could lawfully search virtually anywhere in a vehicle without a warrant after the arrest of any occupant in the vehicle. Then, in 2009, the Court reversed course in Arizona v. Gant, holding that police could only engage in vehicle searches after such arrests in a smaller number of extenuating circumstances. This series of cases became a flash point for the broader debate about the regulation of policing. Law enforcement groups argued that administratively complex rules, like those established in Gant, risk officer safety. …
Criminal Justice Expertise, Benjamin Levin
Criminal Justice Expertise, Benjamin Levin
Fordham Law Review
For decades, commentators have adopted a story of mass incarceration’s rise as caused by “punitive populism.” Growing prison populations, expanding criminal codes, and raced and classed disparities in enforcement result from “pathological politics”: voters and politicians act in a vicious feedback loop, driving more criminal law and punishment. The criminal system’s problems are political. But how should society solve these political problems? Scholars often identify two kinds of approaches: (1) the technocratic, which seeks to wrest power from irrational and punitive voters, replacing electoral politics with agencies and commissions, and (2) the democratic, which treats criminal policy as insufficiently responsive …
Progressive Prosecutors Are Not Trying To Dismantle The Master’S House, And The Master Wouldn’T Let Them Anyway, Paul Butler
Progressive Prosecutors Are Not Trying To Dismantle The Master’S House, And The Master Wouldn’T Let Them Anyway, Paul Butler
Fordham Law Review
The first thing to note about Audre Lorde’s famous phrase “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house” is that it cannot literally be true. If tools can dismantle the master’s house, the master’s own tools would be good as anyone’s. The main problem would not be that the tools don’t work, but rather how to get them to the people who most need the master’s house dismantled—the enslaved ones. But the considerable work that the phrase does in social justice movements and critical theory is figurative rather than literal. It is usually intended as a rebuke of liberal …
No Justice, No Pleas: Subverting Mass Incarceration Through Defendant Collective Action, Andrew Manuel Crespo
No Justice, No Pleas: Subverting Mass Incarceration Through Defendant Collective Action, Andrew Manuel Crespo
Fordham Law Review
The American penal system is a system of massive, racially unjust incarceration. It is also, to quote the U.S. Supreme Court, a “system of pleas.” The latter drives the former, as coercive plea bargaining makes it possible for the state to do two things that are otherwise hard to pull off at once: increase convictions and sentence lengths. Mass incarceration is a predictable result. But while plea bargaining is intensely coercive when leveraged against individuals, the system of pleas has a structural weak point. That Achilles’ heel is exposed once we see people facing prosecution not as isolated individuals but …
Opening The Safety Valve: A Second Look At Compassionate Release Under The First Step Act, Michael T. Hamilton
Opening The Safety Valve: A Second Look At Compassionate Release Under The First Step Act, Michael T. Hamilton
Fordham Law Review
Under federal law, judges are generally prohibited from changing a sentence once it has been imposed. Compassionate release, to put it simply, provides a “safety valve” against this general principle, allowing federal judges to reduce a prisoner’s sentence when it is warranted by “extraordinary and compelling reasons.” For the past thirty years, statutory and bureaucratic roadblocks made compassionate release an unlikely avenue for prisoners to receive sentence reductions. With the passage of the First Step Act of 2018, the U.S. Congress made the first significant changes to the compassionate release statute in decades, permitting defendants for the first time to …
The First Step Act And Individualized Review: Must Judges Apply The 18 U.S.C. 3553(A) Factors To Section 404 Petitioners?, Kielan Barua
The First Step Act And Individualized Review: Must Judges Apply The 18 U.S.C. 3553(A) Factors To Section 404 Petitioners?, Kielan Barua
Fordham Law Review
In 2010, the U.S. Congress amended the notorious mandatory minimum sentencing structure for crack cocaine offenses in response to the decades of harm it had caused. As the amendment was not retroactive, Congress passed the First Step Act of 2018 to allow prisoners incarcerated before 2010 to petition their original sentencing court for discretionary relief based on the new penalties. However, what exactly these courts must do when deciding whether to grant relief has divided the circuits. Some circuits require an up-to-date consideration of defendants’ individual mitigating circumstances and whether their sentences are the minimum necessary to satisfy the purposes …
How Experts Have Dominated The Neuroscience Narrative In Criminal Cases For Twelve Decades: A Warning For The Future, Deborah W. Denno
How Experts Have Dominated The Neuroscience Narrative In Criminal Cases For Twelve Decades: A Warning For The Future, Deborah W. Denno
Faculty Scholarship
Phineas Gage, the man who survived impalement by a rod through his head in 1848, is considered “one of the great medical curiosities of all time.” While expert accounts of Gage's post-accident personality changes are often wildly damning and distorted, recent research shows that Gage mostly thrived, despite his trauma. Studying past cases such as Gage’s helps us imagine—and prepare for—a future of law and neuroscience in which scientific debates over the brain’s functions remain fiery, and experts divisively control how we characterize brain-injured defendants.
This Article examines how experts have long dominated the neuroscience narrative in U.S. criminal cases, …
Proxy Crimes And Overcriminalization, Youngjae Lee
Proxy Crimes And Overcriminalization, Youngjae Lee
Faculty Scholarship
A solution to the problem of “overcriminalization” appears to be decriminalization of certain crimes. This Essay focuses on a group of crimes that has been labeled “proxy crimes” as a candidate to be eliminated. What are proxy crimes? Douglas Husak defines them as “offenses designed to achieve a purpose other than to prevent the conduct they explicitly proscribe.” Michael Moore describes them as involving situations where we “use one morally innocuous act as a proxy for another, morally wrongful act or mental state.” Put that way, proxy crimes seem highly problematic, and Larry Alexander and Kimberly Ferzan bluntly put it, …
Bargaining For Abolition, Zohra Ahmed
Bargaining For Abolition, Zohra Ahmed
Fordham Law Review
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? Early observers of twentieth century urban criminal courts likened them to factories. Since then, commentators often deploy the pejorative epithet “assembly line justice” to describe criminal court’s processes. The term conveys the criticism of a mechanical system delivering a form of justice that is impersonal and fallible. Perhaps unintentionally, the epithet reveals another truth: criminal court is also a workplace, and it takes labor to keep …
An Uncertain Participant: Victim Input And The Black Box Of Discretionary Parole Release, Noah Epstein
An Uncertain Participant: Victim Input And The Black Box Of Discretionary Parole Release, Noah Epstein
Fordham Law Review
Little is understood about the parole release process, as state parole boards predominately operate with incredible discretion and keep their deliberations and rationales hidden from public view. Even less is understood about the intersection of the inscrutable parole release decision-making process and victim rights. As the victim rights movement mobilized in the 1970s, victims, instead of remaining passive witnesses, came to wield significant influence over the release decision process. Today, victim participation in parole proceedings is increasing as most parole boards proclaim how important victims’ voices are and, in turn, actively incorporate victim input into their release calculus. Yet, it …