Law Commons^™

“Police Yelp”, Natalie Gould

UC Irvine Law Review

This Note discusses failed police accountability measures and suggests a new intervention, “Police Yelp,” that focuses on community control over police officers. The Note discusses the current institutional measures that have attempted to control police but have failed, largely due to their reactive and institutional nature. To better control police and ensure they are policing as communities want to be policed, this Note argues for community control over police through a democratic process, similar to the way that users interact with businesses on Yelp. The Note draws on power shifting as articulated by Jocelyn Simonson, among others, which advocates for …

Limits To Prison Reform, Sophie Angelis

UC Irvine Law Review

Central to prison reform is the idea that prisons can be humane. Abolitionist scholarship has raised one challenge to this idea, in the form of a structural critique. Prisons, on this account, are social institutions that reflect and reinforce inequality; reform does not disturb those broader injustices, and so cannot cure the problems with prisons. Yes, and prison reform has another problem: there are limits to how humane any prison can be. Prisons are, by definition, instruments of punishment that inflict extreme isolation and control, which are dehumanizing experiences. And reforming prisons is, in some ways, an aesthetic project …

Embracing Crimmigration To Curtail Immigrant Detention, Pedro Gerson

UC Irvine Law Review

Immigration advocates have long objected to both the constitutionality and conditions of immigration detention. However, legal challenges to the practice have been largely unsuccessful due to immigration law’s “exceptionality.” Placing recent litigation carried out against immigration detention during the COVID-19 pandemic within the context of the judiciary’s approach to immigration, this Article argues that litigation is an extremely limited strategic avenue to curtail the use of immigration detention. I then argue that anti-immigration detention advocates should attempt to incorporate their agenda into criminal legal reform and decarceration efforts. This is important for both movements. Normatively, immigration detention raises comparable issues: …

Progressive Algorithms, Itay Ravid, Amit Haim

UC Irvine Law Review

Our criminal justice system is broken. Problems of mass incarceration, racial disparities, and susceptibility to error are prevalent in all phases of the criminal process. Recently, two dominant trends that aspire to tackle these fundamental problems have emerged in the criminal justice system: progressive prosecution—a model of prosecution adopted by elected reform-minded prosecutors that advance systemic change in criminal justice—and algorithmic decision-making—characterized by the adoption of statistical modeling and computational methodology to predict outcomes in criminal contexts.

While there are growing bodies of literature on each of these two trends, thus far, they have not been discussed in tandem. This …

Who Now Sits Atop The Pyramid Of Violence?, Harrison Weimer

UC Irvine Law Review

This Note seeks to provoke a conversation about the rise in power of federal prosecutors at the expense of district court judges, focusing on the controlled-substances context. While referencing Robert Cover’s portrayal of the justice system as a “pyramid of violence,” this Note shows how the federal mandatory-minimum sentencing laws and the U.S. Sentencing Commission’s Sentencing Guidelines brought about this change. These sentencing schemes have anchored what prosecutors and judges deem an appropriate sentence. Prosecutors are thinking about sentences while deciding what charges to bring. After a discussion about sentencing legislation and current sentencing procedures, this Note identifies a need …

Shining Another Light On Spousal Rape Exemptions: Spousal Sexual Violence Laws In The #Metoo Era, Kennedy Holmes

UC Irvine Law Review

This Note builds on the growing scholarly discourse involving the #MeToo movement and places an importance on discussing the issue of spousal rape in the #MeToo era. It fills a crucial gap in legal scholarship by articulating how sexual violence during marriage persists despite greater attention to sexual violence in the public discourse. There may be a blind spot in the popular discourse surrounding the #MeToo movement. This Note argues that the current conversation around sexual violence in the workplace fails to address the importance of fixing sexual violence in other areas (such as the home). The Centers for Disease …

The Twice Diminished Culpability Of Juvenile Accomplices To Felony Murder, Beth Caldwell

UC Irvine Law Review

No abstract provided.

In Whose Custody? Miranda, Emergency Medical Care & Criminal Defendants, Kayley Berger

UC Irvine Law Review

“Respect for the rule of law in all its dimensions is critical to the fair administration of justice, public order, and protection of fundamental freedoms.” The rule of law surrounding the Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination will not be respected by the police or public at large until major loopholes that allow the police “to take advantage of indigence in the administration of justice” are closed. The major loophole this Note tackles is the “in custody” requirement for Miranda warnings, which allows officers to question suspects without providing them with a Miranda warning. Specifically, this Note focuses on the damage …

The Problematic Use Of The Kill Zone Theory, Kaitlin R. O’Donnell

UC Irvine Law Review

The kill zone theory is a legal doctrine that does not exist in statute but has been used in jury instructions to aid in securing convictions for attempted murder charges. As a result of the kill zone theory, individuals in California have received lengthier sentences and, in some cases, have been convicted of crimes that fail to meet the requisite specific intent for attempted murder cases. The kill zone theory has no purpose in California law but to make the path to conviction easier and to put defendants in jail for longer. The kill zone theory is an unnecessary tool …

Labor Redemption In Work Law, Andrew Elmore

UC Irvine Law Review

People with criminal records must find and keep work to reintegrate into society. But private employers often categorically exclude candidates with criminal record histories, especially if the candidate is African American or Latinx. The conventional wisdom is that workplace laws offer little to address this problem. People with criminal records are not a protected class under Title VII, and many employers fear that hiring people with criminal records invites negligent hiring liability. Ban the Box privacy laws delay but may not deter overbroad criminal background checks.

This Article challenges this standard account by shifting focus to the state in imposing …

Predictable Punishments, Brian Galle, Murat Mungan

UC Irvine Law Review

Economic analyses of both crime and regulation writ large suggest that the subjective cost or value of incentives is critical to their effectiveness. But reliable information about subjective valuation is scarce, as those who are punished have little reason to report honestly. Modern “big data” techniques promise to overcome this information shortfall but perhaps at the cost of individual privacy and the autonomy that privacy’s shield provides.

This Article argues that regulators can and should instead rely on methods that remain accurate even in the face of limited information. Building on a formal model we present elsewhere, we show that …

The Transnational Legal Ordering Of The Death Penalty, Stefanie Neumeier, Wayne Sandholtz

UC Irvine Journal of International, Transnational, and Comparative Law

A transnational legal order (TLO) authoritatively shapes “the

understanding and practice of law” in a specific area of social activity,

involving both state and civil society actors, and linking national, regional,

and international levels. We argue that a TLO has emerged and settled

since 1945 around capital punishment. Our analysis of the death penalty

TLO treats “bottom-up” and “top-down” effects as interconnected,

addresses the creation of legal order at both national and international levels,

and emphasizes the recursivity linking developments at both levels. We trace

the development of death penalty abolition from its origins in the immediate

aftermath of World …

Transnational Criminal Law In A Globalised World: The Case Of Trafficking, Prabha Kotiswaran

UC Irvine Journal of International, Transnational, and Comparative Law

Not a day goes by without a sensationalist report on the travails of modern

slaves, be it the saga of Indian teenagers trafficked into sex work as depicted in the

Hollywood movie Love Sonia, or workers trafficked into the UK’s nail bar and car

wash shops, or the 2018 Global Slavery Index released by the Walk Free

Foundation founded by mining magnate Andrew Forrest which estimates that there

are 40.3 million modern slaves around the world. Anti-slavery groups remind us

that modern slavery afflicts almost everything that we consume on a day-to-day

basis. This includes basic commodities like tea, sugar, …

International Prison Standards And Transnational Criminal Justice, Dirk Van Zyl Smit

UC Irvine Journal of International, Transnational, and Comparative Law

Prison standards are an important element of transnational criminal

justice. This Article shows how legal standards governing prison conditions

emerged at the international and regional levels and considers how,

increasingly, they have gained legitimacy. It then describes how these

standards are applied in a way that contributes to a recognizable

transnational legal order in respect of prison conditions, which has real

impact at the national level. The Article pays close attention to the transfer

of prisoners between states, as a mechanism that operates transnationally

and, in the process, enhances the importance of international prison

standards. It concludes that the benefits …

Anti-Money Laundering: An Inquiry Into A Disciplinary Transnational Legal Order, Terence Halliday, Michael Levi, Peter Reuter

UC Irvine Journal of International, Transnational, and Comparative Law

This Article enquires into the case of one of the most comprehensive,

far-reaching, most deeply penetrating, and most punitive of TLOs: antimoney

laundering. Drawing on an intensive study at a moment when its

governing norms and methodologies of implementation were undergoing

revision and expansion, as well as on observation and participation in

AML/CFT activities over three decades, the Article brings rich empirical

evidence to bear on two theoretical issues. First, despite its seemingly

successful institutionalization, the AML TLO exhibits many deficiencies

and imposes extensive costs on the private and public sectors, and harms

upon the public. Why doesn’t it fail? …

Transnational Criminal Law Or The Transnational Legal Ordering Of Corruption?, Radha Ivory

UC Irvine Journal of International, Transnational, and Comparative Law

To date, “transnational criminal law” has been the dominant

paradigm for explaining and mapping rules on corruption in the

international legal literature. Transnational criminal law is presented as a

system of law descending from multilateral crime control treaties or a field or

order that emerges through international political processes of regime

formation. Transnational criminal lawyers identify and describe cross-border

legal rules, and seek to evaluate them against liberal norms of democratic

governance and individual civil and political human rights. This Article

details the limits of transnational criminal conceptions of “anticorruption”

through a study of proposed changes to Australian laws on …

Location Tracking By Police: The Regulation Of ‘Tireless And Absolute Surveillance’, Bert-Jaap Koops, Bryce Clayton Newell, Ivan Škorvánek

UC Irvine Law Review

Location information reveals people’s whereabouts, but can also tell much about their habits, preferences, and, ultimately, much of their private lives. Current surveillance technologies used in criminal investigation include many techniques to track someone’s movements; not all are equally intrusive. This raises the following questions: how do jurisdictions draw boundaries between lesser and more serious privacy intrusions? What factors play a role? How are geolocational privacy interests framed? In this Article, we answer these questions through a comparative analysis of location-tracking regulation in eight jurisdictions: Canada, Czechia, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, the United Kingdom, and the United States.

We …

Policing Wage Theft In The Day Labor Market, Stephen Lee

UC Irvine Law Review

No abstract provided.

Standing On Shaky Ground: Criminal Jurisdiction And Ecclesiastical Immunity In Seventeenth-Century Lima, 1600–1700, Michelle A. Mckinley

UC Irvine Law Review

No abstract provided.

Beyond Sexual Humanitarianism: A Postcolonial Approach To Anti-Trafficking Law, Prabha Kotiswaran

UC Irvine Law Review

No abstract provided.

Degradation Ceremonies And The Criminalization Of Low-Income Women, Kaaryn Gustafson

UC Irvine Law Review

No abstract provided.

Business Crime And The Public Interest: Lawyers, Legislators, And The Administrative State, Harry First

UC Irvine Law Review

No abstract provided.

A New Approach To Juvenile Justice: An Analysis Of The Constitutional And Statutory Issues Raised By Gender-Segregated Juvenile Courts, Katherine M. Harrison

UC Irvine Law Review

No abstract provided.

Statutory Analysis: Using Criminal Law To Highlight Issues In Statutory Interpretation, Jennifer M. Chacón

UC Irvine Law Review

No abstract provided.

Criminal Clinics In The Pursuit Of Immigrant Rights: Lessons From The Loncheros, Ingrid V. Eagly

UC Irvine Law Review

No abstract provided.