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Full-Text Articles in Law
May The State Punish What It May Not Prevent?, Gabriel S. Mendlow
May The State Punish What It May Not Prevent?, Gabriel S. Mendlow
Articles
In Why Is It Wrong To Punish Thought? I defended an overlooked principle of criminalization that I called the Enforceability Constraint. The Enforceability Constraint holds that the state may punish transgressions of a given type only if the state in principle may forcibly disrupt such transgressions on the ground that they are criminal wrongs. As I argued in the essay, the reason why the state is forbidden from punishing thought is that the state is forbidden from forcibly disrupting a person’s mental states on the ground that they are criminally wrongful (as opposed to, say, on the ground that they …
Why Is It Wrong To Punish Thought?, Gabriel S. Mendlow
Why Is It Wrong To Punish Thought?, Gabriel S. Mendlow
Articles
It’s a venerable maxim of criminal jurisprudence that the state must never punish people for their mere thoughts—for their beliefs, desires, fantasies, and unexecuted intentions. This maxim is all but unquestioned, yet its true justification is something of a mystery. In this Essay, I argue that each of the prevailing justifications is deficient, and I conclude by proposing a novel one. The proposed justification captures the widely shared intuition that punishing a person for her mere thoughts isn’t simply disfavored by the balance of reasons but is morally wrongful in itself, an intrinsic (i.e., consequence-independent) injustice to the person punished. …
Private Actors And Public Corruption: Why Courts Should Adopt A Broad Interpretation Of The Hobbs Act, Megan Demarco
Private Actors And Public Corruption: Why Courts Should Adopt A Broad Interpretation Of The Hobbs Act, Megan Demarco
Michigan Law Review
Federal prosecutors routinely charge public officials with “extortion under color of official right” under a public-corruption statute called the Hobbs Act. To be prosecuted under the Hobbs Act, a public official must promise official action in return for a bribe or kickback. The public official, however, does not need to have actual authority over that official action. As long as the victim reasonably believed that the public official could deliver or influence government action, the public official violated the Hobbs Act. Private citizens also solicit bribes in return for influencing official action. Yet most courts do not think the Hobbs …
Constitutionally Tailoring Punishment, Richard A. Bierschbach, Stephanos Bibas
Constitutionally Tailoring Punishment, Richard A. Bierschbach, Stephanos Bibas
Michigan Law Review
Since the turn of the century, the Supreme Court has regulated noncapital sentencing under the Sixth Amendment in the Apprendi line of cases (requiring jury findings of fact to justify sentence enhancements) as well as under the Eighth Amendment in the Miller and Graham line of cases (forbidding mandatory life imprisonment for juvenile defendants). Although both lines of authority sound in individual rights, in fact they are fundamentally about the structures of criminal justice. These two seemingly disparate doctrines respond to structural imbalances in noncapital sentencing by promoting morally appropriate punishment judgments that are based on individualized input and that …
Federalism And Criminal Law: What The Feds Can Learn From The States, Rachel E. Barkow
Federalism And Criminal Law: What The Feds Can Learn From The States, Rachel E. Barkow
Michigan Law Review
Criminal law enforcement in the United States is multijurisdictional. Local, state, and federal prosecutors all possess the power to bring criminal charges. An enduring question of criminal law is how authority should be allocated among these levels of government. In trying to gain traction on the question of when crime should be handled at the federal level and when it should be left to local authorities, courts and scholars have taken a range of approaches. Oddly, one place that commentators have not looked for guidance on how to handle the issue of law enforcement allocation is within the states themselves. …
Unusual Suspects: Recognizing And Responding To Female Staff Perpetrators Of Sexual Misconduct In U.S. Prisons, Lauren A. Teichner
Unusual Suspects: Recognizing And Responding To Female Staff Perpetrators Of Sexual Misconduct In U.S. Prisons, Lauren A. Teichner
Michigan Journal of Gender & Law
Despite the general public's ignorance of this issue of sexual misconduct perpetrated by female prison staff against male inmates, such stories are remarkably familiar to those who study or work in the world of prisons. The Prison Rape Elimination Act ("PREA") of 2003 mandated that the Bureau of Justice Statistics ("the Bureau") undertake new studies of sexual violence in prisons. Accordingly, the Bureau released a report in July 2006 revealing some groundbreaking data. Of the 344 substantiated allegations of staff-on-inmate sexual violence made in federal, state, and private prisons in 2005, 67% of the overall victims were male inmates and …
When Discretion Leads To Distortion: Recognizing Pre-Arrest Sentence-Manipulation Claims Under The Federal Sentencing Guidelines, Jeffrey L. Fisher
When Discretion Leads To Distortion: Recognizing Pre-Arrest Sentence-Manipulation Claims Under The Federal Sentencing Guidelines, Jeffrey L. Fisher
Michigan Law Review
This Note argues that sentence manipulation should be a legally viable partial defense - a defense that does not warrant complete exoneration, but does warrant a reduced sentence when the government's investigative techniques place a quantity of drugs before the court that overrepresents the defendant's culpability, or individual blameworthiness. Part I describes the policies and objectives that underlie the Guidelines, but then demonstrates how the rigid application of quantity-based sentencing provisions can lead to sentence manipulation that thwarts these goals, particularly the goal of sentencing according to culpability. Part II describes how courts have responded to sentence manipulation claims. It …
Just Punishment In An Imperfect World, Stephen J. Schulhofer
Just Punishment In An Imperfect World, Stephen J. Schulhofer
Michigan Law Review
A Review of Questioning Authority: Justice and Criminal Law by David L. Bazelon
Specific Performance Of "Unfulfillable" Plea Bargains, Stuart L. Gasner
Specific Performance Of "Unfulfillable" Plea Bargains, Stuart L. Gasner
University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform
This article discusses how courts have handled the remedy dilemma presented by unfulfillable plea bargains. Part I analyzes the seminal Supreme Court opinion on the broken plea bargain question, Santobello v. New York. This section concludes that choice-of-remedy is not entirely a matter of lower court discretion. Rather, Santobello delegates to lower courts the authority to develop a law of remedies which conforms to the underlying principles of that decision. Part I also focuses on what courts have done with this mandate, discussing the elements of decision courts have developed to remedy unfulfillable plea bargains. Finally, Part II suggests …