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Criminal Law

Faculty Scholarship

2012

Death penalty

Articles 1 - 2 of 2

Full-Text Articles in Law

Pain As Fact And Heuristic: How Pain Neuroimaging Illuminates Moral Dimensions Of Law, Amanda C. Pustilnik Jan 2012

Pain As Fact And Heuristic: How Pain Neuroimaging Illuminates Moral Dimensions Of Law, Amanda C. Pustilnik

Faculty Scholarship

Legal statuses, prohibitions, and protections often turn on the presence and degree of physical pain. In legal domains ranging from tort to torture, pain and its degree do important definitional work by delimiting boundaries of lawfulness and of entitlements. The omnipresence of pain in law suggests that the law embodies an intuition about the ontological primacy of pain. Yet, for all the work done by pain as a term in legal texts and practice, it has had a confounding lack of external verifiability. As with other subjective states, we have been able to impute pain’s presence but have not been …


Aedpa Mea Culpa, Larry Yackle Jan 2012

Aedpa Mea Culpa, Larry Yackle

Faculty Scholarship

In this essay, the author contends that the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996 [AEDPA] has frustrated both the enforcement of federal rights and legitimate state interests. He lays most of the blame on the Supreme Court's methodology for construing AEDPA's provisions. The Court insists that poorly conceived and drafted provisions must be taken literally, whatever the consequences, and that every provision must be read to change habeas corpus law in some way. This approach has produced unfair, wasteful, and even bizarre results that might have been avoided if the Court had assessed AEDPA more realistically.