Law Commons^™

What's Guilt (Or Deterrence) Got To Do With It?: The Death Penalty, Ritual, And Mimetic Violence, 38 Wm. & Mary L. Rev. 487 (1997), Donald L. Beschle

UIC Law Open Access Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Justice Scalia As A Modern Lord Devlin: Animus And Civil Burdens In Romer V. Evans, S. I. Strong

Faculty Publications

In the late 1950s and early 1960s, the legal world was captivated by an ongoing debate between two of England's most respected jurists regarding whether and to what extent morality should be reflected in the law. The debate was instigated by the publication of the Wolfenden Report, a study presented to Parliament as it considered whether to repeal certain antisodomy laws in Great Britain. Lord Patrick Devlin, then a Lord of Appeal in Ordinary and later elevated to the House of Lords, Britain's highest court, opposed the conclusions contained in the Wolfenden Report and supported the continuation of the antisodomy …

Guest Editor's Observations: Back To Basics: Helping The Commission Solve The "Loss" Mess With Old Familiar Tools, Frank O. Bowman Iii

Faculty Publications

Roughly one-quarter of all convicted federal defendants are sentenced for some kind of economic crime.1 There is an emerging consensus that the provisions of the federal sentencing guidelines devoted to economic crime do not work very well, a consensus that has created a powerful momentum for significant change. This Issue of FSR is about whether the guidelines concerning economic offenses, principally §2B1.1 (Theft) and §2F1.1 (Fraud), should be materially altered, and if so, how. The debate that has been joined over this question is technically complex and philosophically challenging. There are disagreements over issues as particular as when collateral posted …

Appendix To Guest Editor's Observations: A Proposal For A Consolidated Theft/Fraud Guideline, Frank O. Bowman Iii

Faculty Publications

Professor Frank Bowman proposed the following consolidated theft/fraud guideline to the U.S. Sentencing Commission in October 1997. The proposal is explained in detail in a forthcoming law review article, Coping With Loss”: A Re-Examination of Federal Economic Crime Sentencing Under the Guidelines, 51 Vanderbilt L. Rev. -- (April 1998).

Whoever Fights Monsters Should See To It That In The Process He Does Not Become A Monster: Hunting The Sexual Predator With Silver Bullets -- Federal Rules Of Evidence 413-415 -- And A Stake Through The Heart -- Kansas V. Hendricks, Joelle A. Moreno

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Defiling The Dead: Necrophilia And The Law, Tyler T. Ochoa, Christine Jones

Faculty Publications

This article will examine the issue of criminal liability for necrophilia. Part II will address necrophilia in general and will discuss briefly why society finds such acts reprehensible. Part III will discuss existing criminal prohibitions against necrophilia in California and other states. Part IV will discuss the evidentiary use of necrophilia in proving other crimes. Finally, Part V will evaluate proposed legislation outlawing necrophilia.

Sexuality, Rape, And Mental Retardation, Deborah W. Denno

Faculty Scholarship

In this article, Professor Denno addresses the question of when sexual relations with a mentally retarded individual should be considered nonconsensual and therefore criminal. The article first explores the early treatment of mental retardation. It next demonstrates how old stereotypes influence the moralism inherent in modern conceptions of consent in rape determinations. Illustrating the point with reference to the Glen Ridge rape case, the article shows how courts applying contemporary rape statutes typically hold mentally retarded individuals to a higher standard of consent than nonretarded individuals. As a result, courts are hurting the very people they are supposed to protect …

International Human Rights Standards On Sexual Violence Against Women As They Apply To Pornography, Claudia Giunta

LLM Theses and Essays

The United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women was held in Beijing in September 1995, and represented an important step towards the achievement of equality for women. At the Conference, the progress made towards equality was acknowledged, but it was also acknowledged that many goals have not been achieved yet, and that cultural changes of fundamental importance remain to be made. Indeed, in many countries the cultural approach to violence and discrimination against women is quite fatalistic; they believe violence against women cannot be solved by laws. However, this approach overlooks the role played by societies in tolerating practices of …

Old Chief V. United States: Stipulating Away Prosecutorial Accountability?, Daniel Richman

Faculty Scholarship

Earlier this year, in Old Chief v. United States, the Supreme Court finally resolved a circuit split on a nagging evidentiary issue: When a defendant charged with being a convicted felon in possession of a firearm offers to satisfy one of the statute's elements by stipulating to the existence of a prior felony conviction, may the government decline the stipulation and prove the existence and the nature of that prior felony?

The question of evidence law resolved in Old Chief is not particularly earth-shattering. Indeed, while the Court divided five to four on the issue, neither Justice Souter's opinion …

Ethics, Professionalism, And Meaningful Work, William H. Simon

Faculty Scholarship

Much of the anxiety and dissatisfaction associated with legal ethics arises from the categorical quality of the bar's dominant norms. These norms take the form of relatively inflexible rules insensitive to all but a few of the circumstances of the cases they govern. Hence they often require the lawyer to take actions that contribute to injustice or to refrain from actions that would avert injustice.

For example, many lawyers believe that a criminal defender is obliged to impeach a truthful complaining witness even though the only immediate purpose of this tactic is to encourage the trier to draw a mistaken …

Crime Control And Harassment Of The Innocent, Raymond Dacey, Kenneth S. Gallant

Faculty Scholarship

Crime control through law enforcement is generally considered to be a two-part process of appre­hending and incapacitating or rehabilitating the guilty, and deterring the innocent from crime by the threat of punishment. The analysis presented here shows that the protection of the innocent from harass­ment-detention, arrest, punishment, and other intrusions by the criminal justice system-is important in deterring crime. Specifically, the analysis shows that deterrence from crime is weakened and then lost for a rational individual who holds the majority attitude toward risk, if the levels of rightful punishment and wrongful harassment are increased, as in a war on crime, …

Sovereignty, Judicial Assistance And Protection Of Human Rights In International Criminal Tribunals, Kenneth S. Gallant

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Robert Mcnamara And The Art And Law Of Confession: ‘A Simple Desultory Philippic (Or How I Was Robert Mcnamara’D Into Submission)’, Robert N. Strassfeld

Faculty Publications

This Article examines McNamara's "confession" and the public response to it within the context of an American tradition of confession in law and literature. Part I traces that tradition to the criminal conversion narratives and gallows speeches of colonial New England. Puritan society had clear expectations of what it took to make a good confession, and the Article identifies these rules for confession. It also examines the functions of confession in that society and argues that these confessions had several social consequences, including easing the consciences of those implicated in the criminal's punishment; bolstering civil and religious authority; warning the …

Pain Relief For The Dying: The Unwelcome Intervention Of The Criminal Law, Phebe Saunders Haugen

Faculty Scholarship

This Article addresses physician-assisted suicide and the medical treatment of pain and suffering. Part II discusses various medical misconceptions about the treatment of pain and how modern medicine fails to fulfill this aspect of its palliative care role. Part III reviews how the law currently circumscribes the patient and doctor's ability to make medical decisions when the patient is terminally ill. As will be shown, the law is clearer and more respectful of good medical practice than most medical practitioners currently believe. Moreover, this section will also establish that, while several competing philosophical positions surrounding physician-assisted suicide exist, these same …

The Use Of Social Science And Medicine In Sex Offender Commitment, Eric S. Janus

Faculty Scholarship

Sex offender commitment statutes are a controversial and recurring response to the threat of sexual violence. These statutes, claiming exemption from the strict constitutional limitations of the criminal law, use civil-commitment-like procedures to detain sex offenders in secure "treatment centers." Litigation testing these statutes has sought to locate the border between legitimate exercise of the state's mental health power, and illegitimate preventative detention. This article examines the central roles that medicine and behavioral science play in the operation of sex offender commitment statutes and the litigation testing their constitutional validity. The thesis of this article is that the presence of …

The Jury Is Still Out On The Need For An International Criminal Court, Michael P. Scharf

Faculty Publications

In 1989, the United Nations General Assembly proclaimed the 1990s to be "The Decade of International Law." Moreover, 1990, which witnessed both the devolution of the Cold War and the effective use of the United Nations to coalesce universal support for international action against Iraq for its invasion of Kuwait, was a year of renewed optimism for international institutions. It is therefore fitting that proposals for an international criminal court should, at this time, get a fresh look from the international legal community. Towards this end, in the words of the U.S. Representative to the United Nations Sixth (Legal) Committee …

The Failure Of The Criminal Procedure Revolution: A Response, Craig M. Bradley

Articles by Maurer Faculty

No abstract provided.

Sex Offender Commitments: Debunking The Official Narrative And Revealing The Rules-In-Use, Eric S. Janus

Faculty Scholarship

Sex offender commitment laws present courts with a difficult choice: either allow creative efforts to prevent sexual violence or enforce traditional constitutional safeguards constraining the power of the state to deprive citizens of their Iiberty. Three state supreme courts have deflected this hard choice while upholding sex offender commitment schemes. As part of their ""official narrative"" that legitimizes sex offender commitments, the courts claim that society can have prevention and still maintain the primacy of the criminal justice system. This narrative neutralizes the conflict in values by claiming that sex offender commitments are just like mental illness commitments, a small, …

Criminal Law And Criminology: Survey Of Recent Books, Juliet Casper Smith

Articles by Maurer Faculty

No abstract provided.

Criminal Law And Criminology: Survey Of Recent Books, Juliet Casper Smith

Articles by Maurer Faculty

No abstract provided.

Criminal Law And Criminology: Survey Of Recent Books, Juliet Casper Smith

Articles by Maurer Faculty

No abstract provided.

Corporations, Criminal Law And The Color Of Money, Joseph Vining

Articles

This part of From Newton's Sleep, published by Princeton University Press in 1995 and in a paperback edition in early 1997, is reprinted by permission of the publisher. From Newton's Sleep is a book on the legal form of thought and its meaning for science and religion. It consists of some two hundred and fifty self-contained pieces arranged in eight sections. In its form, the book is much like and is meant to be much like the material with which lawyers routinely deal. Here, Law Quadrangle Notes excerpts a piece that touches on a subject of lively debate today, among …

The Jury As Catalyst For The Reform Of Criminal Evidentiary Procedure In Continental Europe: The Cases Of Russia And Spain, Stephen C. Thaman

All Faculty Scholarship

This paper focuses on the dialectic between the search for truth, adversarial procedure, and lay participation in the preparation, presentation, and evaluation of evidence in criminal trials. Its primary focus is on the reintroduction of trial by jury in two classic inquisitorial criminal justice systems, Russia (1993) and Spain (1995), as a catalyst in those countries’ move to adversary procedure. It focuses on the effect of the jury system on preparing evidence for trial, the presentation of evidence at trial, and the evaluation of evidence.

Waiting For The Verdict On Spain's New Jury System, Stephen C. Thaman

All Faculty Scholarship

This article discusses Spain’s history of trial by jury, focusing on the reinstatement of trial by jury in Spain by the 1995 jury legislation implementing Article 125 of the post-Franco Spanish Constitution. It discusses key provisions of the new Spanish jury law with illustrations from the cases of Otegi and others. It also predicts as to whether the classic jury will acquit itself as a catalyst for criminal justice reform in a Civil Law system such as that of Spain.

Deterrence’S Difficulty, Neal K. Katyal

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

We all crave simple elegance. Physicists since Einstein have been searching for a grand unified theory that will tie everything together in a simple model. Law professors have their own grand theories - law and economics's Coase Theorem and constitutional law's Originalism immediately spring to mind. Criminal law is no different, for the analogue is our faith in deterrence - the belief that increasing the penalty on an activity will mean that fewer people will perform it. This theory has much to commend it. After all, economists and shoppers have known for ages that a price increase in a good …

Passion's Progress: Modern Law Reform And The Provocation Defense, Victoria Nourse

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Based on a systematic study of fifteen years of passion murder cases, this article concludes that reform challenges our conventional ideas of a "crime of passion" and, in the process, leads to a murder law that is both illiberal and often perverse. If life tells us that crimes of passion are the stuff of sordid affairs and bedside confrontations, reform tells us that the law's passion may be something quite different. A significant number of the reform cases the author has studied involve no sexual infidelity whatsoever, but only the desire of the killer's victim to leave a miserable relationship. …

Policing Hatred: Police Bias Units And The Construction Of Hate Crime, Jeannine Bell

Articles by Maurer Faculty

Much of the scholarly debate about hate crime laws focuses on a discussion of their constitutionality under the First Amendment. Part of larger empirical study of police methods of investigating hate crimes, this Note attempts to shift thinking in this area beyond the existing debate over the constitutionality of hate crime legislation to a discussion of how low-level criminal justice personnel, such as the police, enforce hate crime laws. This Note argues that, since hate crimes are an area in which police have great discretion in enforcing the law, their understanding of the First Amendment and how it relates to …

Punishing Bias: An Examination Of The Theoretical Foundations Of Bias Crime Statutes, Anthony M. Dillof

Law Faculty Research Publications

No abstract provided.

Concepts Of Culpability And Deathworthiness: Differentiating Between Guilt And Punishment In Death Penalty Cases, Phyllis L. Crocker

Law Faculty Articles and Essays

The punishment of death is supposed to be reserved for those defendants who commit the most grievous murders and deserve the most extreme punishment. It is constitutionally insufficient to conclude that because a defendant is guilty of committing murder, death is the only deserved punishment. The judgment that a defendant is one of the few who will be sentenced to death requires an inquiry that looks beyond the defendant's guilt to consider whether the defendant is worthy of a death sentence. This article argues that the distinction between a defendant's guilt and deathworthiness is so often obscured that defendants who …

The Bomb Thief And The Theory Of Justification, Paul H. Robinson

All Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.