Law Commons^™

Reports Of Batson's Death Have Been Greatly Exaggerated: How The Batson Doctrine Enforces A Normative Framework Of Legal Ethics, Laura I. Appleman

ExpressO

In this article, I aim to explain how the Batson procedure enforces a normative framework of legal ethics, a theory which I hope will be of use to both criminal law professors and scholars of legal ethics. Despite many recent prudential attacks against the Batson procedure and the peremptory challenge, I contend that Batson has a largely unarticulated ethical component, one that invokes a lawyer’s professional responsibility. Accordingly, using legal ethics as a lens through which to interpret Batson sheds new light on the doctrine. Batson’s ethical imperative affects the norms of the legal profession itself. By fostering a non-discrimination …

Book Review: Forensic Linguistics, Dru Stevenson

ExpressO

Review of John Gibbons' text "Forensic Linguistics"

A Brief Look At Broward County Lawyers’ And Judges’ Attitudes Toward Plea Bargaining As A Tool Of Courtroom Efficiency, Mohammad A. Faruqui

ExpressO

Even the most rigidly ideological prosecutors acknowledge that they need to plea out most of the less serious criminal charges to ensure justice without incurring an unmanageable backlog of cases. But what do most criminal lawyers and judges think about the plea arrangment system? Is it fair to defendants? Do lawyers use plea bargains to better serve their clients by finding the best deal, or do they use plea bargains to cut their case load for what some call "garbage cases?" This paper surveys a small sample to see how 21st century Broward County criminal lawyers feel about the plea …

Jury Trials In Japan, Robert M. Bloom

ExpressO

The Japanese are seeking to involve their citizens in the judicial system. They are also establishing a check on the power of the judiciary. Towards these goals, they have enacted legislation to create jury trials. These remarkable ambitions envision adopting a mixed-jury system, slated to take effect in 2009. In this mixed-jury system, judges and citizens participate together in the jury deliberation.

This article first explores the differences between mixed-juries and the American jury system. It then suggests why the Japanese opted for a mixed-jury system. The article explores psychological theories surrounding collective judgment and how dominant individuals influence group …

Victims And Perpetrators: An Argument For Comparative Liability In Criminal Law, Vera Bergelson

Rutgers Law School (Newark) Faculty Papers

This article challenges the legal rule according to which the victim’s conduct is irrelevant to the determination of the perpetrator’s criminal liability. The author attacks this rule from both positive and normative perspectives, and argues that criminal law should incorporate an affirmative defense of comparative liability. This defense would fully or partially exculpate the defendant if the victim by his own acts has lost or reduced his right not to be harmed.

Part I tests the descriptive accuracy of the proposition that the perpetrator’s liability does not depend on the conduct of the victim. Criminological and victimological studies strongly suggest …

Taking Miranda's Pulse, William T. Pizzi, Morris B. Hoffman

Publications

No abstract provided.

Nothing Plus Nothing Equals... Something? A Proposal For Flir Warrants On Reasonable Suspicion, Steve Coughlan, Marc Gorbet

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

Over a series of decisions, the Court has been backing itself into a corner with its section 8 jurisprudence. Section 8 protects against unreasonable searches. Since the earliest ruling on the section in Hunter v. Southam} searches are prima facie unreasonable if they take place without a warrant. Thus, before conducting a search, police must have a warrant. Before getting a warrant, police must have information about the accused. Obtaining information about the accused probably involves conduct that qualifies as a search. Thus for example in K. v. Kokesch, R. v. Wiley, and R. v. Plant, perimeter searches, conducted in …

Mental Disorder And The Civil/Criminal Distinction, Grant H. Morris

University of San Diego Public Law and Legal Theory Research Paper Series

This essay, written as part of a symposium issue to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the University of San Diego Law School, discusses the evaporating distinction between sentence-serving convicts and mentally disordered nonconvicts who are involved in, or who were involved in, the criminal process–people we label as both bad and mad. By examining one Supreme Court case from each of the decades that follow the opening of the University of San Diego School of Law, the essay demonstrates how the promise that nonconvict mentally disordered persons would be treated equally with other civilly committed mental patients was made and …

Unraveling Unlawful Entrapment, Anthony M. Dillof

ExpressO

No abstract provided.

Citizens Of An Enemy Land: Enemy Combatants, Aliens, And The Constitutional Rights Of The Pseudo-Citizen, Juliet P. Stumpf

ExpressO

No abstract provided.

Entrapment And The Problem Of Deterring Police Misconduct, Dru Stevenson

ExpressO

Many the states currently use a version of the entrapment defense known as the “objective test,” which focuses solely on the extent of police overreaching in the case, and seeks to deter police misconduct by acquitting the defendant. Acquitting defendants as a means of deterring undercover police misconduct, however, is a public policy fraught with problems, and these problems have not been adequately addressed in the literature to date. This article applies the insights of modern deterrence theory to wrongful activity by police in undercover operations. In doing so, three general problems emerge. First, the objective test relies on an …

Immaturity, Normative Competence, And Juvenile Transfer: How (Not) To Punish Minors For Major Crimes, David O. Brink

ExpressO

This essay critically examines the national trend to get tough on juvenile crime by making it easier to transfer juvenile offenders to adult criminal court. It assesses this trend in light of different rationales for punishment, arguing that immaturity provides retributive, deterrent, and corrective reasons to punish juvenile crime differently than otherwise similar adult crime. Insofar as retributive concepts determine whom to punish and how much to punish, it is especially important that immaturity involves diminished normative competence and, hence, diminished responsibility. In defending a traditional approach to juvenile criminal justice against the reforms embodied in the transfer trend, the …

Righting Victim Wrongs: Responding To Philosophical Criticisms Of The Nonspecific Victim Liability Defense, Aya Gruber

Publications

Modern criminal law is intensely one-sided in its treatment of victims and defendants. Crime victims and criminal defendants do not enter the trial process on an equal moral footing. Rather, from the beginning victims are assumed blameless, truthful, and even beyond doubt, while defendants are guilty, not worthy of credence, and immoral. This one-sided view of victims, however, is a fiction. As any other people, victims differ in their characterizations. Some are indeed trustworthy, truthful, blameless and ultimately innocent. Others, however, are bad actors themselves, have memory failures, falsely identify, provoke, and even lie. Some victims are in fact, and …

United States V. Bean: Shoveling After The Elephant?, Pannal A. Sanders

ExpressO

Thomas Bean’s felony conviction in Mexico implicated provisions of federal law that preclude certain persons, including specified felons, from owning or trading in firearms and ammunition which have been transported in interstate commerce. 18 USC Sec. 922. Affected persons can seek relief from the federal firearms disability by invoking procedures established in 18 USC Sec. 925(c) under the Dept of Treasury, Director of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (“ATF”). Beginning in 1992, Congress has enacted provisions annually in the ATF’s appropriations laws that ban it from investigating or acting upon Sec. 925(c) applications from individuals. Section 925(c) contains provisions for judicial …

The Self-Incrimination Clause Explained And Its Future Predicted, Ronald J. Allen

ExpressO

No abstract provided.

Canadian Fundamental Justice And American Due Process: Two Models For A Guarantee Of Basic Adjudicative Fairness, David M. Siegel

ExpressO

This paper traces how the Supreme Courts of Canada and the United States have each used the basic guarantee of adjudicative fairness in their respective constitutions to effect revolutions in their countries’ criminal justice systems, through two different jurisprudential models for this development. It identifies a relationship between two core constitutional structures, the basic guarantee and enumerated rights, and shows how this relationship can affect the degree to which entrenched constitutional rights actually protect individuals. It explains that the different models for the relationship between the basic guarantee and enumerated rights adopted in Canada and the United States, an “expansive …

Politicizing The Crime Against Humanity: The French Example, Vivian Grosswald Curran

Articles

The advantages of world adherence to universally acceptable standards of law and fundamental rights seemed apparent after the Second World War, as they had after the First. Their appeal seems ever greater and their advocates ever more persuasive today. The history of law provides evidence that caution may be in order, however, and that the human propensity to ignore what transpires under the surface of law threatens to dull and silence the ongoing self-examination and self-criticism required in perpetuity by the law if it is to be correlated with justice.

This Essay presents one side, the dark side, of the …

Justice White And Judicial Review, Philip J. Weiser

Publications

No abstract provided.

Random Vs. Suspicion-Based Drug Testing In The Public Schools -- A Surprising Civil Liberties Dilemma, Martin H. Belsky

Akron Law Faculty Publications

The Tecumseh School District had a policy that all students who wished to participate in extracurricular activities that involved some sort of competition had to agree to drug testing before the competition and then randomly thereafter. ... Those selected for accusatory drug testing might be perceived to be wearing a "badge of shame" and be subject to the arbitrary whim of an administrator. ... Vernonia involved a rule requiring drug testing as a condition for participation in extracurricular competitive sports. ... In Earls, the Tecumseh School District adopted a "Student Activities Drug Testing Policy" that required all students who wished …

Random Vs. Suspicion-Based Drug Testing In The Public Schools -- A Surprising Civil Liberties Dilemma, Martin H. Belsky

Martin H. Belsky

The Tecumseh School District had a policy that all students who wished to participate in extracurricular activities that involved some sort of competition had to agree to drug testing before the competition and then randomly thereafter. ... Those selected for accusatory drug testing might be perceived to be wearing a "badge of shame" and be subject to the arbitrary whim of an administrator. ... Vernonia involved a rule requiring drug testing as a condition for participation in extracurricular competitive sports. ... In Earls, the Tecumseh School District adopted a "Student Activities Drug Testing Policy" that required all students who wished …

Rule Of Law And The Limits Of Sovereignty: The Private Prison In Jurisprudential Perspective, Ahmed A. White

Publications

No abstract provided.

The Supreme Court's Backwards Proportionaility Jurisprudence: Comparing Judicial Review Of Excessive Criminal Punishments And Excessive Punitive Damages Award, Adam M. Gershowitz

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Positivism And The Notion Of An Offense, Claire Oakes Finkelstein

All Faculty Scholarship

While the United States Supreme Court has developed an elaborate constitutional jurisprudence of criminal procedure, it has articulated few constitutional doctrines of the substantive criminal law. The asymmetry between substance and procedure seems natural given the demise of Lochner and the minimalist stance towards due process outside the area of fundamental rights. This Article, however, argues that the "positivistic" approach to defining criminal offenses stands in some tension with other basic principles, both constitutional and moral. In particular, two important constitutional guarantees depend on the notion of an offense: the presumption of innocence and the ban on double jeopardy. Under …

When The Rule Swallows The Exception, Claire Oakes Finkelstein

All Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

The Inefficiency Of Mens Rea, Claire Oakes Finkelstein

All Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Crazy Reasons, Stephen J. Morse

All Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Lynching Ethics: Toward A Theory Of Racialized Defenses, Anthony V. Alfieri

Articles

No abstract provided.

The Prison Jurisprudence Of Justice Thurgood Marshall, Melvin Gutterman

Maryland Law Review

No abstract provided.

Fourth, Fifth, And Sixth Amendments, William E. Hellerstein

Touro Law Review

No abstract provided.

Where To Draw The Guideline: Factoring The Fruits Of Illegal Searches Into Sentencing Guidelines Calculations, Cheryl G. Bader, David S. Douglas

Touro Law Review

No abstract provided.