Law Commons^™

Deconstructing Burglary, Ira P. Robbins

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

The law of burglary has long played a vital role in protecting hearth and home. Because of the violation of one’s personal space, few crimes engender more fear than burglary; thus, the law should provide necessary safety and security against that fear. Among other things, current statutes aim to deter trespassers from committing additional crimes by punishing them more severely based on their criminal intent before they execute their schemes. Burglary law even protects domestic violence victims against abusers who attempt to invade their lives and terrorize them.

However, the law of burglary has expanded and caused so many problems …

Digital Rummaging, Andrew Guthrie Ferguson

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

The digital world encodes our lives with incriminating clues. How you travel, live, love, and shop are tracked through growing surveillance technologies. Police have recognized this reality and are actively exploiting new surveillance tools for investigative purposes.

The Fourth Amendment—the constitutional protection meant to limit police search powers—has not kept up with the privacy and security threats of these new digital technologies. Current doctrine has remained stymied by legal tests asking all the wrong questions about “reasonable expectations of privacy” and “trespass” searches. While the Supreme Court has acknowledged that “digital is different,” it has not yet provided a coherent …

The Slow Drip Of Decarceration: Reversing The Flood Of Mass Incarceration And Its Racist Impact, Olinda Moyd

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

For the last four decades, the flood of African Americans pouring into our jails and prisons can be likened to a watershed where someone turned on a faucet full force and opened the floodgates to all the prison doors. Despite the multitudinous efforts to secure the release of people unwittingly swept up in this flood, most spending decades behind bars, their releases have been mediocre and only a few have slowly dripped towards freedom. Racism seeps into every facet of American life and nowhere is it more prevalent than in our criminal legal system and the crisis of mass incarceration. …