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The Case For Second Chances: A Pathway To Decarceration In Maine, Catherine Besteman, Leo Hylton Jan 2024

The Case For Second Chances: A Pathway To Decarceration In Maine, Catherine Besteman, Leo Hylton

Maine Law Review

The Article argues that Maine incarcerates too many people, for too long, for too many things, at too great of an expense. We offer evidence to support this claim, briefly review some of the criminal legal legislation that shaped our present reality, and show how recent efforts at reform have been, at best, only modestly successful. In concert with a growing number of expert voices across the country calling for strategies of decarceration, our goal is to demonstrate the need for second chance legislation in Maine in the form of the reinstatement of parole, an effective clemency process, a far-reaching …


The Growing List Of Reasons To Amend The Maine Indian Jurisdictional Agreement, Nicole Friederichs Jul 2023

The Growing List Of Reasons To Amend The Maine Indian Jurisdictional Agreement, Nicole Friederichs

Maine Law Review

The Passamaquoddy Tribe and the Penobscot Nation brought their lands claims against the State of Maine in an effort to reclaim taken lands, to ensure that they could self-determine their futures and to hold on to their cultures and languages. What they faced were a state and federal governments opposed to such a goal. With favorable court decisions in hand, the Tribes began the long process of negotiating for the financial restitution of those claims. They learned, however, that restitution—the recovery of a small portion of their traditional territories—would only be possible if an agreement was made with the State …


Symposium Keynote: "Isolation And Restraint: Maine's Unique Status Outside Federal Indian Law", Michael-Corey Francis Hinton Jul 2023

Symposium Keynote: "Isolation And Restraint: Maine's Unique Status Outside Federal Indian Law", Michael-Corey Francis Hinton

Maine Law Review

No abstract provided.


Ethno-Nationalism And Asylum Law, Anna R. Welch, Emily L. Gorrivan Jul 2022

Ethno-Nationalism And Asylum Law, Anna R. Welch, Emily L. Gorrivan

Maine Law Review

The myth that asylum laws were once more equitable and humanitarian is belied by the reality of the system’s racist origins. This Essay explains that the U.S. asylum system, like much of the U.S. immigration system, was designed to disadvantage people of color. Indeed, although former President Trump’s reference to Haiti, El Salvador, and African nations as “shithole countries” while advocating for immigration from “countries like Norway” exacerbated systemic challenges, racism has been deeply ingrained in the U.S. asylum system since its inception. Not only do U.S. laws and policies have a disparate impact on black asylum seekers but, when …


The Constitutional Law Of Equality In Canada, Kathleen E. Mahoney Apr 2020

The Constitutional Law Of Equality In Canada, Kathleen E. Mahoney

Maine Law Review

On April 17, 1982, Canada repatriated its constitution from the Parliament at Westminster, sweeping away one of the final vestiges of its colonial past. At the same time, a Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms was constitutionally entrenched, giving the people express constitutional rights for the first time. The equality provisions, in particular, represented a new era in Canadian constitutional law. The intense debate leading up to the entrenchment of the Charter raised profound questions about the basic nature of the country, its values, and its ability and willingness to acknowledge equality for women and other disadvantaged groups. Since the …


Death By Fifty Cuts: Exporting Lunn V. Commonwealth To Maine And The Prospects For Waging A Frontal Assault On The Ice Detainer System In State Courts, Sean Turley Jun 2018

Death By Fifty Cuts: Exporting Lunn V. Commonwealth To Maine And The Prospects For Waging A Frontal Assault On The Ice Detainer System In State Courts, Sean Turley

Maine Law Review

As long as the future of federal immigration policy remains unsettled and the use of ICE detainers to capture and deport suspected noncitizens remains widespread, practitioners should focus their attention on waging a frontal assault against the legality of ICE detainers on state law grounds by arguing that they constitute warrantless arrests that are prohibited by state statute. The recent Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court decision in Lunn v. Commonwealth provides a model for how to wage such an attack—not only in states with similar common law and statutory frameworks that are unlikely to resolve the issue legislatively, like Maine, but …


Maine's "Act To Protect Traditional Marriage And Prohibit Same-Sex Marriages": Questions Of Constitutionality Under State And Federal Law, Jennifer B. Wriggins Mar 2018

Maine's "Act To Protect Traditional Marriage And Prohibit Same-Sex Marriages": Questions Of Constitutionality Under State And Federal Law, Jennifer B. Wriggins

Maine Law Review

In 1997, Maine's Legislature passed “An Act to Protect Traditional Marriage and Prohibit Same-Sex Marriages” (Act). The summary attached to the bill states that the bill “prohibits persons of the same sex from contracting marriage.” The bill was the verbatim text of an initiative petition. Civil marriage in Maine and other states is regulated by state statute, and marriage regulation is generally considered to be within the state's police power. However, the state's power to regulate marriage is subject to constitutional limitations. I maintain that “heightened scrutiny” should be applied to the Act because the Act creates a gender-based classification, …


Global Intersections: Critical Race Feminist Human Rights And Inter/National Black Women, Hope Lewis Mar 2018

Global Intersections: Critical Race Feminist Human Rights And Inter/National Black Women, Hope Lewis

Maine Law Review

In this brief essay, I illustrate how Critical Race Feminist analysis could reconceptualize the human rights problems facing “Inter/national Black women” --in this case, Black women who migrate between the United States and Jamaica. This focus on Jamaican American migrants is very personal as well as political; I was raised by Jamaican American women. However, I have begun to focus on such women in my research not only in a search for “home” but also because there are important lessons to be learned from those who are the least visible in the legal literature. I draw the framework for a …


Shattered Jade, Broken Shoe: Foreign Economic Development And The Sexual Exploitation Of Women In China, Elizabeth Spahn Mar 2018

Shattered Jade, Broken Shoe: Foreign Economic Development And The Sexual Exploitation Of Women In China, Elizabeth Spahn

Maine Law Review

Predicting the ways in which feminisms might develop in the next century is unfortunately well beyond my own capabilities. In the next decade or two, however, one thing I believe we might want to think about are the relationships between feminisms and global free market capitalisms. The question I am asking, simply stated, is the extent to which economic development (free-market global capitalism) advances, is neutral toward, or harms women. One traditional American way of viewing the global free market is to tout economic development as a panacea for the problems facing the world's poorest and most violated group, women. …


Litigating Genocide: A Consideration Of The Criminal Court In Light Of The German Jew's Legal Response To Nazi Persecution, 1933-1941, Jody M. Prescott Feb 2018

Litigating Genocide: A Consideration Of The Criminal Court In Light Of The German Jew's Legal Response To Nazi Persecution, 1933-1941, Jody M. Prescott

Maine Law Review

After years of negotiation, a majority of the nations of the world have agreed to create an International Criminal Court. It will be given jurisdiction over three core types of offenses: genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes. With regard to war crimes, however, nations that join the court may take advantage of an “opt-out” procedure, whereby the court's jurisdiction over these offenses may be rejected for seven years after the court comes into existence. For various reasons, a small number of nations, including the United States, have refused to sign the treaty creating the court. While heralded as a …


The Corporate Face Of The Alien Tort Claims Act: How An Old Statute Mandates A New Understanding Of Global Interdependence, Lorelle Londis Nov 2017

The Corporate Face Of The Alien Tort Claims Act: How An Old Statute Mandates A New Understanding Of Global Interdependence, Lorelle Londis

Maine Law Review

In the past thirty-five years, international human rights lawyers and, more recently, international environmental lawyers, have been invoking the Alien Tort Claims Act (ATCA) as a tool to prosecute human rights abuses committed abroad by transnational corporations (TNs) in U.S. federal courts. The ATCA provides: “The district courts shall have original jurisdiction of any civil action by an alien for a tort only, committed in violation of the law of nations or a treaty of the United States.” Although plaintiffs' lawyers have experienced some success in the human rights context, most claims of environmental abuses have failed. In all these …


Boumediene V. Bush: Flashpoint In The Ongoing Struggle To Determine The Rights Of Guantanamo Detainees, Michael J. Anderson Oct 2017

Boumediene V. Bush: Flashpoint In The Ongoing Struggle To Determine The Rights Of Guantanamo Detainees, Michael J. Anderson

Maine Law Review

Following the harrowing events of September 11, 2001, and pursuant to the Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF) passed soon thereafter by Congress, the United States Armed Forces began capturing and detaining individuals at the Naval Air Base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The choice of where to house these detainees was not random. Internal memoranda from the Justice Department reveal that the Naval Base was selected as a means of avoiding any legal entanglements that might ensue from such imprisonment. What resulted was what some commentators have called a “legal black hole” at Guantanamo, a place where any individual …


African Lawyers Harness Human Rights To Face Down Global Poverty, Lucie E. White Oct 2017

African Lawyers Harness Human Rights To Face Down Global Poverty, Lucie E. White

Maine Law Review

This is an exciting time in Africa. Yes, of course it is true that the rise of fundamentalist political movements, armed conflict, epidemic diseases, and extreme poverty will challenge the continent for decades to come. I don’t need to tell you that. Yet at the same time, we are witness to what many call an “African Renaissance.” In many domains, including the arts, civil society, social provision, and democratic governance, African nations are beginning to take their place in a newly configured globe. One of these domains of energy, innovation, and hope is a new human rights movement. This movement …


Refugees And Internally Displaced: A Challenge To Nation-Building, Rebecca M.M. Wallace, Diego Quiroz Oct 2017

Refugees And Internally Displaced: A Challenge To Nation-Building, Rebecca M.M. Wallace, Diego Quiroz

Maine Law Review

Recent statistics published by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) indicate that there are at least 32.9 million people who are “persons of concern to UNHCR.” This growing population includes “refugees, returnees, [and] stateless and internally displaced persons (IDPs).” Furthermore, it is estimated that there are some “[thirty] states in the world . . . that are at some stage or another along the road to possible failure.” These are weak states beset by invasion, civil war, ethnic rivalry and tribal warfare, or struggling in the wake of any of these catastrophes. Given that 2006 saw a fifty-six …


Examining The Board Of Immigration Appeals' Social Visibility Requirement For Victims Of Gang Violence Seeking Asylum, Elyse B. Wilkinson Oct 2017

Examining The Board Of Immigration Appeals' Social Visibility Requirement For Victims Of Gang Violence Seeking Asylum, Elyse B. Wilkinson

Maine Law Review

Since the late 1990s, Latin America has been plagued by gang violence. The increasingly organized and progressively larger gangs are known as the Mara Salvatrucha 13 (MS-13) and the 18th Street Gang (collectively referred to as the “Mara” in this Comment). These gangs are ubiquitous within certain Latin American countries and pose a serious threat to the economic and social stability of the region. The targets of the Mara are mostly youth between the ages of fifteen and eighteen (but as young as eight), women, and those who decry the gang's violence. Resistance to the Mara has resulted in death …


Comparative Perspectives On Specialized Trials For Terrorism, Sudha Setty Oct 2017

Comparative Perspectives On Specialized Trials For Terrorism, Sudha Setty

Maine Law Review

President Obama has made clear that the United States must grapple with questions of how to detain and try potentially dangerous terrorism suspects in a manner that maximizes national security while adhering to the rule of law. Yet the United States faces a serious quandary in terms of how to prosecute suspects who have been detained at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, that puts at risk the reputation of the United States justice system and its adherence to rule of law. The question of what trial system to use for suspected terrorists requires an historical interrogation of how and to what effect …


Nineteenth Annual Frank M. Coffin Lecture On Law And Public Service: Community, Rights, And Climate: A Challenge To A Clever Species, Jonathan Lash Oct 2017

Nineteenth Annual Frank M. Coffin Lecture On Law And Public Service: Community, Rights, And Climate: A Challenge To A Clever Species, Jonathan Lash

Maine Law Review

I want to talk to you today about individual rights and community. I have been struck in reading the Judge’s books and recalling working with him how he honored two competing ideas simultaneously: respect for individual liberty, and a deep belief in the power of government to enhance fairness and promote public well-being. As I shall explain, the tension between those ideas has become increasingly important in the debate over how to address global environmental problems.


Dussault V. Rre Coach Lantern Holdings, Llc: Does The Maine Human Rights Act Recognize Disparate Impact Liability For Claims Of Housing Discrimination Brought By Section 8 Recipients Under Maine Law?, Ari B. Solotoff Feb 2017

Dussault V. Rre Coach Lantern Holdings, Llc: Does The Maine Human Rights Act Recognize Disparate Impact Liability For Claims Of Housing Discrimination Brought By Section 8 Recipients Under Maine Law?, Ari B. Solotoff

Maine Law Review

In Dussault v. RRE Coach Lantern Holdings, LLC, Nicole Dussault filed a complaint with the Maine Humane Rights commission (Commission) alleging a claim of unlawful housing discrimination. Dussault asserted that when RRE Coach Lantern Holdings, LLC and Resource Real Estate Management, Inc. (collectively, Coach Lantern) refused to include a federal Section 8 Housing Choice Voucher Program tenancy addendum in her apartment lease, Coach Lantern discriminated against her because her status as a public assistance recipient. Following an investigation and hearing, the Commission unanimously concluded that there were reasonable grounds for a belief of unlawful housing discrimination. Dussault then brought suit …