Law Commons^™

Whistle Blowing, Ben Depoorter, Jef De Mot

George Mason University School of Law Working Papers Series

For law enforcement purposes corruption and fraud are hard battles. Because of the highly secretive and premeditated nature of these crimes, prime witnesses are themselves often implicated in the fraudulent transaction. Promises of immunity and whistle blowing rewards are often required to resolve these information asymmetries. These insights have set a trend, both in scholarship and law enforcement practice, towards reward-based approaches (carrots), as an alternative or complement to punishment based deterrence (sticks). Applying the U.S. False Claims Act (FCA) as an analytical framework, we provide a critical review of the efficiency limitations of whistle blowing. More specifically, the formal …

The Ipperwash Inquiry - Symposium On Government/Police Relations: The Overview: Four Models Of Police-Government Relationships, Kent Roach

Conferences and Workshops

This chapter provides an introduction to police-governmental relations in Canada. It does so by outlining the law and history of police-government relations in Canada, constructing four different models of police-governmental relations and identifying critical issues that distinguish different approaches to police independence.

The first part of the chapter examines the contested legal basis for claims of police independence from government with a focus on the Supreme Court of Canada’s pronouncements on this issue in R. v. Campbell and Shirose. The second part examines highlights of the history of police-government relationships. Controversies such as the Nicholson affair, the Airbus, Doug Small …

The Ipperwash Inquiry - Symposium On Government/Police Relations: The Idea Of The Political "Independence" Of The Police: International Interpretations And Experiences, Philip Stenning

Conferences and Workshops

This chapter serves to clarify some of the key concepts. By graphically illustrating the relationship between degrees of ‘control’ and degrees of accountability it is argued that the two concepts are not incompatible. The term independence is then used in the chapter to refer only to decision-making that falls in what is pictured as the fourth quadrant: ‘full accountability’ with ‘no control’. The chapter then outlines the scope or range of the potentially ‘independent’ decision-making tasks.

Stenning discusses the growth of the ‘doctrine of police independence’. It is argued that what we might assume is a widely held value favouring …

The Ipperwash Inquiry - Symposium On Government/Police Relations: Memorandum Re June 28-29, 2004 Symposium

Conferences and Workshops

No abstract provided.

The Ipperwash Inquiry - Symposium On Government/Police Relations: Agenda

Conferences and Workshops

No abstract provided.

The Ipperwash Inquiry - Symposium On Government/Police Relations: The Oversight Of Executive Police Relations In Canada: The Constitution, The Courts, Administrative Processes And Democratic Governance, Lorne Sossin

Conferences and Workshops

This chapter critically examines two central questions. First, what are the mechanisms which constrain and define executive accountability and police oversight in Canada? Second, can the need for the police to remain above partisan politics and beyond manipulation by the government of the day be reconciled with these mechanisms of governance and accountability? Sossin argues that an apolitical and autonomous model is best suited to the dynamics of policing in a constitutional democracy such as Canada, and has the potential to balance the need for political input into policing while countering inappropriate political interference in policing.

The executive-police relationship is …

The Ipperwash Inquiry - Symposium On Government/Police Relations: Legal Sites Of Executive-Police Relations: Core Principles In A Canadian Context, Dianne L. Martin

Conferences and Workshops

This chapter provides an overview of the multiple sites where the governance of police in a democratic society is negotiated, with examples and solutions drawn from policy documents, public inquiries, legislation, and case law. Multiple factors bear on the ways that this intricately structured legal relationship is worked out in day-to-day situations, including political, institutional and legal influences. Bearing in mind the political and institutional contexts, this chapter examine the legal instruments and institutions that both structure the relationship and are part of resolving the inevitable conflicts that arise between these two very general concepts. The central argument is that …

The Ipperwash Inquiry - Symposium On Government/Police Relations: Police-Government Relations In The Context Of State-Aboriginal Relations, Gordon Christie

Conferences and Workshops

Common debates over government-police relations share a certain structure – the main realm of contention revolves around questions about how to resolve tension between the concern that the police should be free to act independent of political interference and the concern that the police should, in a liberal democracy, be held accountable for their actions. This paper looks at this tension in the context of state- Aboriginal relations, a process of contextualization that casts a critical eye on the efficacy of the typical forms of analysis that arise from this debate.

The first stage of analysis provides a contrast for …

The Ipperwash Inquiry - Symposium On Government/Police Relations: The History And The Future Of The Politics Of Policing, Margaret Beare

Conferences and Workshops

This chapter examines the operational realities of the police executive linkages—beyond the official dictates of the law and the desired position expressed in ideological discourses on police independence. Paper draws primarily on historical and criminological literature and research, and public inquiries.

The central argument of this paper is that, while there may be a somewhat clear-cut division between the’ policy’ versus the ‘operational’ control of the police by the State in law and in rhetoric, the reality is quite different. The relationship between the State and the police is a dynamic relationship that changes to reflect the nature of the …

Plea Bargaining Outside The Shadow Of Trial, Stephanos Bibas

All Faculty Scholarship

Plea-bargaining literature predicts that parties strike plea bargains in the shadow of expected trial outcomes. In other words, parties forecast the expected sentence after trial, discount it by the probability of acquittal, and offer some proportional discount. This oversimplified model ignores how structural distortions skew bargaining outcomes. Agency costs; attorney competence, compensation, and workloads; resources; sentencing and bail rules; and information deficits all skew bargaining. In addition, psychological biases and heuristics warp judgments: overconfidence, denial, discounting, risk preferences, loss aversion, framing, and anchoring all affect bargaining decisions. Skilled lawyers can partly counteract some of these problems but sometimes overcompensate. The …

Does Criminal Law Deter? A Behavioral Science Investigation, Paul H. Robinson

All Faculty Scholarship

Having a criminal justice system that imposes sanctions no doubt does deter criminal conduct. But available social science research suggests that manipulating criminal law rules within that system to achieve heightened deterrence effects generally will be ineffective. Potential offenders often do not know of the legal rules. Even if they do, they frequently are unable to bring this knowledge to bear in guiding their conduct, due to a variety of situational, social, or chemical factors. Even if they can, a rational analysis commonly puts the perceived benefits of crime greater than its perceived costs, due to a variety of criminal …

Pleas' Progress, Stephanos Bibas

All Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

The Botched Hanging Of William Williams: How Too Much Rope And Minnesota’S Newspapers Brought An End To The Death Penalty In Minnesota, John Bessler

All Faculty Scholarship

This article describes Minnesota's last state-sanctioned execution: that of William Williams, who was hanged in 1906 in the basement of the Ramsey County Jail. Convicted of killing a teenage boy, Williams was tried on murder charges in 1905 and was put to death in February of the following year. Because the county sheriff miscalculated the length of the rope, the hanging was botched, with Williams hitting the floor when the trap door was opened. Three deputies, standing on the scaffold, thereafter seized the rope and forcibly pulled it up until Williams - fourteen and half minutes later - died by …

Addressing Staff Sexual Misconduct With Offenders Curriculum (Instructor’S Guide: Staff Sexual Misconduct With Offenders)_2004, Brenda V. Smith, Morris L. Thigpen, Allen Ault, Anadora Moss, Dee Halley, Jaime M. Yarussi, Marcia Morgan, Susan Mccampbell

Reports

Addressing Staff Sexual Misconduct with Offenders is a 36-hour training program that focuses on the complex issues surrounding staff sexual misconduct with offenders in all correctional settings. This training is designed for correctional policy makers, agency managers and administrators, and community leaders who influence correctional policy.

In this guide you will find a suggested program agenda for this training which will provide the instructor with a snap-shot of the training program as a whole. You will also find an overview of each training module, resources you will need, and activities which you may find helpful in the execution of the …

A Prisoner's Right To Religious Diet Beyond The Free Exercise Clause, 51 Ucla L. Rev. 1151 (2004), Benjamin Liu

UIC Law Open Access Faculty Scholarship

Are religious prisoners entitled to dietary accommodations consistent with their religious beliefs? The current answer for this question derives from two 1987 cases, Turner v. Safley and O'Lone v. Estate of Shabazz, in which the U.S. Supreme Court articulated a factor-driven balancing test. Under this test, a prison regulation may burden an inmate's rights only if, on balance, the regulation reasonably serves a penological interest. However, the application of the Turner test often leads to conflicting results in the lower courts. The conflicting legal decisions stem from ambiguities in the concept of "reasonableness." In this Comment, I argue that the …

Toward A Criminal Law For Cyberspace: A New Model Of Law Enforcement?, Susan W. Brenner

School of Law Faculty Publications

This article argues that one consequence of the increasing proliferation of computer technology and the attendant migration of human activities, including illegal activities, into cyberspace is that the efficacy of our traditional approach to enforcing the criminal law is eroding. (1) As Section II explains, it is already apparent that the traditional model is not an effective means of dealing with cybercrime, i.e., crime the commission of which entails the use of computer technology. (2)

We are therefore seeing the emergence of an alternative approach to law enforcement, (3) one that emphasizes collaboration between the public and private sectors and …

Report To Law Revision Commission Regarding Recommendations For Changes To California Arbitration Law, Roger P. Alford

Journal Articles

In this Article, Professor Alford discusses a report by the Law Revision Commission recommending that certain changes be made to arbitration law in California. It begins by outlining the history of arbitration in California, from its 1961 adoption of the Uniform Arbitration Act, to the 1988 enactment of an international arbitration statute modeled on the UNCITRAL Model Law, to the 1989 enactment of Section 1281.8, which allowed courts to grants provisions remedies to parties involved in arbitration proceedings. It also provides a general overview of the purpose and practice of arbitration law. Then, it provides a chapter-by-chapter analysis the Law …

Rethinking Racial Profiling: A Critique Of The Economics, Civil Liberties, And Constitutional Literature, And Of Criminal Profiling More Generally, Bernard Harcourt

Faculty Scholarship

New reporting requirements and data collection efforts by over four hundred law enforcement agencies across the country – including entire states such as Maryland, Missouri, and Washington – are producing a continuous flow of new evidence on highway police searches. For the most part, the data consistently show disproportionate searches of African-American and Hispanic motorists in relation to their estimated representation on the road. Economists, civil liberties advocates, legal and constitutional scholars, political scientists, lawyers, and judges are poring over the new data and reaching, in many cases, quite opposite conclusions about racial profiling.

Reappraising T.L.O.'S Special Needs Doctrine In An Era Of School-Law Enforcement Entanglement, Joshua Gupta-Kagan

Faculty Scholarship

This essay presents one doctrinal method for lawyers to defend children accused of criminal charges in juvenile or adult court: attacking the applicability of the nearly twenty-year old case, New Jersey v. T.L.O. to most school searches. T.L.O. established a lower standard for searches of students by school officials, but it explicitly did not decide what standard the government must meet to justify school searches performed by police officers, creating a doctrinal starting point for advocates to raise challenges to searches involving police. More fundamentally, the T.L.O. Court based its decision on the presumption that firm gates separate public school …

The Recently Revised Marriage Law Of China: The Promise And The Reality, Charles J. Ogletree Jr., Rangita De Silva De Alwis

All Faculty Scholarship

In April 2001, the Standing Committee of the Ninth National People's Congress (NPC), China's highest legislative body, passed the long-debated and much awaited amendments to the Marriage Law on the closing day of its twenty-first session. As stated by one PRC commentator, "In the 50 years since the founding of the New China, there has not been any law that has caused such a widespread concern for ordinary people."'

Even though the recent revisions to the marriage laws have been hailed as some of the most significant and positive changes in family law in China, thus far no empirical evaluation …

The Unfulfilled Promise Of Citizen Review, Debra A. Livingston

Faculty Scholarship

Once controversial, the idea that citizens should participate in the administrative review of complaints about police conduct is today widely accepted. Citizen review processes of one type or another can be found in about eighty percent of our largest cities. There are approximately 100 separate oversight agencies in this country and that number has been growing steadily for some time. Even as citizen review has become an accepted feature of the landscape in American policing, however, questions have been raised about just what citizen participation in complaint review is likely to achieve in terms of improving police and the relations …

The Burdens Of Representing The Accused In An Age Of Harsh Punishment, Abbe Smith

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Defenders bear witness to an awful social experiment gone awry. Punishment has taken the place of every other intervention because it is so simple. It divides the world neatly into good people and bad, the worthy and unworthy, victims and perpetrators. Once we punish the bad, the unworthy, the perpetrators, the rest of us can rest easy. We can say that we are different from them. We can wag our finger at them and assert our moral superiority. In this social and political climate, hardly anyone ever asks why. Why did this man or woman end up this way? What …

The Burdens Of Representing The Accused In An Age Of Harsh Punishment, Abbe Smith

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The crimes are not any worse than they used to be. They run, as crimes do, from the banal to the barbarous. But punishment seems to have taken on a life of its own.

There are people serving more than twenty years for nonviolent drug offenses. There are people serving more than thirty years for car theft, burglary, and unarmed robbery--crimes for which a harsh sentence used to be ten years. One Oklahoma woman is serving a thirty-five year sentence for "till-tapping"--stealing money out of cash registers--when she was in the throes of a heroin addiction. It is impossible to …

Structuring Sentencing: Apprendi, The Offense Of Conviction, And The Limited Role Of Constitutional Law, Benjamin Priester

Journal Publications

Every year hundreds of thousands of convicted criminal defendants are sentenced for their crimes, often through the implementation of a broad range of laws of relatively recent vintage such as mandatory minimum provisions and regulations of judicial discretion like the Federal Sentencing Guidelines. The policies underlying these sentencing laws are perhaps the most hotly contested issues in all of criminal procedure, with legislative amendments and calls for reform being made every year. Despite their tremendous importance and the constant political activity concerning them, however, the constitutionality of these laws is surprisingly uncertain-the United States Supreme Court has heard an astounding …

"The Shame Of It All": Stigma And The Political Disenfranchisement Of Formerly Convicted And Incarcerated Persons, Regina Austin

All Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Ua12/8 Annual Crime Awareness & Campus Security Report, Wku Police

WKU Archives Records

A statement of current campus policies regarding procedures for students and others to report criminal actions or other emergencies occurring on campus and policies concerning the institution's response to such reports. Includes statistics on the types of crimes which were reported from 2001-2003.

Reason, Results, And Criminal Responsibility, Stephen J. Morse

All Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Reflections On The Manifold Means Of Enforcing The Antitrust Laws: Too Much, Too Little, Or Just Right?, Joseph P. Bauer

Journal Articles

Lately, much attention has been given to the scope of the antitrust laws. This discussion has two overlapping components: (1) consideration of the substantive doctrines specifying the behavioral or structural changes that are or are not unlawful and the appropriate methodology; and (2) analysis for making those determinations with attention given to the appropriate vehicles for enforcing the antitrust laws. Some argue that the antitrust laws proscribe activities that are either pro-competitive or at worst benign. Further, they assert that the multiplicity of antitrust enforcers and enforcement devices has resulted in undue burdens, including excessive cost, time delay, and forestalling …

Prison Reform Revisited: The Unfinished Agenda, Michael B. Mushlin

Elisabeth Haub School of Law Faculty Publications

Prison Reform Revisited: The Unfinished Agenda, which was held at Pace Law School from October 16-18, 2003, was a remarkable event. At this conference--a summit really--leading academics, attorneys, prison reformers, judges, prison officials and international prison reformers gathered at Pace Law School and the New York State Judicial Center in White Plains, New York to discuss how to advance the cause of prison reform in the U.S. This issue of the Pace Law Review is devoted to the papers presented in connection with that important conference.

Courts As Forums For Protest, Jules Lobel

Articles

For almost half a century, scholars, judges and politicians have debated two competing models of the judiciary's role in a democratic society. The mainstream model views courts as arbiters of disputes between private individuals asserting particular rights. The reform upsurge of the 1960s and 1970s led many to argue that courts are not merely forums to settle private disputes, but can also be used as instruments of societal change. Academics termed the emerging model the hein"public law" or "institutional reform" model.

The ongoing debate between these two views of the judicial role has obscured a third model of the role …