Law Commons^™

Police Killings As Felony Murder, Guyora Binder, Ekow Yankah

Journal Articles

The widely applauded conviction of officer Derek Chauvin for the murder of George Floyd employedthe widely criticized felony murder rule. Should we use felony murder as a tool to check discriminatory and violent policing? The authors object that felony murder—although perhaps the only murder charge available for this killing under Minnesota law—understated Chauvin’s culpability and thereby inadequately denounced his crime. They show that further opportunities to prosecute police for felony murder are quite limited. Further, a substantial minority of states impose felony murder liability for any death proximately caused by a felony, even if the actual killer was a police …

Defunding Police Agencies, Rick Su, Anthony O'Rourke, Guyora Binder

Journal Articles

This Article contextualizes the police defunding movement and the backlash it has generated. The defunding movement emerged from the work of Black-led activists to reassert democratic control over policing and shift resources to social service agencies and other institutions serving community needs. In reaction, states have enacted anti-defunding bills checking local government reduction of law enforcement budgets. These anti-defunding measures continue a long tradition of state and federal control over local police spending, subverting local democratic control over police agencies. These limits include direct legal constraints on local police spending and indirect constraints through grants and authorization to collect fines, …

The Ostensible (And, At Times, Actual) Virtue Of Deference, Anthony O'Rourke

Journal Articles

In Rethinking Police Expertise, Anna Lvovsky exposes how litigators leverage judicial understandings of police expertise against the government. The article is rich not only with descriptive insights, but also with normative potential. By rigorously analyzing the relationship between expertise and authority in specific cases, Professor Lvovsky offers guidance as to how judges and lawyers should factor a police officer’s expertise into an assessment of whether the officer’s conduct is lawful. This Response argues, however, that Rethinking Police Expertise’s normative potential is weakened by the sharp conceptual distinction it draws between judicial understandings of expertise as a “professional virtue” (which it …

The Constitutionalization Of Parole: Fulfilling The Promise Of Meaningful Review, Alexandra Harrington

Journal Articles

Almost 12,000 people in the United States are serving life sentences for crimes that occurred when they were children. For most of these people, a parole board will determine how long they will actually spend in prison. Recent Supreme Court decisions have endorsed parole as a mechanism to ensure that people who committed crimes as children are serving constitutionally proportionate sentences with a meaningful opportunity for release. Yet, in many states across the country, parole is an opaque process with few guarantees. Parole decisions are considered “acts of grace” often left to the unreviewable discretion of the parole board.

This …

Disbanding Police Agencies, Anthony O'Rourke, Rick Su, Guyora Binder

Journal Articles

Since the killing of George Floyd, a national consensus has emerged that reforms are needed to prevent discriminatory and violent policing. Calls to defund and abolish the police have provoked pushback, but several cities are considering disbanding or reducing their police forces. This Essay assesses disbanding as a reform strategy from a democratic and institutionalist perspective. Should localities disband their police forces? One reason to do so is that discriminatory police departments are often too insulated from democratic oversight to be reformed. But can localities succeed in disbanding and replacing their forces with something better? Unfortunately, the structural entrenchment of …

Removing Police From Schools Using State Law Heightened Scrutiny, Christina Payne-Tsoupros

Journal Articles

This Article argues that school police, often called school resource officers, interfere with the state law right to education and proposes using the constitutional right to education under state law as a mechanism to remove police from schools. Disparities in school discipline for Black and brown children are well-known. After discussing the legal structures of school policing, this Article uses the Disability Critical Race Theory (DisCrit) theoretical framework developed by Subini Annamma, David Connor, and Beth Ferri to explain why police are unacceptable in schools. Operating under the premise that school police are unacceptable, this Article then analyzes mechanisms to …

Reversing The Decriminalization Of Sexual Violence, Lisa Avalos

Journal Articles

Sexual violence has largely been decriminalized in the United States through disbelief of victims, apathy on the part of law enforcement officers, and inaction on the part of institutions. Indeed, these mechanisms are so effective at burying the problem that most people are not aware of the extent of unprosecuted sexual violence, the woefully deficient law enforcement response, and the need for sweeping reform. The Article proceeds in two parts. Part I maps the extent of this problem and argues that the weakest link in the societal response to sexual assault lies at the juncture between victim and law enforcement. …

Sexual Lynching, Luis E. Chiesa

Journal Articles

Different groups of people experience rape in different ways. Empirical evidence confirms that women fear rape considerably more than men, that incarcerated males fear being sexually assaulted more than non-incarcerated males, and that transgender individuals are more fearful of being raped than cisgender individuals. In the case of women, fear of rape often conditions many decisions females make, including what to wear, where to go, and how much to drink. In the prison context, fear of rape leads many men to adopt overly aggressive behaviors as a way of safeguarding against being raped. Genderqueer people often follow a series of …

Presidential Ideology And Immigrant Detention, Catherine Y. Kim, Amy Semet

Journal Articles

In our nation’s immigration system, a noncitizen charged with deportability may be detained pending the outcome of removal proceedings. These individuals are housed in remote facilities closely resembling prisons, with severe restrictions on access to counsel and contact with family members. Given severe backlogs in the adjudication of removal proceedings, such detention may last months or even years.

Many of the noncitizens initially detained by enforcement officials have the opportunity to request a bond hearing before an administrative adjudicator called an Immigration Judge (IJ). Although these IJs preside over relatively formal on-the-record hearings and are understood to exercise “independent judgement,” …

Secrecy & Evasion In Police Surveillance Technology, Jonathan Manes

Journal Articles

New technologies are transforming the capabilities of law enforcement. Police agencies now have devices to track our cellphones and software to hack our networks. They have tools to sift the vast quantities of digital silt we leave behind on the Internet. They can deploy “big data” algorithms meant to predict where crimes will occur and who will commit them. They have even transformed the humble closed-circuit video camera—and its more recent companion, the body camera—into biometric tracking devices equipped with artificial intelligence meant to pick faces out of a crowd and, eventually, to mine gigabytes of stored footage to automatically …

From The Dark Tower: Unbridled Civil Asset Forfeiture, Saleema Saleema Snow

Journal Articles

The Black Lives Matter movement reinforces that race dominates all aspects of the judicial system. Police officers are significantly more likely to stop African Americans than Whites. Even when a stop or arrest is unwarranted, law enforcement agencies can still profit from the property seized under the guise of forfeiture statutes. Various state and federal civil asset forfeiture statutes legitimize law enforcement seizing cash, homes, cars, and office equipment—all with nominal due process protections. Despite evidence of discriminatory police practices, the U.S. Supreme Court deems these forfeiture practices constitutional.

This article seeks to reignite the conversation about discriminatory policing and …

Parallel Enforcement And Agency Interdependence, Anthony O'Rourke

Journal Articles

Parallel civil and criminal enforcement dominates public enforcement of everything from securities regulation to immigration control. The scholarship, however, lacks any structural analysis of how parallel enforcement differs from other types of interagency coordination. Drawing on original interviews with prosecutors, regulators, and white-collar defense attorneys, this Article is the first to provide a realistic presentation of how parallel enforcement works in practice. It builds on this descriptive account to offer an explanatory theory of the pressures and incentives that shape parallel enforcement. The Article shows that, in parallel proceedings, criminal prosecutors lack the gatekeeping monopoly that traditionally defines their relationships …

Incarceration To Incorporation: Economic Empowerment For Returning Citizens Through Social Impact Bonds, Etienne C. Toussaint

Journal Articles

No abstract provided.

(Un)Reasonable Suspicion: Racial Profiling In Immigration Enforcement After Arizona V. United States, Kristina M. Campbell

Journal Articles

n June 25, 2012, the Supreme Court of the United States issued its landmark decision in Arizona v. United States, 1 striking down three of the four provisions of Arizona’s notorious Senate Bill (“S.B.”) 10702 challenged by the United States Department of Justice as preempted by federal immigration law. Despite agreeing with the government that the majority of Arizona’s attempt to regulate immigration at the state level through S.B. 1070 was impermissible, the Supreme Court let stand the most controversial section of the law, Section 2(B)—the socalled “show me your papers” provision.3 Under Section 2(B), state and local law enforcement …

Sexual Epistemology And Bisexual Exclusion: A Response To Russell Robinson's "Masculinity As Prison: Race, Sexual Identity, And Incarceration", Michael Boucai

Journal Articles

No abstract provided.

Police Discretion And Local Immigration Policymaking, Rick Su

Journal Articles

Immigration responsibilities in the United States are formally charged to a broad range of federal agencies, from the overseas screening of the State Department to the border patrols of the Department of Homeland Security. Yet in recent years, no department seems to have received more attention than that of the local police. For some, local police departments are frustrating our nation’s immigration laws by failing to fully participate in federal enforcement efforts. For others, it is precisely their participation that is a cause for concern. In response to these competing interests, a proliferation of competing state and federal laws have …

Restoring Lost Connections: Land Use, Policing, And Urban Vitality, Nicole Stelle Garnett

Journal Articles

Justice William Brennan rightfully reminded all of us that state constitutional law is too often neglected in our courtrooms and our classrooms. State constitutions, to borrow from the late Chief Justice William Rehnquist, ought not to be "relegated to the status of a poor relation" in our constitutional legal structure. They differ in important ways from the federal law Constitution-and those differences provide the space within which our democratic experiment flourishes. And I am sure if Justice Brennan were here with us today, he would agree that we also should not neglect the study of the state and local policies …

The Overlooked Significance Of Arizona's New Immigration Law, Rick Su

Journal Articles

The current debate over Arizona's new immigration statute, S.B. 1070, has largely focused on the extent to which it “empowers” or “allows” state and local law enforcement officials to enforce federal immigration laws. Yet, in doing so, the conversation thus far overlooks the most significant part of the new statute: the extent to which Arizona mandates local immigration enforcement by attacking local control. The fact is the new Arizona law does little to adjust the federalist balance with respect to immigration enforcement. What it does, however, is threaten to radically alter the state-local relationship by eliminating local discretion, undermining the …

The Order-Maintenance Agenda As Land Use Policy, Nicole Stelle Garnett

Journal Articles

Debates about the broken windows hypothesis focus almost exclusively on whether the order-maintenance agenda represents wise criminal law policy — specifically on whether, when, and at what cost, order-maintenance policing techniques reduce serious crime. These questions are important, but incomplete. This Essay, which was solicited for a symposium on urban-development policy, considers potential benefits of order-maintenance policies other than crime-reduction, especially reducing the fear of crime. The Broken Windows essay itself urged that attention to disorder was important not just because disorder was a precursor to more serious crime, but also because disorder undermined residents’ sense of security. The later …

Reconceptualizing Competence: An Appeal, Mae C. Quinn

Journal Articles

No abstract provided.

"Balancing Your Strengths Against Your Felonies": Considerations For Military Recruitment Of Ex-Offenders, Michael Boucai

Journal Articles

Existing work on ex-offenders’ access to military employment too narrowly represents both the Armed Forces’ and the public’s interests in the issue. This Article proposes to shift the conversation from ex-offenders’ usefulness to the Armed Forces to the reciprocal responsibilities and benefits involved for these potential recruits, the military, and society at large. Part One reviews the rules, policies, and procedures governing the “moral waivers” that allow thousands of individuals with criminal histories to enlist each year, and it shows that that the waiver system nonetheless often fails to detect the criminal backgrounds of many recruits. Part Two reviews some …

Naacp V. The Attorney General: Black Community Struggle Against Police Violence, 1959-68, Jay Stewart

Journal Articles

On March 30, 1959, the U.S. Supreme Court issued two decisions which set the stage for a new era in police-community relations. In Abbate v. United States. I and Bartkus v. Illinois,2 the Court gave the U.S. Justice Department the power to prosecute police officers under federal civil rights laws for acts of racist violence - even when they were already under state or local investigation - without fear of violating states' rights. These decisions - had they been enforced - would have been welcome news at the New York headquarters of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored …

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 …

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 …

Retribution: Punishment's Formative Aim, John M. Finnis

Journal Articles

This Article explores the theoretical underinnings of punishment, in light of statements made about punishment in the works of Friedrich Nietzsche.

Retribution And The Secondary Aims Of Punishment, Gerard V. Bradley

Journal Articles

Punishing criminals involves more than visiting unwelcome experiences–the rack, the gallows, confinement, sitting in a corner–upon them. Privations such as these constitute the behavioral substratum, the raw material of punishment. But behaviors such as confinement become the acts that they are, including acts of punishment by confinement, according to the justifying aim(s) which suffuse(s) the behavior. For behaviors such as confinement are ambiguous; limiting another's freedom of movement may be constitutive of a number of different human acts, including quarantine, kidnapping, institutionalization, and imprisonment for crime. Same behavior, different acts. Each of the ends of punishment shapes privations imposed upon …

Law Enforcement And The Separation Of Powers, Gerard V. Bradley

Journal Articles

The underlying theory and internal coherence of separation of powers is examined. It is noted that the classic rationale for the separation of power is to prevent tyranny by placing execution of the laws in hands independent from those of the legislature. The author summarizes various opinions that contradict this rationale. For example, Synar stated that the legislature and the Executive were directly accountable to the people if they neglected interbranch checks between them. The separation of powers theory, which justifies the claimed enforcement prerogative, is examined from a constitutional perspective. The author also reports on the consequences of federalism. …

Freezing The Status Quo In Criminal Investigations: The Melting Of Probable Cause And Warrent Requirements, Fernand N. Dutile

Journal Articles

This article will trace the development of what can be called the "freezing the status quo" concept in the United States Supreme Court. That concept provides for intermediate level intrusions based on intermediate levels of justification, permitting law enforcement to isolate an event and exploit its opportunities for fruitful investigation. The article will begin with a discussion of two early cases which hinted at the Supreme Court's willingness to adopt the "freezing the status quo" doctrine as a means of justifying certain police activity in the absence of probable cause. Next, the Court's decisions in Terry v. Ohio and subsequent …

Criminal Redistribution Of Stolen Property: The Need For Law Reform, G. Robert Blakey, Michael Goldsmith

Journal Articles

The development of sophisticated fencing systems for the sale of stolen property to consumers has paralleled the industrialization of society. Although crimes against property and attempts to control them have ancient origins, most theft before the Industrial Revolution was committed for immediate consumption by the thieves and their accomplices rather than for redistribution in the market-place. Society's small population, inadequate transportation and communication systems, and technological inability to mass produce identical goods constrained large-scale fencing because there were few buyers and because stolen property could be readily identified. The unprecedented economic and demographic growth in eighteenth-century Europe, however, removed these …