Law Commons^™

Emerging Models For Alternatives To Marriage, Sanford N. Katz

Sanford N. Katz

Perhaps one of the most important changes in family law in the past thirty years has been the inclusion of certain kinds of friendships in the range of relationships from which rights and responsibilities can flow. Domestic partnership laws, a phenomenon of the 1990s, may be seen as a natural development from the judicial recognition of contract cohabitation and the legislative and judicial response to same-sex couples who, unable to meet statutory requirements for marriage, have sought official recognition of their relationships. This essay discusses an aspect of certain kinds of domestic partnership laws-their formal requirements and the extent to …

Collective Choice, Justin Schwartz

Justin Schwartz

This short nontechnical article reviews the Arrow Impossibility Theorem and its implications for rational democratic decisionmaking. In the 1950s, economist Kenneth J. Arrow proved that no method for producing a unique social choice involving at least three choices and three actors could satisfy four seemingly obvious constraints that are practically constitutive of democratic decisionmaking. Any such method must violate such a constraint and risks leading to disturbingly irrational results such and Condorcet cycling. I explain the theorem in plain, nonmathematical language, and discuss the history, range, and prospects of avoiding what seems like a fundamental theoretical challenge to the possibility …

Why Our Justice System Convicts Innocent People And The Challenges Faced By Innocence Projects Trying To Exonerate Them, Steven A. Krieger

Steven A. Krieger

Despite the prominence and success of the over sixty innocence projects in the United States, there is almost no empirical literature discussing how these organizations operate, what resources or factors contribute to their success, and what challenges they must overcome. This article is a foundational step to fill this void. Following a brief introduction, Part I of the article surveys the reasons why innocent individuals get convicted, including: inaccuracy of eyewitnesses, perjured testimony, availability of DNA testing, accuracy of DNA testing and scientific evidence, prosecutorial misconduct, ineffective defense representation, ineffective capital representation, police misconduct: false confessions, and pretrial criminal procedure …

Do “Tough On Crime” Politicians Win More Elections? An Empirical Analysis Of California State Legislators From 1992 To 2000, Steven A. Krieger

Steven A. Krieger

Do “tough on crime” politicians win more elections? Conventional wisdom suggests that they do. After all, who was the last public official to win an election based on a “soft on crime” platform? Correspondingly, this unjustified and widespread belief among legislators (and their strategists) makes it extremely difficult for progressive criminal justice bills to become law. There is no empirical literature, however, to support or deny this conventional political wisdom.

A regression analysis was used to answer (1) whether legislators’ election results were impacted by their voting records (based on an assigned crime score) or constituent support for a ballot …