Law Commons^™

Who Owns Children’S Dna?, Nila Bala

Michigan Law Review

In recent years, DNA has become increasingly easy to collect, test, and sequence, making it far more accessible to law enforcement. While legal scholars have examined this phenomenon generally, this Article examines the control and use of children’s DNA, asking who ultimately owns children’s DNA. I explore two common ways parents—currently considered “owners” of children’s DNA— might turn over children’s DNA to law enforcement: (1) “consensual” searches and (2) direct-to-consumer testing. My fundamental thesis is that parental consent is an insufficient safeguard to protect a child’s DNA from law enforcement. At present, the law leaves parents in complete control of …

The Oligarchic Courthouse: Jurisdiction, Corporate Power, And Democratic Decline, Helen Hershkoff, Luke Norris

Michigan Law Review

Jurisdiction is foundational to the exercise of judicial power. It is precisely for this reason that subject matter jurisdiction, the species of judicial power that gives a court authority to resolve a dispute, has today come to the center of a struggle between corporate litigants and the regulatory state. In a pronounced trend, corporations are using jurisdictional maneuvers to manipulate forum choice. Along the way, they are wearing out less-resourced parties, circumventing hearings on the merits, and insulating themselves from laws that seek to govern their behavior. Corporations have done so by making creative arguments to lock plaintiffs out of …

Collusive Prosecution, Ben A. Mcjunkin, J.J. Prescott

Law & Economics Working Papers

In this Article, we argue that increasingly harsh collateral consequences have surfaced an underappreciated and undertheorized dynamic of criminal plea bargaining. Collateral consequences that mostly or entirely benefit third parties (such as other communities or other states) create an interest asymmetry that prosecutors and defendants can exploit in plea negotiations. In particular, if a prosecutor and a defendant can control the offense of conviction (often through what some term a “fictional plea”), they can work together to evade otherwise applicable collateral consequences, such as deportation or sex-offender registration and notification. Both parties arguably benefit: Prosecutors can leverage collateral consequences to …

Assessing Visions Of Democracy In Regulatory Policymaking, Shoba Sivaprasad Wadhia, Christopher J. Walker

Articles

Motivated in part by Congress’s failure to legislate, presidents in recent years seem to have turned even more to the regulatory process to make major policy. It is perhaps no coincidence that the feld of administrative law has similarly seen a resurgence of scholarship extolling the virtues of democratic accountability in the modern administrative state. Some scholars have even argued that bureaucracy is as much as if not more democratically legitimate than Congress, either in the aggregative or deliberative sense, or both.

The Problematic Structure Of Indigent Defense Delivery, Eve Brensike Primus

Michigan Law Review

The national conversation about criminal justice reform largely ignores the critical need for structural reforms in the provision of indigent defense. In most parts of the country, decisions about how to structure the provision of indigent defense are made at the local level, resulting in a fragmented patchwork of different indigent defense delivery systems. In most counties, if an indigent criminal defendant gets representation at all, it comes from assigned counsel or flat-fee contract lawyers rather than public defenders. In those assigned-counsel and flat-fee contract systems, the lawyers representing indigent defendants have financial incentives to get rid of assigned criminal …

The Problem With Assumptions: Revisiting The Dark Figure Of Sexual Recidivism, Tamara Rice Lave, Jj Prescott, Grady Bridges

Law & Economics Working Papers

What is the actual rate of sexual recidivism given the well-known fact that many crimes go unreported? This is a difficult and important problem, and in The Dark Figure of Sexual Recidivism, Nicholas Scurich and Richard S. John (2019) attempt to make progress on it by “estimate[ing] actual recidivism rates given observed rates of reoffending” (p.172). In this article, we show that the math in their probabilistic model is flawed, but more important, we demonstrate that their conclusions follow ineluctably from their empirical assumptions and the unrepresentative empirical research they cite to benchmark their calculations. Scurich and John contend that …

Introduction, Shari S. Diamond, Richard O. Lempert

Articles

Experts bedeviled the legal system long before seventeenth-century Salem, when the town's good citizens relied on youthful accusers and witchcraft experts to identify the devil's servants in their midst. As in Salem, claims of expertise have often been questioned and objections raised about the bases of expert knowledge. Expertise, then and now, did not have to be based on science; but the importance of science and the testimony of scientific experts has since medieval times been woven into the fabric of the English jurisprudence that Americans inherited. In cases as long ago as 1299 we find examples of courts seeking …

Potential Responses To The Melendez-Diaz Line Of Cases, Richard D. Friedman

Articles

Criminal prosecution is increasingly dependent on proof of the results of forensic laboratory tests. They are used, for example, to prove that a given substance contains cocaine; the prove what a driver’s blood alcohol content was; and to demonstrate that the DNA profile of some substance found at the crime scene matches that of the accused.

In Melendez-Diaz v. Massachusetts, 129 S.Ct. 2527 (2009), the United States Supreme Court resolved a question that had divided the lower courts in the wake of Crawford v. Washington, 541 U.S. 36 (2004). The Melendez-Diaz Court held by a 5-4 vote that forensic laboratory …

Why Theories Of Law Have Little Or Nothing To Do With Judicial Restraint, Philip E. Soper

Articles

The question I explore here, stated in its broadest form, is this: What is the connection between theory and practice between academic claims about how judges should decide cases and the actual behavior of judges as revealed in the opinions they write? More particularly, do theories about the nature of law have any implications for the question whether a judge should adopt an "activist" or a "restrained" approach to deciding cases? As you might infer from my title, I defend here what I call "the skeptical thesis" in answer to both the general and particular questions. Judges pay little or …

After The Dna Wars: Skirmishing With Nrc Ii, Richard O. Lempert

Articles

This article traces some of the controversies surrounding DNA evidence and argues that although many have been laid to rest by scientific developments confirmed in the National Research Council's second DNA report, there remain several problems which are likely to lead to continued questioning of standard ways prosecutors present DNA evidence. Although much about the report is to be commended, it falls short in several ways, the most important of which is in its support for presenting random match probabilities independent of plausible error rates. The article argues that although one can sympathize with the NRC committee's decision as an …

The Honest Scientist's Guide To Dna Evidence, Richard O. Lempert

Book Chapters

Thank you for your invitation to participate in the DNA symposium. As you know DNA has never been a prime research focus of mine, and I have been so preoccupied with my own work on ITPT (intertemporal personal transportation) that I thought I must decline. Happily, however, the two projects came together, for I recently had an amazing breakthrough during which by coincidence I stumbled across a book entitled A Century of DNA Testing and holocopied (a fancy form of Xeroxing) the following few pages for you.

The Honest Scientist's Guide To Dna Evidence, Richard O. Lempert

Articles

The honest scientist recognizes that she herself is a test instrument, and a fallible one at that. Subjectivity inescapably enters into any human endeavor, and should not be denied. DNA testing is rife with subjective elements, no place more so than at the crucial stage of deciding whether a match exists. On the one hand, non-matching extraneous bands may sometimes be properly disregarded and patterns that do not quite meet objective matching criteria may be appropriately regarded as incriminatory matches. On the other hand, band patterns that do meet objective matching criteria may be treated as exonerative depending on how …

Comment: Theory And Practice In Dna Fingerprinting, Richard O. Lempert

Articles

Throughout her useful paper on DNA identification, Professor Roeder properly attends to both theory and practice. Thus she acknowledges the theoretical soundness of certain criticisms that have been made of the standard paradigm used to evaluate DNA random match probabilities but argues that in practice these criticisms matter little. I am thinking here of the arguments that those cautioning against overweighing DNA evidence have made regarding the undeniable existence of population substructure and its potential implications for independence assumptions supporting the application of the product rule and for the use of convenience samples, such as data garnered from no more …

The Suspect Population And Dna Identification, Richard O. Lempert

Articles

Forensic DNA analysis typically proceeds by first determining whether alleles (one of two or more alternative forms of a gene) found in DNA apparently left by the perpetrator of a crime at a crime scene (the "evidence sample") match alleles extracted from a sample of the suspected criminal's blood (the "suspect sample"). If alleles drawn from the two sources match, the next step is to provide information about the probative value of the match by estimating the probability that alleles extracted from the blood of some random individual would have matched the alleles in the evidence sample. Thinking in terms …

Dna, Science And The Law: Two Cheers For The Ceiling Principle, Richard O. Lempert

Articles

The ceiling principle is an intentionally conservative way of estimating the frequency with which individuals who share particular alleles appear in the general population. It establishes frequencies for each allele by taking random samples of 100 individuals from each of 15 to 20 populations and using the largest frequency with which the allele is found in any of these populations or 5 percent, whichever is larger, as an estimate of the allele's frequency in the population of interest. These frequencies are then multiplied to yield an estimate of the likelihood that a randomly selected person would exhibit the same allelic …

Why Do Jury Research?, Richard O. Lempert

Book Chapters

Inside the Juror presents the most interesting and sophisticated work to date on juror decision making from several traditions - social psychology, behavioural decision theory, cognitive psychology, and behavioural modeling. The authors grapple with crucial questions, such as: why do jurors who hear the same evidence and arguments in the courtroom enter the jury room with disagreements about the proper verdict? how do biases and prejudices affect jurors' decisions? and just how 'rational' is the typical juror? As an introduction to the scientific study of juror decision making in criminal trials, Inside the Juror provides a comprehensive and understandable summary …

Telling Tales In Court: Trial Procedure And The Story Model, Richard O. Lempert

Articles

There are three ways in which stories may figure prominently at trials. First, litigants may tell stories to jurors. Not only is there some social science evidence that this happens, but trial lawyers have an instinctive sense that this is what they do. Ask a litigator to describe a current case and she is likely to reply, "Our story is ... " Second, jurors may try to make sense of the evidence they receive by fitting it to some story pattern. If so, the process is likely to feed back on itself. That is, jurors are likely to build a …

Some Caveats Concerning Dna As Criminal Identification Evidence: With Thanks To The Reverend Bayes, Richard O. Lempert

Articles

The conference panel at which this paper was originally presented was structured along the lines of a debate. The three speakers who were supposed to advocate the use of DNA evidence were labeled, as is customary, Proponents. But those who were supposed to take the negative side were not called Opponents. Rather they were labeled Caveators. I do not know who is responsible for this label, but I think it gets things exactly right. To my mind anyone considering DNA as criminal identification evidence should be a Caveator. The promise and utility of DNA analysis in identifying the perpetrators of …

Unpleasant Facts: The Supreme Court's Response To Empirical Research On Capital Punishment, Phoebe C. Ellsworth

Book Chapters

Slowly at first, and then with accelerating frequency, the courts have begun to examine, consider, and sometimes even require empirical data. From 1960 to 1981, for example, use of the terms "statistics" and "statistical" in Federal District and Circuit Court opinions increased by almost 15 times.1 Of course, citation rates indicate only that a topic is considered worthy of mention, not that it is taken seriously, or even understood. Nonetheless, in a number of areas, such as jury composition and employment discrimination, the courts have come to rely on empirical data as a matter of course.

In the last 25 …

Making Sense Of Modern Jurisprudence: The Paradox Of Positivism And The Challenge For Natural Law, Philip E. Soper

Articles

Karl Llewellyn once said, referring to Roscoe Pound's work m jurisprudence, that it was difficult to tell on what level the writing proceeded: sometimes it seemed to be little more than bedtime stones for a tired bar; at other tunes it appeared to be on the level of the after-dinner speech or a thought provoking essay, neither of which were quite the "considered and buttressed scholarly discussion" that one expected to find. Llewellyn's complaint serves as a warning, though a somewhat ambiguous one, to those who give lectures on jurisprudence.

On the one hand, I do not plan to present …

Alternative Methodologies In Contemporary Jurisprudence: Comments On Dworkin, Philip E. Soper

Articles

I have two brief points to make. Both involve recent developments in jurisprudence, by which I mean by and large the subject that Ronald Dworkin has just been discussing. Indeed, the first point is little more than an acknowledgement of the debt that is owed to Dworkin, not only for his specific contributions to this field, but for the implications of his work for law teaching generally.

Legal Theory And The Obligation To Obey, Philip E. Soper

Articles

Contributions to this symposium will undoubtedly share, with other recent discussions of the issue, the assumption that one does not need to decide what law is before deciding whether there is an obligation to obey it. More precisely, the assumption seems to be that our ordinary, pre-analytic understanding of "law" provides a completely adequate base for discussions about law's moral authority. The more refined disputes about the nature of law that dominate analytical jurisprudence can thus be ignored.

Nature Of Legal Rights And Duties, Joseph W. Bingham

Michigan Law Review

One cannot long talk on a legal topic without using the words right and duty or some synonyms. It is familiar hearsay that a purpose of law is to create, delimit, and protect rights and to define and enforce duties. Therefore it is of importance to inquire what is meant by "a right" and by "a duty" when we use these terms in legal discussion. The question is a linguistic one; but in the process of finding the proper answer, we shall have to analyze some of our common sorts of mental concepts and perhaps shall finish with a clear …

What Is The Law? Ii, Joseph W. Bingham

Michigan Law Review

I shall now discuss briefly the nature of the causal effects of precedents upon judicial decisions and the justifications for those effects. One frequently hears laymen scoffing at the respect which courts pay to precedents and sometimes displaying a lamentable ignorance both of the nature of the influence which precedents have on the law and of the reasons for the existence of that influence. The influence of past example on human action pervades all human conduct and endeavor at all times. That influence is fundamental. It occurs through instinctive as well as intelligent processes and sometimes runs to unreasonable extents. …

The Need Of A Scientific Study Of Crime, Crimninal Law, And Procedure--The American Institute Of Criminal Law And Criminology, Eugene A. Gilmore

Michigan Law Review

The multiplying instances of the delay or seeming miscarriage of justice, together with the indications that crime is not diminishing in this country, as it is in most progressive European countries, are responsible for the widespread feeling that American Criminal Law and Administration are ineffective as a corrective system, and thus fail adequately to protect society; that as President Taft puts it, "The administration of criminal law in this country is a disgrace to our civilization." Defective organization of courts, cumbrous and costly procedure and excessive emphasis on technicalities afford an undue advantage to the law-breaker of means and deepen …

What Is The Law?, Joseph W. Bingham

Michigan Law Review

It is intended that this title shall demand an analysis of the field of study in which the lawyer or jurist works and a determination of its essential and contributing elements. The purpose of the article is to sketch briefly a partial answer which will be instructive and helpful to the student who faces the problem as I faced it some ten years ago. I do not expect that anything new will be found in these ideas. I imagine that all of them must have been expressed many times before. Some of them are common­place. None is esoteric. Probably the …