Law Commons^™

Decriminalizing Mental Illness: The Need For Treatment Over Incarceration Before Prisons Become The New Asylums For The Mentally Ill, Rebecca L. Brown

Psychology Summer Fellows

Currently, US prisons are home to 10 times more mentally ill individuals than state psychiatric hospitals. Instead of treating those with mental illness, an extremely vulnerable population is being thrown behind bars. Mental illness is often exacerbated during incarceration, leaving inmates much sicker than when they entered. Moreover, upon discharge mentally ill inmates have virtually no support, making recidivism almost inevitable. This lack of treatment has devastating consequences for the mentally ill as well as the community at large. Removing the mentally ill from jails and prisons would reduce recidivism, increase public safety and save money.

The current research explores …

Resurrecting The "Dead" Second Amendment: How The Libertarian Legal Movement Has Shaped Gun Control Litigation, Anthony M. Sierzega

Politics Honors Papers

For nearly two centuries following its adoption, the Second Amendment was largely ignored and even referred to as a “dead amendment.” Virtually all legal scholarship considered the right protected by the amendment to be a collective right written into the Constitution to protect local militias from a powerful federal standing army. However, beginning in the late 1970s a surge of libertarian scholarship began to emerge promoting the Second Amendment as a safeguard for an individual right to bear arms without any connection to military service. Promoted by the National Rifle Association and libertarian theorists, the individual-right theory began to gain …