Law Commons^™

Visualizing Abolition: Two Graphic Novels And A Critical Approach To Mass Incarceration For The Composition Classroom, Michael Sutcliffe

SANE journal: Sequential Art Narrative in Education

This article outlines two graphic novels and an accompanying activity designed to unpack complicated intersections between racism, poverty, and (d)evolving criminal-legal policy. Over 2 million adults are held in U.S. prison facilities, and several million more are under custodial supervision, and it has become clearly unsustainable. In the last decade, there has been a shift in media conversations about criminality, yet only a few suggest decreasing our reliance upon incarceration. In meaningfully different ways, the two novels trace the development of incarceration from its roots in slavery to its contemporary anti-democratic iteration and offer an underpublicized alternative.

Critical and community …

Rli 285: Research Library Issues: A Report From Arl, Cni, And Sparc 2015 -- Special Issue On Copyright, Prudence Adler, Brandon Butler, Jonathan Band, Krista Cox

Copyright, Fair Use, Scholarly Communication, etc.

In “Fair Use Rising: Full-Text Access and Repurposing in Recent Case Law,” Brandon Butler, practitioner-in-residence at the American University Washington College of Law, reviews six recent fair use decisions that cut across many socially important and beneficial purposes. He highlights the trend of courts finding in favor of allowing “the broad redistribution of unaltered, full-text documents for new purposes.” Butler explains how this trend presents new opportunities for research libraries to use and re-purpose the full text of copyrighted works in their collections.

Exploring the implications of one critically important case for research libraries, Jonathan Band, legal counsel to the …

"'The Law’S The Law, Right?' Sexual Minority Mothers Navigating Legal Inequities And Inconsistencies.”, Emily Kazyak

Department of Sociology: Faculty Publications

LGB parents face a number of legal inequities and confront a legal landscape that not only varies drastically by state but also quickly changes. Research has shown that some LGB parents and prospective parents have inaccurate knowledge about the laws relating to parenting. Drawing on data from 21 interviews, I ask how sexual minority mothers gain knowledge about the law. I found that people were very aware of the legal inequities they face and sought to become knowledgeable about the law before they had children. Sexual minority mothers reported using four primary methods to learn about the law: doing independent …

Challenging The Political Assumption That “Guns Don’T Kill People, Crazy People Kill People!”, Heath J. Hodges, Mario Scalora

Department of Psychology: Faculty Publications

Every time an infamous mass shooting takes place, a storm of rhetoric sweeps across this country with the fury of a wild fire. “Why are we letting these people carry guns?” “Why were they not hospitalized?” “The government needs to crack down on this issue!” What is the government’s response to these cries of concern? Politicians and the media attempt to ease public fears by drawing tenuous connections among a handful of poorly understood tragedies. The salient commonality is that these high-profile shooters had some history of mental illness. A cursory review of the Internet will paint a troubling picture …