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Full-Text Articles in Law
Deterring Torture: The Preventive Power Of Criminal Law And Its Promise For Inhibiting State Abuses, Francesca Laguardia
Deterring Torture: The Preventive Power Of Criminal Law And Its Promise For Inhibiting State Abuses, Francesca Laguardia
Department of Justice Studies Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works
The use of torture in the War on Terror reinvigorated a longstanding debate about how to prevent such human rights violations, and whether they should be criminalized. Using US history as a case study, this article argues that the criminal sanction is likely to be more successful in preventing such abuses than many other often suggested methods. Analyzing thousands of pages of released government documents as an archive leads to the counterintuitive finding that torturers were often deterred, at least momentarily, by fear of criminal liability, and would have been successfully deterred if not for the lack of prior prosecutions.
Firepower To The People: Gun Rights & Self-Defense To Curb Police Misconduct, Spearit
Firepower To The People: Gun Rights & Self-Defense To Curb Police Misconduct, Spearit
Articles
This Article represents a polemic against the most harmful aspects of the policing status quo. At its core, the work asserts the right of civilians to defend against unlawful deadly police conduct. It argues that existing gun and self-defense laws provide a practical and principled basis for curbing police misconduct. It also examines legislative trends in gun laws to show that much of most recent liberalizing of gun rights is a direct response to self-defense concerns sparked by mass public shootings. The expansion of gun rights and self-defense comes at a time when ongoing police killings of Black civilians menace …