Law Commons^™

Reflecting On The Subject: A Critique Of The Social Influence Conception Of Deterrence, The Broken Windows Theory, And Order-Maintenance Policing New York Style, Bernard E. Harcourt

Michigan Law Review

In 1993, New York City began implementing the quality-of-life initiative, an order-maintenance policing strategy targeting minor misdemeanor offenses like turnstile jumping, aggressive panhandling, and public drinking. The policing initiative is premised on the broken windows theory of deterrence, namely the hypothesis that minor physical and social disorder, if left unattended in a neighborhood, causes serious crime. New York City's new policing strategy has met with overwhelming support in the press and among public officials, policymakers, sociologists, criminologists and political scientists. The media describe the "famous" Broken Windows essay as "the bible of policing" and "the blueprint for community policing." Order-maintenance …

Lochner In Cyberspace: The New Economic Orthodoxy Of "Rights Management", Julie E. Cohen

Michigan Law Review

Ninety-three years ago, in Lochner v. New York, the Supreme Court struck down a maximum-working-hours law for bakers as an impermissible invasion of employer-employee liberty of contract and, by implication, of the employer's property rights in his business. Lochner came to symbolize, and was vilified for, a vision of state power as rigidly circumscribed by the operation of judicially-determined laws of social ordering. By the late 1930s, the Court had changed course and accepted that the states' police power - or, in the case of Congress, the commerce power - encompassed even protective regulation of the parameters of the private …

The Anatomy Of Disgust In Criminal Law, Dan M. Kahan

Michigan Law Review

My goal in this review is to call attention to a defect in the dominant theories of criminal law and to identify a resource for remedying it. The defect is the absence of a sophisticated account of how disgust does and should influence legal decisionmaking. The corrective resource is William Miller's The Anatomy of Disgust. To make my claims more vivid, consider two stories. Both involve men who were moved to kill by disgust toward homosexuality.

Review Of The Appearance Of Impropriety: How The Ethics Wars Have Undermined American Government, Business, And Society, By Peter W. Morgan And Glenn H. Reynolds., Jordan B. Hansell

Michigan Law Review

Rameshwar Sharma needed cash to continue his research on two proteins, alpha2A and alpha2GC, so he turned to the federal government. At the time he submitted his grant application, Sharma had completed a good deal of work on alpha2A but very little on alpha2GC At some point while typing his forty-six page grant application, Sharma realized that repeatedly typing alpha2A and alpha2GC was annoying. To ease his pain, he created macro keys that he could hit whenever he wished to type either protein. Big mistake. On page twenty-one he hit the wrong key, inserting alpha2GC where alpha2A should have been. …

Against Common Sense: Why Title Vii Should. Protect Speakers Of Black English, Jill Gaulding

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

The speech of many black Americans is marked by phrases such as 'we be writin"' or "we don't have no problems." Because most listeners consider such "Black English" speech patterns incorrect, these speakers face significant disadvantages in the job market. But common sense suggests that there is nothing discriminatory about employers' negative reactions to Black English because it makes sense to allow employers to insist that employees use correct grammar.

This article argues against this common sense understanding of Black English as bad grammar. The author first analyzes the extent of the job market disadvantages faced by Black English speakers …

Asian America's Greatest Hits: A Review Of Angelo Ancheta's Race, Rights, And The Asian American Experience, Kevin M. Pimentel, Ronnie H. Rhoe

Michigan Journal of Race and Law

A review of Race, Rights, and the Asian American Experience by Angelo N. Ancheta.

Can Money Whiten? Exploring Race Practice In Colonial Venezuela And Its Implications For Contemporary Race Discourse, Estelle T. Lau

Michigan Journal of Race and Law

The Gracias al Sacar, a fascinating and seemingly inconceivable practice in eighteenth century colonial Venezuela, allowed certain individuals of mixed Black and White ancestry to purchase "Whiteness" from their King. The author exposes the irony of this system, developed in a society obsessed with "natural" ordering that labeled individuals according to their precise racial ancestry. While recognizing that the Gracias al Sacar provided opportunities for advancement and an avenue for material and social struggle, the author argues that it also justified the persistence of racial hierarchy. The Article concludes that the Gracias al Sacar, along with their present-day …

College Admission And Affirmative Action- Consequences And Alternatives, Ihan Kim

Michigan Journal of Race and Law

A review of The Shape of the River: Long Term Consequences of Considering Race in College and University Admissions by Derek Bok & William Bowen

Perspectives On Affirmative Action / Rethinking Racial Divides: Asian Pacific Americans And The Law, Michigan Journal Of Race & Law

Michigan Journal of Race and Law

Statements on affirmative action followed by the Asian Pacific American Law Students Association Symposium.

Clint Eastwood And Equity: Popular Culture's Theory Of Revenge, William I. Miller

Book Chapters

Revenge is not a publicly admissible motive for individual action. Church, state, and reason all line up against it. Officially revenge is thus sinful to the theologian, illegal to the prince, and irrational to the economist (it defies the rule of sunk costs). Order and peace depend upon its extirpation; salvation and rational political and economic arrangements on its denial. The official antivengeance discourse has a long history even preceding the Stoics, taken up and elaborated by medieval churchmen and later by the architects of state building.

Up From Individualism (The Brennan Center Symposium On Constitutional Law)." , Donald J. Herzog

Articles

I was sitting, ruefully contemplating the dilemmas of being a commentator, wondering whether I had the effrontery to rise and offer a dreadful confession: the first time I encountered the countermajoritarian difficulty, I didn't bite. I didn't say, "Wow, that's a giant problem." I didn't immediately start casting about for ingenious ways to solve or dissolve it. I just shrugged. Now I don't think that's because my commitments to either democracy or constitutionalism are somehow faulty or suspect. Nor do I think it's that they obviously cohere. It's rather that the framing, "look, these nine unelected characters can strike down …

Update: American Public Opinion On The Death Penalty - It's Getting Personal (Symposium: How The Death Penalty Works: Empirical Studies Of The Modern Capital Sentencing System), Samuel R. Gross

Articles

Americans' views on capital punishment have stabilized. In 1994, when Professor Phoebe Ellsworth and I published a review of research on death penalty attitudes in the United States,' we began by noting that "support for the death penalty [is] at a near record high."'2 That finding, like most of the others we reported, has not changed. Nonetheless, it is interesting to pause and review the data on public opinion on the death penalty that have accumulated over the past several years. Stability is less dramatic than change but it may be equally important, and there is some news to report. …

Engineering The Middle Classes: Class Line-Drawing In New Deal Hours Legislation, Deborah C. Malamud

Michigan Law Review

The likely readers of this Article work for a living, or are studying with the hope that they will work for a living very soon. Unlike many other workers in this society, they do not (and will not) get paid time-and-a-half for overtime. In this Article, I tell the story of how upper-level white-collar workers - people like the intended readers of this Article - came to be exempt from the Fair Labor Standards Act's general overtime rules. My purpose in telling this story is not to participate in the debate on whether the so-called "white-collar exemptions" to the Fair …