Law Commons^™

Unfamiliar Justice: Indigent Criminal Defendants' Experiences With Civil Legal Needs, Lauren Sudeall, Ruth Richardson

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

Our legal system - and much of the research conducted on that system - often separates people and issues into civil and criminal silos. However, those two worlds intersect and influence one another in important ways. The qualitative empirical study that forms the basis of this Article bridges the civil-criminal divide by exploring the life circumstances and events of public defender clients to determine how they experience and respond to civil legal problems.

To date, studies addressing civil legal needs more generally have not focused on those individuals enmeshed with the criminal justice system, even though that group offers a …

Disclosing Prosecutorial Misconduct, Jason Kreag

Vanderbilt Law Review

Prosecutorial misconduct in the form of Brady violations continues to plague the criminal justice system. Brady misconduct represents a fundamental breakdown in the adversarial process, denying defendants a fair trial and undermining the legitimacy of the criminal justice system. Commentators have responded by proposing a range of reforms to increase Brady compliance. Yet these reforms largely ignore the need to remedy the harms from past Brady violations. Furthermore, these proposals focus almost entirely on the harms defendants face from prosecutors'Brady misconduct, ignoring the harms victims, jurors, witnesses, and others endure because of Brady misconduct. This Article proposes a new remedy …

The Gendered Burdens Of Conviction And Collateral Consequences On Employment, Joni Hersch, Erin E. Meyers

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

Ex-offenders are subject to a wide range of employment restrictions that limit the ability of individuals with a criminal background to earn a living. This Article argues that women involved in the criminal justice system likely suffer a greater income-related burden from criminal conviction than do men. This disproportionate burden arises in occupations that women typically pursue, both through formal pathways, such as restrictions on occupational licensing, and through informal pathways, such as employers’ unwillingness to hire those with a criminal record. In addition, women have access to far fewer vocational programs while incarcerated. Further exacerbating this burden is that …

Dangerousness, Disability, And Dna, Christopher Slobogin

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

This Article honors three of Professor Arnold Loewy's articles. The first, published over thirty years ago, is entitled Culpability, Dangerousness, and Harm: Balancing the Factors on Which Our Criminal Law is Predicated,' and the second is his 2009 article, The Two Faces of Insanity. In addition to commenting on these two articles about substantive criminal law, I can't resist also saying something about one of Professor Loewy's procedural pieces, A Proposal for the Universal Collection of DNA, published in 2015.

A theme that unites all three of these articles is that they appear to be quite radical, at least on …