Law Commons^™

Connecting The Disconnected: Communication Technologies For The Incarcerated, Neil Sobol

Faculty Scholarship

Incarceration is a family problem—more than 2.7 million children in the United States have a parent in jail or prison. It adversely impacts family relationships, financial stability, and the mental health and well-being of family members. Empirical research shows that communications between inmates and their families improve family stability and successful reintegration while also reducing the inmate’s incidence of behavioral issues and recidivism rates. However, systemic barriers significantly impact the ability of inmates and their families to communicate. Both traditional and newly developed technological communication tools have inherent advantages and disadvantages. In addition, private contracting of communication services too often …

Narrative Topoi In The Digital Age, Jessica Silbey, Zahr Said

Faculty Scholarship

Decades of thoughtful law and humanities scholarship have made the case for using humanistic texts and methods in the legal classroom. We build on that scholarship by identifying and describing three “narrative topoi” of the twenty-first century – podcasts, twitter and fake news. We use the term “topos” (from the Greek meaning “place”) and its plural, “topoi,” to mean “a literary commonplace” and “general setting for discussion” in the context of literary forms. Like an identifiable genre, narrative topoi are familiar story paths for audiences to travel. These narrative topoi live in contemporary popular culture and are products of digital …

A ‘Bad Rap’: R. V. Skeete And The Admissibility Of Rap Lyric Evidence, Ngozi Okidegbe

Faculty Scholarship

The use of accused-authored rap lyric evidence is no longer rare in Canadian criminal proceedings. Adduced by Crown prosecutors, rap lyrics written or co-written by an accused are increasingly used in criminal trials as evidence of the accused’s intent, knowledge, motive, identity, or confession to the commission of the specific offence charged. The practice is not without controversy.¹ The introduction of an accused’s artistic work in the form of rap lyrics at trial engages trial fairness concerns. Without a keen awareness of the social and cultural context that produces rap music, trial actors risk inflating their probative value and …

Decoding The Impossibility Defense, Daniel B. Yeager

Faculty Scholarship

Impossible attempts were first officially recognized as non-criminal in 1864, the idea being that a person whose anti-social bent poses no appreciable risk of harm is no criminal. To reassure myself the subject doesn’t “smell of the lamp,” I tapped “impossibility” into Westlaw, which designated over 3000 criminal cases as on point, 1200 or so more recent than 1999. Impossible attempts thus turn out to be not merely a professorial hobby horse, but instead, expressive of a non-trivial tension between risk-taking and harm-causing within the very real world of criminal litigation.

Although it is now hornbook that impossible attempts are …

Deporting Undesirable Women, Pooja R. Dadhania

Faculty Scholarship

Immigration law has long labeled certain categories of immigrants "undesirable." One of the longest-standing of these categories is women who sell sex. Current immigration laws subject sellers of sex to an inconsistent array of harsh immigration penalties, including bars to entry to the United States as well as mandatory detention and removal. A historical review of prostitution-related immigration laws reveals troubling origins. Grounded in turn-of-the-twentieth-century morality, these laws singled out female sellers of sex as immoral and as threats to American marriages and families. Indeed, the first such law specifically targeted Asian women as threats to the moral fabric of …

Execution Methods In A Nutshell, Deborah W. Denno

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Do The Ends Justify The Means? Policing And Rights Tradeoffs In New York City, Amanda Geller, Jeffrey Fagan, Tom R. Tyler

Faculty Scholarship

Policing has become an integral component of urban life. New models of proactive policing create a double-edged sword for communities with strong police presence. While the new policing creates conditions that may deter and prevent crime, close surveillance and frequent intrusive police-citizen contacts have strained police-community relations. The burdens of the new policing often fall on communities with high proportions of African American and Latino residents, yet the returns to crime control are small and the risks of intrusive, impersonal, aggressive non-productive interactions are high. As part of the proffered tradeoff, citizens are often asked to view and accept these …

Aggressive Policing And The Educational Performance Of Minority Youth, Joscha Legewie, Jeffrey A. Fagan

Faculty Scholarship

An increasing number of minority youth are confronted with the criminal justice system. But how does the expansion of police presence in poor urban communities affect educational outcomes? Previous research points at multiple mechanisms with opposing effects. This article presents the first causal evidence of the impact of aggressive policing on the educational performance of minority youth. Under Operation Impact, the New York Police Department (NYPD) saturated high crime areas with additional police officers with the mission to engage in aggressive, order maintenance policing. To estimate the effect, we use administrative data from about 250,000 adolescents aged 9 to 15 …