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Challenges And Choices In Criminal Law Course Design Commentary Symposium: Criminal Law Pedagogy, Roger Fairfax

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

I thoroughly enjoy every course in my teaching package, but the first-year Criminal Law course occupies a special place in my heart. The subject matter in the Criminal Law course is perhaps the most compelling of any offered in the first-year curriculum. As such, it provides Criminal Law instructors the tremendous opportunity to capture the imagination of students and to highlight the nexus between law in books and law in action.

Batson's Grand Jury Dna, Roger Fairfax

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Batson v. Kentucky was a landmark decision imposing constitutional restrictions on peremptory challenges in the petit jury selection process. Batson was a culmination of a long line of cases addressing racial discrimination in jury selection. However, the role of anti-discrimination doctrine in grand jury selection is often overlooked when the story of Batson is considered. Many of the key equal protection cases underpinning the Batson decision were grand jury cases. Furthermore, the evidentiary framework applied to challenges to race-based peremptory strikes in Batson was forged in a century's worth of grand jury discrimination doctrine. This Essay, prepared for the "Batson …

Grand Jury Innovation: Toward A Functional Makeover Of The Ancient Bulwark Of Liberty, Roger Fairfax

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The grand jury is a "much maligned" organ of the criminal justice system.' Regularly employed in only about half of the states and grudgingly tolerated in the federal system,2 the American grand jury for two centuries has been criticized as costly, ineffective, overly-compliant, and redundant. Prescriptions have ranged from reforms designed to improve the grand jury's performance of its traditional filtering and charging functions to the outright abolition of the grand jury. Consequently, much of the scholarly defense of the grand jury seemingly has done little more than attempt to justify its very existence.

This Article seeks to take the …

When Human Experimentation Is Criminal, Song Richardson

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Medical researchers engaged in human experimentation commit criminal acts seemingly without consequence. Whereas other actors who violate bodily integrity and autonomy are routinely penalized with convictions for assault, fraud, and homicide, researchers escape criminal punishment. This Article begins to scrutinize this undercriminalization phenomenon and provides a framework for understanding why researchers are not prosecuted for their crimes. It argues that their exalted social status, combined with the perceived social benefit of their research, immunizes them from use of the criminal sanction. Whether these constitute sufficient grounds to give researchers a pass from punishment is a significant question because the state's …

Ignorance Is Effectively Bliss: Collateral Consequences, Silence, And Misinformation In The Guilty-Plea Process, Jenny Roberts

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In the 2009-2010 term, the U.S. Supreme Court will decide if it matters whether a criminal defense lawyer correctly counsels a client about the fact that the client faces deportation as a result of a guilty plea. Under prevailing constitutional norms in almost every jurisdiction, a lawyer does not have a duty to tell her client about many serious but "collateral" consequences of a guilty plea. Yet, in every jurisdiction that has considered the issue, that very same lawyer will run afoul of her duties if she affirmatively misrepresents a collateral consequence-every jurisdiction, that is,except Kentucky. The Supreme Court of …

A Fair Trial, Not A Perfect One: The Early Twentieth-Century Campaign For The Harmless Error Rule, Roger Fairfax

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From just after the turn of the twentieth century through World War II, there was a great deal of activity around criminal justice reform. Much like today, many commentators in the early twentieth century considered the American criminal justice system to be broken. With regard to all of its phases-substance, sentencing, and procedure-the criminal justice system was thought to be inefficient and ineffective, and it failed to inspire the confidence of the bench, bar, or public.

Against this backdrop, a group of reformers sought to address the shortcomings of early twentieth-century criminal justice-during what I consider the "Golden Age" of …

Mental Health And Incarceration: What A Bad Combination, Olinda Moyd

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The District of Columbia has one of the highest per capita incarceration and criminal justice supervision rates in the United States1 and among the highest in the world. The local prison population has risen dramatically over the past decade for a variety of reasons including increased rates of re-incarceration for parole violations and the imposition of longer sentences for drug offenses. Recent acts of Congress have seriously impacted the sentencing laws in the District including determination of where persons sentenced for violating local D.C. laws will serve such sentences. On August 5, 1997, President Clinton signed into law The National …

I Want A Black Lawyer To Represent Me: Addressing A Black Defendant's Concerns With Being Assigned A White Court-Appointed Lawyer, Kenneth P. Troccoli

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"I want a Black lawyer to represent me." These are the first words you hear after you introduce yourself to your new client. You have been appointed to represent this man on a criminal charge. You are white. He is Black. You answer that you are an experienced criminal lawyer and will represent him to the best of your ability, regardless of his or your race. He responds that he too is experienced with the criminal justice system-a system that targets Black men, like himself, for prosecution far more than whites, that sentences Black men to prison more frequently and …

Law, Language And Terror: Policemen Or Soldiers? The Dangers Of Misunderstanding The Threat To America (Commentary On 9-11), Kenneth Anderson

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This article was offered in 2001 as the Times Literary Supplement's main commentary the week following 9-11. The essay argues that 9-11 required war as a response, and challenges views expressed in the days following 9-11 by commentators such as Anne-Marie Slaughter and Michael Ignatieff that the proper response by the United States should be criminal law in nature - either international criminal law, through international tribunals or procedures, or domestic criminal law of the kind pursued in the first 1993 World Trade Center bombing. It further argues against the functional pacifism of many Christian theologians who, while approving of …

Wielding The Double-Edge Sword: Charles Hamilton Houston And Judicial Activism In The Age Of Legal Realism, Roger Fairfax

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A new progressive movement in the law profoundly affected the American judicial climate of the 1930s and 1940s. The jurisprudence of American Legal Realism, which sprang from the progressive American sociological jurisprudence, boasted the adherence of some of America's most influential legal minds. Legal Realism, which complemented the New Deal reform legislation emerging in the 1930s, advocated judicial deference to legislative and administrative channels on matters of social and economic policy. Judicial activism, which had been used as a tool for the protection of economic rights since the late nineteenth century, was seen as inimical to progressive social reform and, …

Improving Police Discretion: Rationality In Handling Public Inebriates Part Ii, David Aaronson , C. Dienes, Michael Musheno

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In 1913 Eugene Ehrlich spoke of the living law when he stated that "[a]t the present as well as at any other time, the center of gravity of legal development lies not in legislation, nor in juristic science, nor in judicial decision, but in society itself.' This article is premised on the belief that Ehrlich's perception is as valid today as it was then. If you want to know the law relating to public intoxication you cannot be content with the statutes and ordinances, in the court decisions nor even the administrative rules and regulations of those charged with enforcing …

Changing The Public Drunkenness Laws: The Impact Of Decriminalization, David Aaronson

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Laws that decriminalize public drunkenness continue to use the police as the major intake agent for public inebriates under the "new" public health model of detoxification and treatment. Assuming that decriminalization introduces many disincentives to police intervention using legally sanctioned procedures, we hypothesize that it will be fol- lowed by a statistically significant decline in the number of public inebriates formally handled by the police in the manner designated by the "law in the books." Using an "interrupted time-series quasi- experiment" based on a "stratified multiple-group single-I design," we confirm this hypothesis for Washington, D.C., and Minneapolis, Minnesota. However, through …

Improving Police Discretion Rationality In Handling Public Inebriates Part Ii, David Aaronson

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

No abstract provided.

Improving Police Discretion: Rationality In Handling Public Inebriates, David Aaronson

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

No abstract provided.

Improving Police Discretion: Rationality In Handling Public Inebriates, David Aaronson , C. Dienes, Michael Musheno

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

This two-part article reports on the findings of the "prescriptive" phase of the American University Law School's Project on Public Inebriation.' First, we provide a framework or model designed to contribute to efforts to improve the rationality of police discretion and the quality of discretionary justice. Second, we seek to increase understanding of, and provide the basis for improving, the intake process whereby public inebriates are delivered to designated facilities-jails, detoxification centers, etc.-in criminal and decriminalized jurisdictions. While the article focuses on the discretionary power of police officers to remove street inebriates, it should increase awareness of problems of decriminalizing …

Criminal Law Reform In The District Of Columbia, David Aaronson

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INTRODUCTION: The prospects for meaningful, comprehensive revision of the District of Columbia's substantive criminal laws have improved markedly in recent years. In the most promising of recent political developments, Congress established a Law Review Commission for the District of Columbia in August of 1974 with a broad mandate to give special consideration to revision of the criminal code.' Since jurisdiction to initiate revision of the criminal laws will pass to the District of Columbia Council in January of 1977 pursuant to the Home Rule Act, Congress has substantial incentive to give final approval to a new criminal code within two …