Law Commons^™

Textualism As Fair Notice?, Benjamin Minhao Chen

Washington Law Review

The opportunity to know the law is one of the bedrocks of legality. It is also a powerful and attractive reason for giving statutory language the meaning it has in everyday discourse. To do otherwise would be to hide the law from those it governs.

Or so the argument goes. Despite its intuitive force, the fair notice argument for textualism is vulnerable to two challenges. The first challenge is to the notion that fair notice requires congruence between ordinary and legal meaning. There is no normative gauge for determining the time and expense people ought to spend learning their legal …

Victims As Instruments, Rachel J. Wechsler

Washington Law Review

Crime victims are often instrumentalized within the criminal legal process in furtherance of state prosecutorial interests. This is a particularly salient issue concerning victims of gender-based violence (GBV) because victim testimony is typically considered essential for successful prosecution of these types of crimes. Since the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2004 decision in Crawford v. Washington, courts require declarants to be available for cross-examination on “testimonial” hearsay evidence. Consequently, criminal legal actors are further incentivized to employ highly coercive practices aimed at securing GBV victims’ participation in the criminal legal process as evidentiary tools. These practices include arresting and incarcerating victims …