Law Commons^™

A Challenge To The Rationale For General Economic Crime Sentence Increases Following Sarbanes-Oxley, Frank O. Bowman Iii

Faculty Publications

I am writing in response to the Commission's request for comment published in the Federal Register on January 17, 2003. I will address the question of whether the base offense level and/or the loss table of U.S.S.G. § 2B1.1 should be further modified to provide across-the-board sentence increases for economic crime offenders at virtually all loss levels. In my view, no case for doing so has yet been made.

Editor's Observations: The Sarbanes-Oxley Act And What Came After, Frank O. Bowman Iii

Faculty Publications

On December 2, 2001, the Enron Corporation filed the largest bankruptcy petition in U.S. history. Losses to investors, creditors, employees, and pensioners were in the billions. Criminal investigations are ongoing. On May 1, 2003, the U.S. Sentencing Commission passed a set of amendments to the U.S. Sentencing Guidelines that will, among other things, prevent a federal district judge from awarding a sentence of straight probation to a defendant convicted at trial of an $11,000 mail fraud. This Issue of FSR tells the story of how the first of these apparently unrelated events led to the second. Put another way, this …

International Decisions: Prosecutor V. Plavsic, Nancy Amoury Combs

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Einstein On The Bench?: Exposing What Judges Do Not Know About Science And Using Child Abuse Cases To Improve How Courts Evaluate Scientific Evidence, Joelle A. Moreno

Faculty Publications

It has been a decade since the Supreme Court made judges the arbiters of scientific validity through Daubert v. Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals, Inc. Although this decision was intended to improve how courts use science, recent empirical evidence reveals that judges continue to struggle with scientific evidence and that Daubert has failed to yield accurate or consistent decisions. This also means that judges have received little useful guidance from ten years of academic literature expounding on the science-law chasm.

If the academic discourse is not helpful, it may be because non-scientists too often try to tame science by treating it as …

Affirming Brahimi: East Timor Makes The Case For A Model Criminal Code, Megan A. Fairlie

Faculty Publications

In August of 2000, the Report of the Panel on United Nations Peace Operations (the “Brahimi Report”) considered the issue of transitional civil administration as an element of United Nations field operations. The Brahimi Report recommended the creation of an interim legal code as part of a U.N. justice package so that any future UN transitional administrations would be able to address the issue of “applicable law” in the early stages of its mission. Using the experience of the United National Transitional Administration in East Timor (UNTAET) as a case study, this article establishes how and why a complete model …