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Full-Text Articles in Law
Can Our Shameful Prisons Be Reformed?, David Cole
Can Our Shameful Prisons Be Reformed?, David Cole
Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works
No abstract provided.
No Equal Justice, David Cole
No Equal Justice, David Cole
Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works
I argue that while our criminal justice system is explicitly based on the premise and promise of equality before the law, the administration of criminal law—whether by the officer on the beat, the legislature, or the Supreme Court—is in fact predicated on the exploitation of inequality. My claim is not simply that we have ignored inequality’s effects within the criminal justice system, nor that we have tried but failed to achieve equality there. Rather, I contend that our criminal justice system affirmatively depends on inequality. Absent race and class disparities, the privileged among us could not enjoy as much constitutional …
Formalism, Realism, And The War On Drugs, David Cole
Formalism, Realism, And The War On Drugs, David Cole
Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works
One of the ways our legal system has avoided confronting this ugly reality is through a commitment to legal formalism. Legal formalism allows us to ignore the social determinants that my AUSA friend saw every day as he prosecuted federal drug cases. As my colleague Professor Michael Seidman has suggested, legal formalism, which has been effectively critiqued and displaced by legal realism in many other areas of law, continues to exercise considerable influence over the way we think about criminal law. This formalist approach, in my view, has strongly affected the way we approach the drug problem. One consequence is …