Law Commons^™

Tools, Not Rules: The Heuristic Nature Of Statutory Interpretation, Morell E. Mullins Sr.

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Upending Status: A Comment On Switching, Inequality, And The Idea Of The Reasonable Person, Victoria Nourse

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

This article reviews Murder and the Reasonable Man: Passion and Fear in the Criminal Courtroom, by Cynthia Lee (2003).

Cynthia Lee has written a hard-hitting and insightful book on bias and the law of homicide. Her purpose is to document how murder law’s “reasonable person” may absorb the unreason of prejudice in its various forms (from biases of race to gender to sexual orientation). Doctrinally, Lee’s book is wide-ranging and ambitious, covering a variety of standard defenses, such as provocation (chs. 1–3) and self-defense (chs. 5–7), in contexts ranging from excessive use of force to intimate homicide, from hate …

When Equality Leaves Everyone Worse Off: The Problem Of Leveling Down In Equality Law, Deborah Brake

Articles

This Article addresses the problem of leveling down as a response to discrimination. Existing case law and legal scholarship generally assume that inequality may be remedied in one of two ways: improving the lot of the disfavored group to match that of the most favored group, or worsening the treatment of the favored group until they fare as badly as everyone else. The term "leveling down" refers to the latter response. This Article contends that courts and commentators have overstated the flexibility of equality rights in accepting leveling down as a response to inequality, and proposes a new framework that …

'But I Thought He Had A Gun' - Race And Police Use Of Deadly Force, Cynthia Lee

GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works

It is undisputed that Blacks are disproportionately represented among the victims of police shootings. In a comprehensive review of the literature on police use of deadly force, James Fyfe reports that every study that has examined this issue [has] found that blacks are represented disproportionately among those at the wrong end of police guns. Although Blacks represent approximately 13 percent of the population in the United States, in parts of the country they constitute 60 to 85 percent of the victims of police shootings. On average, Blacks are more than six times as likely as Whites to be shot by …