Law Commons^™

Surviving Interlocutory Appeals: Trial Lawyer Edition, Grace Jun

The Bridge: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Legal & Social Policy

This presentation provides an overview of Supreme Court caselaw regarding qualified immunity and government officials’ right to interlocutory appeal from denials of qualified immunity, and provides a brief discussion of ways trial lawyers can overcome interlocutory appeals to provide their injured plaintiffs with an opportunity to be heard and vindicated at trial by a jury.

Civil Rights And Protective Orders, Michael P. Doyle, Erin Brockway

The Bridge: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Legal & Social Policy

“Open courts” are a bedrock principal of our judicial system, and court secrecy, including concealment of pretrial proceedings, poses a serious threat to public safety. Overbroad protective orders have concealed facts uncovered during litigation regarding some of the most important public harms, keeping them secret when the public needs protection. Protective orders routinely include provisions that allow parties to designate discovery material as “confidential” without further judicial review. These orders are often abused and result in unnecessary costs to litigants, the courts, and the public’s confidence in the court system. This is always a mistake because it harms the discovery …

Introduction To Re-Imagining “We The People" Part Two: Transcripts From The Aaj Education’S Civil Rights And Police Misconduct Litigation Seminar, Sarah Guidry

The Bridge: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Legal & Social Policy

With this issue of The Bridge, we continue the discussions raised in our Spring 2021 issue: Police Misconduct & Qualified Immunity: Reimagining "We the People”, Vol.6, Issue 1. That issue shared the transcription of the virtual national conference by the same name, and featured an esteemed group of experts who discussed the state of racial unrest in this country, historically and currently. To promote further dialogue and support those who work to establish stronger protections against the use and misuse of police violence, we herein highlight several key sessions featured at the recent American Association for Justice Civil Rights and …

"Send Freedom House!": A Study In Police Abolition, Tiffany Yang

Washington Law Review

Sparked by the police killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, the 2020 uprisings accelerated a momentum of abolitionist organizing that demands the defunding and dismantling of policing infrastructures. Although a growing body of legal scholarship recognizes abolitionist frameworks when examining conventional proposals for reform, critics mistakenly continue to disregard police abolition as an unrealistic solution. This Essay helps dispel this myth of “impracticality” and illustrates the pragmatism of abolition by identifying a community-driven effort that achieved a meaningful reduction in policing we now take for granted. I detail the history of the Freedom House Ambulance Service, a Black civilian …

Making The Optimistic Case For Policing Reform: Police As Partners And Reform As True To Democratic Values And America's Vision Of Itself, Dr. Ihsan Alkhatib

Georgia Journal of International & Comparative Law

No abstract provided.

Police Arbitration, Stephen Rushin

Faculty Publications & Other Works

Before punishing an officer for professional misconduct, police departments often provide the officer with an opportunity to file an appeal. In many police departments, this appeals process culminates in a hearing before an arbitrator. While numerous media reports have suggested that arbitrators regularly overturn or reduce discipline, little legal research has comprehensively examined the outcomes of police disciplinary appeals across the United States.

In order to better understand the use of arbitration in police disciplinary appeals and build on prior research, this Article draws on a dataset of 624 arbitration awards issued between 2006 and 2020 from a diverse range …

Betraying The American Public's Trust And Police Accountability Interrogations: The Darren Wilson Story, Shaymaa Shwel

Intercultural Human Rights Law Review

This paper will be focused on the specific failure by prosecutors to obtain an indictment when Michael Brown (Brown), the victim, was shot by law enforcement and will discuss: (1) systematic racism in the City of Ferguson (Ferguson), and the events leading up to the Darren Wilson (Wilson) case; (2) the specificities of the grand jury proceedings in the Wilson case; and (3) finally, conclude by evaluating how the Wilson case led to no indictment, and how attempting to indict a police officer is completely different.

Improving Police Officer Accountability In Minnesota: Three Proposed Legislative Reforms, Jim Hilbert

Mitchell Hamline Law Review

No abstract provided.

Breonna Taylor: Transforming A Hashtag Into Defunding The Police, Jordan Martin

Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology

How can modern policing be reformed to address police violence against Black women when it can occur at no fault of their own and end with a shower of bullets in the middle of the night while within the sanctity of their own home? What is accomplished when her name is said but justice is never achieved? What good does it do when her story is subsequently overshadowed or overlooked by the reform movements that intend to correct racism and sexism respectively? This Comment analyzes both Black women’s vulnerability to police violence and their invisibility in reform movements. First, police …

Meek Mill's Trauma: Brutal Policing As An Adverse Childhood Experience, Todd J. Clark, Caleb G. Conrad, Andre D.P. Cummings, Amy D. Johnson

St. Thomas Law Review

Meek Mill, in his intimate autobiographical tracks of Trauma, Oodles O’Noodles Babies, and Otherside of America, describes experiencing not just several instances of childhood trauma as identified by the CDC-Kaiser Permanente study, but as a teenager, he suffered additional cruel trauma at the hands of U.S. police and a criminal justice system that wrongly imprisoned and unfairly positioned him in a revolving door between probation and prison. The data tells us that the trauma Meek experienced as a child and teenager statistically predicts a poorer life expectancy for him than those individuals that experienced no trauma or little trauma as …

Policing And "Bluelining", Aya Gruber

Publications

In this Commentary written for the Frankel Lecture symposium on police killings of Black Americans, I explore the increasingly popular claim that racialized brutality is not a malfunction of policing but its function. Or, as Paul Butler counsels, “Don’t get it twisted—the criminal justice system ain’t broke. It’s working just the way it’s supposed to.” This claim contradicts the conventional narrative, which remains largely accepted, that the police exist to vindicate the community’s interest in solving, reducing, and preventing crime. A perusal of the history of organized policing in the United States, however, reveals that it was never mainly about …

Crime And The Mythology Of Police, Shima Baughman

Utah Law Faculty Scholarship

The legal policing literature has espoused one theory of policing after another in an effort to address the frayed relationship between police and the communities they serve. All have aimed to diagnose chronic policing problems in working towards structural police reform. The core principles emanating from these theoretical critiques is that the mistrust of police among communities of color results from maltreatment, illegitimacy and marginalization from the law and its enforcers. Remedies have included police training to encourage treating people with dignity, investing in body cameras and other technology, providing legal avenues to encourage constitutional action by police, and creating …

Police Use Of Force Laws In Texas, Gerald S. Reamey

Faculty Articles

At the heart of calls for police reform lie use of force laws. While policing agencies adopt and enforce their own policies regarding when and how force may be used by officers of those agencies, state laws rarely define the uniform limits under which officers operate. Policing in the United States is highly fractured; of the hundreds of law enforcement agencies operating, most are autonomous, and they determine the policies under which they operate, including those for use of force. They also decide whether and how to investigate violations of internal policies, as well as the punishment that will be …