Law Commons^™

Eyewitness Identification Reform In Massachusetts, Stanley Z. Fisher

Faculty Scholarship

This article traces the impact of the new scientific learning upon police eyewitness identification procedures in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Over the past 25 years, experimental psychologists have devised more reliable techniques for gathering eyewitness identification evidence than have been traditionally used by police. Massachusetts has over 350 autonomous municipal police departments, plus approximately 39 college campus police departments, the state police, and the MBTA (transit) Police Department. The decision how to investigate crime rests principally with the police chief responsible for each department. How does such a system of policing absorb new, scientifically superior methods of investigation?

Gender, Race, And Intersectionality On The Federal Appellate Bench., Todd Collins, Laura Moyer

Faculty Scholarship

While theoretical justifications predict that a judge’s gender and race may influence judicial decisions, empirical support for these arguments has been mixed. However, recent increases in judicial diversity necessitate a reexamination of these earlier studies. Rather than examining individual judges on a single characteristic, such as gender or race alone, this research note argues that the intersection of individual characteristics may provide an alternative approach for evaluating the effects of diversity on the federal appellate bench. The results of cohort models examining the joint effects of race and gender suggest that minority female judges are more likely to support criminal …

Voluntarism, Vulnerability, And Criminal Law: A Response To Professors Hills And O'Hear , Ethan J. Leib, Dan Markel, Jennifer M. Collins

Faculty Scholarship

This Response addresses the criticisms of our project by Professors Rick Hills and Michael O'Hear. Before we address those challenges, we first want to reiterate our gratitude to the B.U. Law Review for hosting an exchange based on our article, Punishing Family Status (forthcoming BU LR, December 2008), and to Professors Hills and O'Hear for their careful and subtle analysis of that article. Additionally, it's worth recapitulating what our bottom-line conclusions are so we can better see if there are any practical disagreements with our critics. Summarizing quickly: we support decriminalization in the cases of parental responsibility laws (based on …

Punishing Family Status , Jennifer M. Collins, Ethan J. Leib, Dan Markel

Faculty Scholarship

This Article focuses upon two basic but under-explored questions: when does, and when should, the state use the criminal justice apparatus to burden individuals on account of their familial status? We address the first question in Part I by revealing a variety of laws permeating the criminal justice system that together form a string of family ties burdens, laws that impose punishment upon individuals on account of their familial status. The seven burdens we train our attention upon are omissions liability for failure to rescue, parental responsibility laws, incest, bigamy, adultery, nonpayment of child support, and nonpayment of parental support. …

Introduction: The Challenge Of Lionel Tate, Elizabeth S. Scott, Laurence Steinberg

Faculty Scholarship

Legal reforms over the past generation have transformed juvenile crime regulation from a system that viewed most youth crime as the product of immaturity into one that is ready to hold many youths to the standard of accountability imposed on adults. Supporters of these reforms argue that they are simply a response to the inability of the traditional juvenile court to deal adequately with violent youth crime, but the legal changes that have transformed the system have often been undertaken in an atmosphere of moral panic, with little deliberation about consequences and costs.

In this book we argue that a …

The Upside Of Overbreadth, Samuel W. Buell

Faculty Scholarship

Overbreadth in criminal liability rules, especially in federal law, is abundant and much lamented. Overbreadth is avoidable if it results from normative mistakes about how much conduct to criminalize or from insufficient care to limit open texture in statutes. Social planners cannot so easily avoid overbreadth if they cannot reach behaviors for which criminalization is well justified without also reaching behaviors for which it is not. This mismatch problem is acute if persons engaging in properly criminalized behaviors deliberately alter their conduct to avoid punishment and have resources to devote to avoidance efforts. In response to such efforts, legal actors …

International Standards For Detaining Terrorism Suspects: Moving Beyond The Armed Conflict-Criminal Divide, Monica Hakimi

Faculty Scholarship

Although sometimes described as war, the fight against transnational jihadi groups (referred to for shorthand as the "fight against terrorism") largely takes place away from any recognizable battlefield. Terrorism suspects are captured in houses, on street comers, and at border crossings around the globe. Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the high-level Qaeda operative who planned the September 11 attacks, was captured by the Pakistani government in a residence in Pakistan. Abu Omar, a radical Muslim imam, was apparently abducted by U.S. and Italian agents off the streets of Milan. And Abu Baker Bashir, the spiritual leader of the Qaeda-affiliated group responsible for …