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Full-Text Articles in Criminal Law

Injustice Under Law: Perpetuating And Criminalizing Poverty Through The Courts, Judge Lisa Foster May 2017

Injustice Under Law: Perpetuating And Criminalizing Poverty Through The Courts, Judge Lisa Foster

Georgia State University Law Review

Money matters in the justice system. If you can afford to purchase your freedom pretrial, if you can afford to immediately pay fines and fees for minor traffic offenses and municipal code violations, if you can afford to hire an attorney, your experience of the justice system both procedurally and substantively will be qualitatively different than the experience of someone who is poor. More disturbingly, through a variety of policies and practices—some of them blatantly unconstitutional—our courts are perpetuating and criminalizing poverty. And when we talk about poverty in the United States, we are still talking about race, ethnicity, and …


The French Prosecutor As Judge. The Carpenter’S Mistake?, Mathilde Cohen Dec 2016

The French Prosecutor As Judge. The Carpenter’S Mistake?, Mathilde Cohen

Mathilde Cohen

In France as elsewhere, prosecutors and their offices are seldom seen as agents of democracy. A distinct theoretical framework is itself missing to conceptualize the prosecutorial function in democratic states committed to the rule of law. What makes prosecutors democratically legitimate? Can they be made accountable to the public? Combining democratic theory with original qualitative empirical data, my hypothesis is that in the French context, prosecutors’ professional status and identity as judges determines to a great extent whether and how they can be considered democratic figures.
 
The French judicial function is defined more broadly than in the United States, …