Criminal Law Commons^™

Reassessing Prosecutorial Power Through The Lens Of Mass Incarceration, Jeffrey Bellin

Michigan Law Review

A review of John F. Pfaff, Locked In: The True Causes of Mass Incarceration - And How to Achieve Real Reform.

The Consensus Myth In Criminal Justice Reform, Benjamin Levin

Michigan Law Review

It has become popular to identify a “consensus” on criminal justice reform, but how deep is that consensus, actually? This Article argues that the purported consensus is much more limited than it initially appears. Despite shared reformist vocabulary, the consensus rests on distinct critiques that identify different flaws and justify distinct policy solutions. The underlying disagreements transcend traditional left/right political divides and speak to deeper disputes about the state and the role of criminal law in society.

The Article maps two prevailing, but fundamentally distinct, critiques of criminal law: (1) the quantitative approach (what I call the “over” frame); and …

Can Criminal Law Be Controlled?, Darryl K. Brown

Michigan Law Review

It is a bizarre state of affairs that criminal law has no coherent description or explanation. We have standard tropes to define criminal law, but they obscure as much as they clarify and are honored in the breach as much as the rule. Crimes, for instance, are defined by wrongdoing and culpability; to be guilty, one must do a wrongful act in a blameworthy manner, that is, as a responsible agent without excuse or justification. And crimes define public wrongs, which are distinct from private wrongs. Further, we criminalize only harmful conduct, or risk-creating conduct, or immoral conduct, or conduct …

The Market For Criminal Justice: Federalism, Crime Control, And Jurisdictional Competition, Doron Teichman

Michigan Law Review

Part I introduces the concepts of jurisdictional competition and crime displacement and argues that, as a positive matter, a decentralized criminal justice system may create a competitive process among the different units composing it, in which each such unit attempts to divert crime to neighboring communities. Part II then turns to evaluate the normative aspects of jurisdictional competition in the area of criminal justice. In this context I will show that competition can have both advantages and disadvantages. On one hand, the forces of competition might drive jurisdictions to fight crime efficiently, since any jurisdiction that functions inefficiently will suffer …

Dangerousness And Criminal Justice, Franklin E. Zimring, Gordon Hawkins

Michigan Law Review

The first section of this paper surveys some recent writings on the topic of dangerousness for major inconsistencies, which we regard as illuminating the special problem of dangerousness in the jurisprudence of criminal sentencing.

The second section describes the "special problem of dangerousness," for, we believe, the first time. The special problem is the fear that any admission of calculations of dangerousness into sentencing decisions will lead to an overuse of dangerousness, which may be worse than the inefficiencies and hypocrisies we confront when denying that future dangerousness is relevant to decisions about prisons.

The third section attempts to reorganize …

Abscam And The Constitution, Louis Michael Seidman

Michigan Law Review

A Review of ABSCAM Ethics: Moral Issues and Deception in Law Enforcement by Gerald M. Caplan

Ethics, Public Policy And Criminal Justice, Michigan Law Review

Michigan Law Review

A Review of Ethics, Public Policy and Criminal Justice by Frederick Elliston and Norman Bowie