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Criminal Law Commons

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Articles 1 - 15 of 15

Full-Text Articles in Criminal Law

The Disutility Of Injustice, Paul H. Robinson, Geoffrey P. Goodwin, Michael Reisig Dec 2010

The Disutility Of Injustice, Paul H. Robinson, Geoffrey P. Goodwin, Michael Reisig

All Faculty Scholarship

For more than half a century, the retributivists and the crime-control instrumentalists have seen themselves as being in an irresolvable conflict. Social science increasingly suggests, however, that this need not be so. Doing justice may be the most effective means of controlling crime. Perhaps partially in recognition of these developments, the American Law Institute's recent amendment to the Model Penal Code's "purposes" provision – the only amendment to the Model Code in the 47 years since its promulgation – adopts desert as the primary distributive principle for criminal liability and punishment. That shift to desert has prompted concerns by two …


Sex And The Supremes: Towards A Legal Theory Of Sexuality, Elaine Craig Oct 2010

Sex And The Supremes: Towards A Legal Theory Of Sexuality, Elaine Craig

PhD Dissertations

This thesis examines how the Supreme Court of Canada, across legal contexts, has tended to conceptualize sexuality. It focuses primarily on areas of public law including sexual assault law, equality for sexual minorities, sexual harassment and obscenity and indecency laws. There were a number of trends revealed upon reviewing the jurisprudence in this area. First, the Court’s decisions across legal contexts reveal a tendency to conceptualize sexuality as innate, as a pre-social naturally occurring phenomenon and as an essential element of who we are as individuals. This is true whether one is speaking of the approach to gay and lesbian …


Realism, Punishment & Reform [A Reply To Braman, Kahan, And Hoffman, "Some Realism About Punishment Naturalism”], Paul H. Robinson, Owen D. Jones, Robert O. Kurzban Oct 2010

Realism, Punishment & Reform [A Reply To Braman, Kahan, And Hoffman, "Some Realism About Punishment Naturalism”], Paul H. Robinson, Owen D. Jones, Robert O. Kurzban

All Faculty Scholarship

Professors Donald Braman, Dan Kahan, and David Hoffman, in their article "Some Realism About Punishment Naturalism," to be published in an upcoming issue of the University of Chicago Law Review, critique a series of our articles: Concordance and Conflict in Intuitions of Justice (http://ssrn.com/abstract=932067), The Origins of Shared Intuitions of Justice (http://.ssrn.com/abstract=952726), and Intuitions of Justice: Implications for Criminal Law and Justice Policy (http://.ssrn.com/abstract=976026). Our reply, here, follows their article in that coming issue. As we demonstrate, they have misunderstood our views on, and thus the implications of, widespread agreement about punishing the "core" of wrongdoing. Although much of their …


Reviving Lenity And Honest Belief At The Boundaries Of Criminal Law, John L. Diamond Oct 2010

Reviving Lenity And Honest Belief At The Boundaries Of Criminal Law, John L. Diamond

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

It is a common misconception that there is a line between criminal and innocent conduct that is transparent and fixed. In fact, much of criminal law is fluid and elastic, free, if strategically applied, to label conduct as legal or illegal. In some cases, this reflects crimes that are vaguely defined or imprecise. In other cases, the prohibited conduct simply includes what is so conventionally accepted as legal that the criminal label is perceived as inapplicable until a prosecutor chooses to apply it. The problem of a fluid rather than a fixed line for criminality is that prosecutorial discretion becomes …


Probabilities In Probable Cause And Beyond: Statistical Versus Concrete Harms, Sherry F. Colb Jul 2010

Probabilities In Probable Cause And Beyond: Statistical Versus Concrete Harms, Sherry F. Colb

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.


The Modern Irrationalities Of American Criminal Codes: An Empirical Study Of Offense Grading, Paul H. Robinson, Thomas Gaeta, Matthew Majarian, Megan Schultz, Douglas M. Weck Jul 2010

The Modern Irrationalities Of American Criminal Codes: An Empirical Study Of Offense Grading, Paul H. Robinson, Thomas Gaeta, Matthew Majarian, Megan Schultz, Douglas M. Weck

All Faculty Scholarship

The Model Penal Code made great advances in clarity and legality, moving most of the states from a mix of common law and ad hoc statutes to the modern American form of a comprehensive, succinct code that has served as a model around the world. Yet the decades since the wave of Model Code-based codifications have seen a steady degradation of American codes brought on by a relentless and accelerating rate of criminal law amendments that ignore the style, format, and content of the existing codes. The most damaging aspect of this trend is the exponentially increasing number of offense …


Why Care About Mass Incarceration?, James Forman Jr. Apr 2010

Why Care About Mass Incarceration?, James Forman Jr.

Michigan Law Review

Advocates for less punitive crime policies in the United States face long and dispiriting odds. The difficulty of the challenge becomes clear if we compare our criminal justice outcomes with those of other nations: We lock up more people, and for longer, than anyone else in the world. We continue to use the death penalty long after Europe abandoned it, we are the only country in the world to lock up juveniles for life, and we have prisoners serving fifty-year sentences for stealing videotapes from Kmart. Our courts offer little relief: the German Constitutional Court prohibits a sentence of life …


Australia’S Homeless Act, James Farrell, Caris Cadd Mar 2010

Australia’S Homeless Act, James Farrell, Caris Cadd

James Farrell

The Federal Government’s White Paper on Homelessness, The Road Home: A National Approach to Reducing Homelessness (White Paper) proposed the introduction of new legislation that would ‘underpin the national response to homelessness, setting standards to deliver the best quality services possible’.This article outlines the significance of this recommendation to Australians experiencing homelessness and focuses on why the problem of homelessness should be situated within a human rights framework.


Documentation, Documentary, And The Law: What Should Be Made Of Victim Impact Videos?, Regina Austin Jan 2010

Documentation, Documentary, And The Law: What Should Be Made Of Victim Impact Videos?, Regina Austin

All Faculty Scholarship

Since the Supreme Court sanctioned the introduction of victim impact evidence in the sentencing phase of capital cases in Payne v. Tennessee, 501 U.S. 808 (1991), there have been a number of reported decisions in which that evidence has taken the form of videos composed of home-produced still photographs and moving images of the victim. Most of these videos were first shown at funerals or memorial services and contain music appropriate for such occasions. This article considers the probative value of victim impact videos and responds to the call of Justice John Paul Stevens, made in a statement regarding the …


International Idealism Meets Domestic-Criminal-Procedure Realism, Stephanos Bibas, William W. Burke-White Jan 2010

International Idealism Meets Domestic-Criminal-Procedure Realism, Stephanos Bibas, William W. Burke-White

All Faculty Scholarship

Though international criminal justice has developed into a flourishing judicial system over the last two decades, scholars have neglected institutional design and procedure questions. International criminal-procedure scholarship has developed in isolation from its domestic counterpart but could learn much realism from it. Given its current focus on atrocities like genocide, international criminal law’s main purpose should be not only to inflict retribution, but also to restore wounded communities by bringing the truth to light. The international justice system needs more ideological balance, more stable career paths, and civil-service expertise. It also needs to draw on the domestic experience of federalism …


The Need For Prosecutorial Discretion, Stephanos Bibas Jan 2010

The Need For Prosecutorial Discretion, Stephanos Bibas

All Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.


Law Enforcement And Intelligence Gathering In Muslim And Immigrant Communities After 9/11, David A. Harris Jan 2010

Law Enforcement And Intelligence Gathering In Muslim And Immigrant Communities After 9/11, David A. Harris

Articles

Since the attacks of September 11, 2001, law enforcement agencies have actively sought partnerships with Muslim communities in the U.S. Consistent with community-based policing, these partnerships are designed to persuade members of these communities to share information about possible extremist activity. These cooperative efforts have borne fruit, resulting in important anti-terrorism prosecutions. But during the past several years, law enforcement has begun to use another tactic simultaneously: the FBI and some police departments have placed informants in mosques and other religious institutions to gather intelligence. The government justifies this by asserting that it must take a pro-active stance in order …


Firms As Social Actors, Richard Adelstein Dec 2009

Firms As Social Actors, Richard Adelstein

Richard Adelstein

A close look at what firms are and how they act.


Organizations And Economics, Richard Adelstein Dec 2009

Organizations And Economics, Richard Adelstein

Richard Adelstein

A contribution to a symposium on a paper by Richard Posner.


Apuntes Generales Sobre La Libertad De Expresión En Internet, Germán M. Teruel Lozano Dec 2009

Apuntes Generales Sobre La Libertad De Expresión En Internet, Germán M. Teruel Lozano

Germán M. Teruel Lozano

GENERAL NOTES ABOUT THE FREEDOM OF SPEECH IN INTERNET: This paper presents an overview of how Internet has revolutionized the setting of freedom of speech. In particular, it is focused in to main aspects: On one hand, the delimitation of freedom of expression in the new media, differentiating in particular between web pages dedicated to the dissemination of information, protected by the freedom of speech; and those that are intended to provide other telematics services, which should not have this protection. Secondly, it is also studied the legal status of this freedom when it is exercised through Internet.