Law and Society Commons^™

Christianity And Bankruptcy, David A. Skeel Jr.

All Faculty Scholarship

Although the term “bankruptcy” is nowhere to be found in the Bible, debt and the consequences of default are a major theme both in the Hebrew Bible and in the New Testament. In Israel, as in the ancient Near East generally, a debtor who defaulted on his obligations was often sold into slavery or servitude. Biblical law moderated the harshness of this system by prohibiting Israelites from charging interest on loans to one another, thus diminishing the risk of default, and by requiring the release of slaves after seven years of service. Jesus alluded to the lending laws at least …

Dignity Takings In Leviathanic Immigration Proceedings, Christopher Mendez

The Scholar: St. Mary's Law Review on Race and Social Justice

Current immigration law in the United States is rife with racially motivated biases necessitating immediate correction. Among the many problems with current law, constitutional rights are withheld from a large populace. This article reflects upon the history of immigration law in the United States, noting key decisions which have formed the status quo. This article also proposes remedies such as the cessation of infringement by government agents on the property rights that affected immigrants have on their own bodies and a modern-day amnesty reflective of the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986. This article also introduces Bernadette Atuahene’s concept …

Critical Reviews Of Flawed Research On Prostitution, Donna M. Hughes

Dignity: A Journal of Analysis of Exploitation and Violence

No abstract provided.

Combatting The Opioid Epidemic In Texas By Holding Big Pharma Manufacturers Liable, Katherine Spiser

St. Mary's Law Journal

Abstract forthcoming

The Effects Of Criminal Embeddedness On School Violence In Brazil, Elenice De Souza De Souza Oliveira, Braulio Figueiredo Alves Da Silva, Silvio Segundo Salej Higgins

Department of Justice Studies Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

This study examines the influence of criminal embeddedness on the intensity of criminal behavior among primary and secondary school students in a large Brazilian city. A database conceived by the Center for the Study of Crime and Public Security at the Federal University in Minas Gerais is used to analyze the involvement of youths displaying delinquent behavior at home or at school and how school performance and peer relationships are effected. Based on differential association and learning theories, the main hypotheses are (1) the greater the criminal embeddedness, the lower the degree of school satisfaction as well as future expectation …

Perpetual Affordability Covenants: Can These Land Use Tools Solve The Affordable Housing Crisis?, Elizabeth Elia

Faculty Scholarship

Approximately 3.8 million privately-owned residential housing units in America today contain affordability covenants recorded in their chains of title. State and local agencies and the District of Columbia use these covenants to ensure that publicly-subsidized properties are actually used to provide affordable housing. With rents at all-time highs and stagnant wages, the affordable housing crisis has reached a fever pitch. House Democrats are proposing billions more in housing subsidy. To the extent those funds subsidize privately-owned housing development they, too, will be secured by affordability covenants. In response to this crisis, a new trend in high cost markets is to …

Professional Resistance Of Lawyers: Defending Human Rights And The Rule Of Law In Hong Kong After Umbrella Movement, Yan-Ho Lai

Biennial Conference: The Social Practice of Human Rights

Purpose: Against the backdrops of deteriorating human rights protections and the rule of law after the unprecedented Umbrella Movement in Hong Kong, this paper investigates the roles and impacts of mobilised legal profession in resisting China’s authoritarian rule over and defending domestic human rights regime in Hong Kong. This paper argues that, despite the legal profession of Hong Kong becomes further divided under the political and economic statecraft, lawyer activism as a professional resistance becomes a new force to resist the political intervention of the rule of law as well as deepening the cultural and institutional foundations of the rule …

Innovative Collaboration To Further Community Self-Determination, Matthew Currie, Amaha Sellassie

Biennial Conference: The Social Practice of Human Rights

The built urban environment is the product of more than a century of policy decisions that have both intentionally discriminated and have had the effect of discriminating, against African Americas, immigrants, the work class, low income individuals and other undesirables. While more than fifty years have passed since the passage of civil rights legislation in the United States, individuals in today’s cities are living out our discriminatory legacy.

In Dayton, Ohio, a new movement has risen from the community to disrupt the legacy of de jure and de facto discrimination by the collaborative efforts of the impactive individuals, neighborhood leaders, …

Law Library Blog (October 2019): Legal Beagle's Blog Archive, Roger Williams University School Of Law

Law Library Newsletters/Blog

No abstract provided.

Law Versus Action: How Five Cape Town Organizations Are Combating High Rates Of Sexual Assault And The Failure Of Progressive Sexual Offences Legislation, Anna Tinker

Independent Study Project (ISP) Collection

This Independent Study Project (ISP) seeks to understand the work various Cape Town organizations are doing to help survivors of sexual assault gain access to justice. Previous research finds that social norms defining masculinity as well as rape myths and stereotypes lead to the high levels of gender-based violence (GBV) in South Africa. This research led to my hypothesis that organizations fighting GBV would target these norms to help survivors access the justice system that so frequently ignores them. Eight organizations were contacted requesting an interview to discuss their work and two agreed to participate. Participants were asked to discuss …

Handcuffing The Vote: Diluting Minority Voting Power Through Prison Gerrymandering And Felon Disenfranchisement, Rebecca Harrison Stevens, Meagan Taylor Harding, Joaquin Gonzalez, Emily Eby

The Scholar: St. Mary's Law Review on Race and Social Justice

For the purposes of legislative redistricting, Texas counts prison populations at the address of the prison in which they are incarcerated at the time of the census, rather than their home prior to incarceration—regardless of whether the prisoners themselves maintain a residence in their home communities and intend to return home after incarceration. This deprives those home communities of full representation in the redistricting process. Combined with Texas’s felon disenfranchisement laws, this also results in arbitrarily bolstering the representational power of some Texans on the backs of other Texans who themselves are unable to vote. All of this takes place …

Challenging Voting Rights And Political Participation In State Courts, Irving Joyner

The Scholar: St. Mary's Law Review on Race and Social Justice

Abstract forthcoming

Making Democracy Count: The Seemingly Technical Procedures That Can Make Or Break A Census, Charlotte Schwartz, Jeffrey Zalesin, Rachel Brown

The Scholar: St. Mary's Law Review on Race and Social Justice

Abstract forthcoming

Systems Of Crime And Castigation: A Reevaluation Of The Punishment Bureaucracy, Lia Pikus

Independent Study Project (ISP) Collection

Models of reform within the criminal justice system often operate from a top-down perspective, affecting change on surface levels to attempt to better the system. One example of such a reform is Scotland’s Presumption Against Short Sentences. These kinds of changes, as I will illustrate in this paper, both fall short of achieving genuine change and often produce negative side effects. However, a few countries have made deeper changes to the ways their systems both view and handle crime and punishment; one such system is Norway. Through rehabilitation and restorative justice, Norway has greatly decreased rates of recidivism, increased social …

Population Law And Policy: From Control And Contraception To Equity And Equality, Victoria Mather

St. Mary's Law Journal

Abstract forthcoming

Texas, The Death Penalty, And Intellectual Disability, Megan Green

St. Mary's Law Journal

Abstract forthcoming

Toward Fair And Sustainable Capitalism: A Comprehensive Proposal To Help American Workers, Restore Fair Gainsharing Between Employees And Shareholders, And Increase American Competitiveness By Reorienting Our Corporate Governance System Toward Sustainable Long-Term Growth And Encouraging Investments In America’S Future, Leo E. Strine Jr.

All Faculty Scholarship

To promote fair and sustainable capitalism and help business and labor work together to build an American economy that works for all, this paper presents a comprehensive proposal to reform the American corporate governance system by aligning the incentives of those who control large U.S. corporations with the interests of working Americans who must put their hard-earned savings in mutual funds in their 401(k) and 529 plans. The proposal would achieve this through a series of measured, coherent changes to current laws and regulations, including: requiring not just operating companies, but institutional investors, to give appropriate consideration to and make …

Notoriously Ruthless: The Idolization Of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Lucille Moran

Political Science Honors Projects

It is now a fixture of mainstream commentary in the United States that Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg has become a popular idol on the political left. Yet, while Justice Ginsburg’s image and story has reached an unprecedented level of valorization and even commercialization, scholars have yet to give sustained attention to the phenomenon and to contextualize it: why has this idolization emerged within this context, and what is its impact? This paper situates her portrayal in the cultural imagination as the product of two political forces, namely partisanship and identity politics. Considering parallel scholarly discourses of reputation, celebrity, …

Knowledge Commons (2019), Michael J. Madison, Brett M. Frischmann, Katherine J. Strandburg

Book Chapters

This chapter provides an introduction to and overview of the knowledge commons research framework. Knowledge commons refers to an institutional approach (commons) to governing the production, use, management, and/or preservation of a particular type of resource (knowledge). The research framework supplies a template for interrogating the details of knowledge commons institutions on a case study basis, generating qualitative data that may be used to support comparative analysis.

The American Pathology Of Inequitable Access To Medical Care, Allison K. Hoffman, Mark A. Hall

All Faculty Scholarship

What most defines access to health care in the United States may be its stark inequity. Daily headlines in top newspapers paint the highs and lows. Articles entitled: “We Mapped the Uninsured. You’ll notice a Pattern: They tend to live in the South, and they tend to be poor” and op-eds with titles like “Do Poor People Have a Right to Health Care?” and “What it’s Like to Be Black and Pregnant when you Know How Dangerous That Can Be” run side-by-side with headlines touting “The Operating Room of the Future,^” and advances in gene therapy that promise cures …

Law And Society: The Criminalization Of Latinx In The United States, Gabriela Groenke

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The United States leads the world in incarceration with just over 2.2 million people in state or federal prisons or local jails in 2014 (Bureau of Justice Statistics 2016). Although the number of incarcerated individuals has declined by about .5 percent since its peak in 2008 (Bureau of Justice Statistics 2016), the fact remains that mass incarceration is an epidemic in the United States. Over the last decade much has been written about the effects of mass incarceration on people of color, with many analysts pointing to the fear of crime as contributing to the formulation of current policies, which …

Politics, Identity, And Class Certification On The U.S. Courts Of Appeals, Stephen B. Burbank, Sean Farhang

Sean Farhang

This article draws on novel data and presents the results of the first empirical analysis of how potentially salient characteristics of Court of Appeals judges influence precedential lawmaking on class certification under Rule 23. We find that the partisan composition of the panel (measured by the party of the appointing president) has a very strong association with certification outcomes, with all-Democratic panels having more than double the certification rate of all-Republican panels in precedential cases. We also find that the presence of one African American on a panel, and the presence of two females (but not one), is associated with …

Does The Decriminalization Of Prostitution Reduce Rape And Sexually Transmitted Disease? A Review Of Cunningham And Shah Findings, Lily Lachapelle, Clare Schneider, Melanie Shapiro, Donna M. Hughes

Dignity: A Journal of Analysis of Exploitation and Violence

In 2013, research findings by Cunningham and Shah claimed that rape and sexually transmitted diseases were reduced by decriminalized prostitution in Rhode Island. The original unpublished claims have received wide media coverage which have gone unexamined. This review finds errors in their analyses. One error is the date when prostitution was decriminalized in Rhode Island. Cunningham and Shah claim that prostitution was decriminalized in 2003. Our analysis finds the date of decriminalization of prostitution was 1980. The change in the start date of decriminalization significantly alters the analysis and the findings. Another error results from Cunningham and Shah using an …

Do Prostitution Advertisements Reduce Violence Against Women? A Methodological Examination Of Cunningham, Deangelo, And Tripp Findings, Katie Feifer, Jody Raphael, Kezban Yagci Sokat

Dignity: A Journal of Analysis of Exploitation and Violence

A recent study by Cunningham, DeAngelo, and Tripp (unpublished 2017, 2019) found that advertising prostitution online led to a lower rate of homicide of women in the United States. These findings have circulated widely in the mainstream media as proof that advertising prostitution online increases the safety of prostituted women. The study’s findings were used to argue against the 2018 passage of a federal anti-trafficking bill: Allow States and Victims to Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act (FOSTA) and Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act (SESTA), known collectively as FOSTA-SESTA. This new law holds websites that knowingly facilitate sex trafficking accountable for …

The Fiduciary Obligations Of Public Officials, Vincent R. Johnson

St. Mary's Journal on Legal Malpractice & Ethics

At various levels of government, the conduct of public officials is often regulated by ethical standards laid down by legislative enactments, such as federal or state statutes or municipal ordinances. These rules of government ethics are important landmarks in the field of law that defines the legal and ethical obligations of public officials. Such provisions can form the basis for the kinds of government ethics training that helps to minimize wrongful conduct by public servants and reduces the risk that the performance of official duties will be clouded by appearances of impropriety. Codified government ethics rules also frequently provide mechanisms …

Conversation With Jody Raphael About "Decriminalization Of Prostitution: The Soros Effect", Heather Brunskell-Evans

Dignity: A Journal of Analysis of Exploitation and Violence

George Soros and Open Society Foundation are supporting the decriminalization of prostitution by funding organizations around the world to advocate for this legal change. Heather Brunskell-Evans (FiLiA podcasts, London) interviews Jody Raphael, Senior Research Fellow, Schiller DuCanto & Fleck Law Center, DePaul University College of Law, Chicago, Illinois, USA, about her research on this topic and discusses her article "Decriminalization of Prostitution: The Soros Effect."

Municipal Annexation Reform In Texas: How A Victory For Property Rights Jeopardizes The State’S Financial Health, Julie Polansky Bell

St. Mary's Law Journal

Municipal annexation is the expansion of city boundaries. The greatest motivator behind municipal annexation is maintaining and improving economic prosperity of the annexing authority. The issue of annexation involves a balance of rights between property owners and municipalities of the state. Historically, Texas cities had broad annexation authority under an involuntary annexation scheme. However, in recent years the power has shifted as lawmakers have given property owners greater control over the annexation process. This trend culminated in the passage of the Municipal Annexation Right to Vote Act (MARVA) by the 85th Texas Legislature, which severely limits annexation authority.

Texas municipalities …

Rulers Or Rules? International Law, Elite Cues And Public Opinion, Anton Strezhnev, Beth A. Simmons, Matthew D. Kim

All Faculty Scholarship

One of the mechanisms by which international law can shape domestic politics is through its effects on public opinion. However, a growing number of national leaders have begun to advocate policies that ignore or even deny international law constraints. This article investigates whether international law messages can still shift public opinion even in the face of countervailing elite cues. It reports results from survey experiments conducted in three countries, the United States, Australia and India, which examined attitudes on a highly salient domestic political issue: restrictions on refugee admissions. In each experimental vignette, respondents were asked about their opinion on …

“I Almost Quit”: Exploring The Prevalence Of The Ferguson Effect In Two Small Sized Law Enforcement Agencies In Rural Southcentral Virginia, Joshua L. Adams

The Qualitative Report

Recent negatively publicized police-citizen interactions in the media, followed by a subsequent de-policing of police in the United States, has been named the Ferguson Effect. The Ferguson Effect has been explored by prominent scholars in the criminal justice community; however, little is known about how police officers in small rural police agencies perceive the Ferguson Effect. The purpose of this qualitative phenomenological study was to explore the perceptions and lived experiences of police officers regarding the Ferguson Effect in small rural police agencies, as well as police officers’ perceptions of their own organizational justice. Organizational justice theory was utilized as …

Citizen Chávez: The State, Social Movements, And Publics, Anthony Peter Spanakos

Anthony Spanakos

Scholars are divided over whether the emancipatory politics promised by new social movements can be attained within civil society or whether seizure of the state apparatus is necessary. The Bolivarian Revolution led by President Hugo Chávez presents a crucial case for examining this question. Chávez’s use of the state apparatus has been fundamental in broadening the concept of citizenship, but this extension of citizenship has occurred alongside the deliberate exclusion of others. This has not only limited its appeal as a citizenship project but created counterpublics that challenge the functioning of the government and its very legitimacy. Analysis of Bolivarianism …