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Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences
The Injustice Of Justice: The Pursuit Of A Harmonious, Just, And Merciful World, Robert W. Boyle
The Injustice Of Justice: The Pursuit Of A Harmonious, Just, And Merciful World, Robert W. Boyle
Pell Scholars and Senior Theses
There is no one universal definition of Justice. Such a limited view of right and wrong conflicts with our infinitely diverse world. The key to a harmonious global community is that justice is malleable and fluid, similar to water, where it can take the shape of its environment while still retaining the properties of fundamental rights. Our world will never come to a universal agreement on justice, due to the deeply embedded cultural beliefs and differing views, so a single understanding of justice is impossible. If the world can have a baseline understanding of right and wrong and the flexibility …
Deborah’S Law: The Effects Of Naming And Shaming On Sex Offenders In Australia, Carol Ronken, Robyn Lincoln
Deborah’S Law: The Effects Of Naming And Shaming On Sex Offenders In Australia, Carol Ronken, Robyn Lincoln
Robyn Lincoln
Community notification laws for sex offenders are now widespread in the USA and there is considerable interest in introducing them in Australia. Along with these public moves to name and shame, there has been a parallel increase in private forms of naming and shaming through ‘outing’ of sex offenders. This article examines both public and private notification to conclude from the few studies available that they fail to achieve their goals and lead to significant unintended consequences. The article analyses The Australian Paedophile and Sex Offender Index (Coddington, 1997), a prime exemplar of the private domain of notification, to explore …
On The Boundaries Of Culture As An Affirmative Defense, Reid Griffith Fontaine, Eliot M. Held
On The Boundaries Of Culture As An Affirmative Defense, Reid Griffith Fontaine, Eliot M. Held
Reid G. Fontaine
A “cultural defense” to criminal culpability cannot achieve true pluralism without collapsing into a totally subjective, personal standard. Applying an objective cultural standard does not rescue a defendant from the external imposition of values—the purported aim of the cultural defense—because a cultural standard is, at its core, an external standard imposed onto an individual. The pluralist argument for a cultural defense also fails on its own terms—after all, justice systems are themselves cultural institutions. Furthermore, a defendant’s background is already accounted for at sentencing. The closest thing to a cultural defense that a court could adopt without damaging the culpability …
The Death Of The American Trial, Robert P. Burns
The Death Of The American Trial, Robert P. Burns
Faculty Working Papers
This short essay is a summary of my assessment of the meaning of the "vanishing trial" phenomenon. It addresses the obvious question: "So what?" It first briefly reviews the evidence of the trial's decline. It then sets out the steps necessary to understand the political and social signficance of our vastly reducing the trial's importance among our modes of social ordering. The essay serves as the Introduction to a book, The Death of the American Trial, soon to be published by the University of Chicago Press.
A Miscarriage Of Juvenile Justice: A Modern Day Parable Of The Unintended Results Of Bad Lawmaking, Amy Vorenberg
A Miscarriage Of Juvenile Justice: A Modern Day Parable Of The Unintended Results Of Bad Lawmaking, Amy Vorenberg
Law Faculty Scholarship
Sensationalized cases increasingly create the context for public policy discussion. Stories about violent crime are a common feature of the local evening news and their emotional nature can often create the hook politicians need to showcase their “tough on crime” agendas. Often anecdotal and lurid, stories of criminal misdeeds are widely used to convince the public of a need to create or change laws. This article demonstrates the perils of making law by extrapolating from a few random, albeit attention-grabbing, events. Specifically, the article examines the impact of a 1995 change in New Hampshire state law that lowered the age …