Law and Society Commons^™

Crime Logic, Campus Sexual Assault, And Restorative Justice, Donna Coker

Articles

No abstract provided.

A Proposal To Allow The Presentation Of Mitigation In Juvenile Court So That Juvenile Charges May Be Expunged In Appropriate Cases, Katherine I. Puzone

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Bend Or Break: Enhancing The Responsibilities Of Law Societies To Promote Access To Justice, Richard Devlin Frsc

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

There now appears to be a consensus in Canada that we have a serious access to justice problem. Chief Justices have been vocal. The Governor-General has made an intervention. Legal newspapers and websites have weekly, if not daily, stories on access to justice concerns. There have been several thorough reports which both detail the problems and propose possible paths forward. And one CEO of a national law firm has lamented that “access to justice is the legal profession’s equivalent of global warming.”

However, in my opinion, despite all this alarm, attention, and progress, two key components tend to be missing …

Chilling Effects: Online Surveillance And Wikipedia Use, Jonathon Penney

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

This article discusses the results of the first empirical study providing evidence of regulatory “chilling effects” of Wikipedia users associated with online government surveillance. The study explores how traffic to Wikipedia articles on topics that raise privacy concerns for Wikipedia users decreased after the widespread publicity about NSA/PRISM surveillance revelations in June 2013. Using an interdisciplinary research design, the study tests the hypothesis, based on chilling effects theory, that traffic to privacy-sensitive Wikipedia articles reduced after the mass surveillance revelations. The Article finds not only a statistically significant immediate decline in traffic for these Wikipedia articles after June 2013, but …

Beyond Airspace Safety: A Feminist Perspective On Drone Privacy Regulation, Kristen Mj Thomasen

Canadian Journal of Law and Technology

No technology emerges in a social or legal vacuum. The laws and norms guiding acceptable uses of new technologies help to shape the ways in which these technologies benefit or disadvantage different individuals and communities. Recently, the impact of drones on women’s privacy has garnered sensational attention in media and popular discussion. Media headlines splash stories from drones spying on sunbathing or naked women and girls, to drones being used to stalk women through public spaces, to drones delivering abortion pills to women who might otherwise lack access. Yet despite this popular attention, and the immense literature that has emerged …

The High Cost Of Transferring The Dream, Kim Brooks

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

This paper is part of a larger project where I use the facts in tax decisions to reveal something about who we are. It looks through a small window into the lives of the people who find themselves caught between our collective and their individual expenditure aspirations. More specifically, it explores the circumstances in which individuals find that their outstanding tax debts pose a threat to their ability to maintain ownership of their home. In this paper I use the facts of tax cases for two ends. First, I am interested in disrupting legal knowledge hierarchies. We choose cases to …

Inclusive Crowdfunding, Andrew A. Schwartz

Publications

Securities “crowdfunding” — the sale of unregistered securities over the internet to large numbers of investors, each of whom contributes only a small amount — is a new concept that comes in at least three types: (1) retail crowdfunding under Title III of the federal JOBS Act of 2012; (2) accredited crowdfunding under Title II of the JOBS Act, which is legally restricted to accredited investors; and (3) intrastate crowdfunding under state law. Which of these three types — all at the dawn of their existence — holds the most promise?

Without claiming to finally resolve the issue, this Article …

Criminal Labor Law, Benjamin Levin

Publications

This Article examines a recent rise in civil suits brought against unions under criminal statutes. By looking at the long history of criminal regulation of labor, the Article argues that these suits represent an attack on the theoretical underpinnings of post-New Deal U.S. labor law and an attempt to revive a nineteenth century conception of unions as extortionate criminal conspiracies. The Article further argues that this criminal turn is reflective of a broader contemporary preference for finding criminal solutions to social and economic problems. In a moment of political gridlock, parties seeking regulation increasingly do so via criminal statute. In …

The Discretionary Death Penalty For Drug Couriers In Singapore: Four Challenges, Siyuan Chen

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

In 2012, Singapore amended its Misuse of Drugs to give courts hearing capital drug trafficking cases the discretion to replace the default death penalty with life imprisonment and caning, provided that the accused person can show that he was merely a drug courier and the prosecution certifies that he had substantively assisted the authorities in disrupting drug trafficking activities. The Singapore High Court and Court of Appeal have since made important pronouncements on the 2012 amendments, but several challenges remain: first, whether the privilege against self-incrimination has been further eroded; secondly, whether an accused person can invoke the statutory relief …

Section 276 Misconstrued: The Failure To Properly Interpret And Apply Canada's Rape Shield Provisions, Elaine Craig

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

Despite the vintage of Canada’s rape shield provisions (which in their current manifestation have been in force since 1992), some trial judges continue to misinterpret and/or misapply the Criminal Code provisions limiting the use of evidence of a sexual assault complainant’s other sexual activity. These errors seem to flow from a combination of factors including a general misunderstanding on the part of some trial judges as to what section 276 requires and a failure on the part of some trial judges to properly identify, and fully remove, problematic assumptions about sex and gender from their analytical approach to the use …

The High Cost Of Transferring The Dream, Kim Brooks

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

This paper is part of a larger project where I use the facts in tax decisions to reveal something about who we are. It looks through a small window into the lives of the people who find themselves caught between our collective and their individual expenditure aspirations. More specifically, it explores the circumstances in which individuals find that their outstanding tax debts pose a threat to their ability to maintain ownership of their home.

In this paper I use the facts of tax cases for two ends. First, I am interested in disrupting legal knowledge hierarchies. We choose cases to …

Consent To Psychiatric Treatment: From Insight (Into Illness) To Incite (A Riot), Sheila Wildeman

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

The aim of this chapter is to go back to the basics on consent to treatment, starting with the right to refuse and building from there. Part II addresses the leading judicial statements on the value of medical self-determination, and in light of these statements, considers what is at stake in psychiatric treatment choice. Part III explores the three core elements of valid consent to treatment -- namely that consent be voluntary, informed and capable -- with attention to variation in the law amongst provinces and territories, and some lines of analysis and critique specifically applicable to mental health care …

Agenda-Setting In The Regulatory State: Theory And Evidence, Cary Coglianese, Daniel E. Walters

Faculty Scholarship

Government officials who run administrative agencies must make countless decisions every day about what issues and work to prioritize. These agenda-setting decisions hold enormous implications for the shape of law and public policy, but they have received remarkably little attention by either administrative law scholars or social scientists who study the bureaucracy. Existing research offers few insights about the institutions, norms, and inputs that shape and constrain agency discretion over their agendas or about the strategies that officials employ in choosing to elevate certain issues while putting others on the back burner. In this article, we advance the study of …

Taking Dignity Seriously: Excavating The Backdrop Of The Eighth Amendment, Meghan J. Ryan

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

The U.S. punishment system is in turmoil. We have a historically unprecedented number of offenders in prison, and our prisoners are serving longer sentences than in any other country. States are surreptitiously experimenting with formulas for lethal injection cocktails, and some prisoners are suffering from botched executions. Despite this tumult, the Eighth Amendment of our Constitution does place limits on the punishments that may be imposed and how they may be implemented. The difficulty, though, is that the Supreme Court’s Eighth Amendment jurisprudence is a bit of a mess. The Court has been consistent in stating that a focus on …

The State Courts Centre For Dispute Resolution: Serving The Society With Quality Dispute Resolution Services, Dorcas Quek Anderson

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

Court Alternative Dispute Resolution (“ADR”) has its origins in a 1994 pilot project in the Subordinate Courts (as it was known then) to have selected District Judges assist in resolving civil disputes using ADR processes. Within two decades, Court ADR has been extended to the entire gamut of cases filed in court, including civil claims, minor criminal offences and family disputes. Court ADR services, which have been known as “Court Dispute Resolution”, have become integral to the delivery of justice in the State Courts. As the Honourable The Chief Justice Sundaresh Menon has observed, ADR has been promoted as the …

Young Adulthood As A Transitional Legal Category: Science, Social Change, And Justice Policy, Elizabeth S. Scott, Richard J. Bonnie, Laurence Steinberg

Faculty Scholarship

In the past decade, much attention has focused on developmental brain research and its implications for the regulation of crime. Public and policy interest has been directed primarily toward juveniles. In light of recent research, courts and legislatures increasingly have rejected the punitive response of the 1990s and embraced a developmental approach to young offenders. Of particular importance in propelling this trend has been the framework offered by the U.S. Supreme Court in a series of Eighth Amendment opinions that have rejected harsh adult sentences for juveniles. These decisions, supported by adolescent brain research, rested on two empirically based principles: …

The Trouble With 'Bureaucracy', Deborah L. Brake

Articles

Despite heightened public concern about the prevalence of sexual assault in higher education and the stepped-up efforts of the federal government to address it, new stories from survivors of sexual coercion and rape, followed by institutional betrayal, continue to emerge with alarming frequency. More recently, stories of men found responsible and harshly punished for such conduct in sketchy campus procedures have trickled into the public dialogue, forming a counter-narrative in the increasingly polarized debate over what to do about sexual assault on college campuses. Into this frayed dialogue, Jeannie Suk and Jacob Gersen have contributed a provocative new article criticizing …

Reviving Paycheck Fairness: Why And How The Factor-Other-Than-Sex Defense Matters, Deborah L. Brake

Articles

Ever since the Supreme Court’s short-lived decision in Ledbetter v. Goodyear Tire Company, the equal pay movement has coalesced around the Paycheck Fairness Act as the legal reform strategy for addressing the gender wage gap. The centerpiece of the Act would tighten the Factor Other Than Sex defense (FOTS) to require the employer’s sex-neutral factor to be bona fide, job-related for the position in question, and consistent with business necessity. Even without the Paycheck Fairness Act, some recent lower court decisions have interpreted the existing Equal Pay Act to set limits on the nondiscriminatory factors that can satisfy the …

Health And Taxes: Hospitals, Community Health And The Irs, Mary Crossley

Articles

The Affordable Care Act created new conditions of federal tax exemption for nonprofit hospitals, including a requirement that hospitals conduct a community health needs assessment (CHNA) every three years to identify significant health needs in their communities and then to develop and implement a strategy responding to those needs. As a result, hospitals must now do more than provide charity care to their patients in exchange for the benefits of tax exemption, and the CHNA requirement has the potential both to prompt a radical change in hospitals’ relationship to their communities and to enlist hospitals as meaningful contributors to community …

Keeping It Real: Why Congress Must Act To Restore Pell Grant Funding For Prisoners, Spearit

Articles

In 1994, Congress passed the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act (VCCLEA), a provision of which revoked Pell Grant funding “to any individual who is incarcerated in any federal or state penal institution.” This essay highlights the counter-productive effects this particular provision has on penological goals. The essay suggests Congress acknowledge the failures of the ban on Pell Grant funding for prisoners, and restore such funding for all qualified prisoners.