Legal Studies Commons^™

Prison Abuse And Mental Health, Hayley R. Wolfe, Shelby Haas, Candace Olley

The Research and Scholarship Symposium

Abuse among mentally ill inmates is a relevant issue in prison systems worldwide. This presentation will focus on the pervasiveness and severity of this abuse in the US and abroad. Pertinent statistics regarding the prevalence of abuse among the mentally ill in prison systems, as well as the obstacles to obtaining such statistics will be presented. Following the major deinstitutionalization of mental hospitals in the 1970s, the mentally ill inmate population has seen exponential increase in the United States. Abuse statistics of the mentally ill in United Kingdom prisons will also be presented and analyzed, including concerns in prison staff ...

Recidivism And The Convict Labor Market, Alex Basinger

Georgia State Undergraduate Research Conference

No abstract provided.

Prosecution Of The Perpetrators Of Child Abuse Cases: Examination Of Focal Concerns Principles, Kerry F. Mcdonough

Georgia State Undergraduate Research Conference

No abstract provided.

Murder Mitigation In The Fifty-Two American Jurisdictions: A Case Study In Doctrinal Interrelation Analysis, Paul H. Robinson

Faculty Scholarship

The essay surveys the law in the fifty-two American jurisdictions with regard to the three doctrines that commonly provide a mitigation or defense to murder liability: common law provocation and its modern counterpart, extreme mental or emotional disturbance; the so-called diminished capacity defense and its modern counterpart, mental illness negating an offense element; and the insanity defense. The essay then examines the patterns among the jurisdictions in the particular formulation they adopt for the three doctrines, and the combinations in which those formulations commonly appear in different jurisdictions. After this review, the essay steps back to see what kinds of ...

Gideon And The Effective Assistance Of Counsel: The Rhetoric And The Reality, David Rudovsky

Faculty Scholarship

There is general agreement that the “promise” of Gideon has been systematically denied to large numbers of criminal defendants. In some cases, no counsel is provided; in many others, excessive caseloads and lack of resources prevent appointed counsel from providing effective assistance. Public defenders are forced to violate their ethical obligations by excessive case assignments that make it impossible for them to practice law in accordance with professional standards, to say nothing of Sixth Amendment commands. This worsening situation is caused by the failure of governmental bodies to properly fund indigent defense services and by the refusal of courts to ...

Your Friends And Neighbors: Localized Economic Development And Criminal Activity, Matthew Freedman, Emily Owens

Matthew Freedman

We exploit a sudden shock to demand for a subset of low-wage workers generated by the 2005 Base Realignment and Closure (BRAC) program in San Antonio, Texas to identify the effects of localized economic development on crime. We use a difference-in-difference methodology that takes advantage of variation in BRAC’s impact over time and across neighborhoods. We find that appropriative criminal behavior increases in neighborhoods where a fraction of residents experienced increases in earnings. This effect is driven by residents who were unlikely to be BRAC beneficiaries, implying that criminal opportunities are important in explaining patterns of crime.

Conditionally accepted ...

Justice: 1850s San Francisco And The California Gold Rush, Paul H. Robinson, Sarah M. Robinson

Faculty Scholarship

Using stories from the 1848-1851 California gold miners, the 1851 San Francisco vigilante committees, Nazi concentration camps of the 1940s, and wagon trains of American westward migration in the 1840s, the chapter illustrates that it is part of human nature to see doing justice as a value in itself—in people’s minds it is not dependent for justification on the practical benefits it brings. Having justice done is sufficiently important to people that they willingly suffer enormous costs to obtain it, even when they were neither hurt by the wrong nor in a position to benefit from punishing the ...

Punishment: Drop City And The Utopian Communes, Paul H. Robinson, Sarah M. Robinson

Faculty Scholarship

Using stories from the utopian non-punishment hippie communes of the late 1960's, the essay challenges today’s anti-punishment movement by demonstrating that the benefits of cooperative action are available only with the adoption of a system for punishing violations of core rules. Rather than being an evil system anathema to right-thinking people, punishment is the lynchpin of the cooperative action that has created human success.

This is Chapter 3 from the forthcoming general audience book Living Beyond the Law: Lessons from Pirates, Prisoners, Lepers and Survivors (Rowman & Littlefield 2014). Included is a table of contents for the book and ...

Catalogs, Gideon Parchomovsky, Alex Stein

Faculty Scholarship

It is a virtual axiom in the world of law that legal norms come in two prototypes: rules and standards. The accepted lore suggests that rules should be formulated to regulate recurrent and frequent behaviors, whose contours can be defined with sufficient precision. Standards, by contrast, should be employed to address complex, variegated, behaviors that require the weighing of multiple variables. Rules rely on an ex ante perspective and are therefore considered the domain of the legislator; standards embody a preference for ex post, ad-hoc, analysis and are therefore considered the domain of courts. The rules/standards dichotomy has become ...

Asymmetric Empirical Similarity, Joshua C. Teitelbaum

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The paper offers a formal model of analogical legal reasoning and takes the model to data. Under the model, the outcome of a new case is a weighted average of the outcomes of prior cases. The weights capture precedential influence and depend on fact similarity (distance in fact space) and precedential authority (position in the judicial hierarchy). The empirical analysis suggests that the model is a plausible model for the time series of U.S. maritime salvage cases. Moreover, the results evince that prior cases decided by inferior courts have less influence than prior cases decided by superior courts.

Women As Expert Witnesses: A Review Of The Literature, Tess M. S. Neal

Publications of the University of Nebraska Public Policy Center

This review of women’s participation in the legal system as expert witnesses examines the empirical literature on the perceived credibility and persuasiveness of women compared with men experts. The effects of expert gender are complex and sometimes depend on the circumstances of the case. Some studies find no differences, some find favorable effects for women and others for men, and still others find that expert gender interacts with other circumstances of the case. The findings are interpreted through social role theory and the role incongruity theory of prejudice. Future directions for research are identified and implications are considered for ...

Invited Response To "Think Again: Prostitution", Donna M. Hughes Dr.

Donna M. Hughes

Aziza Ahmed begins her article “Think Again: Prostitution” with the oldest slur against women: that “prostitution may be the world’s oldest profession” (January/ February 2014).

Implementing The Policy Of The U.N. Declaration On The Rights Of Indigenous Peoples, Roxanne T. Ornelas

The International Indigenous Policy Journal

On September 13, 2007, the United Nations General Assembly voted to adopt the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP). This was an historic event as work on UNDRIP had been ongoing for 30 years before its passage. Today, UNDRIP provides a framework for addressing human rights protections for Indigenous peoples globally. This article examines the significance of UNDRIP as a public policy tool for developing national policy to support future resource and land management consultations that are based on free, prior, and informed consent.

Towards An Understanding Of Modern Policing Norms: Social Identity, Organization Identity, And Efficient Policing, Billy R. Close, Patrick Leon Mason

Patrick L. Mason

This study examines the relationship between bureaucratic identity, social identity and policing outcomes. We utilize alternative outcomes tests to examine traffic stop data collected by the Florida Highway Patrol during 2000-2009. This study finds that representation of African American and Hispanic troopers improves outcomes for all groups of drivers, by increasing efficiency in searches. All troopers, regardless of race, engage in fewer searches when they are assigned to racially diverse or minority troops. Importantly, we show that this decrease in search activity simultaneously yields higher hit rates, thereby increasing efficiency. Finally, the data reveal that the greatest change in search ...

Discounting And Criminals' Implied Risk Preferences, Murat C. Mungan, Jonathan Klick

Faculty Scholarship

It is commonly assumed that potential offenders are more responsive to increases in the certainty than increases in the severity of punishment. An important implication of this assumption within the Beckerian law enforcement model is that criminals are risk-seeking. This note adds to existing literature by showing that offenders who discount future monetary benefits can be more responsive to the certainty rather than the severity of punishment, even when they are risk averse, and even when their disutility from imprisonment rises proportionally (or more than proportionally) with the length of the sentence.

How Attorneys Question Children About The Dynamics Of Sexual Abuse And Disclosure In Criminal Trials., Stacia N. Stolzenberg, Thomas D. Lyon

Stacia Stolzenberg

Little is known about how the dynamics of sexual abuse and disclosure are discussed in criminal court. We examined how attorneys ask child witnesses in sexual abuse cases (N = 72, 6–16 years of age) about their prior conversations, both with suspects and with disclosure recipients. Prosecutors’ questions were more open-ended than defense attorneys, but most questions asked by either attorney were yes/no questions, and children tended to provide unelaborated responses. Prosecutors were more inclined to ask about children’s prior conversations with suspects than defense attorneys, but focused on the immediate abuse rather than on grooming behavior or ...

A Systems Approach To Error Reduction In Criminal Justice, John Hollway

Faculty Scholarship

The “systems approach” has been used, improved, and refined over time to improve safety and reduce errors in a variety of complex, high-risk industries, including health care, aviation, and manufacturing, among others. Such an approach targets the system for improvement rather than specific individuals within the system, and seeks to provide an environment that maximizes each participant’s ability to act safely and in a way that achieves the goals of the system. It prizes a non-punitive culture of disclosure to identify errors, gathers and applies data to understand the causes of the error, and tests systems changes to prevent ...

Assessing Sheriff’S Office Emergency And Disaster Website Communications, Philip M. Stinson, John Liederbach, L. Fleming Fallon, Hans Schmalzried

Criminal Justice Faculty Publications

Sheriff’s offices are an integral component of the public health emergency preparedness and response system in the United States. During a public health emergency or disaster, sheriff’s offices need to communicate with people affected by the event. Sheriff’s office websites are logical sources for information about disaster preparedness and response efforts. No prior research evaluates emergency preparedness and response resources available through sheriff’s office websites. The current research is a national study of sheriff’s office websites to assess the availability of information relating to emergency preparedness and response. A content analysis of 2,590 sheriff ...

Legitimation, Mark C. Modak-Truran

Mark C Modak-Truran

This article identifies three different conceptions of legitimation - pre-modern, modern, and post-secular - that compete both within and across national boundaries for the coveted prize of informing the social imaginary regarding how the government and the law should be legitimated in constitutional democracies. Pre-modern conceptions of legitimation consider governments and rulers legitimate if they are ordained by God or if the political system is ordered in accordance with the normative cosmic order. Contemporary proponents of the pre-modern conception range from those in the United States who maintain that the government has been legitimated by the “Judeo-Christian tradition” to those in predominantly ...

Racial And Ethnic Profiling In Massachusetts: An Examination Of Police Policy And Practice, Anne-Marie Gabrielle Hakstian

Law and Public Policy Dissertations

The use of extra-legal factors such as race and ethnicity in police decision-making impacts the public's overall trust and confidence in the law and in the police as enforcers of the law. Because the police play a key role in ensuring the primacy of the rule of law, the practice of racial profiling can undermine the legitimacy of the law in American communities. Widespread recognition of the problem during the 1990s led several states to pass legislation banning the practice of racial profiling.

In Massachusetts, the legislature enacted a statute with the purpose of identifying the cities and towns ...