Digital Commons Network^™

Newsroom: A Closer Look At Mass Incarceration, Roger Williams University School Of Law

Life of the Law School (1993- )

No abstract provided.

An Analysis Of The Legal And Practical Implications Of The Potential Increased Participation In Jury Service By Racial Minorities In The U.S. Criminal Justice System, Brian Keith Leonard

West Virginia Law Review

No abstract provided.

Foreign Precedents In Constitutional Adjudication By The Supreme Court Of Singapore, 1963-2013, Jack Tsen-Ta Lee

Washington International Law Journal

This article surveys the use of foreign precedents in constitutional adjudication by the Supreme Court of Singapore for over half of a century during the terms of the first three Chief Justices—Wee Chong Jin (1963–1990), Yong Pung How (1990–2006), and Chan Sek Keong (2006–2012)—and the first year in office of the fourth Chief Justice, Sundaresh Menon (2012–2013). It concludes that while judges have always cited foreign case law, they have only actually applied foreign cases where the wording of the Constitution and the constitutional arrangements in Singapore are fairly analogous to the constitutional texts and arrangements upon which the cases …

The Law And Politics Of The Charles Taylor Case, Charles Chernor Jalloh

Articles

This article discusses a rare successful prosecution of a head of state by a modern international criminal court. The case involved former Liberian president Charles Taylor. Taylor, who was charged and tried by the United Nations-backed Special Court for Sierra Leone ("SCSL'), was convicted in April 2013 for planning and aiding and abetting war crimes, crimes against humanity, and other serious international humanitarian law violations. He was sentenced to 50 years imprisonment. The SCSL Appeals Chamber upheld the historic conviction and sentence in September 2013. Taylor is currently serving his sentence in Great Britain.

This article, from an insider who …

A Prosecutor's Guide To Character Evidence: When Is Uncharged Possession Evidence Probative Of A Defendant's Intent To Distribute?, James Decleene

Marquette Law Review

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An Appeal To Common Sense: Why "Unappealable" District Court Decisions Should Be Subject To Appellate Review, Matthew D. Heins

Northwestern University Law Review

28 U.S.C. § 1291 vests jurisdiction in the United States Circuit Courts of Appeal to hear “appeals from all final decisions of the district courts of the United States.” Various circuit courts have, however, determined that they may only hear appeals of final “judicial” decisions, and that they do not have jurisdiction to hear appeals from final decisions of United States district courts if those decisions are “administrative.” Circuit courts have been loath to explicitly define the dividing line between the two classes of case, and have frequently invoked the potential availability of mandamus review as a means of placating …

Griggs At Midlife, Deborah A. Widiss

Michigan Law Review

Not all Supreme Court cases have a midlife crisis. But it is fair to say that Griggs v. Duke Power Co., which recently turned forty, has some serious symptoms. Griggs established a foundational proposition of employment discrimination law known as disparate impact liability: policies that significantly disadvantage racial minority or female employees can violate federal employment discrimination law, even if there is no evidence that the employer “intended” to discriminate. Griggs is frequently described as one of the most important decisions of the civil rights era, compared to Brown v. Board of Education for its “momentous social consequences.” In 1989, …

Lessons Unlearned: The Effects Of Statutory Ambiguity And The Interpretative Uncertainty It Injects In The Courts, Carolyn Singh

University of the District of Columbia Law Review

For centuries, courts have dealt with the challenge of imposing penalties for crimes when governing law changes. Applying the new provisions can be a straightforward exercise for courts, but when legislatures are ambiguous with regard to which law applies-forexample, to pending cases-the courts are forced to interpret what legislatures intended. For some judges, the answer is easily found in the plain meaning of the text. For others, legislative intent can become the deciding factor. Throughout United States history, this has been a manageable yet controversial task, but aside from interpretive differences among judges, creating laws with uncertainty is a dangerous …

Violence-Related Police Crime Arrests In The United States, 2005-2011, Philip M. Stinson, Steven L. Brewer Jr, Joelle K. Bridges

Criminal Justice Faculty Publications

This study is a quantitative content analysis of news reports and court records on 3,328 violence-related arrest cases of 2,586 individual sworn law enforcement officers during the years 2005-2011. The arrested officers were employed by 1,445 nonfederal state, local, special, constable, tribal, and regional law enforcement agencies located in 805 counties and independent cities in 49 states and the District of Columbia. Binary logistic regression and classification and regression tree (CART) analyses were conducted to predict criminal conviction in violence-related police crime arrest cases. Finding indicate that conviction of police officers on one or more offenses charged are driven by …

At The Fontier Of The Younger Doctrine: Reflections On Google V. Hood, Gil Seinfeld

Articles

On December 19, 2014, long-simmering tensions between Mississippi Attorney General Jim Hood and the search engine giant Google boiled over into federal court when Google filed suit against the Attorney General to enjoin him from bringing civil or criminal charges against it for alleged violations of the Mississippi Consumer Protection Act. Hood had been investigating and threatening legal action against Google for over a year for its alleged failure to do enough to prevent its search engine, advertisements, and YouTube website from facilitating public access to illegal, dangerous, or copyright protected goods. The case has garnered a great deal of …

Post-Sentencing Appellate Waivers, Kevin Bennardo

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

A sentencing appellate waiver is a criminal defendant’s promise not to appeal her sentence. These provisions routinely appear in federal defendants’ plea agreements. With a few narrow exceptions, a knowing and voluntary sentencing appellate waiver bars a defendant from appealing all issues within the waiver’s scope. Using models of judicial behavior and empirical studies, this Article argues that the inclusion of sentencing appellate waivers in plea agreements creates bargaining inefficiencies and removes important incentives from the sentencing process. As a solution, the Article proposes that sentencing appellate waivers should take the form of separate post-sentencing agreements.

Identifying The Culprit In Wrongful Convictions, Valena Elizabeth Beety

Tennessee Law Review

No abstract provided.

Sentencing Rules And Standards: How We Decide Criminal Punishment, Jacob Schuman

Tennessee Law Review

Over the past 300 years, American sentencing policy has alternated between "determinate" and "indeterminate" systems of deciding punishment. Debates over sentence determinacy have so far focused on three main questions: Who should decide punishment? What makes punishment fair? Why should we punish wrongdoers at all?

In this Article, I ask a new, fourth question: How should we decide punishment? First, I demonstrate that determinate sentencing uses rules to decide sentences, while indeterminate sentencing relies on standards. Next, I show how the trigger-based nature of rules-in contrast to the qualitative character of standards-makes them vulnerable to four different kinds of substantive …

Alternate Judges As Sine Qua Nons For International Criminal Trials, Megan A. Fairlie

Faculty Publications

When one of the three judges hearing the case against Vojislav Šešelj at the International Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) was disqualified during the deliberations phase of the prosecution, many observers assumed that the multi-year trial would have to be re-heard. Instead, the ICTY opted to begin deliberations anew once a judge — who has not spent a single day participating in the proceedings — has familiarized himself with the trial record. This article demonstrates why the plan to proceed with a new judge is both procedurally illegitimate and markedly at odds with the ICTY’s statutory guarantee of a …

Excusing Murder? Conservative Jurors’ Acceptance Of The Gay Panic Defense, Cynthia J. Najdowski, Jessica Salerno, Bette L. Bottoms, B. L. Harrington, Dave Kemner

Psychology Faculty Scholarship

We conducted a simulated trial study to investigate the effectiveness of a “gay-panic” provocation defense as a function of jurors’ political orientation. Mock jurors read about a murder case in which a male defendant claimed a victim provoked the killing by starting a fight, which either included or did not include the male victim making an unwanted sexual advance that triggered a state of panic in the defendant. Conservative jurors were significantly less punitive when the defendant claimed to have acted out of gay panic as compared to when this element was not part of the defense. In contrast, liberal …

The Legitimacy Crisis And The Future Of Courts, Orna Rabinovich-Einy

Cardozo Journal of Conflict Resolution

There is an overall legitimacy crisis in courts. The sources of this crisis have, to a large extent, been misconstrued. While there has been significant writing depicting the diminished quality, effectiveness, and fairness of courts, these phenomena have, for the most part, been viewed as distinct problems that warrant discrete solutions. This article shows that these problems are all manifestations of an overall legitimacy crisis that stems from the blurring of the originally stark distinctions between courts and alternatives. Traditionally, formal and informal dispute resolution processes had their own sources of legitimacy, each grounded in their respective distinctive (often opposing) …

Griswold And Its Surroundings: The 1963, '64, And '65 Terms, L.A. Powe

American University Law Review

No abstract provided.

Death Penalty, Amnesty Laws, And Forced Disappearances: Three Main Topics Of The Inter-American Corpus Juris In Criminal Law, Eduardo Ferrer Mac-Gregor, Pablo GonzáLez DomíNguez

Notre Dame Journal of International & Comparative Law

In this Article, Judge Eduardo Ferrer Mac-Gregor of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights and International Human Rights Researcher Pablo González Domínguez explore three of the richest and most contentious areas of the jurisprudence of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights: death penalty cases, amnesty law, and cased regarding forced disappearance. These topics encompass some of the most pressing human rights issues in the Inter-American System. For each topic, Ferrer Mac-Gregor and González Domínguez provide a succinct but comprehensive view of the Inter-American Court's jurisprudence, discuss the ways in which the core principles of this jurisprudence have been applied in …

Sexual Assault And Rape In The Military: The Invisible Victims Of International Gender Crimes At The Front Lines, Stella Cernak

Michigan Journal of Gender & Law

In the past several years in particular, intra-military sexual assault and rape in the U.S. armed forces have been the focus of frequent media attention and intense congressional debate. Despite reforms, the rate of intra-military sexual crimes continues to remain high, as does soldiers’ wariness to report instances of sexual violence to military commanders. These problems and others have invigorated the position taken by some that outside judicial review of intra- military sexual crimes is necessary to provide justice to victims and lower the rate of intra-military sexual assault and rape. This Note argues that one of the primary contributors …

The Surprising Acquittals In The Gotovina And Perišić Cases: Is The Icty Appeals Chamber A Trial Chamber In Sheep’S Clothing?, Mark A. Summers

Richmond Journal of Global Law & Business

No abstract provided.

The Rise And Fall Of Bad Judge: Lady Justice Is No Tramp, Taylor Simpson-Wood

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Anna Moscowitz Kross And The Home Term Part: A Second Look At The Nation's First Criminal Domestic Violence Court, Mae C. Quinn

Journal Articles

No abstract provided.

Military Tribunals And Due Process In Post-Revolutionary Egypt, Bianca C. Isaias

The International Lawyer

No abstract provided.

The Complexity Of International Criminal Trials Is Necessary, 48 Geo. Wash. Int'l L. Rev. 151 (2015), Stuart Ford

UIC Law Open Access Faculty Scholarship

There is a widespread belief among both academics and policymakers that international criminal trials are too complex. As a result, tribunals have come under enormous pressure to reduce the complexity of their trials. However, changes to trial procedure have not meaningfully affected trial complexity. This Article explains why these changes have failed and argues that the complexity of international criminal trials is necessary for them to achieve their purposes.

Using a multiple regression model of the factors driving trial complexity at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY), this Article shows that the largest drivers of complexity are …

Standards Of Legitimacy In Criminal Negotiations, Wesley Macneil Oliver, Rishi Batra

Faculty Articles

Scholarship on negotiation theory and practice is rich and well developed. Almost no work has been done, however, to translate to the criminal context the lessons learned about negotiation from extensive empirical study using the disciplines of economics, game theory, and psychology. This Article suggests that defense lawyers in criminal negotiations can employ tools frequently useful to negotiators in other arenas: neutral criteria as a standard of legitimacy. Judges sometimes exercise a type of discretion analogous to prosecutorial discretion. When they do so, they offer an independent, reasoned, and publicly available assessment of the factors that a prosecutor ought to …

Recusal Failure, Dmitry Bam

Faculty Publications

The American judiciary is suffering from a terrible affliction: biased judges. I am not talking about the subconscious or unconscious biases — stemming from different backgrounds, experiences, ideologies, etc. — that everyone, including judges, harbors. Rather, I am describing invidious, improper biases that lead judges to favor one litigant over another for reasons that almost everyone would agree should play no role in judicial decision-making: the desire to repay a debt of gratitude to those who helped the judge get elected and be reelected.

In this article, I argue that that recusal has failed to prevent biased judges from rendering …

Addressing Racial Disparities In Preschool Suspension And Expulsion Rates, Amy B. Cyphert

Tennessee Law Review

In 2014, the Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights published data for the first time that tracked preschool suspension and expulsion rates. The data was startling: not only were preschoolers being suspended and expelled, something that surprised many readers on its own, they were being suspended and expelled in racially disproportionate numbers, with African-American boys bearing the brunt of the discipline. Politicians, researchers and advocates quickly spoke out, noting that these numbers confirmed that the school to prison pipeline really starts in preschool, and calling for reform.

In this Article, I explore some of the policies and practices that …

The Relationship Between Inter-American Jurisdiction And States (National Systems): Some Pertinent Questions, Sergio GarcíA RamíRez

Notre Dame Journal of International & Comparative Law

In this Article, Judge Sergio García Ramírez of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights explores the complex and often vexing relationship between the Inter-American Human Rights system and the domestic human rights protections within the system's member states. García Ramírez identifies a number of challenges to implementing human rights protections in Latin America, many of which are rooted in a history of authoritarianism in the twentieth century and the nascent nature of the region's democratic institutions. Yet he sees solutions in the role of the Inter-American Court in the region. García Ramírez highlights the Court's role in interpreting international human …

The Procedural Aspect Of The Rule Of Law: India As A Case Study For Distinguishing Concept From Conception, Karina T. Hwang

CMC Senior Theses

In this thesis, the concept of the procedural aspect of the Rule of Law will be distinguished from what I argue are conceptions that are falsely promulgated as concept. The different aspects of the Rule of Law—form, substance, and procedure— are helpful in making the distinction between concept and conception. Examining procedure within the Rule of Law is particularly important, and I define a broader set of requirements of the concept of the procedural aspect of the Rule of Law. This concept is applied to understand the Indian conception of the Rule of Law, a particularly interesting case that brings …

Law As An Ally Or Enemy In The War On Cyberbullying: Exploring The Contested Terrain Of Privacy And Other Legal Concepts In The Age Of Technology And Social Media, A. Wayne Mackay

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

This article focuses on the role and limits of law as a response to cyberbullying. The problem of cyberbullying engages many of our most fundamental legal concepts and provides an interesting case study. Even when there is general agreement that the problem merits a legal response, there are significant debates about what that response should be. Which level and what branch of government can and should best respond? What is the most appropriate legal process for pursuing cyberbullies—traditional legal avenues or more creative restorative approaches? How should the rights and responsibilities of perpetrators, victims and even bystanders be balanced? Among …