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Postpartum Psychosis On Trial: A Preview Of Commonwealth V. Clancy, Jolie Zangari

Scholarly Works

In the case of Commonwealth v. Clancy, the deaths of three young children are the focus of the upcoming criminal trial.  However, the identity of their killer will not be at issue.  The children, Cora, Dawson, and Callan Clancy, were killed by their mother, Lindsay Clancy, who then attempted suicide, but survived with severe permanent injuries. The critical issue to be litigated is—why?  Why did she kill them?  Most fundamentally at issue is whether Lindsay Clancy was suffering from symptoms of a mental disease so severe that she should be found not guilty by reason of insanity.

The Commonwealth of …

Race And Racism In Canada’S Immigration Detention System, Efrat Arbel, Prasanna Balasundaram, Hanna Gros, Nana Yanful

All Faculty Publications

Race and Racism in Canada's Immigration Detention System is the first comprehensive, independent study to examine race and racism in Canada's immigration detention system. Grounded in rigorous legal analysis and qualitative research, the study draws on interviews with 50 participants, including people with lived experience of immigration detention, as well as lawyers, paralegals, and service providers who work in immigration detention. The research was guided by an advisory board of people with lived-experience in immigration detention and co-led by a collaborative research team.

The Punishment Paradox, Steven Arrigg Koh

Faculty Scholarship

What does criminal punishment do? Across centuries of criminal legal thought, a shared answer persists: punishment incapacitates the wrongdoer. And yet punishment sometimes yields its opposite. Paradoxically, punishment sometimes becomes a rallying point-expanding community identification and solidarity around the defendant. This Article shows this punishment paradox using the 2023-24 prosecutions of President Trump and recent and historical case examples-from Luigi Mangione to Karen Read to Rosa Parks. By arguing that criminal law can generate solidarity rather than stigma, the Article both rethinks foundational theories of punishment and reconsiders the role of criminal law in democratic politics. Such an approach transcends …

Reproductive Wrongful Convictions: The Making Of "Unfit" Mothers, Valena Beety

Articles by Maurer Faculty

This Article draws a straight line from wrongful convictions of women in the past to criminal charges based on pregnancy and parenting behaviors today. Faulty forensic evidence and biased evidence based on sex-stereotypes have, in combination, been used to convict innocent women, particularly in situations where an accident or health event was misconstrued to be a criminal act. Seventy-four percent of known exonerated women were wrongly convicted where no crime occurred. Similarly, in criminalizing pregnancy behaviors, police, medical personnel, or prosecutors erroneously label a non-criminal event, such as a miscarriage or stillbirth, as criminal. Criminal charges are being brought against …

Civil Death By A Thousand Cuts, Eisha Jain

Faculty Publications

Commentators have leveled trenchant critiques of collateral consequences of criminal conviction, analogizing them to a form of “civil death.” This Essay develops the related concept of “civil death by a thousand cuts” in two senses. First, penalties such as voting bans or deportation after a conviction are often just the tip of the iceberg. Second, a system of far-flung, intertwined civil and criminal penalties portends the death of a civil society capable of recognizing and mediating excessive penalties. Recognizing how these penalties operate—and how difficult they can be to address—is a critical step toward creating a more proportionate criminal legal …

Civil Rights Microviolations, Michael Kagan, Alissa Cooley Yonesawa

Scholarly Works

No abstract provided.

Legal Ethics Of Ai Snake Oil: Navigating The Hype, Harm, And Hope Of Legal Ai, Drew Simshaw

Scholarly Works

This paper argues that the legal ethics of AI extend far beyond competence and hallucinations. It shows how AI often functions as a mirror, exposing deeper ethical questions about institutional incentives, lawyer wellbeing, access to justice, and AI's broader social and environmental impacts.

Justifying The Fourth Amendment, Daniel Epps

Vanderbilt Law Review

Why does the Fourth Amendment belong in the Constitution? This question is not whether society should impose some legal restraints on government searches and seizures. Rather, why should such protections reside in our national charter, superior to other forms of law and insulated from change via ordinary majoritarian political processes? Despite major disputes about the Fourth Amendment's content, Fourth Amendment theorists rarely ask this question. Almost all agree that the Fourth Amendment's constitutional protections are critically important-even if no one can agree exactly what those protections are.
This Article seeks a justification for the Fourth Amendment-the reason why search-and-seizure protections …

Scaling Private Remedies To Public Problems: A Resilient Property Theory Analysis, Marc L. Roark

Articles, Chapters in Books and Other Contributions to Scholarly Works

No abstract provided.

Disconsents, Daryl J. Levinson, David E. Pozen

Faculty Scholarship

Consent is an indispensable standard and organizing principle in any liberal legal order that prizes self-directed autonomy, self-identified preferences, and collective agreement. Yet consent’s capacity to advance those values has become increasingly uncertain in a society beset by power imbalances, information asymmetries, and multiple forms of polarization. In this Article, we document how the rise of neoliberalism has led to greater reliance on consent throughout U.S. law, while at the same time leading to greater doubts about its moral efficacy and empirical feasibility. Connecting and generalizing pathologies of consent-based regulation that have been identified within myriad domains, the Article identifies …

Criminal Law: Secretive Sheriffs: Opacity And Variation In California’S Jail Responses To Covid-19, Aparna Komarla, Hadar Aviram

The Judges' Book

Agnotology, a term coined by Robert Proctor and Iain Boal, is the study of culturally produced ignorance, which assumes that gaps in knowledge are not coincidental but rather reflect social values and interests. In this Chapter, we apply this context to a domain in which information gaps have life-or-death consequences: healthcare in county jails, and more particularly, the availability, or lack thereof, of COVID-19 data from California’s fifty-eight county jail systems.

Our argument is twofold: First, that public ignorance about jail healthcare conditions is not accidental but is instead the product of weak state oversight and a culture of noncooperation …

Dismantling The Whiteness Of Legal Education, Doron Samuel-Siegel

Law Faculty Publications

Whiteness is not merely a racial description. Whiteness operates as allegiance to structural racism. The quiet engine of racial hierarchy, whiteness pervades and shapes traditional legal education, rendering legal pedagogy a structurally racist enterprise. Legal education not only reproduces the racism embedded in the law and legal profession, but also obscures the ways legal doctrine, professional norms, and pedagogical practices normalize, protect, and make invisible the advantages that accrue to whiteness itself. In doing so, itproduces lawyers ill-equipped to dismantle structural injustice.

This Article breaks new ground in the scholarship on legal pedagogy by defining whiteness as it operates within …

The Spectrum Of Limited Jurisdictions Courts: Exploring The City And Justice Courts In New York State, Alyssa Clark

Electronic Theses & Dissertations (2024 - present)

This dissertation is an investigation of decisions and outcomes in an important but seldom studied sector of the criminal justice system, the lower tiers of criminal courts (hereinafter referred to as LJCs). The LJCs in New York State (the subject of this dissertation) vary across two dimensions. The first dimension is court characteristics, which includes integration into a statewide court system (i.e., Justice Court vs. City Court). The second dimension is geodemographic characteristics (i.e., rural, suburban, and urban demographic characteristics). Recognizing this gap in literature, this dissertation provides an exploratory examination of the LJC’s patterns of case disposition and sentencing …

Undermining Discretion: The Selective Attacks On Progressive Prosecutors, Angela J. Davis

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

Prosecutors are the most powerful officials in the criminal legal system. They decide whether to bring criminal charges and what those criminal charges should be. These decisions are totally within their discretion. The U.S. Supreme Court has consistently protected the power and discretion of prosecutors in making these decisions, and legal challenges to the exercise of prosecutorial discretion have been largely unsuccessful.

In recent years, a growing number of individuals have successfully run for chief prosecutor on platforms of reducing the prison and jail populations, consistent with public safety. They pledged to use their power and discretion to implement policies …

Misinformation And The Law, Gustavo Ribeiro

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

This Article bridges critical gaps between the growing body of social science research on misinformation and the persistent challenges jurors face in evaluating potentially unreliable evidence in courtrooms. Misinformation—a pervasive issue undermining decision-making in democratic societies—mirrors the difficulties jurors encounter in distinguishing truth from falsehood amid compelling but unreliable evidence. The consequences of such challenges are dire: wrongful convictions, racial disparities, and the erosion of public trust in the legal system.

This Article is the first piece of legal scholarship to provide a comprehensive discussion of current research on the psychological mechanisms underlying susceptibility to misinformation—such as the illusory truth …

The New Neccesity, Ezra Rosser

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

According to the U.S. Supreme Court, cities are free to criminalize homelessness. The 2024 case City of Grants Pass v. Johnson is the most important homelessness case in decades and was a significant blow to advocates for the unhoused. The conservative majority rejected the idea that city ordinances criminalizing sleeping in public amounted to cruel and unusual punishment insofar as they penalized status. There is no sidestepping the loss. But within the faint glow of the embers of the oral argument and of the decision itself, there is the possibility that a new understanding of necessity, supported by the same …

Unsuccessful? Universal Human Rights And The United Nations: Russian Imperialism In Ukraine And The Post-Udhr International System, Sofiia Novytska

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

Human universality has always stood as a controversial subject and remains politically contentious today. Following the humanitarian crisis of World War II, the international community was determined to protect the integrity and dignity of people worldwide by developing the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights. However, universal human rights were not invented by the Declaration and were already conceptually established in global ancient thought, further evolved into Early Modern scholarship, and later paved the way for modern humanitarian frameworks. The UDHR was not universally well-received, and was criticized for its revolutionary legal character, postcolonial contestation, and practical ambiguity. The …

The Future Of The Furman Challenge To The Death Penalty, Scott W. Howe

Georgia Law Review

This article revisits the core argument against the death penalty that Professor Anthony Amsterdam offered in Furman v. Georgia. The article situates itself, however, in a modern, forward-facing context by accounting for post-Furman death penalty developments. These include the thirteen federal executions during the last six months of President Trump’s first term, the thirty-seven commutations of federal death sentences by President Biden, and the executive order by President Trump, issued on the first day of his second term, directing vigorous use of the federal death penalty and aid and encouragement in the use of capital punishment by the …

The Death Penalty For Bribery-Related Corruption In Social Assistance During Non-Natural Disasters: A Legal Certainty Perspective, Elly Sudarti, Sahuri Lasmadi, Andi Agus Salim, Riana Devi Lestari, Mohammad Thoriq Bahrie

Padjadjaran Jurnal Ilmu Hukum (Journal of Law)

This article analyzes the judge's verdict regarding the bribery corruption of social assistance during a non-natural disaster committed by Juliari Batubara. It questions whether such bribery corruption can be punishable by the death penalty. Juliari was not sentenced to death because the law only threatens the death penalty under natural disaster conditions, and COVID-19 is not considered a natural disaster. The death penalty is only threatened for corruption under Article 2, paragraph 2, not for bribery corruption. The judge's decision followed conventional legal norms, resulting in a verdict that was overly normative and failed to address the issue. This article …

Debating Expert Authority In Corruption Cases: The Challenge Of Interpreting State Financial Losses Under The 2023 Indonesian Criminal Code, Wendy Kenafiana Assanti, Hendry Julian Noor

Padjadjaran Jurnal Ilmu Hukum (Journal of Law)

The 2023 Indonesian Criminal Code revises the formulation of corruption offenses, including rules on proving state financial losses; however, the elucidation of Article 603 raises questions regarding the competent institution and the evidentiary weight of audit results. This study examines how the provision may perpetuate ongoing debates over experts’ authority to determine state financial losses, which are often perceived as affecting legal certainty, and proposes a reformulation to provide clearer legal guidance. This doctrinal study employs statutory and case law approaches, utilizes qualitative methods, and applies Gustav Radbruch’s perspective as an analytical lens. It finds that Article 603’s elucidation uses …

Jalan Tengah Indonesia Menuju Penghapusan Pidana Mati, Calvin Wie

Jurnal Hukum & Pembangunan

Constitutional Court Decision Number 2-3/PUU-V/2007 states that the death penalty does not conflict with the 1945 Constitution of the Republic of Indonesia. However, the decision provides a kind of guideline that suggests that efforts should be made to moderate the death penalty, including by removing the death penalty from the main criminal system and by formulating provisions for postponing the implementation of the death penalty (conditional capital punishment). This was followed up in the reform of the national criminal law with the promulgation of Law Number 1 of 2023 concerning the Criminal Code. This research aims to determine the legal …

การรอการกำหนดโทษหรือรอการลงโทษจำคุกในฐานความผิดทางอาญาร้ายแรง (Suspension Of Sentence And Suspension Of Punishment For Serious Criminal Offenses), Natha Wichien

Chulalongkorn University Law Journal

การรอการกำหนดโทษหรือรอการลงโทษ ตามประมวลกฎหมายอาญา มาตรา 56 เป็นมาตรการที่มีความสำคัญในกระบวนการยุติธรรมทางอาญา ซึ่งเป็นมาตรการที่บัญญัติขึ้นโดยมีวัตถุประสงค์ให้ศาลใช้ดุลพินิจรอการกำหนดโทษหรือรอการลงโทษสำหรับคดีที่มีอัตราโทษจำคุกระยะสั้นหรือโทษปรับ ตามทฤษฎีการลงโทษเพื่อแก้ไขพฤติกรรมของผู้กระทำความผิด กล่าวคือ ในคดีความผิดอาญาที่มีโทษจำคุกหรือปรับ และศาลจะลงโทษจำคุกไม่เกิน 5 ปี ทั้งนี้ เพื่อมิให้ผู้กระทำความผิดเล็กน้อยนั้นเข้าไปปะปนกับผู้กระทำความผิดเป็นอาจิณและเลียนแบบพฤติกรรมนั้นจนกลับมากระทำความผิดซ้ำอีก และเพื่อให้โอกาสผู้กระทำความผิดได้รู้สำนึกถึงสิ่งที่ได้กระทำลงไป รวมถึงสามารถกลับมาดำเนินชีวิตในสังคมได้อย่างเป็นปกติ แต่ในทางกลับกันเมื่อพิจารณาจากการบังคับใช้ประมวลกฎหมายอาญา มาตรา 56 ศาลสามารถใช้ดุลพินิจได้กับทุกฐานความผิด แม้ลักษณะของฐานความผิดนั้นจะกระทบกระเทือนต่อความปลอดภัยของสังคมมากเพียงใด แต่หากโทษจำคุกที่ศาลลงมีกำหนดไม่เกิน 5 ปี ศาลก็สามารถสั่งรอการกำหนดโทษหรือรอการลงโทษได้กับทุกกรณี ซึ่งอาจจะขัดหรือแย้งกับทฤษฎีการลงโทษทางอาญาประการอื่น กล่าวคือ ทฤษฎีการลงโทษเพื่อแก้แค้น การลงโทษเพื่อข่มขู่ยับยั้ง การลงโทษเพื่อตัดผู้กระทำผิดออกจากสังคมรวมถึงการลงโทษเพื่อป้องกันอาชญากรรม อันส่งผลกระทบต่อความรู้สึกและการได้รับความยุติธรรมของผู้เสียหาย หรือเหยื่อในคดีอาญารวมทั้งประชาชนในสังคม เนื่องจากในบางกรณีเป็นฐานความผิดที่มีความร้ายแรง และเป็นอันตรายต่อสังคม แต่ผู้กระทำความผิดกลับไม่ถูกลงโทษ ยิ่งไปกว่านั้นอาจทำให้ผู้เสียหายไม่ได้รับความยุติธรรม และบุคคลทั่วไปย่อมเข้าใจว่าการกระทำร้ายแรงเช่นนั้นสามารถกระทำได้โดยไม่ต้องรับผลใด ๆ จากการกระทำดังกล่าว ฉะนั้นจึงควรปรับปรุงแก้ไข และจัดทำคำแนะนำเกี่ยวกับวิธีการรอการลงโทษหรือรอการกำหนดโทษให้มีความชัดเจนยิ่งขึ้น โดยการกำหนดแนวทาง หรือข้อพิจารณาที่ผู้ใช้กฎหมายควรให้การคำนึง และให้ความสำคัญยิ่งขึ้นเกี่ยวกับฐานความผิดร้ายแรงที่ไม่ควรรอการกำหนดโทษหรือรอการลงโทษ เพื่อให้การลงโทษเป็นไปตามสัดส่วนของการกระทำความผิด และตรงตามทฤษฎีวัตถุประสงค์ของการลงโทษ

Book Review: The Role Of Civil Society In Transitional Justice: The Case Of Russia, Myra Dahgaypaw

Genocide Studies and Prevention: An International Journal

This book review evaluates Selbi Durdiyeva's The Role of Civil Society in Transitional Justice: The Case of Russia as a vital contribution to genocide prevention scholarship, which is particularly timely given Russia's mass atrocity crimes in Ukraine and their connection to domestic repression. The book's theoretical innovation in challenging state-centric transitional justice paradigms through rigorous analysis of Memorial NGO, Orthodox Church activities, and revisionist groups across three decades of post-Soviet Russia is critical for the transitional justice field. It is worth highlighting Durdiyeva's unique postcolonial perspective as someone from a former Soviet territory studying the metropole, and her demonstration that …

Innocent Until Proven Guilty, Disenfranchised All The Same: Hidden Voter Suppression Within American Jails, Kennedy Hill

Arkansas Law Review

Jails throughout the United States hold thousands of legally eligible voters who have not been convicted of a crime While those convicted of felonies are often statutorily disenfranchised, pretrial detainees retain their civil rights—including the right to vote. In theory, this should guarantee them a voice. In practice, pretrial detention operates like a legal disqualification. Without meaningful enforcement mechanisms, the right to vote becomes hollow.

This Comment argues that implementing a national standard based on the proactive policies of Massachusetts and Nevada will ensure accessible voting for pretrial detainees. To build that argument, this Comment first explores the low level …

Religious Liberty And The Constitution, Steven J. Heyman

Chicago-Kent Law Review

No abstract provided.

The Myths And Legal Implications Of Cancel Culture, Yekun Zhou

Loyola of Los Angeles Entertainment Law Review

No abstract provided.

Legal Issues Arising From The Military Use Of Ai-Supported Biometrics, Marten Zwanenburg

International Law Studies

Biometrics is increasingly used by armed forces for a variety of purposes, such as access control, the registration of detainees, and increasingly also targeting. The capabilities of biometric systems are considerably strengthened when they are enabled by artificial intelligence (AI). This article analyzes legal questions that are raised by the military use of such AI-supported biometrics. It argues that relevant legal frameworks are International Humanitarian Law, international human rights law, and the right to privacy in particular, as well as data protection law. The article finds that arguably, IHL may require the use of (AI-supported) biometrics in certain situations if …

García Rodríguez Et Al. V. México, Madeline Prokop

Loyola of Los Angeles International and Comparative Law Review

This case is about the arrest, prosecution, conviction and detention of two suspects of the murder of the mayor of a Mexican municipality. The Court found Mexico in violation of several articles of the American Convention and of the Inter-American Convention to Prevent and Punish Torture.

Full Issue

BYU Law Review

No abstract provided.

Mobility And Power In Temp Work, Andrew Elmore

BYU Law Review

Labor mobility is an underdiscussed determinant of temp worker power. Drawing on original interviews with professional and blue-collar workers who work as and alongside temps, this Article shows how businesses use staffing agencies to restrict the labor mobility of contingent workers. Staffing agencies limit worker mobility by imposing user- and worker-side contractual restraints while misrepresenting themselves to temp workers as their sole employer. They also exploit state-imposed mobility limitations by recruiting foreign nationals and people leaving incarceration and channeling them into their most precarious work. This enables clients to dismantle internal labor markets and to fill staffing shortages without raising …