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Racial Trauma In Civil Rights Representation, Angela Onwuachi-Willig, Anthony V. Alfieri

Michigan Law Review

Narratives of trauma told by clients and communities of color have inspired an increasing number of civil rights and antiracist lawyers and academics to call for more trauma-informed training for law students and lawyers. These advocates have argued not only for greater trauma-sensitive practices and trauma-centered interventions on behalf of adversely impacted individuals and groups but also for greater awareness of the risks of secondary or vicarious trauma for lawyers who represent traumatized clients and communities. In this Article, we join this chorus of attorneys and academics. Harnessing the recent civil rights case of P.P. v. Compton Unified School District …

Senior Day 2022, University Of Michigan Law School

Commencement and Honors Materials

Program for the May 6, 2022 University of Michigan Law School Senior Day.

Prison And Jail Civil Rights/Conditions Cases: Longitudinal Statistics, 1970-2021, Margo Schlanger

Law & Economics Working Papers

These tables relating to prison and jail civil rights litigation in federal court update prior-published versions, using data available as of April 6, 2022.

The Tables show longitudinal statistics about case filings, features, and outcomes, for jail/prison civil rights and conditions cases and for the entire federal civil docket, grouped by case category.
List of tables:
Table A: Incarcerated Population and Prison/Jail Civil Rights Filings, FY1970–FY2021
Table B: Pro Se Litigation in U.S. District Courts by Case Type, Cases Terminated Fiscal Years 1996–2021
Table C: Outcomes in Prisoner Civil Rights Cases in Federal District Court, Fiscal Years 1988–2021
Table D: …

Examining The Bar Exam: An Empirical Analysis Of Racial Bias In The Uniform Bar Examination, Scott Devito, Kelsey Hample, Erin Lain

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

The legal profession is among the least diverse in the United States. Given continuing issues of systemic racism, the central position that the justice system occupies in society, and the vital role that lawyers play in that system, it is incumbent upon legal professionals to identify and remedy the causes of this lack of diversity. This Article seeks to understand how the bar examination—the final hurdle to entering the profession— contributes to this dearth of diversity. Using publicly available data, we analyze whether the ethnic makeup of a law school’s entering class correlates to the school’s first-time bar passage rates …

The Color Of Justice, Alexis Hoag

Michigan Law Review

A Review of Free Justice: A History of the Public Defender in Twentieth-Century America. By Sara Mayeux.

Responding To Abolition Anxieties: A Roadmap For Legal Analysis, Jamelia Morgan

Michigan Law Review

A Review of We Do This ’Til We Free Us. By Mariame Kaba.

Free-Ing Criminal Justice, Bennett Capers

Michigan Law Review

A Review of Free Justice: A History of the Public Defender in Twentieth-Century America. By Sara Mayeux

The Progressive Love Affair With The Carceral State, Kate Levine

Michigan Law Review

A Review of The Feminist War on Crime: The Unexpected Role of Women’s Liberation in Mass Incarceration. By Aya Gruber.

Reconstructing Rural Discourse, Bailey Tulloch

Michigan Law Review

A Review of Where the Crawdads Sing. By Delia Owens.

Another Katz Moment?: Privacy, Property, And A Dna Database, Claire Mena

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

The Fourth Amendment protects the “right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures.” The understanding of these words seems to shift as new technologies emerge. As law enforcement’s arsenal of surveillance techniques has grown to include GPS tracking, cell phones, and cell site location information (CSLI), the Supreme Court has applied Fourth Amendment protections to these modern tools. Law enforcement continues to use one pervasive surveillance technique without limitations: the routine collection of DNA. In 2013, the Supreme Court in Maryland v. King held that law enforcement may routinely …

Second Chances: Why Michigan Should Categorically Prohibit The Sentence Of Juvenile Life Without Parole, Richard Zhao

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

The United States is the only country in the world that sentences children to die in prison. This practice, known as juvenile life without parole (JLWOP), is condemned by the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child. Yet twenty-five states still permit the sentence, and Michigan houses one of the nation’s largest JLWOP populations. Despite the U.S. Supreme Court’s ban on some forms of JLWOP, more must be done to further limit the use of this sentence. The current JLWOP sentencing scheme is untenable, imposes a significant financial burden on taxpayers, and perpetuates racial inequality. This Note explores …

Front Matter, Michigan Law Review

Michigan Law Review

Front Matter for Volume 120, Issue 6 of Michigan Law Review

How Racism Persists In Its Power, Deborah N. Archer

Michigan Law Review

A Review of The Fire Next Time. By James Baldwin.

Introduction: Two Perspectives On Sara Mayeux’S Free Justice, Brooke Simone, Aditya Vedapudi

Michigan Law Review

A Review of Free Justice: A History of the Public Defender in Twentieth-Century America. By Sara Mayeux.

97th Henry M. Campbell Moot Court Competition: Final Round, University Of Michigan Law School

Event Materials

Henry Munroe Campbell was a distinguished lawyer who served as legal counsel to the University of Michigan's Board of Regents for several years.

Following Campbell's death in 1926, his law partners met with then-University of Michigan Law School Dean Henry Bates to discuss a fitting memorial. They decided to establish a case club competition to foster training for law students in appellate advocacy in his honor. The first Henry M. Campbell competition was held in the 1927-1928 academic year.

A trust fund to finance the competition was established in 1927 and has been periodically augmented with gifts from Dickinson Wright …

Criminal Law In A World Of States, Ryan Liss

Michigan Journal of International Law

In recent decades, a new school of criminal law theory has emerged. Its proponents reject the traditional story that criminal law ought to be justified on either retributivist or utilitarian grounds alone. Instead, they argue that justifications for criminal law must be rooted in a broader political theory of the state’s authority. While this political theory turn is becoming increasingly dominant in the literature, it gives rise to two significant challenges that scholars have thus far failed to recognize. These challenges emerge when we turn our attention from an internal, domestic view of the state to the world beyond its …

Contractual Inequality, Manisha Padi

Michigan Law Review

Most individuals strive to satisfy every obligation laid out in standard form contracts such as mortgages, insurance plans, or credit agreements. Sophisticated parties, however, adapt and modify their obligations during contract performance by negotiating for lenient treatment and taking advantage of unclear terms. The common law explicitly authorizes variance from standardized contract terms during performance. When the same standard terms create value for sophisticated individuals and destroy value for others, the result is contractual inequality. Contractual inequality has grown without scrutiny by courts or scholars, enabling regressive redistribution of resources and creating economic inefficiency by sowing distrust in markets for …

Hope V. Harris: Brief Of Amici Curiae Current And Former Prosecutors And Department Of Justice Officials In Support Of Petitioner, Barbara Mcquade

Appellate Briefs

Amici are 45 current and former federal, state, and local prosecutors, state attorneys general, and Department of Justice officials with experience prosecuting and establishing policies for prosecuting serious crimes. Amici recognize that humane conditions of incarceration are important to the community’s trust in the fairness of the criminal justice system and, in turn, to individuals’ willingness to report crimes, act as witnesses, and serve as fair and impartial jurors. As stewards of public safety, amici also have an interest in ensuring that incarcerated people—the vast majority of whom are eventually released—are given the opportunity to rejoin society successfully and refrain …

Cedaw And Transformative Judicial Obligations: The Vulnerable Migrant Domestic Worker And Root Causes Of Abuse, Cheah W. L.

Michigan Journal of International Law

CEDAW’s transformative provisions, which require states to address root causes of injustice and discrimination, can be made more effective not only through legislation and policy, as commonly argued, but through the judiciary. This article highlights the need to develop the content and implementation of transformative judicial obligations under CEDAW through a comparative study of judicial decisions on the abuse of female MDWs in three key MDW destinations that are party to CEDAW—Hong Kong, Singapore, and Malaysia. By engaging with scholarship on CEDAW’s positive obligations, transformative equality, and theories of adjudication, this article argues that criminal law courts should not only …

2022 Winter Class Schedule, University Of Michigan Law School

Class Schedules

Class schedule for the 2022 Winter semester at the University of Michigan Law School

Data Privacy, Human Rights, And Algorithmic Opacity, Sylvia Lu

Fellow, Adjunct, Lecturer, and Research Scholar Works

Decades ago, it was difficult to imagine a reality in which artificial intelligence (AI) could penetrate every corner of our lives to monitor our innermost selves for commercial interests. Within just a few decades, the private sector has seen a wild proliferation of AI systems, many of which are more powerful and penetrating than anticipated. In many cases, AI systems have become “the power behind the throne,” tracking user activities and making fateful decisions through predictive analysis of personal information. Despite the growing power of AI, proprietary algorithmic systems can be technically complex, legally claimed as trade secrets, and managerially …

Women, Peace, And Security: A Human Rights Agenda?, Christine M. Chinkin

Book Chapters

The Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda emanates from the ground-breaking Security Council Resolution 1325 (2000) which centres upon bringing women’s experiences of armed conflict into decision and policymaking in the exercise of the Council’s primary responsibility for the maintenance of international peace and security. The chapter asks whether, despite its location within the Security Council, WPS can be understood as an international human rights agenda as envisaged by women activists who lobbied for the adoption of Resolution 1325. It traces the antecedents of WPS through women’s peace and human rights activism throughout the twentieth century. It examines the texts …

Evaporating Into Thin Air: The Prosecution Of Air Pollution Crimes During The Trump Administration, Joshua Ozymy, Melissa Jarrell Ozymy

Michigan Journal of Environmental & Administrative Law

Antagonistic to environmental regulation, the Trump Administration sought to significantly roll back federal clean air law enforcement. Yet, we know very little about the impact of the Administration on air pollution criminal enforcement. Through content analysis of all EPA criminal investigations leading to prosecution, we analyze patterns in charging and sentencing and draw out the broader themes in air pollution prosecutions during this period. Our results show a sizable drop in prosecutions compared to the Obama Administration. Although prosecutors managed to pursue serious crimes involving significant harm and criminal conduct and secure over $2.9 billion in monetary penalties, roughly 160 …

Race Belongs In Week One Of Lrw, Beth H. Wilensky

Articles

I talk to my 1Ls about race and the law in their first week of law school. In doing so, I have discovered that discussing race helps me introduce foundational concepts about legal writing and law school that we will return to throughout the year. That is partly because race is relevant to nearly every topic law school touches on. But it is also because race is present in—and often conspicuous in its absence from—court opinions in ways that provide rich fodder for discussing how to approach law school. That topic interests all students—even those who might be skeptical about …

A Quiet Revolution: How Judicial Discipline Essentially Eliminated Foster Care And Nearly Went Unnoticed., Melissa Carter, Christopher Church, Vivek Sankaran

Articles

This Article argues that juvenile court judges can safely reduce the number of children entering foster care by faithfully and rigorously applying the law. Judges often fail to perform this core functon when a state child welfare agency separates a child from their family. Judges must perform their role as impartial gatekeeper despite the temptation to be "omnipotent moral busybodies".

Ending The Discriminatory Pretrial Incarceration Of People With Disabilities: Liability Under The Americans With Disabilities Act And The Rehabilitation Act, Margo Schlanger, Elizabeth Jordan, Roxana Moussavian

Articles

Our federal, state, and local governments lock up hundreds of thousands of people at a time—millions over the course of a year—to ensure their appearance at a pending criminal or immigration proceeding. This type of pretrial incarceration—a term we use to cover both pretrial criminal detention and immigration detention prior to finalization of a removal order—can be very harmful. It disrupts the work and family lives of those detained, harms their health, interferes with their defense, and imposes pressure on them to forego their trial rights and accede to the government’s charges in an effort to abbreviate time behind bars. …

Limiting Access To Remedies: Select Criminal Law And Procedure Cases From The Supreme Court's 2021-22 Term, Eve Brensike Primus, Justin Hill

Articles

Although the most memorable cases from the Supreme Court’s 2021-22 Term were on the civil side of its docket, the Court addressed significant cases on the criminal side involving the Confrontation Clause, capital punishment, double jeopardy, criminal jurisdiction in Indian Country, and important statutory interpretation principles, such as the mens rea presumption and the scope of the rule of lenity. Looking back, the Court’s decisions limiting individuals’ access to remedies for violations of their constitutional criminal procedure rights stand out. Shinn v. Ramirez and Shoop v. Twyford drastically limit the ability of persons incarcerated in state facilities to challenge the …

Willard Hurst's Unpublished Manuscript On Law, Technology, And Regulation, Bj Ard, William J. Novak

Other Publications

It is with a great deal of excitement ( and with thanks to so many contributing colleagues and collaborators over the years ) that we are able to present to the public for the first time a newly published work by one of the great originators of modem legal history and law and society scholarship-James Willard Hurst. Hurst published his last two books, Law and Markets in United States History and Dealing with Statutes, in 1982. And, fittingly, he published his last substantive article--.-a very short comment on "The Use of Case Histories"-in the Wisconsin Law Review in 1992. In …

White Paper: Effective Communication With Deaf, Hard Of Hearing, Blind, And Low Vision Incarcerated People, Tessa Bialek, Margo Schlanger

Other Publications

Tens of thousands of people incarcerated in jails and prisons throughout the United States have one or more communication disabilities, a term that describes persons who are deaf, hard of hearing, blind, low vision, deaf-blind, speech disabled, or otherwise disabled in ways that affect communication. Incarceration is not easy for anyone, but the isolation and inflexibility of incarceration can be especially challenging, dangerous, and further disabling, for persons with disabilities. Correctional entities must confront these challenges; persons with communication disabilities are overrepresented in jails and prisons and the population continues to grow. Federal antidiscrimination law obligates jails and prisons to …

Mich. Ruling Widens Sentencing Protections For Young Adults, Kimberly A. Thomas

Other Publications

On July 28, the Michigan Supreme Court held that the mandatory imposition of a life-without-parole sentence on an 18-year-old violated the state constitution.

This decision expands the protections provided for young defendants by the U.S. Supreme Court in Miller v. Alabama and builds on a nascent trend that provides additional constitutional and statutory protections for young people over 17 years old who are charged with serious offenses.