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Brown, Governor Of California Et Al V. Plata Et Al., Mary Rogan

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The case of Brown, Governor of California et at v. Plata et al (hereinafter Plata) is one of the most eye-catching decisions of the Supreme Court of the United States in recent times. The result in itself – the upholding of an order of a Californian District Court to reduce the state’s prison population by up to 46,000 prisoners – would warrant attention. The reasoning of the Court and the differences between the majority and minority are also, however, most significant. The willingness of the Court to uphold the drastic measure of ordering a sizeable reduction in the Californian prison …

Forfeitures Revisited: Bringing Principle To Practice In Federal Court, David Pimentel

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No abstract provided.

Crawford V. Washington: What Would Justice Thomas Do?, Brad Clary

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No abstract provided.

Who Said The Crawford Revolution Would Be Easy?, Richard D. Friedman

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One of the central protections of our system of criminal justice is the right of the accused in all criminal prosecutions "to be confronted with the witnesses against him." It provides assurance that prosecution witnesses will give their testimony in the way demanded for centuries by Anglo-American courts-in the presence of the accused, subject to cross-examination- rather than in any other way. Witnesses may not, for example, testify by speaking privately to governmental agents in a police station or in their living rooms. Since shortly after it was adopted, however, the confrontation right became obscured by the ascendance of a …

Should Mass Comments Count?, Nina A. Mendelson

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I am grateful to the Michigan Journal of Environmental & Administrative Law for the opportunity to reply to “Rulemaking vs. Democracy: Judging and Nudging Public Participation That Counts,” a terrific article by Professor Cynthia Farina, Mary Newhart, and Josiah Heidt of the Cornell eRulemaking Institute (“CeRI”). Farina, Newhart, and Heidt’s continuing commitment to structuring public engagement in e-rulemaking, both through scholarship and CeRI’s Regulation Room project, is one of the most hopeful signs for the future of that process. In their Article, the authors are concerned with agency treatment of large volumes of public comments in rulemaking, an increasingly common …

Requiring Miranda Warnings For The Christmas Day Bomber And Other Terrorists, Malvina Halberstam

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No abstract provided.

On Overreaching, Or Why Rick Perry May Save The Voting Rights Act But Destroy Affirmative Action, Ellen D. Katz

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The State of Texas is presently staking out two positions that are not typically pursued by a single litigant. On the one hand, Texas is seeking the invalidation of the Voting Rights Act, and, on the other, the State is now defending the validity of the expansive race-based affirmative action policy it uses at its flagship university. This Essay presses the claim that Texas has increased the chance it will lose in bothTexas v. Holder andFisher v. University of Texas because it has opted to stake out markedly extreme positions in each. I argue that Texas would be more likely …

Do Sex Offender Registries Make Us Less Safe?, J. J. Prescott

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State legislatures enacted sex offender registration and notification (SORN) laws with the explicit and exclusive aim of reducing sex offender recidivism. The general idea that we ought to “regulate” released offenders — of any type — to reduce the likelihood of their returning to crime is an attractive one, at least in theory. Criminal recidivism generates significant social harm. Nevertheless, despite their now-widespread use, SORN laws became the norm without any systematic study of their consequences. Admittedly, the logic underlying these laws seems at first difficult to gainsay: if a known sex offender poses even a small risk to a …

Delineating Sexual Dangerousness, Fredrick E. Vars

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Only “dangerous” individuals may be indefinitely detained. Is a one percent chance of a future crime clear and convincing evidence of dangerousness? For sex offenders, fear and uncertainty in case law leave open this passage to limbo. This Article closes it. The due process balancing test used to evaluate standards of proof provides the framework. This Article explains the relationship between the standard of proof and the definition of “dangerous” and argues that only an approach combining the two is consistent with the Constitution. Applying decision theory with assumptions favoring the government, this Article calculates a minimum likelihood of recidivism …

Rebellious State Crimmigration Enforcement And The Foreign Affairs Power, Mary Fan

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The propriety of a new breed of state laws interfering in immigration enforcement is pending before the Supreme Court and the lower courts. These laws typically incorporate federal standards related to the criminalization of immigration ("crimmigration'), but diverge aggressively from federal enforcement policy. Enacting states argue that the legislation is merely a species of "cooperative federalism" that does not trespass upon the federal power over foreign affairs, foreign commerce, and nationality rules since the laws mirror federal standards. This Article challenges the formalist mirror theory assumptions behind the new laws and argues that inconsistent state crimmigration enforcement policy and resulting …

Tangled Up In Knots: How Continued Federal Jurisdiction Over Sexual Predators On Indian Reservations Hobbles Effective Law Enforcement To The Detriment Of Indian Women, Suzianne D. Painter-Thorne

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Consequently, tribal lands have become safe havens for sexual predators, who can commit their offenses with little fear of prosecution. As Fort Peck Tribal Chairman A.T. “Rusty” Stafne explained, “Our people are afraid because there are persons committing crimes against us at night and in broad daylight....We have criminals that are simply unafraid of prosecution.” Indeed, “[t]o a sexual predator, the failure to prosecute sex crimes against American Indian women is an invitation to prey with impunity.”

Congress has responded to the epidemic of reservation crime with the Tribal Law and Order Act27 (TLOA). But, as this article explains, the …

Randomization And The Fourth Amendment, Bernard E. Harcourt, Tracey L. Meares

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Randomized checkpoint searches are generally taken to be the exact antithesis of reasonableness under the Fourth Amendment. In the eyes of most jurists checkpoint searches violate the central requirement of valid Fourth Amendment searches-namely, individualized suspicion. We disagree. In this Article, we contend that randomized searches should serve as the very lodestar of a reasonable search. The notion of "individualized" suspicion is misleading; most suspicion in the modem policing context is group based and not individual specific. Randomized searches by definition are accompanied by a certain level of suspicion. The constitutional issue, we maintain, should not turn on the question …

Rethinking The Interest-Convergence Thesis, Justin Driver

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No abstract provided.

Unilateral Alteration Of Public Sector Collective Bargaining Agreements And The Contract Clause, Stephen F. Befort

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As public sector budgets have waxed and waned in response to changes in the economic cycle over the past 30 years, public sector employers increasingly have sought to control personnel costs by resorting to measures such as wage freezes and furloughs. Not infrequently, those measures have pitted the viability of collective bargaining agreements against the ability of government to protect its coffers. This article examines those court decisions that have considered the reach of the contract clause in this setting over the past thirty years. Most of these courts properly have applied the principles established by the Supreme Court in …

Promoting Democracy In Prosecution, Russell M. Gold

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No abstract provided.

Do Sex Offender Registration And Notification Laws Affect Criminal Behavior?, J. J. Prescott, Jonah E. Rockoff

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Sex offenders have become the targets of some of the most far-reaching and novel crime legislation in the U.S. Two key innovations in recent decades have been registration and notification laws which, respectively, require that convicted sex offenders provide valid contact information to law enforcement authorities, and that information about sex offenders be made public. Using the evolution of state law during the 1990s and 2000s, we study how registration and notification affect the frequency of reported sex offenses and the incidence of such offenses across victims. We find evidence that registration reduces the frequency of sex offenses by providing …

Throwing Away The Key: Has The Adam Walsh Act Lowered The Threshold For Sexually Violent Predator Commitments Too Far?, Tamara Rice Lave

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No abstract provided.

Disentangling Administrative Searches, Eve Brensike Primus

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Everyone who has been screened at an international border, scanned by an airport metal detector, or drug tested for public employment has been subjected to an administrative search. Since September 11th, the government has increasingly invoked the administrative search exception to justify more checkpoints, unprecedented subway searches, and extensive wiretaps. As science and technology advance, the frequency and scope of administrative searches will only expand. Formulating the boundaries and requirements of administrative search doctrine is therefore a matter of great importance. Yet the rules governing administrative searches are notoriously unclear. This Article seeks to refocus attention on administrative searches and …

Rethinking The Indefinite Detention Of Sex Offenders, Fredrick E. Vars

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Thousands of sex offenders in the United States are being held indefinitely under civil commitment programs The analysis in this Article suggests that none or precious few belong there Specifically in a large dataset an instrument as good as the one most widely used by experts the "Static99" could not identify even one sex offender who met the legal standards for commitment Supplementing such instruments with additional information appears not to improve matters so the failure of the instrument is profoundly disturbingThere are three possible responses 1 improve instruments to meet existing standards 2 lower the standards and 3 abandon …

Expression By Ordinance: Preemption And Proxy In Local Legislation, Lindsay Nash

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Local laws based on immigration status have prompted heated national debate on federalism and discrimination. A second strain of nuisance-related legislation has emerged in recent years, which often targets these same immigrant communities. This paper examines the hitherto-unstudied correlation between ordinances explicitly related to immigrants and legislation regarding nuisance–as illuminated through primary research into municipal legislation across the nation. Evaluating these laws and the context of their enactment, this research shows when and how nuisance laws target certain populations. Ultimately, this inquiry reveals troubling parallels to previous community responses to disfavored subgroups and the harm resulting from proxy legislation.

Aba Criminal Justice Standards On The Treatment Of Prisoners, Margo Schlanger, Margaret C. Love, Carl Reynolds

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or more than i O years, corrections professionals and others concerned about the treatment of prisoners have despaired over conditions in California's prisons. Crowding, violence, racial segregation, abysmal medical care, an obstructionist corrections union. and a state budget crisis have combined to bring the system to the point of constitutional meltdov,n. In 2008. a state appellate court found conditions of "'extreme peril to the safety of persons and property,'' and a three-judge federal court confirmed the existence of a "substantial risk to the health and safety of the men and women who work inside these prisons and the inmates housed …

Optical Limiting Study Of Double Wall Carbon Nanotube-Fullerene Hybrids, Kang-Shyang Liao, Jun Wang, Daniel Fruchtl, Nigel Alley, Enrico Andreoli, Eoghan Dillon, Andrew Barron, Hansoo Kim, Hugh Byrne, Werner Blau, Seamus Curran

Articles

In order to merge complementary temporal and spatial nonlinear optical characteristics of Fullerene and carbon nanotubes, synthesis of double wall carbon nanotube-Fullerene hybrid was performed by covalently linking DWNT and C60 by amination reaction with polyethylenimine. DWNT-Fullerene hybrids were characterized by thermogravimetric analysis, UV-vis spectroscopy and transmission electron microscopy. Optical limiting performance of DWNT-Fullerene hybrids is superior to those of Fullerenes and SWNTs at the same level (~ 80%) of transmission. Whereas nonlinear scattering is an evident mechanism, reverse saturable absorption from Fullerene moieties has significant contribution. Charge transfer between the DWNT and Fullerene moieties may play an important role …

Realizing The Abstraction: Using Today's Law To Reach Tomorrow's Sustainability, Jerrold A. Long

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No abstract provided.

The Rights Of Migrants: An Optimal Contract Framework, Adam B. Cox, Eric A. Posner

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Why do migrants enjoy some of the rights associated with citizenship? Existing accounts typically answer this question in terms of obligation-of a duty on the part of states to confer citizenship. Moreover, scholars tend to lump together the rights conventionally associated with citizenship when they answer this question. In contrast, this Article disaggregates the rights associated with citizenship, asks what both states and migrants want, and inquires into how the suite of rights associated with citizenship might advance those interests. States want to encourage migrants to enter their territory and to make country-specific investments, but states also have an interest …

Legislatures, Judges, And Parole Boards: The Allocations Of Discretion Under Determinate Sentencing, Dhammika Dharmapala, Nuno Garoupa, Joanna M. Shepherd

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No abstract provided.

Nra V. City Of Chicago : Does The Second Amendment Bind Frank Easterbrook?, Richard A. Epstein

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No abstract provided.

Constitutions And Capabilities: A (Necessarily) Pragmatic Approach, Diane P. Wood

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No abstract provided.

Latin American Presidentialism In Comparative And Historical Perspective, Tom Ginsburg, Jose Antonio Cheibub, Zachary Elkins

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No abstract provided.

Predicting Crime, M. Todd Henderson, Justin Wolfers, Eric Zitzewitz

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Prediction markets have been proposed for a variety of public policy purposes, but no one has considered their application in perhaps the most obvious policy area.: crime. This Article proposes and examines the use of prediction markets to forecast crime rates and the potential impact on crime policy, such as changes in resource allocation, policing strategies, sentencing, post-conviction treatment, and so on. First, we argue that prediction markets are especially useful in crime rate forecasting and criminal policy analysis because information relevant to decisionmakers is voluminous, dispersed, and difficult to process efficiently. After surveying the current forecasting practices and techniques, …

Framing Justice: Media, Bias, And Legal Decisionmaking, Perry L. Moriearty

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During the 1990s, the news media saturated the American public with stories and images of glassy-eyed, teenaged “superpredators,” who allegedly killed and maimed for sport. These violent, dark and “morally impoverished” youth were running wild in our city streets was the message, and unless we did something, they would destroy the very moral fabric of our society. Drawing on recent social science studies, which demonstrate that the graphic and racialized content of crime news coverage can increase consumers’ cognitive bias in imperceptible, but determinative ways, I argue that exposure to the “superpredator” narrative may have had a discernable impact on …