Digital Commons Network^™

S.W. Griffith: A Suitable Case For Indictment?, Mark Finnane, Jonathan Richards

Faculty Publications

In his 2021 book ‘Truth-Telling: History, Sovereignty and the Uluru Statement’, Henry Reynolds called for an inquiry into the historical record of Samuel Walker Griffith, Federation ‘father’ and first Chief Justice of the High Court of Australia. Reynolds’ iconoclasm targeted a historical figure whose name is memorialised in a Riverina town, a Canberra suburb and a Queensland university. Reynolds charged that Griffith was morally and politically responsible for the violence carried out by an agency of the Queensland government, the Native Police. This historically grounded allegation relates to Griffith's pre-Federation Queensland political career, 1874–93, when he served intermittently as Premier, …

How To Do The History Of Sexual Science, Benjamin Kahan, Greta Lafleur

Faculty Publications

This introduction maps the ways in which sexual scientific thought circulated during the fin de siècle, tracing the interconnections between and breaks in the global circuits of sexological thought and how this circuitry continues to structure sexuality in the present. In so doing, Kahan and LaFleur position their approach and that of the special issue as a whole within the larger field of sexology, placing it in more robust dialogue with sexuality studies and attending in particular to sexology's racial and imperial logics. They examine the ways in which racial science and colonial knowledge constitute sexual science as an amorphous …

Gender Violence As A Penalty Of Poverty, Deborah M. Weissman

Faculty Publications

The matter of gender violence, including intimate partner violence (IPV), has long been categorized as a particularly egregious crime. The consequences of IPV are profound and affect all members of the household, family members near and far, and the communities where they live. Gender violence impacts the national economy. Costs accrue to workplaces, health care institutions, and encumber local and state coffers. Survivors are deprived of income, property, and economic stability: conditions that often endure beyond periods of physical injuries. Offenders also experience economic hardship as a result of involvement with the legal system. They often face significant obstacles when …

Donating To The District Attorney, Carissa Byrne Hessick, Michael Morse, Nathan Pinnell

Faculty Publications

The United States is the only country that elects its local prosecutors. In theory, these local elections could facilitate local control of criminal justice policy. But the academic literature assumes that, in practice, prosecutor elections fail to live up to that promise. This Article complicates that conventional wisdom with a new, national study of campaign contributions in prosecutor elections. The study offers a more complete empirical account of prosecutor accountability by analyzing contributions to local candidates as well as their election results. It details the amount of money in local prosecutor elections, including from interest groups, and the relationship between …

What Comes Next?, Neil Fulton

Faculty Publications

The United States stands at an important crossroads. Polarization and paralysis are the political norm. Social divisions are deep and seemingly intractable. Concerted action is disappointingly rare. Social and political pressures continue to build like tectonic plates waiting to release. What will come next? This Article begins with a description of the current situation before turning to a consideration of five possible paths forward. First, stasis. There may be more of the same with limited systemic shocks releasing small amounts of pressure without a fundamental change of circumstances. Second, rupture. Building pressure may tear the current political and social system …

A Cyclically Adjusted Spatio-Temporal Kernel Density Estimation Method For Predictive Crime Hotspot Analysis, Ya Han, Yujie Hu, Haojie Zhu, Fahui Wang

Faculty Publications

This paper presents a new method for predictive crime hotspot analysis that further improves the kernel density estimation (KDE) method and the spatio-temporal kernel density estimation (STKDE) method by accounting for temporal crime cycles and is therefore termed the ‘cyclically adjusted STKDE (cSTKDE) method’. The case study on robbery incidents in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, shows a temporal cycle with a 6-month period of statistical significance from January 2010 to May 2018. This identified period is incorporated into the temporal kernel function of the new cSTKDE method. For validation, the Forecast Accuracy Index (FAI) and Forecast Precision Index (FPI) are used …

Alcohol Misuse And Gun Violence: An Evidence-Based Approach For State Policy, Silvia Villarreal, Amy Bornhorst, Richard Bonnie, Kami Chavis, Ari Davis, Shannon Frattaroli, Kelly Roskam, Jeffrey Swanson, Joshua Horwitz

Faculty Publications

During the COVID-19 pandemic, excessive drinking increased by 21% and alcohol-related deaths increased approximately 25%.6 At the same time, gun sales increased by 40%, gun homicides by 35%, and gun suicides had the largest one-year increase ever recorded.

These alarming trends urge us to think about alcohol misuse as a risk factor for gun violence. To better understand this connection, the Consortium, in partnership with the Center for Gun Violence Solutions, developed this report to highlight the available research to inform policy. As detailed in this report, alcohol misuse is associated with a risk of dangerous firearm behaviors, interpersonal firearm …

John Lewis And The Politics Of Love: Book Review, Neil Fulton

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

School Resource Officers' Impact On Violence And Crime, Angelo Kevin Brown

Faculty Publications

School resource officers (SRO) have been involved in the American school system for about 70 years. SRO programs began in the early 1950s beginning within a school district in Flint, Michigan. Since the start of SRO programs, police officers were predominately placed in schools with a high percentage of African American students and in low-income communities. School administration had implemented a program to station law enforcement officers in the school because of crime, drugs, and violence within the school. The community in the Flint School District had a lot of racial discrimination and elevated levels of racial inequality and segregation. …

The Traditional Restorative Justice Practices That Have Influenced Southern Africa, Angelo Kevin Brown

Faculty Publications

The indigenous peoples of Southern Africa have a tradition of using restorative justice practices. The region has used restorative justice practices primarily until European colonization had enforced a Western criminal justice and legal system. During and after colonization, Southern Africa has continued to use traditional methods for public safety and resolving conflicts in communities. This led to governments having a dual system in which nonserious violations are usually handled in the traditional courts, and the more serious crimes are handled in the formal criminal courts.

Judge Frankel’S Fifty-Year-Old Invitation To Reconstruct Sentencing, Jelani Jefferson Exum

Faculty Publications

(Excerpt)

America was a different place at the time Judge Marvin Frankel penned his now-famous text Criminal Sentences: Law without Order in 1973. Richard Nixon was the U.S. president. The Vietnam War was ending. The Watergate scandal was unfolding. There was much to grab the public’s attention, and criminal sentencing was not a national or international headline. Just two years earlier, President Nixon had declared a war on drugs and targeted drug abuse as “public enemy number one,” but it would be over a decade before punitive mandatory minimum drug sentences would become our sentencing norm. At the time of …

Investing In Abolition, Sandeep Singh Dhaliwal

Faculty Publications

This Article situates the prison within a broader macro-financial trend, what I call “community capture.” As private equity firms have consolidated the market for carceral services, they have also gained control over other essential social infrastructure, like housing and healthcare. By layering debt, fees, and aggressive profit expectations over companies or assets that provide for basic needs, their strategies intensify the economic pressures communities face. These strategies rely on various forms of coordination and legal protection from contestation. To demonstrate this process in the context of mass incarceration, this Article tells the story of Securus, a dominant carceral service company …

Plea Bargains: Efficient Or Unjust?, Jeffrey Bellin, Erin Blondel, John Flynn, Elana Fogel, Anjelica Hendricks, Carissa Byrne Hessick

Faculty Publications

The vast majority of state and federal cases end in plea bargains. The practice has eased backlogs and may benefit some defendants — but the trade-offs, some say, are too steep. Is there a better way?

Religious Convictions, Anna Offit

Faculty Publications

The Anglo-American jury emerged at a time when legal and religious conceptions of justice were entwined. Today, however, though the American public remains comparatively religious, the country’s legal system draws a distinction between legal and religious modes of determining culpability and passing judgment. This Article examines the doctrine that governs the place of religious belief and practice in U.S. jury selection proceedings. It argues that the discretion afforded to judges with respect to applying the Batson antidiscrimination doctrine has given these beliefs and practices an ambiguous status. On the one hand, judges aim to protect prospective religious jurors from discrimination. …

The Tesla Meets The Fourth Amendment, Adam M. Gershowitz

Faculty Publications

Can police search a smart car’s computer without a warrant? Although the Supreme Court banned warrantless searches of cell phones incident to arrest in Riley v. California, the Court left the door open for warrantless searches under other exceptions to the warrant requirement. This is the first article to argue that the Fourth Amendment’s automobile exception currently permits the police to warrantlessly dig into a vehicle’s computer system and extract vast amounts of cell phone data. Just as the police can rip open seats or slash tires to search for drugs under the automobile exception, the police can warrantlessly …

Political Default. The Implications Of Weaponizing Global Financial Infrastructure, Lev E. Breydo

Faculty Publications

In response to Russia’s unlawful invasion of Ukraine, the U.S. has led a broad-based global coalition to punish the aggressor with an “unprecedented” sanction regime. Those measures have targeted “the Russian government’s basic tools to manage its macroeconomy,” with a particular emphasis on its sovereign debt. That concerted focus, as this Article empirically demonstrates through analysis of bond and credit default swap data, ultimately resulted in Russia’s first foreign currency debt default in over a century — despite the nation’s ability and seeming willingness to pay.

Notwithstanding aptly-deserved “just deserts” considerations, a forced — or “political” — Russian sovereign debt …

The Prosecutor Lobby, Carissa Byrne Hessick, Ronald F. Wright, Jessica Pishko

Faculty Publications

Prosecutors shape the use of the criminal law at many points during criminal proceedings but there is an earlier point in the process where prosecutors have influence: during the legislative process. The conventional wisdom in legal scholarship is that prosecutors are powerful and successful lobbyists who routinely support laws that make the criminal law more punitive and oppose criminal justice reform. In this Article, we test that narrative with an empirical assessment of prosecutor lobbying in America. Using an original dataset of four years of legislative activity from all fifty states, we analyze how frequently prosecutors lobbied, the issues on …

Judicial Moral Prophecy, Daniel B. Rice

Faculty Publications

American judges decry past moral lapses as intolerable. They paint their predecessors’ worst mistakes as tragedies that must never be allowed to happen again. When given the chance to avoid new injustices, however, judges increasingly flaunt their moral indifference. They insist that legal fidelity requires them to ignore whether their own rulings will be remembered as monstrous. But this cavalier outlook—for all its devotion to the past—is remarkably ahistorical. Feats of legal craft have never survived cultural repudiation. When precedents become morally shameful, the quality of their reasoning ceases to matter. The opinions’ authors are remembered not for the technical …

Policing Veterans: What The Veterans Affairs Police Can Illustrate About The Policing Of Disability In America, Zachary R.M. Outzen

Faculty Publications

The Department of Veterans Affairs Police (“VA Police”), a federal law enforcement agency tasked with law enforcement on Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) properties, has a shocking record of misconduct and brutality against veterans. Because the VA is the largest integrated healthcare system in the United States, the VA Police are primarily responsible for policing VA medical facilities. While issues facing the veteran community have largely been analyzed as separate from those facing the American public at large, VA medical facilities replicate broader socioeconomic trends in policing of vulnerable populations. Veterans receiving VA healthcare services are disproportionately likely to be …

How Does Religious Faith Impact Positive Youth Outcomes, Michael A. Goodman, W. Justin Dyer

Faculty Publications

This study investigates the protective aspects of religiosity in young adolescents and explores the potential processes involved. Specifically, we examine the influence of three measures of religiosity—religious salience, intrinsic religiosity, and daily religious experiences—on delinquency and anxiety. The study sample consists of 636 families located in the state of Utah. Additionally, we explore how positive youth development (PYD) constructs may mediate the relationship between religiosity and adolescent outcomes. The findings indicate that religious salience and daily religious experiences are directly and indirectly associated with lower levels of delinquency and anxiety. Furthermore, two PYD constructs—character and connectivity—serve as mediators between religious …

Rightsizing Local Legislatures, Brenner M. Fissell

Faculty Publications

Local councils, boards, and commissions have all the lawmaking powers of a legislature—including the power to criminalize conduct—but they are far too small to deserve them. With an average size of only four members, local legislatures depart from the norm observable at all other levels of government. Only in the past few years have legal scholars turned their attention to the institutional design of these bodies, but this developing literature has yet to address their most striking feature—their small size.

This Article takes up this project. It claims that local microlegislatures are comparatively unrepresentative and undemocratic, and that their size …

Economic Thought: A Biblical Perspective, Williams Kwasi Peprah, Lucile Sabas, Quentin Sahly, Delynne Shepard

Faculty Publications

This study joins the debate about whether capitalism or socialism best shows how the Bible sees economic interactions between people and, by extension, provides insights into how a Christian should live. Capitalism is based on the private ownership and control of resources and profit, which spread with the migration process of the Protestants. Socialism is based on the idea that the group or community should own the means of production and distribution to benefit everyone equally. This paper argues that biblical principles point neither to socialism nor capitalism as the appropriate economic framework for economic interactions and the organization of …

Pitfalls Of Progressive Prosecution, Carissa Byrne Hessick

Faculty Publications

This Essay examines the political vulnerabilities facing the progressive prosecution movement, arguing that two core features of its public brand—emphasizing a fundamental break from traditional prosecution and pledging to “do less” by shrinking the criminal justice footprint—have inadvertently exposed reform‑oriented prosecutors to intensified backlash. Drawing on recent examples, the Essay shows how framing progressive prosecution as radically different obscures the long-standing prosecutorial tools these offices still rely on, enabling critics to portray routine exercises of discretion as unprecedented or dangerous. It further explains how decarceral commitments make progressive prosecutors easy targets when crime or disorder rises, both because voters may …

Fake And Real People In Bankruptcy, Melissa B. Jacoby

Faculty Publications

This essay explores the bankruptcy system’s structural bias in favor of artificial persons—for-profit companies, non-profit enterprises, and municipalities given independent life by law—relative to humans. The favorable treatment extends to foundational issues such as the scope and timing of debt relief, the conditions to receiving any bankruptcy protections, and the flexibility to depart from the Bankruptcy Code by asserting that doing so will maximize economic value. The system’s bias also contributes to the “bad-apple-ing” of serious policy problems, running counter to other areas of law that have deemed harms like discrimination to be larger institutional phenomena rather than merely the …

The Real Problem With Plea Bargaining, Carissa Byrne Hessick

Faculty Publications

This Response critiques Jeffrey Bellin’s argument that plea‑bargaining reform should focus solely on problems uniquely caused by plea bargaining and instead contends that the practice has fundamentally reshaped American criminal justice in ways that extend far beyond Bellin’s narrow framework. The Response argues that plea bargaining exacerbates systemic issues—including harsh sentencing, coercive leverage, and inaccurate convictions—by insulating legislative excess, weakening trial incentives, and pressuring even innocent defendants to plead guilty. It further maintains that Bellin understates how plea bargaining distorts legislative behavior, affects statutory design, and suppresses political pressure for reform. Most importantly, the Response identifies plea bargaining’s central harm …

The (Local) Prosecutor, Carissa Byrne Hessick, Rick Su

Faculty Publications

The rise of the reform prosecutor has led to a backlash. Many states have sought to circumvent the power of reform prosecutors, others to sanction them, and some to replace them with unelected appointees. These efforts have been met with resistance and, in some instances, with legal challenges. Resolving those challenges may prove difficult because local prosecutors straddle three distinct axes within state governments: the horizontal divide between its branches, the vertical divide between the state government and its local subdivisions, and the constitutional divide between constitutional and statutory offices. This Essay exposes the significant state variation in the legal …

Automated Agencies, Joshua D. Blank, Leigh Osofsky

Faculty Publications

This article presents the first comprehensive study of how federal agencies use automated legal guidance tools—such as chatbots, virtual assistants, and decision-tree systems—to explain complex law to the public. The authors show that while automation offers administrative efficiency and wider reach, it often simplifies or distorts underlying legal rules. Through detailed analysis of agency tools and ten semi-structured interviews with officials, the article demonstrates that automated systems can portray unsettled or complex law as clear, omit exceptions, and answer too narrowly, thereby influencing user behavior in ways agencies neither fully appreciate nor monitor.

The study further finds that agencies lack …

Gender Violence As Legacy: To Imagine New Approaches, Deborah M. Weissman

Faculty Publications

This essay considers gender violence as a consequence of systemic problems rooted in patriarchal structures, transacted through poverty and inequality, and embedded in a historically conditioned political economy. It is informed by the scholarship that propounds the need to develop community responses independent of the carceral system as a means to address the systemic source factors that contribute to Intimate Partner Violence (“IPV”), with attention to restorative and transformative justice approaches (RJ/TJ). This essay advances anti-violence scholarship to suggest the need to reconceptualize gender discrimination, poverty, and inequality as cause and consequence of social ills, and, moreover, to contribute to …

The Gender Of Gideon, Kathryn A. Sabbeth, Jessica Steinberg

Faculty Publications

This Article makes a simple claim that has been overlooked for decades and yet has enormous theoretical and practical significance: the constitutional guarantee of counsel adopted by the U.S. Supreme Court in Gideon v. Wainwright accrues largely to the benefit of men. In this Article, we present original data analysis demonstrating that millions of women face compulsory and highly punitive encounters with the justice system but do so largely in the civil courts, where no right to counsel attaches. The demographic picture that emerges is one in which the right to counsel skews heavily against women’s interests. As this Article …

Understanding Uncontested Prosecutor Elections, Carissa Byrne Hessick, Sarah Treul, Alexander Love

Faculty Publications

Prosecutors are very powerful players in the criminal justice system. One of the few checks on their power is their periodic obligation to stand for election. But very few prosecutor elections are contested, and even fewer are competitive. As a result, voters are not able to hold prosecutors accountable for their decisions. The problem with uncontested elections has been widely recognized, but little understood. The legal literature has lamented the lack of choice for voters, but any suggested solutions have been based on only anecdote or simple descriptive analyses of election data.

Using a logistic regression analysis, this Article estimates …