Digital Commons Network^™

Catholic Schools, Charter Schools, And Urban Neighborhoods, Margaret F. Brinig, Nicole Stelle Garnett

Journal Articles

This paper addresses implications for urban neighborhoods of two dramatic shifts in the American educational landscape: (1) the rapid disappearance of Catholic schools from urban neighborhoods, and (2) the rise of charter schools. In previous studies, we linked Catholic school closures to increased disorder and crime, and decreased social cohesion, in Chicago neighborhoods. This paper turns to two questions unanswered in our previous investigations. First, because we focused exclusively on school closures in our previous studies, we were uncertain whether our results reflected the work that open Catholic schools do as neighborhood institutions or whether we were finding a “loss …

Using Community Based Participatory Research To Study The Relationship Between Sources And Types Of Funding And Mental Health Outcomes For Children Served By The Child Welfare System In Ohio, Susan Vivian Mangold, Catherine Cerulli, Gregory Kapcar, Crystal Ward Allen, Kim Kaukeinen, Hua He

Journal Articles

No abstract provided.

The Value Of Valor: Money, Medals And Military Labor, Mateo Taussig-Rubbo

Journal Articles

The United States Supreme Court recently overturned the Stolen Valor Act on the grounds that the law’s blanket prohibition on falsely claiming to have received a military medal or decoration violated the First Amendment right to free speech. This Article uses the controversy provoked by the law to explore the implications of offering compensation for military service in the form of medals. How is compensation in medals related to monetary compensation? Querying the distinctions between money and medals — and the ways in which the boundaries around medals are drawn and policed — offers a means of considering the forms …

Encountering Attica: Documentary Filmmaking As Pedagogical Tool, Teresa A. Miller

Journal Articles

No abstract provided.

Catholic Schools, Charter Schools, And Urban Neighborhoods, Nicole Stelle Garnett

Journal Articles

This Article addresses previously unstudied implications of two dramatic shifts in the American educational landscape. The first shift is the rapid disappearance of urban Catholic schools. More than 1,600 Catholic elementary and secondary schools, most of them located in urban neighborhoods, have closed during the last two decades. The Archdiocese of Chicago alone (the subject of our study) has closed 148 schools since 1984. Since the economic and demographic realities underlying urban Catholic school closures persist, this trend likely will continue and even accelerate in coming years. The second shift is the rise of charter schools. In 2010 more than …

Explaining Abuse Of The Disabled Child, Margaret F. Brinig

Journal Articles

This article discusses abuse of disabled children in terms of two competing theories for why it may occur. The evolutionary biology theory has been discussed in the legal literature as well as in biological and social science pieces. The author contrasts this theory with a novel one, mimetic desire, which may be less familiar in legal circles, but which, he believes, better explains the abuse of Attention Deficit Hyperactive Disorder children and offers more hope for preventing abuse without disrupting intact families. While the evolutionary biology explanations for child abuse may be helpful and important, more territory can be covered …

Ancillary Discovery To Prove Denial Of Justice, Roger P. Alford

Journal Articles

Today foreign investors have a new and powerful weapon to challenge denial of justice. Bilateral investment treaties (BITs) require “fair and equitable treatment” consistent with customary international law, including “the obligation not to deny justice in criminal, civil, or administrative adjudicatory proceedings in accordance with the principles of due process embodied in the principle legal systems of the world.” Those treaties also create a private right of action, empowering investors with the right to initiate international arbitral proceedings directly against the host State. BITs provide the substance and the means for the effective review of judicial behavior. These treaties do …

Managing The Urban Commons, Nicole Stelle Garnett

Journal Articles

Over the past several decades, debates about the appropriate tools of commons management have played themselves out in a particularly illuminating way in the management of urban public spaces. Some commentators urge, a là Garrett Hardin, that government coercion is needed to restore order to the urban commons. Others urge the privatization or quasi-privatization of urban public-spaces. On the ground in American cities, these theoretical arguments have been translated into concrete policies, especially policing strategies (e.g., order-maintenance and community policing) and urban development strategies (e.g., business improvement districts). This is an opportune time to reexamine the commons-management questions raised by …

The Innocence Effect, Avishalom Tor, Oren Gazal-Ayal

Journal Articles

Nearly all felony convictions - about 95 percent - follow guilty pleas, suggesting that plea offers are very attractive to defendants compared to trials. Some scholars argue that plea bargains are too attractive and should be curtailed because they facilitate the wrongful conviction of innocents. Others contend that plea bargains only benefit innocent defendants, providing an alternative to the risk of a harsher sentence at trial. Hence, even while heatedly disputing their desirability, both camps in the debate believe that plea bargains commonly lead innocents to plead guilty. This Article shows, however, that the belief that innocents routinely plead guilty …

Adversarial No More: How Sua Sponte Assertion Of Affirmative Defenses To Habeas Wreaks Havoc On The Rules Of Civil Procedure, Katherine Macfarlane

Journal Articles

In every federal civil case, a defendant must raise its affirmative defenses in the pleading that responds to a plaintiff's complaint. According to Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 8(c), failure to properly plead, for example, a statute of limitations defense, waives the defense for good. Rule 8(c) does not exempt any category of affirmative defense, nor does it forgive unintentional omissions of certain defenses. It also does not prefer governmental defendants to others. Yet in habeas corpus cases, the most significant affirmative defenses to habeas petitions need not comply with Rule 8(c). Instead, federal courts may raise the affirmative defenses …

Overcoming Overcriminalization, Stephen F. Smith

Journal Articles

The literature treats overcriminalization (and, at the federal level, the federalization of crime) as a quantitative problem. Legislatures, on this view, have simply enacted too many crimes, and those crimes are far too broad in scope. This Article uses federal criminal law as a basis for challenging this way of conceptualizing the overcriminalization problem. The real problem with overcriminalization is qualitative, not quantitative: federal crimes are poorly defined, and courts all too often expansively construe poorly defined crimes. Courts thus are not passive victims in the vicious cycle of overcriminalization. Rather, by repeatedly interpreting criminal statutes broadly, courts have taken …

What Is Aggression?: Comparing The Jus Ad Bellum And The Icc Statute, Mary Ellen O'Connell, Mirakmal Niyazmatov

Journal Articles

Under the international law on resort to force, the jus ad bellum, any serious violation of the United Nations Charter prohibition on the use of force amounts to aggression. Despite a close connection for over a century between the prohibition on aggression by states and the crime of aggression for which individuals may be held accountable, delegates to the 2010 International Criminal Court Review Conference in Kampala, Uganda felt compelled to bifurcate the two prohibitions and reach a compromise. Today, the ICC Statute contains a detailed provision on the crime of aggression, but with a byzantine procedure for entry into …

Uprooted Justice: Transformations Of Law And Everyday Life In Northern Thailand, David M. Engel

Journal Articles

Studies of law in everyday life tend to view law either as instrumental in shaping specific decisions and practices or as constitutive of the cultural categories through which humans apprehend their world and perceive law as relevant to a greater or lesser extent. This article, however, suggests that circumstances may arise in which law’s role in relation to everyday life is neither instrumental nor constitutive but instead becomes one of radical dissociation. Based on an analysis of injuries in northern Thailand, it examines two transformational episodes in Thai legal and political history. The first occurred at the turn of the …

Cracks In The Cost Structure Of Agency Adoption, Andrea B. Carroll

Journal Articles

No abstract provided.

Making The Best Of Felony Murder, Guyora Binder

Journal Articles

Although scorned as irrational by academics, the felony murder doctrine persists as part of our law. It is therefore important that criminal law theory show how the felony murder doctrine can be best justified, and confined within its justifying principles. To that end, this Article seeks to make the best of American felony murder laws by identifying a principle of justice that explains as much existing law as possible, and provides a criterion for reforming the rest. Drawing on the moral intuition that blame for harm is properly affected by the actor’s aims as well as the actor’s expectations, this …

The "Asian" Category In Mcas Achievement Gap Tracking: Time For A Change, Philip Lee

Journal Articles

Data gathered on Asian American students in public school by the Massachusetts Department of Education are aggregated into one general “Asian” category, which may skew the results, both perpetuating an enduring myth and masking any true gaps that may exist for certain Asian American subgroups. As explored in this article, achievement gap tracking for the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System is an apt example.

In this article, I posit that this aggregation of many subgroups into one general “Asian” category perpetuates the myth of Asian Americans as a model minority, while downplaying any achievement gap that exists for certain Asian American …

Toward Integrated Law Clinics That Train Social Justice Advocates, Marcy L. Karin, Robin R. Runge

Journal Articles

The integrated approach to clinical legal education enables law students to explore and to utilize more than one legal advocacy strategy simultaneously to achieve social change. This framework facilitates law students’ ability to develop a range of essential lawyering skills including reflecting upon the connection between law and social justice by addressing the broader social problems impacting our communities. The integrated approach has been accepted as an effective clinic structure, and is being successfully developed and applied in a range of ways that are best suited to specific legal issues and geographic regions. In this article the authors, who are …

Negotiating Social Mobility And Critical Citizenship: Institutions At A Crossroads, Michelle D. Deardorff, Angela Mae Kupenda

Journal Articles

A Black law professor who teaches at a predominantly White law school and a White public law professor who teaches at a historically Black university in the same southern, urban community are co-authors of this Article. Here, in this piece, we explore the tension between the goals of our institutions and many other institutions to improve the socioeconomic status of our students with our personal goals of preparing students to challenge societal injustice and to be critical citizens who are willing to challenge a government that engages in abusive actions or is exploitative of its citizenry.

Punishing Without Free Will, Luis E. Chiesa

Journal Articles

Most observers agree that free will is central to our practices of blaming and punishment. Yet the conventional conception of free will is under sustained attack by the so-called determinists. Determinists claim that all of the events that take place in the universe – including human acts – are the product of causally determined forces over which we have no control. If human conduct is really determined by factors that we cannot control, how can our acts be the product of our own unfettered free will and what would that mean for the criminal law? The overwhelming majority of legal …

Police Discretion And Local Immigration Policymaking, Rick Su

Journal Articles

Immigration responsibilities in the United States are formally charged to a broad range of federal agencies, from the overseas screening of the State Department to the border patrols of the Department of Homeland Security. Yet in recent years, no department seems to have received more attention than that of the local police. For some, local police departments are frustrating our nation’s immigration laws by failing to fully participate in federal enforcement efforts. For others, it is precisely their participation that is a cause for concern. In response to these competing interests, a proliferation of competing state and federal laws have …

The Political Economy Of Criminal Procedure Litigation, Anthony O'Rourke

Journal Articles

Criminal procedure has undergone several well-documented shifts in its doctrinal foundations since the Supreme Court first began to apply the Constitution’s criminal procedure protections to the States. This Article examines the ways in which the political economy of criminal litigation – specifically, the material conditions that determine which litigants are able to raise criminal procedure claims, and which of those litigants’ cases are appealed to the United States Supreme Court – has influenced these shifts. It offers a theoretical framework for understanding how the political economy of criminal litigation shapes constitutional doctrine, according to which an increase in the number …

Localism And Capital Punishment, Stephen F. Smith

Journal Articles

Professor Adam Gershowitz presents an interesting proposal to transfer from localities to states the power to enforce the death penalty. In his view, state-level enforcement would result in a more rationally applied death penalty because states would be much more likely to make capital charging decisions based on desert, without the distorting influence of the severe resource constraints applicable to all but the wealthiest of localities. As well conceived as Professor Gershowitz’s proposal is, however, I remain skeptical that statewide enforcement of the death penalty would be preferable to continued local enforcement. First, Professor Gershowitz underestimates the benefits of localism …

Dangerous Psychopaths: Criminally Responsible But Not Morally Responsible, Subject To Criminal Punishment And To Preventive Detention, Ken M. Levy

Journal Articles

How should we judge psychopaths, both morally and in the criminal justice system? This Article will argue that psychopaths are generally not morally responsible for their bad acts simply because they cannot understand, and therefore be guided by, moral reasons.

Scholars and lawyers who endorse the same conclusion automatically tend to infer from this premise that psychopaths should not be held criminally punishable for their criminal acts. These scholars and lawyers are making this assumption (that just criminal punishment requires moral responsibility) on the basis of one of two deeper assumptions: that either criminal punishment directly requires moral responsibility or …

Re-Regulating The Baby Market: A Call For A Ban On Payment Of Birth Mother Living Expenses, Andrea B. Carroll

Journal Articles

More than fifty years ago, state law on domestic infant adoption changed to uniformly prohibit the practice of baby selling, a development that eliminated the “black market” for babies that many argued previously existed. Nonetheless, one need not look far to find that the United States’ domestic adoption system is broken even today, and the cost structure of the domestic adoption scheme is the greatest offender. A domestic adoption currently costs in the neighborhood of $40,0000, with the vast majority of the associated expenses coming not from the payment of any professional fees, but rather from the payment of living …

Panel On Federalism In Practice -- National And Local Perspectives On States' Use Of Criminal Law To Regulate Undocumented Or Unauthorized Migration, Raymond T. Diamond, Ingrid Eagly, Hiroko Kusuda

Journal Articles

No abstract provided.

Memory And Punishment, O. Carter Snead

Journal Articles

This article is the first scholarly exploration of the implications of neurobiological memory modification for criminal law. Its point of entry is the fertile context of criminal punishment, in which memory plays a crucial role. Specifically, this article will argue that there is a deep relationship between memory and the foundational principles justifying how punishment should be distributed, including retributive justice, deterrence, incapacitation, rehabilitation, moral education, and restorative justice. For all such theoretical justifications, the questions of who and how much to punish are inextricably intertwined with how a crime is remembered - by the offender, by the sentencing authority, …

Lessons Learned, Lessons Lost: Immigration Enforcement's Failed Experiment With Penal Severity, Teresa A. Miller

Journal Articles

This article traces the evolution of “get tough” sentencing and corrections policies that were touted as the solution to a criminal justice system widely viewed as “broken” in the mid-1970s. It draws parallels to the adoption some twenty years later of harsh, punitive policies in the immigration enforcement system to address perceptions that it is similarly “broken,” policies that have embraced the theories, objectives and tools of criminal punishment, and caused the two systems to converge. In discussing the myriad of harms that have resulted from the convergence of these two systems, and the criminal justice system’s recent shift away …

Protecting Cats And Dogs In Order To Protect Humans: Making The Case For A Felony Companion Animal Statute In Mississippi, Deborah Challener

Journal Articles

During the 2010 session of the Mississippi legislature, Senator Billy Hewes (R-Gulfport) introduced Senate Bill No. 2623 which, inter alia, made it a felony to "with malice torture, mutilate, maim, burn, starve, disfigure or kill any domesticated dog or cat." The penalty for a conviction under the proposed companion animal statute was one to five years in prison and a fine of $1500 to $10,000. Senate Bill No. 2623 passed the Senate but failed in the House, largely because the Mississippi Farm Bureau Federation argued that it would be harmful to Mississippi's farming industry. This objection, along with the others …

Lumping As Default In Tort Cases: The Cultural Interpretation Of Injury And Causation, David M. Engel

Journal Articles

Empirical studies of the tort law system suggest that "lumping, " or decisions by victims to do without adequate remedies, should be regarded as the predominant response to injury in American society and elsewhere. Yet research on lumping remains conceptually impoverished and gives insufficient attention to the culturalftameworks victims use to interpret their experiences and determine their responses. This Article presents the stories of injury victims in Thailand and compares their common-sense understandings of torts and tort law to those of injured Americans. It argues that analyses of lumping in America as well as Asia should take into account the …

The Role Of The Family In Criminal Law, Gerard V. Bradley

Journal Articles

Privilege or Punish: Criminal Justice and the Challenge of Family Ties. Dan Markel, Jennifer M. Collins & Ethan J. Leib. Oxford University Press, 2009.

The authors of Privilege or Punish (PoP) pose two questions, one descriptive and the other morally evaluative. "First, how does the criminal justice system in this country approach the issue of family status? Second, how should family status be recognized, if at all, in a criminal justice system situated within a liberal democracy committed to egalitarian principles of nondiscrimination?"