Digital Commons Network^™

"Fact-Finding Without Facts": A Conversation With Nancy Combs, Nancy Amoury Combs

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Ethical Guidance For A Grander Jury, Anna Offit

Faculty Publications

Section I of this Note explores the extent to which the American Bar Association (ABA) Practice Guide, and similar major ethical conventions and advisory opinions, present competing interpretations of the grand jury's role in the criminal justice system. The lack of prosecutorial disclosure of exculpatory evidence, grand jury secrecy, and the abundance of plea negotiations demonstrate how historicized visions of the grand jury are appropriated to serve distinct conceptions of the institution's proper role. Section II offers a historical narrative of the grand jury that places grand jurors' "local knowledge" and experience at the heart of an inherently interpretive and …

Deciding When To Decide: How Appellate Procedure Distributes The Costs Of Legal Change, Aaron-Andrew P. Bruhl

Faculty Publications

Legal change is a fact of life, and the need to deal with it has spawned a number of complicated bodies of doctrine. Some aspects of the problem of legal change have been studied extensively, such as doctrines concerning the retroactivity of new law and the question whether inferior courts can anticipatorily overrule a moribund superior court precedent. How such questions are answered affects the size and the distribution of the costs of legal change. Less appreciated is the way that heretofore almost invisible matters of appellate procedure and case handling also allocate the costs of legal transitions. In particular, …

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, …

Orwellian Educational Change Under Obama: Crisis Discourse, Utopian Expectations, And Accountability Failures, Paul Thomas

Journal of Inquiry and Action in Education

The contributors to this special issue of The Journal of Inquiry and Action provide insight into why the Obama administration’s educational policies manifest the dominance of neoliberal ideology over most elements of social life. The articles presented herein build on the work originally presented in The Phenomenon of Obama and the agenda for Education: Can hope audaciously trump neoliberalism? (Carr & Porfilio, 2011).

Course Schedule Spring 2011, William & Mary Law School

Course Information

No abstract provided.

Reading, Writing, And Interrogating: Providing Miranda Warnings To Students In Schoolhouse Interrogations, Stephanie Gaylord Forbes

Student Award Winning Papers

No abstract provided.

The Constructionist Analytics Of Interpretive Practice, James A. Holstein, Jaber F. Gubrium

Social and Cultural Sciences Faculty Research and Publications

No abstract provided.

Doing Re-Entry: Accounts Of Post-Prison Release In Finland And The United States, Richard S. Jones, Ikponwosa O. Ekunwe

Social and Cultural Sciences Faculty Research and Publications

No abstract provided.

Creating Bright-Line Rules For Tribal Court Jurisdiction Over Non-Indians: The Case Of Trespass To Real Property, Grant Christensen

American Indian Law Review

The 2010 passage of the Tribal Law and Order Act will invest significantly more resources in tribal courts. As tribal courts expand, conflicts between sovereignties - tribal, state, and federal - are likely to occur with much greater frequency. Tribal court civil jurisdiction over non-Indians will be among the issues most frequently appealed to federal courts. I offer this piece to propose a new and novel solution - that tribal courts, through a piecemeal process, be extended absolute civil jurisdiction over non-Indians for those civil offenses over which tribes have the greatest interest. This article takes one of the most …

Defending The "Indefensible": Replacing Ethnocentrism With A Native American Cultural Defense, Megan H. Dearth

American Indian Law Review

No abstract provided.

Juvenile Offenders And Their Victims, Jennifer E. Swetits

Theses and Dissertations

No abstract provided.

Community Down: The Loss Of Sergeant Joe Bergeron, John Edward Helcl Ii

All Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Other Capstone Projects

What local government officials, administrators, and staff can expect and how to can help in the aftermath of a peace officer’s line-of-duty death within their community.

Exceptions: The Criminal Law's Illogical Approach To Hiv-Related Aggravated Assaults, Ari Ezra Waldman

Articles & Chapters

This Article identifies logical and due process errors in HIV-related aggravated assault cases, which usually involve an HIV-positive individual having unprotected sex without disclosing his or her HIV status. While this behavior should not be encouraged, this Article suggests that punishing this conduct through a charge of aggravated assault - which requires a showing that the defendant’s actions were a means likely to cause grievous bodily harm or death - is fraught with fallacies in reasoning and runs afoul of due process. Specifically, some courts use the "rule of thumb" that HIV can possibly be transmitted through bodily fluids as …

Meeting Across The River: Why Affirmative Action Needs Race And Class Diversity, Deirdre M. Bowen

Faculty Articles

This paper is a response to Richard Sander’s latest work challenging the notion that race based affirmative action is still relevant and demanding that institutions of higher education consider class based affirmative action. To support his thesis, Sander conducts an empirical study on who benefits from affirmative action.

This Article is divided into three sections, each containing a critique of Sander’s arguments and analysis. First, I briefly reframe and reiterate the history of race and ethnicity in affirmative action’s origins to directly confront the assumption that Sander makes about what affirmative action’s original purpose entailed. The goal of Part I …

Rodrigo’S Reconsideration: Intersectionality And The Future Of Critical Race Theory, Richard Delgado

Faculty Articles

The author presents a discussion between him and his friend Rodrigo Crenshaw on intersectionality and the future of critical race theory. They discuss the three core critical-race theory ideas which include narrative jurisprudence, integroup coalitions and intersectionality. The author also explains the concept of classical liberalism.

Freedom From Violence: Using The Stages Of Change Model To Realize The Promise Of Civil Protection Orders, Jane K. Stoever

Faculty Articles

This Article is the first legal scholarship to analyze domestic violence civil protection orders and response systems using the Stages of Change Model from the field of psychology. The Stages of Change Model, which describes how domestic violence survivors end relationship violence, includes five stages: (1) pre-contemplation; (2) contemplation; (3) preparation; (4) action; and (5) maintenance. According to the model, ending intimate partner violence is an iterative and complex process, and survivors typically revisit earlier stages as they progress toward maintaining freedom from violence. The model has been validated by numerous studies and is widely accepted in the psychology community. …

Clinical Social Work And The Biomedical Industrial Complex, Tomi Gomory, Stephen E. Wong, David Cohen, Jeffrey R. Lacasse

The Journal of Sociology & Social Welfare

This article examines how the biomedical industrial complex has ensnared social work within a foreign conceptual and practice model that distracts clinical social workers from the special assistance that they can provide for people with mental distress and misbehavior. We discuss: (1) social work's assimilation of psychiatric perspectives and practices during its pursuit of professional status; (2) the persistence of psychiatric hospitalization despite its coercive methods, high cost, and doubtful efficacy; (3) the increasing reliance on the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, despite its widely acknowledged scientific frailty; and (4) the questionable contributions of psychoactive drugs to clinical …

Falling Through The Crack: How Courts Have Struggled To Apply The Crack Amendment To Nominal Career And Plea Bargain Defendants, Maxwell Arlie Halpern Kosman

Michigan Law Review

Under the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure, a defendant is normally obligated to attend all of the proceedings against her. However Rule 43(b)(2) carves out an exception for organizational defendants, stating that they "need not be present" if represented by an attorney. But on its face, the language of 43(b)(2) is ambiguous: is it the defendant or the judge who has the discretion to decide whether the defendant appears? That is, may a judge compel the presence of an organizational defendant? This Note addresses the ambiguity in the context of the plea colloquy, considering the text of several of the …

Prosecuting The Informant Culture, Andrew E. Taslitz

Michigan Law Review

Alexandra Natapoff, in her outstanding new book, Snitching: Criminal Informants and the Erosion of American Justice, makes a compelling case for reform of the system by which we regulate police use of criminal informants. Indeed, as other writers have discussed, law enforcement's overreliance on such informants has led to a "snitching culture" in which informant snitching replaces other forms of law enforcement investigation (pp. 12, 31, 88-89). Yet snitches, especially jailhouse snitches, are notoriously unreliable.

Federal Rule Of Evidence 408 And Criminal Cases, Stephen A. Saltzburg

GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works

This article examines United States v. Davis, 596 F.3d 852 (D.C. Cir. 2010) to illustrate the kind of protection Federal Rule of Evidence 408 can afford a criminal defendant who seeks to exclude evidence of an offer to settle what appears to be a civil dispute.

The Right Objection, Stephen A. Saltzburg

GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works

Crafting the right objection to evidence presented at trial is important both to win an evidence fight and to preserve an issue for appeal. This article examines United States v. Davis, 596 F.3d 852 (D.C. Cir. 2010) to illustrate just how difficult making the right objection can be.

Randomizing Law, Michael B. Abramowicz, Ian Ayers, Yair Listokin

GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works

Governments should embrace randomized trials to estimate the efficacy of different laws and regulations. Just as random assignment of treatments is the most powerful method of testing for the causal impact of pharmaceuticals, randomly assigning individuals or firms to different legal rules can help resolve uncertainty about the consequential impacts of law. We explain why randomized testing is likely to produce better information than nonrandom evaluation of legal policies and offer guidelines for conducting legal experimentation successfully, considering a variety of obstacles, including ethical ones. Randomization will not be useful for all policies, but once government gains better experience with …

Child Citizenship And Agency As Shaped By Legal Obligations, Suzanne H. Jackson

GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works

This article maintains that the legal recognition of obligations for children facilitates their recognition as citizens and agents when such obligations are understood from contextual and relational perspectives. Drawing primarily upon sources from Canada and the United States, the article advances this claim through a study of three separate settings. Part I examines the “child as student” and studies children’s obligations within schools. Part II considers the “street child” and the obligations and challenges children encounter when they live away from their families and communities. Part III contemplates the “child as bargainer” and focuses on obligations children assume when accessing, …

The Rise And Fall Of Comparative Constitutional Law In The Postwar Era, David Fontana

GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works

In the first few decades after World War II, comparative constitutional law rose to a prominent position in American law schools, only to disappear in many ways in the years after the Warren Court in part because of the Court’s decisions. During the years after World War II, Justices of the Supreme Court (from William Douglas to Felix Frankfurter to Earl Warren) and deans of major American law schools (like Harvard Law School Dean and later Nixon Solicitor General Erwin Griswold) traveled the country and the world encouraging everyone to examine the constitutional law of other countries. Law reviews featured …

Dialogue Magazine, Winter 2011

Dialogue, the magazine of the DePaul University College of Law

No abstract provided.

It's All Relative: Familial Dna Testing And The Fourth Amendment, Amanda Pattock

Minnesota Journal of Law, Science & Technology

No abstract provided.

Undervaluing Indeterminacy: Translating Social Science Into Law, Elizabeth Mertz

DePaul Law Review

No abstract provided.

Plaintiffs' Lawyers: Dealing With The Possible But Not Certain, Stephen Daniels, Joanne Martin

DePaul Law Review

No abstract provided.

The Function Of Indigenous Law In A Modern Economic And Political State: The Cameroon Scenario, Victoria M. Time

Sociology & Criminal Justice Faculty Publications

Using Cameroon as a case study, this research examines if a legal system built primarily upon indigenous laws can serve modern economic, political, and social realities. Indigenous laws have several attractive advantages (such as expediency in dispute resolution, and fostering community cohesiveness), and may fully thrive in a homogenous society. However, after examining the realities in Cameroon, the study concludes that since the society has dozens of tribes with values and traditions which are invariably different, and because the country relies on foreign aid, what is advocated is a system whereby indigenous and formal laws co-exist.