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2014-2015 School Of Law Academic Honors & Awards, University Of San Diego School Of Law

Academic Honors and Awards

No abstract provided.

Instead Of Suspension: Alternative Strategies For Effective School Discipline, Jenni Owen, Jane Wettach, Katie Claire Hoffman

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Decriminalizing Delinquency: The Effect Of Raising The Age Of Majority On Juvenile Recidivism, Charles E. Loeffler, Ben Grunwald

Faculty Scholarship

In the last decade, a number of states have expanded the jurisdiction of their juvenile courts by increasing the maximum age to 18. Proponents argue that these expansions reduce crime by increasing access to the beneficial features of the juvenile justice system. Critics counter that the expansions risk increasing crime by reducing deterrence. In 2010, Illinois raised the maximum age for juvenile court for offenders who commit a misdemeanor. By examining the effect of this law on juvenile offenders in Chicago, this paper provides the first empirical estimates of the consequences of recent legislative activity to raise the age of …

Self-Interest Or Self-Inflicted? How The United States Charges Its Service Members For Violating The Laws Of War, Chris Jenks

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

This chapter explores the aspects of self-interest implicated by the US military prosecuting its own service members who violate the laws of war under different criminal charges than it prosecutes enemy belligerents who commit substantially similar offences. The chapter briefly explains how the US asserts criminal jurisdiction over its service members before turning to how the US military reports violations of the laws of war. It then sets out the US methodology for charging such violations as applied to its service members, and compares this methodology to that applied to those tried by military commissions. The chapter then discusses the …

Depalma And Ringer's "Mapping Christian Rhetorics: Connecting Conversations, Charting New Territories" (Book Review), Grace Veach

The Christian Librarian

No abstract provided.

Taking Another Look At Second-Look Sentencing, Meghan J. Ryan

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

A historically unprecedented number of Americans are currently behind bars. Our high rate of incarceration, and the high bills that it generates for American taxpayers, has led to a number of proposals for sentencing reform. For example, bills were recently introduced in both the House and Senate that would roll back federal mandatory minimum sentences for certain drug offenders, and the Obama Administration has announced a plan to grant clemency to hundreds of non-violent drug offenders. Perhaps the most revolutionary proposal, though, is one advanced by the drafters of the Model Penal Code, namely that judges be given the power …

Emergence From Civil Death: The Evolution Of Expungement In West Virginia, Valena Beety, Michael Aloi, Evan Johns

Articles by Maurer Faculty

Ninety-two million Americans have a criminal record—nearly one in three adults. This criminal record can include an arrest that did not lead to a conviction, a conviction for which the person did not serve time in prison, or a conviction for a nonviolent crime. All can have a similar impact on an individual’s job prospects and on local economies. Incarcerating adult Americans costs a combined $68 billion annually at the local, state, and federal levels. The cost of lost wages and lost financial contributions to society by ex-offenders is even higher.

This financially immobilized population of former offenders may be …

Police Violence And Ferguson: (En)Racing Criminal Procedure, Jeannine Bell

Articles by Maurer Faculty

No abstract provided.

Modifying Unjust Sentences, E. Lea Johnston

Georgia Law Review

Judicial sentence modification offers a means to address the phenomenon of over-incarcerationas well as the harsh prison conditions that threaten unjust punishment. Indeed, some legislatures have framed states' early release provisions as fulfilling goals of proportionality and just punishment. This Article explores whether the tools available to judges at sentence modification hearings are adequate to respond to the unjust punishment experienced by prisoners. In examining this question, the Article focuses on one population particularly likely to experience disproportionate or inhumane punishment: inmates with serious mental disorders. A deep literature suggests that individuals with serious mental illnesses are especially likely to …

Outsourcing, Data Insourcing, And The Irrelevant Constitution, Kimberly N. Brown

Georgia Law Review

Long before revelations of the National Security Agency's data collection programs grabbed headlines, scholars and the press decried the burgeoning harms to privacy that metadata mining and new surveillance technologies present. Through publicly accessible social media sites, web-tracking technologies, private data mining consolidators, and its own databases, the government is just a mouse click away from a wealth of intimate personal information that was virtually inaccessible only a decade ago. At the heart of the conundrum is the government's ability to source an unprecedented amount of personal data from private third parties. This trail of digital information is being insourced …

Without A Pilot: Navigating The Space Between The First Amendment And State And Federal Directives Affecting Drone Journalism, Leah M. Davis

Georgia Law Review

A new player in American airspace, the drone, creates greater opportunities for news gathering. But with new opportunities, come new rules. Current legislatures, regulators and courts face the challenge of creating and enforcing a legal framework by which this new technology can be integrated into American airspace. The debate surrounding proper drone directives is influenced by competing policies of privacy, security, and First Amendment concerns. This Note surveys past and present state and federal directives on drone use, and argues for the creation of a separate set of guidelines for Press drones. Separate directives would ensure that news outlets are …

Instrumentalizing The Expressive: Transplanting Sentencing Circles Into The Canadian Criminal Trial, Toby S. Goldbach

All Faculty Publications

This Article examines reforms to criminal sentencing procedures in Canada, focusing on Aboriginal healing circles, which were incorporated as “sentencing circles” into the criminal trial. Using the lens of comparative law and legal transplants, this Article recounts the period of sentencing reform in Canada in the 1990s, when scholars, practitioners, and activists inquired into Aboriginal confrontation with the criminal justice system by comparing Euro-Canadian and Aboriginal justice values and principles. As a way to bridge the gap between vastly differing worldviews and approaches to justice, judges and Aboriginal justice advocates transplanted sentencing circles into the sentencing phase of the criminal …

The Supreme Court And The Rehabilitative Ideal, Chad Flanders

Georgia Law Review

Graham v. Florida was a watershed decision, not least because of the centrality of the "rehabilitative ideal" to its holding that life in prison for juveniles convicted of nonhomicide crimes was cruel and unusual. The Court's emphasis on rehabilitation was surprising both because rehabilitation was barely included as a 'purpose of punishment" in prior decisions of the Court, but also in terms of the history of academic and legislative skepticism toward rehabilitation. Courts and commentators have struggled to make sense of both the meaning and the scope of Graham's rehabilitative holding. This Article places Graham in the context of the …

Social Structure And Clearance Rates: The Effect Of Neighborhood Characteristics On Aggravated Assault Case Outcome, Brad Silberzahn

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

The ability of police to make an arrest for a crime is one of the most visible aspects of the criminal justice system. As a result, it is no surprise that clearance rates are one of the most commonly used measures of police effectiveness. Previous studies of clearance rates focus heavily on the clearance of homicide cases, as many researchers examine the effect of individual level characteristics on case outcomes. Using Donald Black's theory of law, which places an emphasis on social space, i.e., vertical and horizontal distances between victims and offenders, this study examines the effect of neighborhood characteristics …

Christ In The Margins: Confronting Racism Through The (Written) Word In Post-Civil War America, Cara L. Snider

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

This dissertation examines fictional texts of the late nineteenth century in order to recover the response of progressive Christian writers facing a growing tide of racial violence, injustice, and segregation in the postbellum decades. By investigating the works of Mark Twain, Charles Sheldon, Frances Harper, and Sutton Griggs, I argue that we gain access to a cadre of writers who sought to translate emerging strains of New Theology into practical means of race reform. They regarded their novels as sermons to the masses and saw writing as a sacred practice of communicating the Word to fellow believers; and their brand …

Clustering By Academic Major At Historically Black Colleges And Universities (Hbcus), Aaron Goodson

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

Follow-up studies of clustering by academic major, the dynamic of 25% or more of the student-athletes on a roster pursuing the same academic major, indicate that it still occurs in revenue-generating sports (Fountain & Finley 2009, 2011; Otto, 2012). Clustering challenges the notion that student-athletes have control over their collegiate academic experience and reveals that their educational pursuits may not align with their professional goals or provide a meaningful educational experience (Sharp & Sheilley, 2008). Research on clustering is absent in member institutions of different NCAA divisions, institutions with unique missions and history (such as Historically Black Colleges and Universities …

Expanding The Use Of Rna In Forensic Science: A Quantum Dot Molecular Beacon Approach, Joshua R. Moore

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

As the popularity of shows such as CSI increases, so does the demand for DNA evidence in court cases. This has led to the overwhelming of capacity for analysis of biological samples at crime labs across the country, and to the development of a massive backlog of DNA evidence waiting to be processed. At the end of 2011, labs had a processing capacity of 250,000 cases per year, but an annual total of nearly 350,000 that needed to be processed. Such delays have effects throughout the US justice system. One way to reduce the backlog would be to increase the …

Dimensions Of Political Reasoning: Associations Among Informational Assumptions, Sociopolitical Values, And Domain-Specific Judgments About Laws, Benjamin Oosterhoff

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

Adolescents' beliefs about laws are a critical component of their emerging political reasoning, which is hypothesized to guide political decisions in adulthood. Laws serve a variety of purposes by restricting certain social behaviors. However, little is known about the types of laws adolescents view as important and obligatory to obey, or the amount of punishment that should be received for breaking different laws. Identifying individual differences in these beliefs may help elucidate the developmental origins of political attitudes. Therefore, the current study had three primary goals. The first goal was to utilize social domain theory to assess adolescents' judgments and …

You Can't Fight City Hall: Organization And Success In West Virginia, Theodore Malone

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

This research centers on the question of 'Who wins?' in criminal and civil cases heard by West Virginia's Supreme Court of Appeals. The study examines litigant characteristics and whether court winners are favored by virtue of their higher organizational levels, such as being business or government affiliates. The study is a partial small-scale replication of the prior research by Songer and Sheehan (1992) who determined that litigation resources that resulted from higher organizational levels predicated higher win rates in the United States Courts of Appeals. I utilized an array of cross-tabulations of success and litigant organization for a two-year sample …

How Well Are Your Police Doing?: The Relationship Between Fear Of Crime And Perceptions Of The Police, Erin Bixler

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

Research on the fear of crime, or the fear of victimization, started becoming a popular topic in the late 1960s and has stayed in the spotlight since then. However, there has been a very small amount of literature that has focused on how an individual's fear of crime impacts their perceptions of the police. There has also been cloudiness in previous literature about how to measure fear of crime. This study examines the relationship between an individual's fear of crime and their perceptions of the police using two different measures of police, perceptions of police effectiveness and perceptions of community …

Choosing Not To Cheat: A Framework To Assess Students’ Rationales For Abiding By Academic Integrity Policies, Kenneth H. Kolb, Kyle C. Longest, Alexa J. Singer

International Journal for the Scholarship of Teaching & Learning

Writing intensive first-year seminars are well situated within the curriculum to teach about issues like cheating and plagiarism. Although most research on academic integrity focuses on how—and how much—students cheat, we take a different approach. We assess whether participation in writing intensive first-year seminars produces measurable changes in students’ rationales for choosing not to cheat. Relying upon data collected via pre and post-test in-depth interviews, we propose a framework to measure these changes that is grounded in students’ accounts of how they negotiated real-life opportunities to cheat on campus. In general, we find that writing intensive first-year seminars produce no …

“It’S Just Nice Having A Real Teacher”: Student Perceptions Of Online Versus Face-To-Face Instruction, Lisa P. Tichavsky, Andrea N. Hunt, Adam Driscoll, Karl Jicha

International Journal for the Scholarship of Teaching & Learning

With recent increases in online enrollment, undergraduate students are far more likely to experience an online learning environment than they were in the past. While existing literature provides general insight into reasons why students may or may not prefer online instruction, it is unclear whether these preferences are shaped by student’s perceptions of online learning or actual experience with online courses. To address this gap, undergraduate students enrolled in either online (n=370) or face-to-face (n=360) courses were surveyed about their course format preference. A content analysis of the responses was performed with the findings suggesting that 1) student perceptions may …

From Contract To Status: Collaboration And The Evolution Of Novel Family Relationships, Elizabeth S. Scott, Robert E. Scott

Faculty Scholarship

The past decade has witnessed dramatic changes in public atti- tudes about and legal status for same-sex couples who wish to marry. These changes demonstrate that the legal conception of the family is no longer limited to traditional marriage. They also raise the possibility that other relationships – cohabiting couples and their children, voluntary kin groups, multigenerational groups, and polygamists – might gain legal recognition as families. This Article probes the challenges faced by aspiring families and the means by which they could attain their goal. It builds on the premise that the state remains committed to social-welfare criteria for …

Ascension, Sandra Bennett, Doy Cave

Research & Economic Development

editor: director: designer:

Mallory Biggers photographer: Jeremy Wilburn

Goode, Lewis, And Trulear's "Ministry With Prisoners And Families: The Way Forward" (Book Review), Lisa B. Hayes

The Christian Librarian

No abstract provided.

Defining And Punishing Offenses Under Treaties, Sarah H. Cleveland, William S. Dodge

Faculty Scholarship

One of the principal aims of the U.S. Constitution was to give the federal government authority to comply with its international legal commitments. The scope of Congress's constitutional authority to implement treaties has recently received particular attention. In Bond v. United States, the Court avoided the constitutional questions by construing a statute to respect federalism, but these questions are unlikely to go away. This Article contributes to the ongoing debate by identifying the Offenses Clause as an additional source of Congress's constitutional authority to implement certain treaty commitments. Past scholarship has assumed that the Article I power to "define …

Leniency In Chinese Criminal Law? Everyday Justice In Henan, Benjamin L. Liebman

Faculty Scholarship

This Article examines one year of publicly available criminal judgments from a basic-level rural county court and an intermediate court in Henan Province in order to better understand trends in routine criminal adjudication in China. I present an account of ordinary criminal justice in China that is both familiar and striking: a system that treats serious crimes, in particular those affecting State interests, harshly, while at the same time acting leniently in routine cases. Most significantly, examination of more than five hundred court decisions shows the vital role that settlement plays in criminal cases in China today. Defendants who agree …

Three Essays In Criminal Justice, Bernard E. Harcourt

Faculty Scholarship

How could the New York Times call the grand jury’s decision to no bill the indictment against officer Darren Wilson in Ferguson, Missouri, a “verdict”? How could federal appellate judges call it a “procedural shortcut” when a state judge, in a death penalty case, signs the state attorney general’s proposed judicial opinion without even striking the word “proposed” or reviewing the full opinion? What do these incidents tell us about contemporary criminal justice? These essays explore these puzzles. The first, “Verdict and Illusion,” begins to sketch the role of illusions in justice. The second, “A Singe Voice of Justice,” interprets …

The ’73 Graft: Punishment, Political Economy, And The Genealogy Of Morals, Bernard E. Harcourt

Faculty Scholarship

In this essay, I explore the place of a genealogy of morals within the context of a history of political economy. More specifically, I investigate the types of moralization – of criminals and delinquents, of the disorderly, but also of political economic systems, of workers and managers, of rules and rule-breaking – that are necessary and integral to making a population accept new styles of political and economic governance, especially the punitive institutions that accompany modern political economies in the contemporary period.

The marriage of political economy and a genealogy of morals: this essay explores how the moralization of certain …

Cues Of Colorism: The Psychological, Sociocultural, And Developmental Differences Between Light-Skinned And Dark-Skinned African-Americans, Tasia M. Pinkston

College of Graduate Studies: Theses & Dissertations

Skin color biases, henceforth referred to as colorism, are the biased judgments, attitudes and behaviors toward an individual based on the lightness or darkness of their skin. Available research on the topic has examined a select group of variables, such as mate selection, self-esteem and perceived attractiveness. However, there is no single study on differences between African-Americans across several domains, including their psychological (skin color satisfaction and self-esteem), sociocultural (media influence on appearance and discriminatory events), and developmental (ethnic identity) well-being. Moreover, there is no research on differences in these variables between African-Americans reared in rural versus non-rural areas. To …