Digital Commons Network^™

The Meaning Of A Misdemeanor In A Post-Ferguson World: Evaluating The Reliability Of Prior Conviction Evidence, John D. King

Georgia Law Review

Despite evidence that America’s low-level courts are
overburdened, unreliable, and structurally biased,
sentencing judges continue to uncritically consider a
defendant’s criminal history in fashioning an
appropriate punishment. Misdemeanor courts lack
many of the procedural safeguards that are thought to
ensure accuracy and reliability. As with other stages of
the criminal justice system, people of color and poor
people are disproportionately burdened with the
inaccuracies of the misdemeanor system.
This Article examines instances in which sentencing
courts have looked behind the mere fact of a prior
conviction and assessed whether that prior conviction
offered any meaningful insight for the subsequent
sentence. …

The Four Horsemen Of The Internet Apocalypse: The Relevation Of State Net Neutrality Laws, Zachary P.T. Lundgren

Georgia Law Review

In 2018, on the heels of intense debate and
widespread media campaigns, the FCC repealed its
2015 regulations protecting net neutrality. The repeal
continued to stoke controversy after it was announced,
facing congressional and legal challenges almost
immediately. The most interesting response, however,
has been the passage of state net neutrality laws in
California, Oregon, Vermont, and Washington. The first
of their kind, these four laws largely purport to reinstate
the 2015 net neutrality rules within state lines.
Rather than take sides in the net neutrality debate,
this Note focuses on these novel state laws and,
principally, whether they will …

Faulty Forensics: Bolstering Judicial Gatekeeping In Georgia Courts, Miranda S. Bidinger

Georgia Law Review

Forensic evidence is widely used in criminal cases
across the country and is accorded great weight by
juries. But critics have begun to question its reliability.
Its use has contributed to numerous wrongful
convictions, and though some individuals have been
exonerated, many remain incarcerated for crimes they
did not commit.
This Note explores a variety of forensic science
disciplines and their associated problems, the recent
push for forensic reform, and the current standards
governing the admissibility of forensic evidence at the
federal level and in Georgia courts, highlighting the
lenient standard embodied in the Georgia Code and
elaborated upon in …

Georgia’S Runoff Election System Has Run Its Course, Graham P. Goldberg

Georgia Law Review

Georgia requires candidates to earn a majority of
votes in their party’s primary to win elected office. The
majority-vote requirement—passed by the General
Assembly in 1964—is stained by racially-fraught
politics of the era, and even its alleged “good
government” goals are now antiquated. This Note
explores the history of Georgia’s majority-vote
requirement, examines two legal challenges to the law,
and analyzes its flaws and virtues. Finally, this Note
demonstrates that more appealing alternatives to the
majority-vote requirement exist and recommends that
Georgia replace its current runoff election system with
either ranked choice voting or a forty-percent
threshold-vote requirement.

Bending The Arc Toward Justice: The Current Era Of Juvenile Justice Reform In Georgia, Melissa D. Carter

Georgia Law Review

America’s juvenile justice system is experiencing another era of reform. The formal juvenile justice system originated from the ideology and methods of social reformers who viewed deviant behavior as a treatable condition and sought redemption of criminal youth. In the first era of reform, that view powered the state’s exercise of its parens patriae authority and produced a paternalistic judiciary and institutions that used custody as a means of achieving social control. Over time, changing political and social views of childhood and a growing recognition in the law of children as rights-holders shifted the system’s focus away from the rehabilitative …

Juvenile Justice Reform In Georgia: A Collective Decisionmaking Approach To De-Politicize Crime And Punishment, The Honorable Steven Teske

Georgia Law Review

Since the creation of the first juvenile court in 1899, juvenile courts have undergone periods of transition in response to legislative enactments prompted by societal events or in response to legal challenges involving due process rights of children. This Article examines politics and the extent in which it played a role in shaping juvenile justice and crime policies and its impact on children and public safety. In this critical review of each period of transition, this Article concludes that the lack of success among juvenile justice agencies, including the courts, is predominately the result of the politicizing of crime and …

Boots And Bail On The Ground: Assessing The Implementation Of Misdemeanor Bail Reforms In Georgia, Andrea Woods, Sandra G. Mayson, Lauren Sudeall, Guthrie Armstrong, Anthony Potts

Georgia Law Review

This Article presents a mixed-methods study of misdemeanor bail practice across Georgia in the wake of reform. We observed bail hearings and interviewed system actors in a representative sample of fifty-five counties to assess the extent to which pretrial practice conforms to legal standards clarified in Senate Bill 407 and Walker v. Calhoun. We also analyzed jail population data published by county jails and by the Georgia Department of Community Affairs. We found that a handful of counties have made promising headway in adhering to law and best practices, but that the majority have some distance to go. Most counties …

To Outgrow A Mockingbird: Confronting Our History—As Well As Our Fictions—About Indigent Defense In The Deep South, Sarah Gerwig-Moore

Georgia Law Review

To Kill a Mockingbird occupies a beloved space in law school classrooms and curricula, especially in its portrayal of Atticus Finch. Frequently held up as the model or “hero-lawyer,” Atticus’s character is powerful in fiction, but problematic in practice. His work is lauded, rather than scrutinized, despite his questionable ability to represent his client in life-or-death circumstances—specifically, a racially charged sexual assault case in the Deep South. Through considering examples of historical lawyers and texts which explore similar themes without the lens of fiction, those engaged in legal education and legal practice can and should look to others to study …

Confronting Memory Loss, Paul F. Rothstein, Ronald J. Coleman

Georgia Law Review

The Confrontation Clause of the Sixth Amendment grants
“the accused” in “all criminal prosecutions” a right “to be
confronted with the witnesses against him.” A particular
problem occurs when there is a gap in time between the
testimony that is offered and the cross-examination of it, as
where—pursuant to a hearsay exception or exemption—
evidence of a current witness’s prior statement is offered and,
for some intervening reason, her current memory is impaired.
Does this fatally affect the opportunity to “confront” the
witness? The U.S. Supreme Court has, to date, left unclear the
extent to which a memory-impaired witness can …

Whistleblowing In The Compliance Era, Jeffrey R. Boles, Leora Eisenstadt, Jennifer M. Pacella

Georgia Law Review

International events over the last year have propelled the
importance of whistleblowers to the forefront. It is increasingly
evident that whistleblowers provide immense value to society.
Yet, for years, whistleblowers have been victims of retaliation,
commonly experiencing threats, discrimination, and
employment termination due to their reporting. Against the
backdrop of a society heavily defined by compliance-focused
initiatives—where organizations and industries construct
robust compliance programs, internal policies, and codes of
conduct—this Article highlights a significant gap in legal
protections for would-be whistleblowers. While compliance
initiatives demonstrate that active self-regulation is
increasingly a staple of organizational governance, this Article
pinpoints the problems …

The Georgia Condominium Act’S Authorization Of Private Takings: Revisiting Kelo And “Bitter With The Sweet”, Tyler Gaines

Georgia Law Review

Homeownership provides owners with certain property
rights and a sense of security. One of the most important
property rights is the Takings Clause of the U.S. Constitution,
which prohibits the government from taking private property
without just compensation. The Clause has been incorporated
against the states and is interpreted as prohibiting any taking
that does not serve a public use. Despite these constitutional
protections, numerous condominium owners face the threat of
private investors taking their units for no public use, without
just compensation, and without the owners’ consent.
Many state condominium laws allow private investors who
obtain a specified percentage …

Puppies, Puppies, Puppies: Why Georgia Should “Adopt” A Progressive Puppy Lemon Law And Engage In Much-Needed Statutory Reform, Jonathan T. Tortorici

Georgia Law Review

The Georgia Animal Protection Act—a set of animal
protection laws that has remained unchanged for nearly two
decades—was passed to promote animal welfare across the
state. Although the Act was progressive at its inception, its
failure to curb the atrocious conditions created by puppy mills
has become increasingly apparent, resulting in serious
consequences for both consumers and dogs. Georgia must
amend its animal protection laws to shift the costs of puppy
mills to where they belong: on pet sellers. Among other
innovative solutions to this problem, many states have enacted
“puppy lemon laws” that generally provide pet purchasers with
the …

Why The Vppa And Coppa Are Outdated: How Netflix, Youtube, And Disney+ Can Monitor Your Family At No Real Cost, Anna O’Donnell

Georgia Law Review

Video-streaming services like Netflix, YouTube, and Disney+
dominate the current media landscape. This Note explains why
current laws likely cannot effectively prevent these streaming
services from collecting and sharing users’ private information.
The Video Privacy Protection Act (the VPPA) contains language
that has baffled courts when applying its text to streaming
services, resulting in multiple circuit splits. The Children’s
Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) has a clearer
application to streaming services, yet its enforcement has
resulted in small settlements with companies that have been
charged with collecting children’s private information. Both the
VPPA and COPPA need to be updated to …

Antecedents Of Tendency To Help The Victims Of Human Trafficking From The Perspective Of High-Contact Service Employees In The Lodging Industry, Melissa Farboudi Jahromi

Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2020-2023

International Labor Organization estimated that 40.3 million people were victims of human trafficking in 2016. The high rate of human trafficking has drawn policymakers' attention to this issue and made them enforce anti-trafficking laws and regulations. However, their legal measures have not been based on solid empirical evidence due to the lack of academic research on human trafficking. The scant research available on human trafficking has been mainly descriptive or an investigation of sex trafficking cases to provide help to survivors. Thus, there is a need for research to explore human trafficking as a human rights issue through various perspectives …

Cultural Institutions' Digital Responses To Covid-19 Temporary Closures, Brittany N. Ryder

Honors Undergraduate Theses

The purpose of the study was to explore what types of digital content cultural institutions implemented during COVID-19 temporary closures and their effects on social media engagement. Existing research identified the role of digital content and social media in cultural institutions, but only in times of normal operations. The study adds to the existing literature by exploring types of digital content implemented, impacts on social media engagement, measures of social media engagement, and future implications in regard to COVID-19 temporary closures.

The study recruited 16 cultural institutions from across the United States to take part in in-depth semi-structured phone interviews …

Deal Insurance: Representation & Warranty Insurance In Mergers & Acquisitions, Sean J. Griffith

Faculty Scholarship

Efficient contracting depends upon imposing risk on the party with superior access to information. Yet the parties in mergers and acquisitions transactions now commonly use Representation and Warranty Insurance (“RWI”) to shift this risk to a third-party insurer. Because liability and trust go together, RWI would seem to give rise to a credible commitment problem between the transacting parties, and it raises adverse selection and moral hazard problems for the insurer.

This paper examines the emergence of RWI, focusing on three interrelated questions. First, how does RWI affect transactions?Second, why do transacting parties use RWI? And third, why do insurers …

Lying And Cheating, Or Self-Help And Civil-Disobedience?, Aditi Bagchi

Faculty Scholarship

May poor sellers lie to rich buyers? This article argues that, under limited circumstances, sellers may indeed have a license to lie about their goods. Where sellers are losers under unjust background institutions and they reasonably believe that buyers have more than they would under just institutions, lies that result in de minimum transfers can be regarded as a kind of self-help. More generally, what we owe each other in our interpersonal interactions depends on the institutional backdrop. Consumer contract law, including its enforcement regimes, should recognize the social and political contingency of sellers’ obligations to buyers. In other contexts, …

What's The Difference Between A Conclusion And A Fact?, Howard M. Erichson

Faculty Scholarship

In Ashcroft v. Iqbal, building on Bell Atlantic Corp. v. Twombly, the Supreme Court instructed district courts to treat a complaint’s conclusions differently from allegations of fact. Facts, but not conclusions, are assumed true for purposes of a motion to dismiss. The Court did little to help judges or lawyers understand this elusive distinction, and, indeed, obscured the distinction with its language. The Court said it was distinguishing “legal conclusions” from factual allegations. The application in Twombly and Iqbal, however, shows that the relevant distinction is not between law and fact, but rather between different types of factual assertions. This …

Tracking Client Outcomes: A Qualitative Assessment Of Civil Legal Aid’S Use Of Outcomes Data, With Recommendations, David Udell, Amy Widman

Faculty Scholarship

In virtually all sectors of society, people are using data to improve what they do. Everyone, it seems, is interested in data, and is searching for best strategies to draw on its power. The stakes are high in the civil legal aid community, where strengthened advocacy can enable people to preserve their homes, their relationships with their children, their life savings, their physical and emotional well-being, and even their freedom.

Yet, in the civil legal aid community, awareness of the power of data is just beginning to take root. Traditionally, civil legal aid has been thinly funded, with little infrastructure …

The Mainstreaming Of Sex Workers' Rights As Human Rights, Chi Adanna Mgbako

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Afrodescendants, Law, And Race In Latin America, Tanya K. Hernandez

Faculty Scholarship

Law and Society research in and about Latin America has been particularly beneficial in elucidating the gap between the ideals of racial equality laws in the region and the actual subordinated status of its racialized subjects. Some of the recurrent themes in the race-related literature have been: the limits of the Latin American emphasis on criminal law to redress discriminatory actions; the limits of multicultural constitutional reform for full political participation; the insufficiency of land reform and recognition of ethnic communal property titles; and the challenges to implementing race conscious public policies such as affirmative action. Especially illuminating have been …

What Should Presidential Candidates Tell Us About Themselves? Proposals For Improving Transparency In Presidential Campaigns, Megha Dharia, Rikki Lavine, Ryan Partelow, James Auchincloss, Krysia Lenzo

Faculty Scholarship

Elections are at the foundation of our democracy, but voters sometimes cast their ballots without critical information about presidential candidates. This report calls for requirements that candidates release more personal financial information, including five years of tax returns, and undergo criminal and intelligence background checks. The report also advocates for a system allowing candidates to submit to voluntary medical exams with some results released to the public.

This report was researched and written during the 2018-2019 academic year by students in Fordham Law School’s Democracy and the Constitution Clinic, which is focused on developing non-partisan recommendations to strengthen the nation’s …

Evidentiary Irony And The Incomplete Rule Of Completeness: A Proposal To Amend Federal Rule Of Evidence 106, Daniel J. Capra, Liesa L. Richte

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

A Poetics Of Violence: Representations Of Violence As Storytelling And World-Building Tools Of The Theater, Richard Gilbert

Dissertations

This dissertation explores how representations of violence do dramaturgical work in theatrical production. Playwrights write scenes of violence, and directors and designers stage them, with specific dramaturgical goals in mind. The project of this work is to develop a theoretical framework for understanding how productions use representations of violence. Ideally, that framework will be of use both to critics seeking to analyze productions with violence and to practitioners who want to more consciously shape their own use of violence.

Representations of violence create a sudden change in the audience's affective experience of the fictional world. I call that sudden change …

The Impact Of Number Talks On Kindergarten Math Growth In A Large Private Independent School, Rebecca Knight

Doctor of Education Dissertations

This mixed methods action research study examined the implementation process and impact of a 9-week Number Talk intervention to build number sense in kindergarten students. Fifty-eight kindergarten students engaged in daily Number Talk lessons for 9 weeks. Qualitative data were collected to evaluate the strengths and challenges of the implementation process with the teacher participants through a twice weekly observation tool and through bi-weekly math professional learning community discussions. The qualitative data gathered were coded for themes using Tesch’s Eight Steps for coding information. The data allowed me to evaluate the implementation process to determine if Number Talks were implemented …

Examining The Effects Of Culturally Responsive Teaching Practices Of Educators, Lenore Thompson

Doctor of Education Dissertations

This dissertation was designed to examine how experiences, education, and professional development informed culturally responsive pedagogy and influenced teacher beliefs in their ability to guide students to success when employing culturally responsive teaching practices. The research school district was located in the piedmont region of North Carolina. It was determined after reviewing the district’s historical student achievement data there was a trend of underachievement by marginalized groups of students. Licensed educators completed the Culturally Responsive Teaching Self-Efficacy (CRTSE) Scale and the Culturally Responsive Teaching Outcome Expectancy (CRTOE) Scale in order to determine their level of preparedness to teach students from …

Annual Reports Of The Town Of Seabrook, New Hampshire For The Year Ending December 31, 2019, As Compiled By The Town Officers., Seabrook Town Representatives

Seabrook, NH Annual Reports

This is an annual report containing vital statistics for a town/city in the state of New Hampshire.

Perceived Threat And Left-Wing Authoritarianism: The Effect Of Framing On Persuasive Messages, James Donald Mcfarland

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Past research reveals a strong connection between feeling threatened and Right-Wing Authoritarianism (RWA). This relationship is considered to be an integral part of authoritarianism and the nature of its presence in the left-leaning populace is still being fully explored. This study examined the relationship between perceived threat and Left-Wing Authoritarianism (LWA) through the framing of persuasive messages. Participants (n = 256) were recruited through Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (MTurk) and given a list of reward- or threat-framed statements concerning the possible ramifications of voting in future elections and then asked to rate the quality and persuasiveness of the respective statements. …

“Meet Them Where They're At”: Faith-Based And Secular Homeless Outreach Approaches, Larissa K. Fitzpatrick

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Many organizations strive to provide resources for individuals experiencing homelessness both in and outside of shelters. Studies analyzing the effects of religiosity on the practices of homeless shelters show that both faith-based and secular shelters generally offer a variety of services, from the accommodative, such as food and shelter, to the restorative, like housing, substance-use rehabilitation, and spiritual transformation (Snow and Anderson 1993). Although both types of shelters may require clients to participate in the latter to access the former, faith-based shelters often show a belief-based rigidity, with many requiring prayer, sermon attendance, or a proclamation of faith to access …

Digitizing The Corporeal: The Affect Of Mediatized Elements In Theatrical Performance, Kurtis Layne Hassinger

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

This paper explores the affect of digital media in live performance. The research is generated from work with integrated digital media in Carol Ann Duffy's 2015 adaptation of Everyman as well as Samuel Beckett's radio play Cascando. Through experimentation and implementation of motion tracking digital elements and actor-manipulated sonic and visual digital media achieved with MIDI and OSC mapping, I explore the embodiment of performances by actors when their various characters are represented on the physical as well as the digital stage simultaneously.

The research interrogates digital media in storytelling when actors can manipulate imagery and language in real time …