Digital Commons Network^™

Handling Aggravating Facts After Blakely: Findings From Five Presumptive Guidelines States, Nancy J. King

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

This Article reveals how five states with presumptive (binding) sentencing guidelines have implemented the right announced in Blakely v. Washington to a jury finding of aggravating facts allowing upward departures from the presumptive range. Using data provided by the sentencing commissions and courts in Kansas, Minnesota, North Carolina, Oregon, and Washington, as well as information from more than 2,200 docket sheets, the study discloses how upward departures are used in plea bargaining, sometimes undercutting policy goals; how often aggravating facts are tried and by whom; common types of aggravating facts; and the remarkably different, sometimes controversial interpretations of Blakely and …

Medicate And Segregate: How Due Process Fails To Protect Mentally Ill Inmates From Medically Inappropriate Confinement And Restraint, Peter J. Teravskis

Minnesota Journal of Law, Science & Technology

No abstract provided.

(Re)Framing Race In Civil Rights Lawyering, Angela Onwuachi-Willig, Anthony V. Alfieri

Faculty Scholarship

A review of Henry Louis Gates, Stony the Road: Reconstruction, White Supremacy, and the Rise of Jim Crow (Penguin Press, 2019). The Review proceeds in four parts. Part I parses Gates’s analysis of the rise of white supremacist ideology and the accompanying concept of the “Old Negro” during the Redemption era and the countervailing emergence of the concept of a “New Negro” culminating in the Harlem Renaissance. Part II examines the lawyering process as a rhetorical site for constructing racialized narratives and racially subordinating visions of client, group, and community identity through acts of representing, prosecuting, and defending people of …

The Right To Counsel In Illinois: Evaluation Of Adult Criminal Trial-Level Indigent Defense Services, Sixth Amendment Center, The Defender Initiative

Fred T. Korematsu Center for Law and Equality

The Right to Counsel in Illinois: Evaluation of Adult Criminal Trial-Level Indigent Defense Services

The Rule Of Law: A Necessary Pillar Of Free And Democratic Societies For Protecting Human Rights, John Bessler

All Faculty Scholarship

This essay traces the history and development of the concept of the Rule of Law from ancient times through the present. It describes the elements of the Rule of Law and its importance to the protection of human rights in a variety of contexts, including under domestic and international law. From ancient Greece and Rome to the Enlightenment, and from the American and French Revolutions to modern times, the Rule of Law has played a key role in societies around the world. The essay discusses definitions of the Rule of Law, its origins, and its development over time, including in …

Oliver Charbonneau’S Civilizational Imperatives: Americans, Moros, And The Colonial World, Review Author:; Cesar Suva

Philippine Studies: Historical and Ethnographic Viewpoints

No abstract provided.

Bob Couttie’S Fool’S Gold: Fakes, Frauds, And Fallacies In Philippine History. Vol. 1., Review Author:; Francisco Jayme Paolo A. Guiang

Philippine Studies: Historical and Ethnographic Viewpoints

No abstract provided.

Critical Thinking In Law Enforcement Training Academies: A Phenomenological Study Of Officer Experiences, Billy J. Spruill

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Recently, law enforcement officer use of force incidents resulting in death has seemingly become more prevalent. Generally, the educational requirement for a law enforcement officer is a high school diploma or general education development degree. One must question if this requirement is sufficient for a law enforcement officer to be successful in a modern world as the law enforcement training academy may be the law enforcement officer’s only postsecondary education. Critical thinking is a needed skill identified by high-stress professions such as the military, nursing, and disaster management, yet there is limited study regarding critical thinking in law enforcement. The …

Fighting Words: Targeting Speech In Armed Conflict, A. Louis Evans

Washington International Law Journal

Freedom of speech is considered one of the most fundamental human rights, but it is not without limits. In the context of an armed conflict, engaging in certain types of speech can form the basis for lethal targeting by States. Consensus exists in customary international law that speech-driven strikes constitute a lawful use of force under jus in bello standards. For example, a civilian who communicates the position of targets, or broadcasts tactical intelligence for a specific military operation has, by their speech, made themselves a lawful target. While customary international law agrees that speech-driven targeting is lawful, there has …

International Law And Transnational Legal Orders: Permeating Boundaries And Extending Social Science Encounters, Gregory Shaffer, Terence C. Halliday

Chicago Journal of International Law

This Essay elaborates in three ways the call for a renewal of social science approaches to international law advanced by Daniel Abebe, Adam Chilton, and Tom Ginsburg. First, while we affirm the importance of what they call the “scientific method” of hypothesis testing, we argue that it can and must be complemented by several other well-institutionalized social science approaches to international law. Second, we loosen the conventional “internal”/“external” distinction in legal scholarship and make the case that conceptualization and empirics are integral to both approaches. Third, we propose that the full promise of social science approaches to international law can …

A Review Of Harold Johnson, Peace And Good Order: The Case For Indigenous Justice In Canada, Haneen Al-Noman

Dalhousie Law Journal

Haneen Al Noman: A Review of Harold Johnson, Peace and Good Order: The Case for Indigenous Justice in Canada (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 2019).

Judging By The Numbers: Judicial Analytics, The Justice System And Its Stakeholders, Jena Mcgill, Amy Salyzyn

Dalhousie Law Journal

This article considers the future of judicial analytics, its possible effects for the public, the judiciary and the legal profession, and potential responses to the rise of judicial analytics in Canada. Judicial analytics involves the use of advanced technologies, like machine learning and natural language processing, to quickly analyze publicly-available data about judges and judicial decision-making. While, in Canada, judicial analytics tools are as yet at the early stages of development and use, such tools are likely to become more powerful, more accurate and more accessible in the near-to-medium future, resulting in unprecedented public insight into judges and the work …

Turning The Tables On Rds: Racially Revealing Questions Asked By White Judges, Constance Backhouse

Dalhousie Law Journal

In the 1997 RDS case, the Supreme Court of Canada deliberated on the concept of judicial race bias. The decision subjected the oral ruling of a lower court trial judge in a busy Youth Court to close scrutiny. The majority of the nine-person, all-white bench reprimanded Canada’s first Black female judge, whose words about police officers who “overreact” in dealing with racialized youth they found “troubling” and “worrisome.” This article places the same close scrutiny on the words of the white judges who were most critical of the trial judge. It examines their informal interjections and comments at the Supreme …

Exploring The Overlap, Saliency, And Consistency Of Environmental Predictors In Crime Hot Spots: A Remote Systematic Social Observation And Case-Control Examination, Nathan T. Connealy

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Despite the common finding that crime is highly concentrated in space, the specific locations, characteristics, and contexts of crime hot spots are not consistently the same or generalizable across unique units of analysis and crime types. This dissertation will simultaneously integrate different types of environmental criminology predictors, including crime generators and attractors and environmental disorder indicators, to best identify the situational predictors of hot spot street segments relative to empirical controls in Indianapolis for several different crime types. Hot spot and control units will be compared based on the presence of spatially joined crime generators and attractors and environmental disorder …

Tears, Trauma And Transformation: Central American Mothers' Experiences Of Violence, Migration And Family Reunification, Sandra B. Castro

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This study analyzes the experiences of migration, separation, and reunification of transnational mothers from El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala and their children. Drawing on data collected from 25 mothers living and working on Long Island, New York who migrated to the US during four periods from 1976-2019 and whose children returned to them, sometimes years later. My findings suggest that transnational mothering is an experience marked by multiple forms of structural, institutional, and interpersonal violence, along with the commitment to sacrifice for their children. Taken together, transnational mothers operated within a form of “compounded disadvantage” (Abrego, 2014) due to their …

Optimism Of The Intellect, Pessimism Of The Will? A Gramscian Analysis Of Two New York Police Reform Campaigns, Christian Covington

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This paper attempts to analyze two recent New York police reform campaigns - one to overturn the state’s system of criminal bail release, the other to make police officer discipline transparent to the public - using theories given by Antonio Gramsci. The paper will apply the concepts of hegemony, hegemonic discourse, the intertwining of the state and civil society, the attainment of political agency amongst the subaltern, and the role ideology plays in all of these concepts, to assess the success of the reform campaigns. The paper will argue that many of these concepts are further developments of political theories …

Anticipatory Fear And Psychopathic Traits In Adolescents, Catherine Chan

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Psychopathy is characterized by impulsive antisocial behavior, interpersonal and affective deficits such as lack of guilt, empathy, and remorse. An affective deficit observed in individuals with psychopathic traits is the lack of anticipatory fear. In a fearful situation, individuals generally develop fear and associate it with the situation, so they know to avoid it in the future. The ability to anticipate fear prevents individuals from committing wrongdoings due to the negative consequences that arise from it. However, individuals with psychopathic traits have been found to show reduced anticipatory fear, which in turn may contribute to more antisocial behavior. To date, …

Culture And Cyber Security: How Cultural Tightness-Looseness Moderates The Effects Of Threat And Coping Appraisals On Mobile Cyber Hygiene, Kok Wei Hoe

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

With increasing adoption of smartphone for mobile-commerce and increasing incidents of cyber breaches, it is timely to investigate how the weakest link in this security chain, human, can be strengthened. To date, there has been a gap in research examining the impact of culture on protection motivation. Most extant research focus on technological, organizational and behavioral factors affecting protection motivation. In this study, I develop a model integrating Theory of Cultural Tightness-Looseness and Protective Motivation Theory to investigate how cultural norms, define as shared expectations and rules that guide behavior of people within social groups, affect a person’s intentions to …

Critique-Inspired Pedagogies In Canadian Criminal Law Casebooks: Challenging "Doctrine First, Critique Second" Approaches To First-Year Law Teaching, Sarah-Jane Nussbaum

Dalhousie Law Journal

This article is a critical evaluation of Canadian criminal law casebooks. The author explores the aims, practices, and challenges of these teaching texts by examining their relationship to critique-inspired pedagogical methods. A number of English-language Canadian criminal law casebooks add a welcome feature to the Canadian common law teaching landscape: all but one of six recently published casebooks teach doctrine and critique together. The research builds on an emerging scholarship of Canadian legal education by demonstrating evidence of critical political commitments and critique-inspired teaching methods within Canadian criminal law education. Yet casebook editors and other professors who utilize critical methods …

Leading From Eternity: Developing Inmates With Life Sentences Into Undershepherds, Richard S. Kowalczyk

Doctoral Dissertations and Projects

In an attempt to reform the American criminal justice system, the United States Congress passed, and the President signed, the comprehensive First Step Act (FSA). The aim of the FSA is to identify and begin preparing offenders for release in order to reduce recidivism. Unfortunately, the provisions of FSA applied to only a small percentage of the inmate population. Further, there was very little relief with regards to the reforming of the sentencing guidelines. None of the provisions provided any direct relief for inmates with a minimum of 20 years to life sentences. This thesis project provides an opportunity for …

Mothers Of Students With A Disability: A Phenomenological Study Of Experiences With School Discipline, Mary Jane Harris

Doctoral Dissertations and Projects

The purpose of this transcendental phenomenological study was to understand what school discipline means to mothers of students with a disability at various school districts in Ohio, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Virginia. School discipline was defined as the policies and procedures schools use to manage student behavior. This study was supported by Oliver’s social model theory, Bronfenbrenner’s ecological systems theory, and Bandura’s self-efficacy theory. The purpose of data collection in this qualitative, transcendental phenomenological study was to gather data so an empirical analysis could be completed of how mothers of students with a disability define school discipline. Interviews, focus groups, and …

(Re)Framing Race In Civil Rights Lawyering, Anthony V. Alfieri, Angela Onwuachi-Willig

Articles

This Review examines the significance of Henry Louis Gates, Jr.'s new book, Stony the Road: Reconstruction, White Supremacy, and the Rise of Jim Crow, for the study of racism in our nation's legal system and for the regulation of race in the legal profession, especially in the everyday labor of civil-rights and poverty lawyers, prosecutors, and public defenders. Surprisingly, few have explored the relevance of the racial narratives distilled by Gates in Stony the Roa - the images, stereotypes, and tropes that Whites constructed of Blacks to deepen and ensure the life and legacy of white supremacy-to the practice …

#Blacklivesmatter—Getting From Contemporary Social Movements To Structural Change, Jamillah Bowman Williams, Naomi Mezey, Lisa O. Singh

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

From the haters and hackers to propaganda and privacy concerns, social media often deserves its bad reputation. But the sustained activism that followed George Floyd’s death and the ongoing movement for racial justice also demonstrated how social media can be a crucial mechanism of social change. We saw how online and on-the-ground activism can fuel each other and build momentum in ways neither can achieve in isolation. We have seen in the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement, and more specifically the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter, a new and powerful approach to using social media that goes beyond symbolic “slacktivism” and performative allyship …

"Building The Temple": An Alternative Metaphor To The Use Of "Kingdom" In The Christian University Context, Donald Roth

Pro Rege

No abstract provided.

Young Women And The Initiation Trajectory Of Prescription Opioid Misuse, Rachel Chernick

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The most recent opioid epidemic in United States history emerged in the late 1980s and continues its destructive impact to this day. It has evolved into a devastating public health crisis with a broad range of medical, social, and economic consequences. This dissertation focuses on the “first wave” of this opioid epidemic characterized largely by the misuse of prescription opioids. The research questions here were focused on developing a greater understanding of the social processes involved in young women’s initiation of prescription opioid misuse (POM) during this first wave. The research methodology consisted of a cross-sectional, exploratory study using qualitative …

Teacher Wellbeing In A Juvenile Detention Facility, Elizabeth G. Baker

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

“Teaching is inextricably linked to teachers’ personal lives; teachers invest their selves and their sense of identity and self-esteem in their work” (Rinchen, Ritchie, & Bellocchi, 2016, p. 604).

The teaching profession in the United States of America can be a highly stressful one, especially in America’s largest urban centers, due to the high incidences of violence, lack of resources and insufficient funding (Tobin, Roth & Zimmermann, 2001). The situation is even worse for teachers teaching in juvenile detention centers with traumatized youth and many teachers may internalize this trauma. Teachers may experience tremendous emotional tensions, such as …

Testing The Waters: An Investigation Of The Impact Of Hot Tubbing On Experts From Referral Through Testimony, Jennifer T. Perillo, Anthony D. Perillo, Nikoleta Despodova, Margaret Bull Kovera

Publications and Research

Objective: The present research examined whether concurrent expert testimony (“hot tubbing”) and court appointed testimony reduced adversarial allegiance in clinical experts’ judgments compared with traditional adversarial expert testimony. Hypotheses: We predicted Hypothesis 1: Defense experts would render more not responsible judgments and lower ratings of criminal responsibility than would prosecution experts; Hypothesis 2: Adversarial allegiance effects on experts’ judgments would be heightened for adversarial experts and attenuated for concurrent experts over time; Hypothesis 3: Adversarial and concurrent experts would report higher dissonance than would court-appointed experts and adversarial experts’ ratings would increase over time, concurrent experts’ ratings would decrease, and …

Better Balance: Why The Second Judicial District In New Mexico Should Prioritize Use Of Preliminary Hearings, Kathryn Sears

New Mexico Law Review

The New Mexico Constitution guarantees that felony charges shall not be brought against a person prior to either a grand jury indictment or a preliminary hearing finding of probable cause. But in March 2020, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, New Mexico courts were forced to halt the use of grand jury proceedings. As a result, all felony charges brought for the remainder of the year 2020 were vetted through preliminary hearings. Moreover, New Mexico is a unique jurisdiction because it applies the Rules of Evidence in full strength at preliminary hearings. This Comment makes a case for the continued expansion …

Judicial Application Of Strict Liability Local Ordinances, Brenner Fissell, Guyora Binder

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

The Building Blocks Of Legal Correspondence, Mary Ann Robinson

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.