Digital Commons Network^™

Reparations For Racial Wealth Disparities As Remedy For Social Contract Breach, Martha M. Ertman

Faculty Scholarship

Acute crises such as the COVID-19 pandemic and the 2008 financial meltdown exposed and exacerbated chronic racial wealth disparities. Those disparities accumulated over time as government and private actions—often involving contracts—systemically benefitted White Americans and institutions at the expense of African-Americans. This essay focuses on a private law mechanism—loan contracts—as one important contributor to systemic racial wealth disparities, labels particular lending contracts and related government action as breaches of the social contract, and proposes a restitution-based form of reparations as a remedy for that breach.

Why Reforms Are Not Enough: Justice And Accountability Reimagined, Felix Sitthivong

City University of New York Law Review

To address police brutality, we must ground our responses in abolition rather than reform. Abolition demands that we address the root causes of police brutality and transform society into a place where we can thrive together. On the other hand, reform makes surface-level changes while maintaining the core elements of our inherently flawed policing and carceral systems. The author grounds his arguments for abolition based on his personal experiences and life accounts, and on the ongoing abolitionist efforts in the wake of George Floyd. In so doing, the author challenges us to think creatively and broadly about what kind of …

Reclaiming Establishment: Identity And The 'Religious Equality Problem', Faraz Sanei

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

Since at least 2017, the Court has implicitly recognized a right of equal access to generally available public benefits based on the beneficiary’s religious identity or status. In Carson v. Makin (2022), the Court went a step further and, for the first time, concluded that the “statususe distinction lacks a meaningful application” in both theory and practice. It then held that restrictions on the use of public benefits for sacral purposes amount to religious discrimination because they impose substantial burdens on free exercise rights. Carson’s holding, and the rationale underlying it, contravene settled case law and effectively gut the Establishment …

Repairing Our System Of Constitutional Accountability: Reflections On The 150th Anniversary Of Section 1983, David H. Gans

Cardozo Law Review de•novo

Section 1983 is a landmark statute that provides the foundation for holding state and local governments and their agents accountable when they violate constitutional rights. Unfortunately, rather than enforce the statute’s text and ensure the accountability that its drafters passed it to achieve, the Supreme Court has created four interlocking doctrines that squelch its promise of accountability: qualified immunity, absolute immunity, strict limits on local governmental liability, and the exclusion of states from Section 1983. This Article, written to mark the 150th anniversary of Section 1983, does a deep dive into the text and history of Section 1983 and recovers …

The Criminal Legal System Doesn’T Care About Your Mental Illness, Fredrick E. Vars

Cardozo Law Review de•novo

Why would a beloved small-town doctor with no history of violence suddenly strangle his father to death? The Other Dr. Gilmer is a gripping account of the search for an answer to this question. It turns out the doctor has a rare neurological disorder that likely caused the killing. If only the diagnosis had come before trial, the author believes, the doctor would not have been convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to life without parole. That belief is appealing, but naïve. Jails and prisons are full of people with mental illness. Misdiagnosis is not the reason. A close examination …

Systemic Solutions To Addressing Juvenile Sexual Offending, Alyscia Mayhugh

DSW Capstone Projects

Research on and treatment of juvenile sexual offenders has surged since the 1980s. While research on this social justice issue has expanded over the past four decades, little has been done in the United States to systemically address the recidivism rates of juvenile sexual offenders. The systematic literature review explores existing literature on this topic, with a focus on thematic categories that emerged through data extraction and analysis. The conceptual paper presents a unique idea for addressing juvenile sexual offending systemically, emphasizing the value of utilizing incrementalism and trauma theory to enact changes to existing systems. The final practice application …

What's The Play? Using Social Learning Theory To Treat Men In Mental Health, Aaron Hemlepp

DSW Capstone Projects

Men have problems when it comes to mental health. Specifically, men are more likely to have a fatality of suicide than other genders and are more likely to have substance abuse problems than other genders. Combine this with societal problems such as the shrinking physical labor market and instability of family systems that have traditionally been seen as “men’s work.” The gender is not adapting to modern social functioning in the way that other genders have been, which means that therapy is not a useful tool for men and their problems. This means that therapy systems need an approach to …

Applications Of The John Henryism Hypothesis: Mitigating Associations Between Incarceration, Drug Use, And Sex Partner Characteristics, Paris Wheeler

Theses and Dissertations--Educational, School, and Counseling Psychology

Individual risk behaviors are not enough to explain STI disparities among African American women. Effects of structural, social, and individual level risk factors may be mitigated by cultural factors that help increase resilience. The current study aimed to examine whether John Henryism Active Coping (JHAC), a cultural correlate marked by physical and mental vigor and self-determination, mitigates relationships between criminal justice status, crack cocaine use, and sex partner risk characteristics. Data were derived from a sample of African American women living in Kentucky (n=643). Ordinal logistic regression and stepwise linear regression analyses were utilized to examine whether interactions between criminal …

Barriers That Prevent Officers From Seeking Mental Health Support, Jessica Jude Ziegler

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

AbstractLaw enforcement officers have hidden their inability to cope with the exposure to trauma and occupational stress endemic to the profession. This particular community continues to suffer because of the stigma associated with seeking mental health and stress management. The problem this study addressed are factors embedded within police culture that deter officers working in the Tampa Bay region from help-seeking behaviors. There is a critical need to evaluate officers’ perceptions in order to provide lifesaving tools that can ultimately mitigate police suicide. Participants were ten police officers from six different agencies located within the Tampa Bay region. Data were …

The Effects Of Federal Funding Reductions On Emergency Shelters In Urban U.S. Sanctuary Cities., Venice Hylton

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

AbstractWhen the U.S. federal government reduces funding to urban sanctuary cities because of those cities’ refusal to cooperate with federal law enforcement agents this affects the services offered by the municipalities to their residents. The purpose of this study was to provide a better understanding of the effects that withdrawal of federal funds from urban sanctuary cities have on people experiencing homelessness. The social exchange theory provided the theoretical foundation for the study, which featured a qualitative exploratory case study design and involved interviews with four shelter administrators in three mid-Atlantic states. The participants described (a) the effects of reduced …

Adverse Childhood Experiences And The Risk Of Drug Overdose In Adulthood, Samantha E. Wright

Graduate Research Posters

Background: Adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) encompass a variety of traumatic events that occur during one’s youth. ACEs may be physical, mental, emotional, or sexual in nature, and they are often associated with long-term negative consequences such as alcoholism, substance abuse, and criminal justice involvement. The global rise of the opioid epidemic has intensified the need to better understand and address factors associated with illicit substance use. The current study will investigate the relationship between exposure to ACEs, onset of drug use, and history of drug overdose.

Methods: This study will utilize an observational design in which participants will be asked …

Immigration Law—The $2 Cost Of Deportation For Black Immigrants, Aisatou Diallo

Western New England Law Review

The United States is a nation with protected borders and in order to protect the immigration laws control who may or may not come into the country. One way this is done is been by excluding individuals who have been convicted of crimes involving moral turpitude. There is no single definition of what a crime involving moral turpitude is, but over time the types of crimes held to involve moral turpitude have expanded. This article describes how this expansion of the types of crimes that are categorized as crimes involving moral turpitude have had a drastic impact on black immigrants …

Criminal Law—Dreaming Of A Drug War Reckoning, Luke Ryan, Molly Ryan Strehorn

Western New England Law Review

Day after day, government officials across the United States make public statements celebrating various “victories” in our never-ending War on Drugs. These shallow statements overlook the true cost of this “war” and perpetuate the binary idea that there will eventually be a winner and a loser. If we continue down the path of war, nobody wins. The following article assesses the impact of this war by imagining a public official having a moment of contrition and acknowledging the errors of our ways.

Constitutional Law—Penalizing The “Unsightly”: An Argument For The Abolishment Of Laws Criminalizing Life-Sustaining Behaviors Among The Homeless, Carli Ross

Western New England Law Review

Thousands of people across the country suffer from homelessness. Instead of funding more shelters or dealing with the lack of subsidized housing, cities have chosen to rely on the criminal justice system to regulate homeless behavior. Homeless individuals are being punished with fines and potential jail time for sleeping, sitting, gathering, and camping in public. Not only does this practice contribute to the homelessness crisis in the United States, but it also creates an additional obstacle for homeless individuals. Additionally, relying on the criminal justice system is more costly than helping homeless individuals find a permanent shelter. The Ninth Circuit …

When Exemptions Discriminate: Unlawfully Narrow Religious Exemptions To Vaccination Mandates By Private Colleges And Universities, Ronald J. Colombo

Western New England Law Review

Numerous colleges and universities have imposed COVID-19 vaccination mandates upon their students. Most of these mandates also include language purporting to recognize medical and religious exemptions. With regard to religious exemptions, some are unjustly discriminatory. Most notably, some give preference to students who are members of organized religions over students who are not. And even facially neutral exemptions can be administered in an unjustly discriminatory way by, for example, giving preference to one set of religious denominations over another, or by engaging in “religious profiling” (whereby students of a particular denomination are held completely beholden to the beliefs of that …

Constitutional Law—Answering Justice Barrett’S Fulton Prompt: The Case For A Narrow Reconsideration Of Free Exercise, Andrew Lavender

Western New England Law Review

In Fulton v. City of Philadelphia, the Supreme Court, for the second time in three years, considered a case involving the conflict between First Amendment religious, speech, and associational freedoms and the civil rights of the LGBTQ community. And, for the second time, the Court arrived at an apparent compromise, issuing a narrow, factual ruling in favor of the party seeking an exception from antidiscrimination law while avoiding any firm precedent that might create a broader exception.

In addition to this substantive dodge, the Court also “sidestep[ped] the question on which certiorari had been granted: whether to overrule Employment …

Fines, Fees, Race, And Socioeconomic Disadvantage, Joshua D. Houy

Dissertations and Theses

Fines and fees for legal violations finance American criminal justice systems but often at a severe cost to those incurring fines and fees. While fines and fees are a long-standing feature of the United States criminal justice system, the use of fines and fees recently captured attention of scholars in the wake of questions prompted by recent social, political, and legal developments. The central question is: What, if any, association is there between race, socioeconomic disadvantage, and county fine and fee issuance? The main hypothesis is: Fine and fee issuance of the most populous counties positively and significantly associate with …

Externalizing Psychopathology In Individuals Who Have Criminally Offended: Factor Structure And Differential Outcome Associations, Robert Doss

Dissertations and Theses

In light of recent grievances with categorical conceptualizations of psychopathology, researchers recommend shifting away from categorical toward dimensional conceptualizations. However, research on dimensional conceptualizations and existing measurement tools’ ability to capture these dimensions is still in its early stages. Specifically, special attention has been paid to the externalizing dimension’s structure as a general dimension or two specific dimensions with shared characteristics (i.e., disinhibited externalizing and antagonistic externalizing). The current study aims to validate the PAI’s dimensional structure, focusing on the externalizing dimensions as depicted by the Hierarchical Taxonomy of Psychopathology (HiTOP) model, an emerging dimensional model of psychopathology. Participants were …

A Human-Centered Approach To Improving Adolescent Online Sexual Risk Detection Algorithms, Afsaneh Razi

Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2020-2023

Computational risk detection has the potential to protect especially vulnerable populations from online victimization. Conducting a comprehensive literature review on computational approaches for online sexual risk detection led to the identification that the majority of this work has focused on identifying sexual predators after-the-fact. Also, many studies rely on public datasets and third-party annotators to establish ground truth and train their algorithms, which do not accurately represent young social media users and their perspectives to prevent victimization. To address these gaps, this dissertation integrated human-centered approaches to both creating representative datasets and developing sexual risk detection machine learning models to …

The Fourth Amendment And The Problem Of Social Cost, Thomas P. Crocker

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Role Of Covid-19 Attributions In Inciting Violence Toward Older Asian Individuals, Emily Zhen Ning Hwang

Public Health Theses

Older adults in the Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders (AAPI) community faced heightened levels of violence and discrimination during the COVID-19 pandemic. Yet, little is known about the factors driving Asian-specific violence. This study investigated if individuals who attributed COVID-19 to stable factors and anything related to China were more likely to commit violence against older Asian adults. From April 23 to May 5 2020, a survey was conducted with 1498 American individuals (M = 55.19 years, SD = 17.97 years) using two online platforms. Participants who made stable attributions about the origin of COVID-19 were significantly more likely to …

Defining And Demystifying Automated Decision Systems, Rashida Richardson

Maryland Law Review

No abstract provided.

Against Criminal Law Localism, Brenner M. Fissell

Maryland Law Review

No abstract provided.

Tsa (Transportation Security Administration) Program - Academic History, Steve Barger

Academic Program Histories

No abstract provided.

Puzzles Of Progressive Constitutionalism, Jonathan S. Gould

Faculty Articles

This Review examines the relationship between progressivism and constitutionalism. In doing so, it considers three different ways of thinking about a constitution’s role in a political system. First is constitutionalism as a distinct ideology of governance in which an apex court plays a major role in deciding issues of public policy and articulating national values. Second is the way constitutional culture prompts political actors to argue for their preferred policies in constitutional terms, even when calling for legislative rather than judicial action. Third is constitutional design, the rules of the political game that dictate how lawmaking takes place. Each of …

Our Metropolitan Separations: The Case For Metropolitan Public Schools In The Commonwealth Of Virginia, Marvin T. Chiles

History Faculty Publications

This research uses published reports from think tanks, statistical data from the Virginia Department of Education, newspaper articles, and court cases to argue for the creation of metropolitan school districts in the Commonwealth of Virginia. Framing this article's importance is the undeniable fact that almost seventy years after the famous Brown v. Board of Education decision (1954), American public schools still legally operate on a racially segregated basis. Virginia contributes to this issue by having some of the highest rates of racial segregation within its major metropolitan area school districts. This racial segregation has resulted in disparate educational outcomes between …

A Trauma-Centered Approach To Addressing Hate Crimes, Avlana Eisenberg

Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology

A dominant justification for hate crime laws is that they serve a crucial expressive function—sending messages of valuation to victims, and of denunciation to defendants. Yet, as this Essay will demonstrate, the focus on criminalizing hate—through the enactment of either sentencing enhancements or stand-alone hate crime statutes—has resulted in a thin conception of messaging that fails to recognize the limitations of the criminal law in addressing psychic harm.

This Essay argues that a more robust approach to addressing hate crimes must consider alternatives—beyond incarceration—that would center the trauma associated with hate crimes. This includes restorative justice models that might benefit …

2022-2023 Granite State College - Graduate Catalog, Granite State College

Granite State College Catalogs

No abstract provided.

Sitting Ducks And Title Vi Of The Civil Rights Act: Preventing The Siting Of New Prisons Near Harmful Pollutants, Jessa Webber

Notre Dame Journal of Law, Ethics & Public Policy

No abstract provided.

Feminist Ethics And Research With Women In Prison, Christina Quinlan, Lucy Baldwin, Natalie Booth

Articles

In this article, a new model, An Ethic of Empathy, is proposed as a guide for researchers, particularly new scholars to the discipline. This model emerged from the authors’ concerns regarding the application of ethics to studies that focus on the experience of female offenders in criminal justice systems. The key issue is the vulnerability of incarcerated and post-release women in relationship to the powerful status of social scientist researchers. The complexity of ethics in such research settings necessitates a particular ethical preparation, involving formation, reflection, understanding, commitment, care, and empathy. Three cases are outlined which document the authors’ ethical …