Digital Commons Network^™

A World Without Prosecutors, Jeffrey Bellin

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

Bennett Capers' article Against Prosecutors challenges us to imagine a world where we "turn away from prosecution as we know it," and shift "power from prosecutors to the people they purport to represent." In this world, crime victims decide whether to prosecute their own cases, and public prosecutors play a subsidiary role, taking primary responsibility only for cases "where the state is truly a victim (such as tax fraud)." This leaves a large category of cases - victimless crimes - without any prosecutor at all; Capers singles out drug offenses as "the biggest examples." Without prosecutors championing these and analogous …

The Homelessness Crisis In Los Angeles, California, Kaitlin Butulan

Selected Social Change Portfolios in Prevention, Intervention, and Consultation

Goal Statement: The goal of my social change portfolio is to implement intervention and prevention strategies that lead us one step closer toward eradicating the homelessness crisis in Los Angeles.

Significant Findings: Los Angeles is the home of one of the largest unhoused populations in the United States. The leading causes to becoming homeless include lack of affordable housing, unemployment, pathological illnesses, and necessary resource impediments (National Law Center on Homelessness & Poverty, 2015). This social change portfolio discusses the risk and protective factors of the unhoused on a range of levels viewed in the lens of a social-ecological model. …

When Time Stands Still: Eliminating Immigration “Death Sentences”, Lori A. Nessel

SMU Law Review

The nation prides itself on the notion of rebirth—the ideal that one can leave their past behind, come to the United States, and seize the opportunities available to advance and remake oneself. Yet, when it comes to immigration law, neither the passage of time nor a life full of positive equities ameliorates past wrongdoing or allows for future opportunities. In the words of the Senate Subcommittee when Congress permanently removed the statute of limitations for deportation from the Immigration and Nationality Act in 1952, “If the cause for exclusion existed at the time of entry, it is believed that such …

Grassroots Approach Of Embracing Survivors To Inform The Fight Against Human Trafficking, Christina S. Bentch, Gordon A. Crews

Criminal Justice Faculty Publications

When human trafficking survivors work as “informants and advocates,” they keep systems trying to end this horrific crime honest and open to receiving new input. Grassroots approaches can inform many of the systems survivors pass through to improve or add to policies and procedures. Survivors can reveal new dynamics of transnational criminal networks and the development of new indicators and typologies in several systems. The systems discussed in this chapter will highlight the benefits and barriers to approaching an anti-trafficking agenda through a systems theory lens. The authors suggest ways to amend the limitations of these current systems by utilizing …

Internal Funding Newsletter, Academic Year 2021-2022, Uno Office Of Research And Creative Activity

Internal Funding Newsletters

The University of Nebraska at Omaha is committed to exceptional education, groundbreaking research, and the life-long success of our students and alumni. The 2021- 2022 Academic Year brought many exciting opportunities for us to invest in a multitude of funding programs that promote research and creative activity. This year’s programs provided over $600,000 for student and faculty projects that reflect the broad range of scholarly interests of the UNO community, including evaluating marmoset stress responses to music, examining factors that influence undergraduate women to leave (or remain in) computer science majors, the human experience of dementia, aging, and caregiving, and …

The Character Of Jury Exclusion, Anna Offit

Faculty Publications

Encounters with the legal system are unevenly distributed throughout the American population, with Black and poor citizens targeted as disparate subjects of surveillance, arrest, and criminal conviction. At the same time, these encounters, as well as a stated belief in the unfairness of the legal system, are commonly viewed as legitimate grounds for excusal from jury service. This follows from an understanding of juror bias that assumes that people with negative experiences with legal actors—police and prosecutors, for example—will be less likely to trust and more likely to discount the contributions of those actors within the context of the jury …

Eliminating Shadows And Ghosts: Findings From A Study Of Inclusiveness, Representativeness, And Record Accuracy In Master Jury Lists And Juror Source Lists In Three States, Paula Hannaford-Agor, Miriam Hamilton, Erika Bailey

Faculty Publications

In 2021, the National Center for State Courts (NCSC) obtained grant funding from the State Justice Institute to assess the inclusiveness, representativeness, and accuracy of the juror source lists for Missouri, New Jersey, and Tennessee and the resulting master jury lists for Missouri and Tennessee. Each jurisdiction volunteered to be part of the project. For its analyses of inclusiveness, the NCSC compared the total number of records on the master jury list with the total number of adult residents in each county reported by the U.S. Census Bureau on the 2020 Census. To assess the accuracy of address records generally …

Fundamental Criminal Procedure (2022 Edition), Fredric I. Lederer

Faculty Publications

Fundamental Criminal Procedure explores American criminal procedure in a format ultimately destined for electronic publication. Because many students devote a great deal of their class time to taking notes, often at the expense of creative analysis, the text is intended to supply all of the necessary “black letter law” needed for mastery of the subject. The materials are, however, far more than a “study aid.” They emphasize where appropriate the crucial philosophical and policy questions and issues inherent in the subject. Periodic “Review Questions” require understanding application of academic material in a pragmatic context. “Legal Briefs” require the student to …

#Metoo And The Process That's Due: Sexual Misconduct Where We Live, Work, And Learn, Nicole Buonocore Porter

Faculty Publications

The #MeToo movement has been instrumental in bringing attention to the pervasiveness of sexual harassment and sexual assault (collectively, sexual misconduct) in all walks of life and in all environments, including at work, school, home, and out in public. But the movement has also brought with it a great deal of confusion about how we define sexual misconduct and whether and when legal liability attaches. Part of the confusion can be blamed on the fact that at least three discrete areas of law can possibly apply to sexual misconduct—criminal law, Title VII (when the sexual misconduct takes place in the …

Affirmative Consent, Aya Gruber

Publications

No abstract provided.

A Taxonomy Of Silencing: The Law’S 100 Year Suppression Of The Tulsa Race Massacre, Suzette M. Malveaux

Publications

Over one hundred years have passed since the 1921 brutal massacre of Tulsa’s African American community. This notorious attack came at the hands of a white mob and with the government’s blessing. With numerous centennial commemorations behind us, what has been learned? The answer to this question is crucial to preventing similar atrocities in the future.

One lesson is how important it is to tell the story—to honor the voices of those who lived through one of the most infamous government-sanctioned racial attacks in U.S. history. Knowledge is power.

Another lesson is how pernicious the law can be in silencing …

Book Review, Justin Murray

Publications

No abstract provided.

Prosecutorial Nonenforcement And Residual Criminalization, Justin Murray

Publications

In recent years a small but influential group of locally elected prosecutors committed to criminal justice reform have openly refused to enforce various criminal laws—laws prohibiting marijuana possession, sentencing enhancements, laws authorizing the death penalty, and much more—because they see those laws as unjust and incompatible with core reform objectives. Condemned by many on the political right for allegedly usurping the legislature’s lawmaking role and praised by many on the left for bypassing dysfunctional state legislatures in favor of local solutions, these prosecutorial nonenforcement policies are commonly said to have the same effect as nullifying, or even repealing, the laws …

Reaching For The Stars: Building Effective Subject Specific Digital Learning Objects, Marc Bess

LOEX Conference Proceedings 2018

No abstract provided.

The Classic, Winter 2022, Public Relations

The Classic, 2020-present

Zwemer View: Sabbatical Reflections; around the Green: First PA Grads Begin Careers; In Box; Summer Study; Hired!; Students on a Mission; Campus Life: Dramatic Experiences; New Academic Programs; A New High; Ranking Success; Handyman; Sounding Good; Face Value: Kendall Stanislav; Summer Opportunities; Moving Music; Giving to Northwestern College in 2021-22; Legendary Raiders: Nine faculty and staff give 231 years to Northwestern; Called to Serve; Disciple Maker; Biology's Backbone; Resourceful; Willing Spirit; Bridge Builder; Truth Seeker; Paying It Forward; Adding It Up; Teacher as Servant; Esteemed Educator; Standouts; Servant-Leadership Amid Challenges; Music for the Hurting; Red Zone: Strong and Courageous; Leave …

The Dynamics Of Cross-Sector Collaboration In Centralized Disaster Governance: A Network Study Of Interorganizational Collaborations During The Mers Epidemic In South Korea, M. Ku, Ahreum Han, Keon Hyung Lee

Health Care Administration Faculty Research

The debate continues as to which governance structure is most appropriate for collaborative disaster response, particularly between centralization and decentralization. This article aims to contribute to this debate by analyzing the structural characteristics of a multisectoral network that emerged and evolved under strong state control during the 2015 outbreak of Middle East respiratory syndrome-coronavirus (MERS) in South Korea. This study particularly focuses on the evolution of intra- and inter-sectoral collaboration ties in the network. The data for the study were collected through a content analysis of government documents and news articles. Using social network analysis, the authors found that the …

Roundtable Two: Environmental Law Education: New Techniques In The Classroom And Beyond, Lincoln Davies, Karrigan Bork, Sarah Krakoff

Publications

No abstract provided.

Criminal Law Exceptionalism, Benjamin Levin

Publications

For over half a century, U.S. prison populations have ballooned and criminal codes have expanded. In recent years, a growing awareness of mass incarceration and the harms of criminal law across lines of race and class has led to a backlash of anti-carceral commentary and social movement energy. Academics and activists have adopted a critical posture, offering not only small-bore reforms, but full-fledged arguments for the abolition of prisons, police, and criminal legal institutions. Where criminal law was once embraced by commentators as a catchall solution to social problems, increasingly it is being rejected, or at least questioned. Instead of …

Against Domestic Violence: Public And Private Prosecution Of Batterers, Carolyn B. Ramsey

Publications

No abstract provided.

Victims’ Rights Revisited, Benjamin Levin

Publications

This Essay responds to Bennett Capers's article, "Against Prosecutors." I offer four critiques of Capers’s proposal to bring back private prosecutions: (A) that shifting power to victims still involves shifting power to the carceral state and away from defendants; (B) that defining the class of victims will pose numerous problems; C) that privatizing prosecution reinforces a troubling impulse to treat social problems at the individual level; and (D) broadly, that these critiques suggest that Capers has traded the pathologies of “public” law for the pathologies of “private” law. Further, I argue that the article reflects a new, left-leaning vision of …

Mind The (Participation) Gap: Vouchers, Voting, And Visibility, Abby K. Wood, Christopher S. Elmendorf, Douglas M. Spencer, Nicholas G. Napolio

Publications

This study exploits the introduction of a new type of public financing of elections—campaign finance vouchers—to estimate the effects of neighborhood-level political cross-pressure on citizens’ decisions to participate in low-cost political activities which vary in their publicness: voting (private) and vouchering (public). Does proximity to ideologically divergent neighbors affect one’s use of publicly disclosed campaign finance vouchers? We find that cross-pressured individuals are slightly more likely to use a campaign finance voucher than similarly situated individuals who are ideologically typical for their precinct. We also find evidence that precinct-level cross-pressure does not drive voucher users to shade their voucher donations …

Blind Justice: Algorithms And Neutrality In The Case Of Redistricting, Douglas M. Spencer, Moon Duchin

Publications

In several areas of law and public policy, there have been longstanding dreams that computers can secure decisionmaking that takes only some things into account, while remaining demonstrably neutral to other factors. In 2022, the U.S. Supreme Court will consider mandating race-neutrality in multiple domains, notably in college admissions and redistricting. In this piece, we clarify the real and imagined uses of computers in redistricting, considering their application for optimization approaches and, more recently, for representative sampling. The current pitch to the Court for a race-blind Voting Rights Act is discussed at length.

Election Surveillance, Rebecca Green

Faculty Publications

For most of this country's history, we have relied on human eyes and ears to oversee our system of elections. Modern surveillance tools, from cell phones to video streaming platforms, are now cheap and ubiquitous. Technology holds great promise to increase election transparency. But the 2020 election confirmed what has become quite clear: the use of technology to record election processes does not always serve the goal of reassuring the public of the integrity of elections; in fact, it can do the opposite. As legislatures around the country reexamine rules governing elections following the 2020 election, an underexplored question is …

Dissent And Legitimacy In International Criminal Law, Nancy Armoury Combs

Faculty Publications

Throughout history, dissenting opinions have been subject to soaring praise as well as vitriolic criticism. Although some commentators nominally acknowledge that the normative value of dissenting opinions necessarily varies depending on the unique context in which the relevant court operates, in fact, we see the same arguments advanced to support or oppose dissenting opinions, regardless of the court in which those opinions appear. Dissents are particularly prevalent in international criminal courts--those courts established to prosecute the worst crimes known to humankind: genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity. Although dissents in these courts have garnered little scholarly attention, the few …

Perceptions Of Family-Of-Origin Belief Systems Among Cisgender Men In Outpatient Treatment For Sexual Offending: A Phenomenological Investigation, Jessie K. Huebner

Graduate Research Theses & Dissertations

Sexual offending is a public concern and results in lasting detrimental effects. To prevent sexual offending, it is important to identify potential factors that increase an individual’s vulnerability to engage in sexual offending behaviors. Researchers have identified a general connection between early life experiences, specifically family-of-origin experiences, and later sexual offending behaviors. There is also an established agreement on the transmission of thoughts and beliefs present within a family unit on the development of thoughts, beliefs, perceptions, and behaviors for a child as they age and into adulthood. Among individuals who offend sexually, implicit theories, the underlying beliefs that began …

Crime, Crisis And Economic Growth: An Investigation Of Socio-Economic Determinants Of Crimes In The Indian States, Ankita Thapa

Masters Theses

This paper investigates the impact of socio-economic conditions on five major crime heads from 2001-2019 using a panel data set for the Indian states. The paper focus on the great recession of 2008-09, economic growth of the states, and deterrence variables. The paper employed two estimation procedures: panel Fixed-Effect and two-stage least square-fixed effect (2SLS-FE). The 2SLS-FE is preferred over the fixed effect method, where poverty is treated as an endogenous variable with higher education and social sector expenditure as instrumental variables. A dummy variable is used for the period of the great recession. A square of state GDP per …

Staff Perception Of Pbis Implementation In Illinois School Districts, Dominique Starling

Masters Theses

Behavioral management is a top priority in the educational setting. Historically, schools have implemented a variety of different methods to manage behaviors in schools. One of these methods is punitive punishment, which has led to the school-to-prison pipeline phenomena. The school-to-prison pipeline is a practice in the U.S. public schools that removes students with behavioral issues from educational institutions often resulting in placement in juvenile and criminal justice systems. Through zero tolerance and other punitive disciplinary policies, many youths find themselves dropping out or being expelled from school and eventually in juvenile detention centers and prisons. Research evidence shows that …

School-Based Mental Health Professionals’ Perceptions Of And Role In Disciplinary Practices Related To The School-To-Prison Pipeline, Ashlyn Wingate

Masters Theses

The school-to-prison pipeline is a process in which school children are funneled out of the school system and into the criminal justice system through suspension and expulsion, both forms of exclusionary discipline. Suspension and expulsion are ineffective disciplinary policies that have harmful effects on school children, contributing to grade retention, drop-out, involvement in the juvenile justice system, and higher unemployment and incarceration rates as adults. These damaging practices occur in the presence of school-based mental health professionals (school psychologists, school social workers, and school counselors) who are trained to promote the overall wellbeing and success of school children. In the …

Learning From Hobby Lobby’S Misdeeds: Crafting New International Due Diligence Standards For Human Rights And Cultural Heritage, Taryn Chubb

American Indian Law Review

No abstract provided.

Missing And Murdered: Finding A Solution To Address The Epidemic Of Missing And Murdered Indigenous Women In Canada And Classifying It As A “Canadian Genocide”, Melanie Mcgruder

American Indian Law Review

No abstract provided.