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The Political Implications Of Felon Disenfranchisement Laws In The United States, Katharine G. Connaughton

CMC Senior Theses

This empirical study analyzes the political implications for presidential election outcomes that stem from varying felon disenfranchisement laws within the United States. In the past decade incarceration rates have drastically increased, consequently augmenting the disenfranchised population. This paper focuses on presidential election outcomes and state political party majorities in the election years 2000, 2004, 2008, and 2012. I use demographic characteristics to calibrate assumptions for voter turnout and political party choice among the disenfranchised populations within each state. I then apply these voting populations to historical election outcomes and find that three state political party outcomes change, as well as …

Playing Fair With Imprisonment, Richard Dagger

Political Science Faculty Publications

This chapter rests on two assumptions, at least one of which is controversial. The first is that something is wrong when a society imprisons as many people as the United States now does. According to a widely published columnist, George Will, the rate of imprisonment was about 100 per 100,000 Americans until the 1970s. Since then the rate has shot up, to the point where "700 per 100,000" are now in prison; "America," Will reported in 2013, "has nearly 5 percent of the world's population but almost 25 percent of its prisoners." It is possible, of course, that these figures …

The Ethical Identity Of Sexual Assault Lawyers, Elaine Craig

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

Despite progressive law reforms, sexual assault complainants continue to experience the criminal justice response to the violations that they have suffered as unsatisfactory, if not traumatic. One emerging response to this dilemma involves greater consideration of the ethical boundaries imposed on lawyers that practice sexual assault law. What is the relationship between a criminal lawyer’s ethical duties and the reforms to the law of sexual assault in Canada? How do lawyers themselves understand the ethical limits imposed on their conduct of a sexual assault case? How do lawyers that practice in this area of law comprehend their role in the …

Permitting Voluntary Euthanasia And Assisted Suicide: Law Reform Pathways For Common Law Jurisdictions, Jocelyn Downie

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

End of life law and policy reform is the subject of much discussion around the world. This paper explores the pathways to permissive legal regimes that have been tried in various common law jurisdictions. These include legislation, prosecutorial charging guidelines, court challenges, jury nullification, the exercise of prosecutorial discretion in the absence of offence-specific charging guidelines, and the exercise of judicial discretion in sentencing. In this paper, I describe these pathways as taken (or attempted) in five common law jurisdictions (USA, UK, Australia, New Zealand, and Canada) and reflect briefly on lessons that can be drawn from the recent experiences …

Beyond Deportation: Understanding Immigration Prosecutorial Discretion And United States V. Texas, Shoba S. Wadhia

Faculty Scholarship

In this article, I place the Supreme Court case of United States v. Texas into a broader context by describing the history and legal authority for prosecutorial discretion in immigration law and highlighting the contents and recommendations in my book, Beyond Deportation: The Role of Prosecutorial Discretion in Immigration Cases. Part I of this article offers a primer on the role of prosecutorial discretion in immigration law and also describes two related programs announced by President Obama on November 20, 2014 and the subject of litigation for nearly two years as of this writing. Part II provides a history …

The Ethical Identity Of Sexual Assault Lawyers, Elaine Craig

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

Despite progressive law reforms, sexual assault complainants continue to experience the criminal justice response to the violations that they have suffered as unsatisfactory, if not traumatic. One emerging response to this dilemma involves greater consideration of the ethical boundaries imposed on lawyers that practice sexual assault law. What is the relationship between a criminal lawyer’s ethical duties and the reforms to the law of sexual assault in Canada? How do lawyers themselves understand the ethical limits imposed on their conduct of a sexual assault case? How do lawyers that practice in this area of law comprehend their role in the …

The Inhospitable Court, Elaine Craig

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

Who speaks and with what authority, who is believed, what evidence is introduced, and how it is presented, is informed not only by the substantive law and the rules of evidence but also by the rituals of the trial. It is from this legal process as a whole that a judge or jury determines the (legal) ‘truth’ about a woman’s allegation of rape. A sexual assault complainant’s capacity to be believed in court, to share in the production of meaning about an incidence of what she alleges was unwanted sexual contact, requires her to play a part in certain rituals …

Testing Racial Profiling: Empirical Assessment Of Disparate Treatment By Police, Sonja B. Starr

Articles

In this Article, I explore why measuring disparate-treatment discrimination by police is so difficult, and consider the ways that researchers' existing tools can make headway on these challenges and the ways they fall short. Lab experiments have provided useful information about implicit racial bias, but they cannot directly tell us how these biases actually affect real-world behavior. Meanwhile, for observational researchers, there are various hurdles, but the hardest one to overcome is generally the absence of data on the citizen conduct that at least partially shapes policing decisions. Most crime, and certainly most noncriminal "suspicious" or probable-cause-generating behavior, goes unreported …

The Just-Barely-Sustainable California Prisoners' Rights Ecosystem, Margo Schlanger

Articles

Over the past two decades, the United States has seen a marked decline in the frequency and depth of court interventions in prisons and jails. Prisoners’ rights litigation has not disappeared—but it has been drastically curtailed by the 1996 Prison Litigation Reform Act (PLRA), along with myriad other forces, doctrinal and political. The PLRA, enacted as part of the Newt Gingrich “Contract with America,” undermined prisoners’ ability to bring, settle, and win lawsuits. (Schlanger 2003; Schlanger 2006)

The resulting impact on jail and prison litigation has been extremely substantial. Significant prisoners’ rights cases certainly remain on court dockets, and new …

Stops And Stares: Street Stops, Surveillance, And Race In The New Policing, Jeffrey Fagan, Anthony A. Braga, Rod K. Brunson, April Pattavina

Fordham Urban Law Journal

No abstract provided.

The Psychotherapist-Patient Privilege In Prison Litigation: How Can You Claim "Garden Variety" Emotional Distress When The Flowers Are Made Out Of Steel, Michael D'Ambrosio

Fordham Urban Law Journal

No abstract provided.

The Place Of Flourishing Families, Nestor M. Davidson, Clare Huntington

Fordham Urban Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Where The Rubber Meets The Clouds: Anticipated Developments In Conflict And Conflict Resolution Theory, Heather Pincock, Timothy Hedeen

Faculty Articles

No abstract provided.

2015 Symposium: Wrongful Convictions: Science, Experience & The Law Keynote Panel Discussion, Mary Kelly Tate

Law Faculty Publications

The following is a minimally-edited transcript of the panel speakers from the 2015 Richmond Journal of Law and the Public Interest Symposium, Wrongful Convictions: Science, Experience and the Law held on October 29, 2015. Biographies of the speakers are included in the Introductory Remarks. None of the opinions of these persons are necessarily the opinion of their respective agencies or employers. They are not to be used nor will they be able to be used for any legally binding purpose regarding the speaker or any agency.

Moderator: Professor Mary Kelly Tate, Director, Richmond Institute for Actual Innocence

Panelists: Shawn Armbrust …

Front Matter

SMU Law Review

No abstract provided.

Front Matter

SMU Law Review

No abstract provided.

Explaining Scotus Repeaters, Richard M. Re

Vanderbilt Law Review En Banc

No abstract provided.

The Challenges Of Fitting Principled Modern Government – A Unified Public Law – To An Eighteenth Century Constitution, Peter L. Strauss

Faculty Scholarship

The papers presented at a fall 2016 conference at Cambridge University, The Unity of Public Law?, generally addressed issues of judicial review in the UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, often from a comparative perspective and the view that unifying impulses in “public law” arose from the common law. Accepting what Justice Harlan Fisk Stone once characterized as the ideal of “a unified system of judge-made and statute law woven into a seamless whole by [judges],” The Common Law in the United States, 50 Harvard L Rev 4 (1936), this paper considers a variety of issues that have complicated maintaining …

Learning To Counter Mass Incarceration, Brett Dignam

Faculty Scholarship

Limited access to education inside American prisons imposes a devastating condition of confinement that cripples both the offender and the community. The prolonged and empty time that characterizes prison today affords little mental stimulation, productive engagement, or preparation for post-release employment. Recent research and analysis has found that education during incarceration correlates with lower rates of recidivism and increases the likelihood and quality of post-release employment. There is a pronounced racially disparate dimension to these effects that are concentrated in communities where investment by the criminal justice system is extraordinarily high. Failure to provide education and the resulting higher rates …

The Duty Of Responsible Administration And The Problem Of Police Accountability, Charles F. Sabel, William H. Simon

Faculty Scholarship

Many contemporary civil rights claims arise from institutional activity that, while troubling, is neither malicious nor egregiously reckless. When law-makers find themselves unable to produce substantive rules for such activity, they often turn to regulating the actors’ exercise of discretion. The consequence is an emerging duty of responsible administration that requires managers to actively assess the effects of their conduct on civil rights values and to make reasonable efforts to mitigate harm to protected groups. This doctrinal evolution partially but imperfectly converges with an increasing emphasis in public administration on the need to reassess routines in the light of changing …

America Is Slowly Awakening To The Structural Unfairness In Our Criminal Justice System, Mary Kelly Tate

Law Faculty Publications

Review of Bryan Stevenson's book, Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption, published by Spiegal & Grau in 2014.

Improving The Health Of African Americans In The Usa: An Overdue Opportunity For Social Justice, Allan S. Noonan, Hector Eduardo Velasco-Mondragon, Fernando A. Wagner

Faculty Publications & Research of the TUC College of Osteopathic Medicine

Using a modified social ecological model, we conducted a review of the literature and nationwide statistics on African American health. We discuss the main social determinants of health and main health disparities, risk factors, the leading causes of morbidity and mortality, and access to health services for blacks in the USA. The mechanisms through which social determinants, including racism, exert their deleterious effects on black health are discussed at the macro and individual levels. Incarceration and mental health care issues are highlighted as priorities to be addressed. African Americans remain the least healthy ethnic group in the USA, a somber …

Annual Higher Ground Women's Leadership Conference 2016, The Grace E. Harris Leadership Institute At Virginia Commonwealth University

GEHLI - 2026 VCUL Team Project Publications

No abstract provided.

Scoring A Goal Against The “Dumb Jock” Stereotype, Gabrielle Longo

Honors Theses - Providence Campus

The “dumb jock” stereotype prevalence is being questioned, along with its validity throughout this thesis. More negative articles about student-athletes are known by the public, while the successes have been buried beneath them. This thesis will discuss what the “dumb jock” stereotype is, what previous research has been done with it while determining the prevalence of the “dumb jock” stereotype and challenging its accuracy. Multiple student-athletes and non-student athletes from two different athletic divisions institutions were surveyed on the stereotype along with personal experience was pulled together to determine if this is a problem, and if it’s true. A majority …

A Guidebook To Thesis And Non-Thesis Options Of The Masters Program In Sociology 2016-2017, Department Of Sociology And Rural Studies

Sociology Guidebooks

This guide is designed to help Master's students in the Department of Sociology and Rural Studies succeed in meeting program requirements. As a guide it does not replace the Graduate School Bulletin requirements. The guide also spells out in detail the responsibilities of a graduate student in the Department of Rural Sociology and provides information on forms, timelines, exams, and policies.

He Jiahong, Back From The Dead: Wrongful Convictions And Criminal Justice In China, Stanley B. Lubman

Hong Yen Chang Center for Chinese Legal Studies

1In 1987, Teng Xingshan was sentenced to death for raping a woman and dismembering her body; wrongfully convicted, he was executed in 1989 – but in 1992 the “victim” returned home, and Teng was exonerated in 2005. His case is only one among numerous other tragic wrongful convictions discussed in Back From the Dead: Wrongful Convictions and Criminal Justice in China, by Professor He Jiahong (Renmin University Law School, Beijing). This book, the product of ten years of research, is a scholarly analysis of wrongful convictions that demonstrates deep system-wide flaws in China’s criminal justice system.

Mexico City's Citizen Comptroller Program, Patricio Martinez Llompart

Center for the Advancement of Public Integrity (Inactive)

Since 1997, Mexico City has had an autonomous, elected government responsible for meeting the needs of nearly nine million metropolitan citizens. Controlling corruption has been a key public priority. In 2004, the city government passed the Citizen Participation Act (Ley de Participación Ciudadana), which established a landmark program to enlist citizen volunteers directly in the day-to-day work of procurement oversight.

These trained volunteers, called “citizen comptrollers,” act as ground-level watchdogs to observe and evaluate public contracting processes. The “bottom up” approach to municipal anti-corruption control pioneered by the Citizen Comptrollers program can serve as an innovative model for cities and …

Profile In Public Integrity: David Harper, Center For The Advancement Of Public Integrity

Center for the Advancement of Public Integrity (Inactive)

David Harper was appointed as the Inspector General of Albuquerque, New Mexico, this past April. Prior to becoming Inspector General, Harper served for over three decades in the Air Force Office of Special Investigations (AFOSI), conducting and overseeing financial investigations resulting in recoveries of over one billion dollars. Most recently, he served as AFOSI’s Chief of Economic Crimes Investigations. In that capacity, he directed staff support to the more than 200 AFOSI field and regional offices and oversaw over 500 financial crime investigations. Harper previously served as Special Agent-in-Charge of the AFOSI regional office in Boston, Massachusetts. He holds a …

Fighting "Small Town" Corruption: How To Obtain Accountability, Oversight, And Transparency, Center For The Advancement Of Public Integrity

Center for the Advancement of Public Integrity (Inactive)

Small municipalities have been the subject of numerous corruption scandals. Bell, California and Crystal City, Texas are just two of many small cities to have made their way into the national spotlight after suffering at the hands of seriously corrupt leadership.1 While news headlines often focus on issues of corruption within state or federal governments, the effects of corruption within local municipalities is equally problematic. First, there are many thousands of small cities and towns in the United States, depending on one’s definition. And these governments receive and spend billions of dollars in public funds. For obvious reasons, however, small …

Douglas County Youth Impact Challenges Evaluation Report, Emily Wright, Ryan E. Spohn

Reports

Douglas County Youth Impact! is a practice model designed to prevent “crossover” youth from moving further into the child welfare or juvenile justice systems. The target population for this initiative is youth that meet the following criteria: 1) the youth must have been referred to the County Attorney’s office for: a) a status offense, or b) a law violation; and 2) the youth has a child welfare case which is: a) open, b) closed within the last 12 months, c) voluntary, or d) court-involved.