Law Commons^™

Do Foreign Nationals Really Have Constitutional Rights?, John M. Greabe

Law Faculty Scholarship

[Excerpt] "Last month, President Trump issued an executive order that has become known as the "travel ban." Among other things, the ban sought to temporarily exclude from the United States foreign nationals from seven predominantly Muslim countries.

Almost immediately, a number of plaintiffs sued and succeeded in obtaining "stays" preventing the ban from going into effect until the cases can be tried. Courts granted these stays because they found that the ban was likely to violate, among other things, anti-discrimination principles embedded within the First and Fifth Amendments to the United States Constitution.

How Much Is Police Brutality Costing America?, Eleanor Lumsden

Publications

The criminal law of the United States fails to stop the unlawful killing of minorities by law enforcement. In fact, it was never meant to do so. Civil tort law is also unequal to the task. The consequences of not correcting these legal failures are far-reaching for the United States and for our neighbors, and have so far been underreported. This article explores the direct and indirect costs of these failings, positive measures already underway, and makes further sugges-tions for reform.

Dismantling The Trap: Untangling The Chain Of Events In Excessive Force Claims, Cara Mcclellan

All Faculty Scholarship

In the wake of repeated police shootings of unarmed Black men and women, police departments across the country are focusing on de-escalation. Yet federal courts reviewing Fourth Amendment excessive force violations are often unwilling to take into account how an officer’s pre-seizure conduct may have affected the need to use force during a civilian encounter. I argue that as part of the Graham v. Connor reasonableness analysis, courts reviewing excessive force claims should consider prior police conduct that impacted the need for force when the officer predictably causes the civilian to respond by employing an overly aggressive tactic. I provide …