Law Commons^™

What Is A Business Crime?, Richard A. Booth

Working Paper Series

Criminal prosecution has been used with increasing frequency recently in connection with a variety of business failures and other financial offenses. Indeed, it appears that there are few such offenses that cannot be prosecuted criminally even though they also give rise to civil remedies. While some such offenses seem to be quite serious frauds, others seem to be as minor as getting the accounting rules wrong. Thus, the question addressed in this essay is how to define a business crime and what should be the proper role of criminal prosecution in connection with business offenses. I start with the proposition …

Suspension And The Extrajudicial Constitution, Trevor W. Morrison

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

What happens when Congress suspends the writ of habeas corpus? Everyone agrees that suspending habeas makes that particular - and particularly important - judicial remedy unavailable for those detained by the government. But does suspension also affect the underlying legality of the detention? That is, in addition to making the habeas remedy unavailable, does suspension convert an otherwise unlawful detention into a lawful one? Some, including Justice Scalia in the 2004 case Hamdi v. Rumsfeld and Professor David Shapiro in an important recent article, answer yes.

This Article answers no. I previously offered that same answer in a symposium essay; …

Fallibility + Unchecked Power = Trouble, C. Peter Erlinder

C. Peter Erlinder

No abstract provided.

The Prisoners’ (Plea Bargain) Dilemma, Oren Bar-Gill, Omri Ben-Shahar

Law & Economics Working Papers Archive: 2003-2009

How can a prosecutor, who has only limited resources, credibly threaten so many defendants with costly and risky trials and extract plea bargains involving harsh sentences? Had defendants refused to settle, many of them would not have been charged or would have escaped with lenient sanctions. But such collective stonewalling requires coordination among defendants, which is difficult if not impossible to attain. Moreover, the prosecutor, by strategically timing and targeting her plea offers, can create conflicts of interest among defendants, frustrating any attempt at coordination. The substantial bargaining power of the resource-constrained prosecutor is therefore the product of the collective …

Credibility: A Fair Subject For Expert Testimony?, Anne Poulin

Working Paper Series

This article explores the ways in which experts can assist the jury to assess the credibility of other witnesses and suggests analytical approaches to such expert testimony. The article argues that the courts should be more receptive to expert testimony bearing on witness credibility and engage in a more nuanced consideration of the role played by proffered expert testimony and how the role of the evidence affects its admissibility. Doing so should lead the courts to embrace the promise of the modern rules of evidence and permit experts to assist juries as they assess credibility.

Every Juror Wants A Story: Narrative Relevance, Third Party Guilt And The Right To Present A Defense, John H. Blume, Sheri L. Johnson, Emily C. Paavola

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

On occasion, criminal defendants hope to convince a jury that the state has not met its burden of proving them guilty beyond a reasonable doubt by offering evidence that someone else (a third party) committed the crime. Currently, state and federal courts assess the admissibility of evidence of third-party guilt using a variety of standards. In general, however, there are two basic approaches. Many state courts require a defendant to proffer evidence of some sort of direct link or connection between a specific third-party and the crime. A second group of state courts, as well as federal courts, admit evidence …

Integrating The Complexity Of Mental Disability Into The Criminal Law Course, Linda C. Fentiman

Elisabeth Haub School of Law Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Rights, Wrongs, And Comparative Justifications, Vera Bergelson

Rutgers Law School (Newark) Faculty Papers

The goal of this article is to rethink the relationship between the concepts of justification and wrongdoing, which play vital roles in the theory of criminal law. Reading George P. Fletcher’s new book, The Grammar of Criminal Law, in the context of his earlier scholarship has led me to one major disagreement with Fletcher as well as with the traditional criminal law doctrine: for Fletcher and many others, wrongdoing and justification mutually exclude each other; for me, they do not.

Consider a hypothetical: a group of people are captured by criminals. The criminals are about to kill everyone but then …

Undermining Individual And Collective Citizenship: The Impact Of Felon Exclusion Laws On The African-American Community, S. David Mitchell

S. David Mitchell

Felon exclusion laws are jurisdiction-specific, post-conviction statutory restrictions that prohibit convicted felons from exercising a host of legal rights, most notably the right to vote. The professed intent of these laws is to punish convicted felons equally without regard for the demographic characteristics of each individual, including race, class, or gender. Felon exclusion laws, however, have a disproportionate impact on African-American males and, by extension, on the residential communities from which many convicted felons come. Thus, felon exclusion laws not only relegate African-American convicted felons to a position of second-class citizenship, but the laws also diminish the collective citizenship of …

Racism, Unreasonable Belief, And Bernhard Goetz, Stephen P. Garvey

Cornell Law Faculty Working Papers

How should the law respond when one person (D) kills another person (V), who is black, because D believes that V is about to kill him, but D would not have so believed if V had been white? Should D be exonerated on grounds of self-defense? The canonical case raising this question is People v. Goetz. Some commentators argue that norms of equal treatment and anti-discrimination require that D’s claim of self-defense be rejected. I argue that denying D’s claim of self-defense would be at odds with the principle that criminal liability should only be imposed on an actor if …

Solving The Lawyer Problem In Criminal Cases, George C. Thomas Iii

Rutgers Law School (Newark) Faculty Papers

We are learning that the vaunted American adversarial system too often fails to protect innocent defendants. Part of the problem is that indigent criminal defenders, in many parts of the country, are overburdened to the point that they cannot always provide an adequate adversarial testing of the State’s case. Part of the problem is the emotional burn out that many defenders experience. A less well known part of the problem is that the very nature of the adversarial mentality too often causes prosecutors to cut corners and thus threaten innocent defendants. “Solving the Lawyer Problem in Criminal Cases,” a 9,000 …

Interrogation Of Detainees: Extending A Hand Or A Boot?, Amos N. Guiora

ExpressO

The so called “war on terror” provides the Bush administration with a unique opportunity to both establish clear guidelines for the interrogation of detainees and to make a forceful statement about American values. How the government chooses to act can promote either an ethical commitment to the norms of civil society, or an attitude analogous to Toby Keith’s “American Way,” where Keith sings that “you’ll be sorry that you messed with the USofA, ‘Cuz we’ll put a boot in your ass, It’s the American Way.”

No aspect of the “war on terrorism” more clearly addresses this balance than coercive interrogation. …

Making Crime (Almost) Disappear, George C. Thomas Iii

Rutgers Law School (Newark) Faculty Papers

This essay sketches the outlines of a future world in which crime has been drastically reduced. The author proposes two radical approaches to achieve this crime reduction. Some crimes, like drunk driving, can be almost completely eliminated by using technology to prevent the operation of a vehicle by a driver with a blood alcohol greater than the permissible level. Other crimes, like larceny or burglary of expensive items, can be made extremely easy to solve by requiring the installation of micro chips that will, when activated, broadcast their location to police.

To the objection that it will be expensive to …

The Catch-22 In Prison Privatization: The Problem With The Solution, Ahmed M.T. Riaz

ExpressO

A step into just about any state prison in the United States reveals an institution plagued by over-population, with just about every prison running at more than 100% capacity. The problem, of course, is not new but one that has received great attention. In the past decade or so the solution has been privatization of state prisons. Proponents of privatization have pushed forth the idea that private institutions are the solution to prison overcrowding. However, by looking to for-profit private institutions as a means to resolving the problems of the penal system, are legislators in fact ensuring that the problems …

Hudson And Samson: The Roberts Court Confronts Privacy, Dignity, And The Fourth Amendment, John D. Castiglione

ExpressO

This article critically analyzes Samson v. California and Hudson v. Michigan, which were the Roberts Court's first major Fourth Amendment decisions. In Samson, the Court upheld a California law allowing government officials to search parolees without any suspicion of wrongdoing. In Hudson, to the surprise of almost every observer, the Court held that knock-and-announce violations do not carry with them a remedy of exclusion. What was most notable about Hudson was not only that it rejected what every state and every federal court, save one, believed to be the proper remedy for knock-and-announce violations, but that it called into question …

Son Of Sam Resurrected: Did Greedy Criminals Unwittingly Give New Life To The “Son Of Sam” Laws?, Arthur M. Ortegon

ExpressO

No abstract provided.

Principled Consequentialism, Hamish C. Stewart

ExpressO

This Article characterizes and seeks to reconcile two competing approaches to legal reasoning, through the lens of the problem of the determinacy of legal doctrine. On the “neo-formalist” approach, characteristic of many modern liberal scholars, the appropriate doctrinal answer to any legal problem can be determined by working out, in a quasi-deductive way and in isolation from consequentialist considerations, the implications of a small and stable set of legal principles. On the “neo-realist” approach, characteristic of many economic analysts of law but also of certain leftist critics of liberalism, principles provide no determinate answer to legal problems; the only way …

Yukos Risk: The Double Edged Sword, Joseph Tanega, Dmitry Gololobov

ExpressO

Abstract The article focuses on elucidating the meaning of Yukos risk mainly in terms of corporate bankruptcy litigation in multiple jurisdictions, including, the U.S., U.K., The Netherlands, and Russia. The emphasis is on understanding the various legal theories and the court decisions reached so far in this continuing legal saga.

Dialogic Allocution, Felix Valenzuela

ExpressO

This Article argues in favor of increasing the scope of the national sentencing dialogue in order to remedy the current sentencing defects. The increase in scope hinges on expanding the role of allocution within criminal sentencing. By treating allocution as seriously as the Federal Rules do, new discussants will contribute creative solutions for the defects, while at the same time enhancing institutional and ontological legitimacy. To achieve that end, the Article proposes a modified view of allocution. This dialogic allocution unifies the judge and defendant as co-discussants in the national debate, rather than pitting them against each other. The Article …

Cyber-Extortion: Duties And Liabilities Related To The Elephant In The Server Room, Adam J. Sulkowski

ExpressO

This is a comprehensive analysis of the legal frameworks related to cyber-extortion – the practice of demanding money in exchange for not carrying out threats to commit harm that would involve a victim's information systems. The author hopes it will catalyze an urgently needed discussion of relevant public policy concerns.

Cyber-extortion has, by all accounts, become a common, professionalized and profit-driven criminal pursuit targeting businesses. 17% of businesses in a recent survey indicated having received a cyber-extortion demand. An additional 13% of respondents were not sure if their business had received such a demand.

Awareness of the risks of cybercrime …

Prosecutors: Factors To Aid Your Filing Decisions With Respect To Fatal Traffic Collisions, Kimberly Rebecca Bird

ExpressO

As you may know, on a fairly regular basis, prosecutors are faced with filing decisions with respect to fatal traffic collisions. Many of them, of course, do not involve criminal negligence and are not prosecuted as crimes. Sometimes, on the other hand, the circumstances are egregious and the decision to be made is whether to file a case as a vehicular manslaughter or as a murder, on an implied malice theory. There are a finite number of California Supreme Court and Court of Appeal cases (beginning with People v. Watson (1981) 30 Cal.3d 290) that have addressed the sufficiency of …

The Personal Is Political--And Economic: Rethinking Domestic Violence, Deborah M. Weissman

Deborah M. Weissman

This Article seeks to expand the scope of the domestic violence discourse within the context of the theory and practice of legal strategies. The intent is to shift the analytical parameters beyond the criminal justice system to include the political economy of everyday experiences of households. Such a paradigm shift examines the conditions of the private sphere as a function of the circumstances of public realms. It considers domestic violence by linking it to the structural transformations of the U.S. economy during recent years. It assesses domestic violence from the perspective of the daily life of men and women who …

Self-Defense In Asian Religions, David B. Kopel

David B Kopel

This Article investigates the attitudes of six Far Eastern religions - Confucianism, Taoism, Hinduism, Sikhism, Jainism, and Buddhism - towards the legitimacy of the use of force in individual and collective contexts. Self-defense is strongly legitimated in the theory and practice of the major Far Eastern religions. The finding is consistent with natural law theory that some aspects of the human personality, including the self-defense instinct, are inherent in human nature, rather than being entirely determined by culture.

Is Silence Sacred? The Vulnerability Of Griffin V. California In A Terrorist World, Lissa Griffin

Elisabeth Haub School of Law Faculty Publications

Part I of this Article traces the shared history of the right against self-incrimination from twelfth-century England to the mid-twentieth century. Part II examines the modern history of the privilege in the United States, from the Supreme Court's 1965 decision in Griffin to its 1999 decision in Mitchell. Part III examines the United Kingdom's modern approach to the privilege, including its re-shaping of the privilege in response to domestic terrorism. Part IV examines why the U.S. and U.K. systems, with a common history and shared values, have moved in such dramatically different directions with respect to the privilege. Part V …

Delimiting The Culture Defense, James M. Donovan, John Stuart Garth

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

This essay builds upon the arguments of Alison Dundes Renteln in her influential book, The Cultural Defense (2004), in which she argues persuasively for a uniformly recognized culture defense in certain litigations. Critiquing some of her details, we recast her three-prong culture defense test to more effectively balance the competing interests of minority culture members to have their ways of life taken seriously by the courts, and of members of the dominant tradition who wish to preserve the rule of law with its necessary perception as treating all parties equally. The offered formulation now includes the following five elements:

1. …

Justice Without Politics: Prosecutorial Discretion And The International Criminal Court, Alexander K.A. Greenawalt

Elisabeth Haub School of Law Faculty Publications

The ICC Prosecutor's own charging policies should be prepared to give way to the judgments of legitimate political actors in times of political transition when actual arrests are more likely and competing justice proposals pose a more troubling challenge to the ICC's authority. In that scenario, I argue that the Prosecutor should encourage legitimate political actors to reach policy decisions that will command deference by the ICC. Such deference could take one or both of the following forms: (1) explicit deference to political actors, principally the U.N. Security Council acting under Chapter VII of the U.N. Charter, and (2) implied …

Normative Gaps In The Criminal Law: A Reasons Theory Of Wrongdoing, Luis E. Chiesa

Elisabeth Haub School of Law Faculty Publications

In this article it is argued that in two controversial homicide cases--severing conjoined twins and downing a hijacked commercial plane headed toward a heavily populated area--it is permissible to kill innocent human beings without having to establish the existence of a claim of justifcation such as self-defense or choice of evils. Even though criminal law scholars consider that unjustified conduct is always wrong, the position defended in the article is that there is a normative gap between an absence of justification and a finding of wrongdoing. This "normative gap defense," which negates wrongdoing without justifying the conduct, is the best …

The Act Requirement As A Basic Concept Of Criminal Law, Luis E. Chiesa

Elisabeth Haub School of Law Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Forgiveness In Criminal Procedure, Stephanos Bibas

All Faculty Scholarship

Though forgiveness and mercy matter greatly in social life, they play fairly small roles in criminal procedure. Criminal procedure is dominated by the state, whose interests in deterring, incapacitating, and inflicting retribution leave little room for mercy. An alternative system, however, would focus more on the needs of human participants. Victim-offender mediation, sentencing discounts, and other mechanisms could encourage offenders to express remorse, victims to forgive, and communities to reintegrate and employ offenders. All of these actors could then better heal, reconcile, and get on with their lives. Forgiveness and mercy are not panaceas: not all offenders and victims would …

Prosecuting Government Fraud Despite The Csi Effect: Getting The Jury To Follow The Money, James B. Johnston

James B Johnston

Prosecutors have complained that jurors who think they are educated in crime scene investigations by watching T.V. have made it difficult to prove cases even when the charge is white collar in nature because they expect the forensics the see on the show "CSI". In regard to government fraud cases, the prosecutor simply must get the jury to follow the fraud linked money. This article notes that those in law enforcement must give the jury what they want to get them to follow the money especially when the case concerns government fraud and corruption.