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Full-Text Articles in Law
Mentally Ill, Or Mentally Ill And Dangerous?: Rethinking Civil Commitments In Minnesota, Eliot T. Tracz
Mentally Ill, Or Mentally Ill And Dangerous?: Rethinking Civil Commitments In Minnesota, Eliot T. Tracz
Mitchell Hamline Law Journal of Public Policy and Practice
No abstract provided.
A Crooked Picture: Re-Framing The Problem Of Child Sexual Abuse, Eric S. Janus
A Crooked Picture: Re-Framing The Problem Of Child Sexual Abuse, Eric S. Janus
Faculty Scholarship
This article discusses the problem of ending child sexual abuse using an allegory explaining that certain types of punitive solutions as solving the river "downstream", or in problem-solving mode, as opposed to "upstream", or in prospective problem avoidance. The thesis of this brief article is that our public policy is focused too far downstream. We rightly condemn child sexual abuse, but our public discourse frames the issue in a way that misdirects our public policy towards downstream solutions. If we truly want to protect our children from sexual abuse and end the cycle of violence, we need to reframe the …
Sexually Violent Predator Laws: Psychiatry In Service To A Morally Dubious Enterprise, Eric S. Janus
Sexually Violent Predator Laws: Psychiatry In Service To A Morally Dubious Enterprise, Eric S. Janus
Faculty Scholarship
This article discusses the role of psychiatrists in determining the treatment of sexually violent predators (SVP). Instead of being released at the end of their prison sentences, sex offenders in the USA who are judged mentally disordered and dangerous are being confined in secure "treatment facilities" for indeterminate terms. This novel and aggressive legislative tactic—embodied in US sexually violent predator laws—commandeers the traditional power of state mental health systems and puts it in service to a core function of the criminal justice system: the control of sexual violence. This transposition of "civil commitment" has forced psychiatry to legitimate and arbitrate …
Toward A Conceptual Framework For Assessing Police Power Commitment Legislation, Eric S. Janus
Toward A Conceptual Framework For Assessing Police Power Commitment Legislation, Eric S. Janus
Faculty Scholarship
Recent litigation and scholarship have begun to focus on the substantive limits of the state's power to use civil commitment as a social control tool. Courts and commentators describe civil commitment as grounded on two powers of the state: the parens patriae interest and the police power. This Article seeks an analytical framework for defining the boundaries of police power commitments in which justification rests on the interests of the public rather than on the interests of the committed individual.