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Full-Text Articles in Law
Can Criminal Law Be Controlled?, Darryl K. Brown
Can Criminal Law Be Controlled?, Darryl K. Brown
Michigan Law Review
It is a bizarre state of affairs that criminal law has no coherent description or explanation. We have standard tropes to define criminal law, but they obscure as much as they clarify and are honored in the breach as much as the rule. Crimes, for instance, are defined by wrongdoing and culpability; to be guilty, one must do a wrongful act in a blameworthy manner, that is, as a responsible agent without excuse or justification. And crimes define public wrongs, which are distinct from private wrongs. Further, we criminalize only harmful conduct, or risk-creating conduct, or immoral conduct, or conduct …
Why Care About Mass Incarceration?, James Forman Jr.
Why Care About Mass Incarceration?, James Forman Jr.
Michigan Law Review
Advocates for less punitive crime policies in the United States face long and dispiriting odds. The difficulty of the challenge becomes clear if we compare our criminal justice outcomes with those of other nations: We lock up more people, and for longer, than anyone else in the world. We continue to use the death penalty long after Europe abandoned it, we are the only country in the world to lock up juveniles for life, and we have prisoners serving fifty-year sentences for stealing videotapes from Kmart. Our courts offer little relief: the German Constitutional Court prohibits a sentence of life …
Deconstructing International Criminal Law, Kevin Jon Heller
Deconstructing International Criminal Law, Kevin Jon Heller
Michigan Law Review
After nearly fifty years of post-Nuremberg hibernation, international criminal tribunals have returned to the world stage with a vengeance. The Security Council created the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia ("ICTY") in 1993 and the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda ("ICTR") in 1994. Hybrid domestic-international tribunals have been established in Sierra Leone (2000), East Timor (2000), Kosovo (2000), Cambodia (2003), Bosnia (2005), and Lebanon (2007). And, of course, the international community's dream of a permanent tribunal was finally realized in 2002, when the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court ("ICC") entered into force. This unprecedented proliferation of international …
China Reexamined: The Worst Offender Or A Strong Contender?, Yang Wang
China Reexamined: The Worst Offender Or A Strong Contender?, Yang Wang
Michigan Law Review
These are the questions that Professor Randall Peerenboom sets out to answer from an American legal scholar's perspective in China Modernizes: Threat to the West or Model for the Rest. Peerenboom advances three main arguments in China Modernizes. First, to more accurately assess China's performance in its quest for modernization, one must "plac[e] China within a broader comparative context" (p. 10). Through a careful analysis of empirical data, Peerenboom observes that China outperforms many other countries at a similar income level on almost all key indicators of well-being and human rights, with the sole exception of civil and political …
Keeping The State Out: The Separation Of Law And State In Classical Islamic Law, Lubna A. Alam
Keeping The State Out: The Separation Of Law And State In Classical Islamic Law, Lubna A. Alam
Michigan Law Review
The implementation and enforcement of Islamic law, especially Islamic criminal law, by modem-day Muslim nation-states is fraught with controversy and challenges. In Pakistan, the documented problems and failures of the country's attempt to codify Islamic law on extramarital sexual relations have led to efforts to remove rape cases from Islamic law courts to civil law courts. In striking contrast to Pakistan's experience, the Republic of the Maldives recently commissioned a draft of a penal law and sentencing guidelines based on Islamic law that abides by international norms. The incorporation of Islamic law into the legal systems of various countries around …
Pluralizing International Criminal Justice, Mark A. Drumbl
Pluralizing International Criminal Justice, Mark A. Drumbl
Michigan Law Review
From Nuremberg to The Hague scours the institutions of international criminal justice in order to examine their legitimacy and effectiveness. This collection of essays is edited by Philippe Sands, an eminent authority on public international law and professor at University College London. The five essays derive from an equal number of public lectures held in London between April and June 2002. The essays - concise and in places informal - carefully avoid legalese and arcania. Taken together, they cover an impressive spectrum of issues. Read individually, however, each essay is ordered around one or two well-tailored themes, thereby ensuring analytic …
Equality, Objectivity, And Neutrality, Alafair S. Burke
Equality, Objectivity, And Neutrality, Alafair S. Burke
Michigan Law Review
When is homicide reasonable? That familiar, yet unanswered question continues to intrigue both courts and criminal law scholars, in large part because any response must first address the question, "reasonable to whom?" The standard story about why that threshold question is both difficult and interesting usually involves a juxtaposition of "objective" and "subjective" standards for judging claims of reasonableness. On the one hand, the story goes, is a "subjective" standard of reasonableness under which jurors evaluate the reasonableness of a criminal defendant's beliefs and actions by comparing them to those of a hypothetical reasonable person sharing all of the individual …
Was The Frog Prince Sexually Molested?: A Review Of Peter Westen's The Logic Of Consent, Heidi M. Hurd
Was The Frog Prince Sexually Molested?: A Review Of Peter Westen's The Logic Of Consent, Heidi M. Hurd
Michigan Law Review
Peter Westen's The Logic of Consent is nothing short of a tour de force. In the tradition of the very best and most significant contributions to legal theory, Professor Westen demonstrates that we do not know what we think we know about a capacity that on a daily basis turns trespasses into dinner parties, brutal batteries into football games, rape into lovemaking, and the commercial appropriation of name and likeness into biography. While we all employ claims of consent in everyday moral gossip to absolve some and withhold sympathy from others, and while courts of law across the nation commonly …
Carr: Federal Protection Of Civil Rights: Quest For A Sword, Michigan Law Review
Carr: Federal Protection Of Civil Rights: Quest For A Sword, Michigan Law Review
Michigan Law Review
A Review of FEDERAL PROTECTION OF CIVIL RIGHTS: QUEST FOR A SWORD. By Robert K. Carr.
The Story Of A County Prosecutor: A Review, Henry M. Bates
The Story Of A County Prosecutor: A Review, Henry M. Bates
Michigan Law Review
During the later years of the last century the writing about law began to undergo a profound change. Generally speaking, prior to the period indicated it had been largely a statement of what the law was supposed to be as found in legislation and, in Anglo-American countries particularly, in the decisions and opinions of courts. Relatively, it was dogmatic, technical, often too general to be of much use in particular cases and gave a very imperfect picture of the law as actually administered.
Criminal Law In Russia, Pendelton Howard
Criminal Law In Russia, Pendelton Howard
Michigan Law Review
A Review of SOVIET ADMINISTRATION OF CRIMINAL LAW. By Judah Zelitch.
Review: The Law Of Insanity. By George A. Smoot, Arthur Evans Wood
Review: The Law Of Insanity. By George A. Smoot, Arthur Evans Wood
Michigan Law Review
A Review of THE LAW OF INSANITY. By George A. Smoot
Review: Criminology. By Fred E. Haynes, Arthur Evans Wood
Review: Criminology. By Fred E. Haynes, Arthur Evans Wood
Michigan Law Review
A Review of CRIMINOLOGY. By Fred E. Haynes