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Criminal Law

Faculty Publications

2012

Articles 1 - 13 of 13

Full-Text Articles in Law

Subverting Symbolism: The Matthew Shepard And James Byrd, Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act And Cooperative Federalism, Kami Chavis Simmons Oct 2012

Subverting Symbolism: The Matthew Shepard And James Byrd, Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act And Cooperative Federalism, Kami Chavis Simmons

Faculty Publications

Hate crimes continue to persist in the United States and undermine the traditions and values to which the country aspires. Until recently, however, the stringent jurisdictional limitations of existing federal legislation made it difficult for the federal government to prosecute these crimes. In October 2009, President Obama signed into law the Matthew Shepard James Byrd Jr., Hate Crimes Prevention Act (the "HCPA"). The HCPA significantly expands the federal government's authority to prosecute defendants accused of hate crimes because it dispenses with a previous jurisdictional requirement that made it difficult to prosecute many such crimes. The HCPA also represents an expansion …

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Editor's Observations: It's Alive! The Federal Booker-Fix Debate Sirs, Frank O. Bowman Iii Jun 2012

Editor's Observations: It's Alive! The Federal Booker-Fix Debate Sirs, Frank O. Bowman Iii

Faculty Publications

Seven years have passed since Justice Ginsburg do-si-doed from the merits majority to the remedial majority in Booker and transformed the Federal Sentencing Guidelines into an advisory system.' And despite the logical absurdity of the Scalian Sixth Amendment doctrine that produced this outcome,' and despite the expectation of folks like me that this marriage of fish and fowl could not long survive, it survives. What is more, a great many people whose opinion matters now claim to love it-or at least to like it well enough to want to keep it for the foreseeable future. Thus, the outburst of legislative …

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Getting Away With Murder (Most Of The Time): Civil War Era Homicide Cases In Boone County, Missouri, Frank O. Bowman Iii Apr 2012

Getting Away With Murder (Most Of The Time): Civil War Era Homicide Cases In Boone County, Missouri, Frank O. Bowman Iii

Faculty Publications

Much of the modem American legal process is dependent, not on particular substantive or procedural rules, but on legal and societal infrastructure that we tend to take for granted. To give the simplest example, appellate practice in Missouri (and elsewhere) was stunted until the late 1880s by the absence of court reporters who could create the verbatim trial records upon which a detailed review for error depends. The study of actual cases decided by juries and judges - law in action, rather than law in theory - owes its fascination to the insights it gives into what people really believe …

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Kenya Vs. The Icc Prosecutor, Charles Chernor Jalloh Jan 2012

Kenya Vs. The Icc Prosecutor, Charles Chernor Jalloh

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

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Of Trayvon Martin, George Zimmerman, And Legal Expressivism: Why Massachusetts Should Stand Its Ground On "Stand Your Ground", Louis N. Schulze Jr. Jan 2012

Of Trayvon Martin, George Zimmerman, And Legal Expressivism: Why Massachusetts Should Stand Its Ground On "Stand Your Ground", Louis N. Schulze Jr.

Faculty Publications

This essay suggests that the expressive impact of Stand Your Ground laws alters the shared norms governing our collective understanding of the moral limits of “self-defense.” The essay argues that the theory of Legal Expressivism can explain the widespread misunderstanding of the limits of self-defense, as demonstrated by the institutional and popular reactions to the killing of Trayvon Martin by George Zimmerman. To support this thesis, the piece briefly explains Stand Your Ground statutes and legal expressivism. It then details the nature of the expressive function of these statutes and asserts that Massachusetts, which recently considered the adoption of such …

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Bringing Nuremberg Home: Justice Jackson's Path Back To Buffalo, October 4, 1946, John Q. Barrett Jan 2012

Bringing Nuremberg Home: Justice Jackson's Path Back To Buffalo, October 4, 1946, John Q. Barrett

Faculty Publications

During one permanently consequential decade in the history of the United States and the world, United States Supreme Court Justice Robert H. Jackson delivered three major lectures at the University of Buffalo. The last of these was Jackson's May 9, 1951, James McCormick Mitchell Lecture, "Wartime Security and Liberty under Law," which inaugurated this distinguished lecture series. Justice Jackson's first formal lecture at the University of Buffalo occurred on February 23, 1942, halfway through his first year as a Supreme Court Justice and just twelve weeks after the attack on Pearl Harbor brought the United States into World War II. …

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Nothing Is Not Enough: Fix The Absurd Post-Booker Federal Sentencing System, Frank O. Bowman Iii Jan 2012

Nothing Is Not Enough: Fix The Absurd Post-Booker Federal Sentencing System, Frank O. Bowman Iii

Faculty Publications

This article is an elaboration of testimony I gave in February 2012 at a U.S. Sentencing Commission hearing considering whether the advisory guidelines system created by the Supreme Court’s 2005 decision in United States v. Booker should be modified or replaced. I argue that it should.

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International Decision, International Criminal Court, Judgment On The Appeal Of The Republic Of Kenya Against Pre-Trial Chamber Decision Denying Inadmissibility Of The Kenya Situation, Charles Chernor Jalloh Jan 2012

International Decision, International Criminal Court, Judgment On The Appeal Of The Republic Of Kenya Against Pre-Trial Chamber Decision Denying Inadmissibility Of The Kenya Situation, Charles Chernor Jalloh

Faculty Publications

A fundamental pillar of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (ICC) is Article 17, which enshrines the complementarity principle – the idea that ICC jurisdiction will only be triggered when states fail to act to prosecute genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes within their national courts or in circumstances where they prove unwilling and or unable to do so. The problem is that, as shown in this case report in the American Journal of International Law on the first ICC Appeals Chamber ruling regarding a state party’s objection to the court’s assertion of jurisdiction over its nationals, …

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Par In Parem Imperium Non Habet, Beth Van Schaack Jan 2012

Par In Parem Imperium Non Habet, Beth Van Schaack

Faculty Publications

The principle of complementarity undergirds the International Criminal Court’s admissibility regime. And yet, in the negotiations leading up to the 2010 Review Conference in Kampala, Uganda, delegates did not fully focus on the potential for the addition of the crime of aggression to destabilize the Court’s complementarity regime. The only guidance from the ASP came in the form of two interpretive Understandings that express a subtle preference that States Parties not incorporate the crime into their domestic codes. If States Parties heed this call - which they should - the Court will inevitably be faced with situations in which there …

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Against Theories Of Punishment: The Thought Of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Marc O. Degirolami Jan 2012

Against Theories Of Punishment: The Thought Of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Marc O. Degirolami

Faculty Publications

This paper reflects critically on what is the near-universal contemporary method of conceptualizing the tasks of the scholar of criminal punishment. It does so by the unusual route of considering the thought of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, a towering figure in English law and political theory, one of its foremost historians of criminal law, and a prominent public intellectual of the late Victorian period. Notwithstanding Stephen's stature, there has as yet been no sustained effort to understand his views of criminal punishment. This article attempts to remedy this deficit. But its aims are not exclusively historical. Indeed, understanding Stephen's ideas …

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Mass Murderers Discover Mass Murder: The Germans And Katyn, 1943, Kenneth F. Ledford Jan 2012

Mass Murderers Discover Mass Murder: The Germans And Katyn, 1943, Kenneth F. Ledford

Faculty Publications

After the German army in 1943 discovered the graves of murdered Polish army officers in the Katyn Forest, Joseph Goebbels embarked upon a cynical publicity campaign to spread before the world the perils of Bolshevik success. But the Nazi discovery of Soviet crimes against leaders of Polish state and society elided the reality that from the very beginning of the German invasion of Poland, the SS had carried out identical mass murders of Polish intellectuals and other social leaders. Goebbels's campaign amounted to mass murderers ““uncovering” mass murders on the part of their adversaries and seeking cynically to use that …

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Universal Jurisdiction And The Crime Of Aggression, Michael P. Scharf Jan 2012

Universal Jurisdiction And The Crime Of Aggression, Michael P. Scharf

Faculty Publications

In June 2010 in Kampala, Uganda, the states that are party to the Statute of the International Criminal Court agreed to amend the ICC Statute to add the crime of aggression to the Court's jurisdiction. One of the key compromises that made this possible was the adoption of a U.S.-proposed “understanding” which provided that the aggression amendment should not be interpreted as creating a right for national courts to prosecute the crime of aggression under universal jurisdiction. If, however, national courts already possess the right to do so under customary international law, stemming from the Nuremberg precedent, then the understanding …

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Katyn: Justice Delayed Or Justice Denied? Report Of The Cleveland Experts' Meeting, Michael P. Scharf, Maria Szonert-Binienda Jan 2012

Katyn: Justice Delayed Or Justice Denied? Report Of The Cleveland Experts' Meeting, Michael P. Scharf, Maria Szonert-Binienda

Faculty Publications

Report of the Frederick K. Cox International Law Center and the Libra Institute, Inc. hosted a Symposium and Experts Meeting in commemoration of the 70th anniversary of the Katyn massacre, Cleveland, OH, February 4-5, 2011

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