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Full-Text Articles in Law

Legal Punishment As Civil Ritual: Making Cultural Sense Of Harsh Punishment, Spearit Jan 2013

Legal Punishment As Civil Ritual: Making Cultural Sense Of Harsh Punishment, Spearit

Articles

This work examines mass incarceration through a ritual studies perspective, paying explicit attention to the religious underpinnings. Conventional analyses of criminal punishment focus on the purpose of punishment in relation to legal or moral norms, or attempt to provide a general theory of punishment. The goals of this work are different, and instead try to understand the cultural aspects of punishment that have helped make the United States a global leader in imprisonment and execution. It links the boom in incarceration to social ruptures of the 1950s and 1960s and posits the United States’ world leader status as having more …


A Snitch In Time: An Historical Sketch Of Black Informing During Slavery, Andrea L. Dennis Jan 2013

A Snitch In Time: An Historical Sketch Of Black Informing During Slavery, Andrea L. Dennis

Scholarly Works

This article sketches the socio-legal creation, use, and regulation of informants in the Black community during slavery and the Black community’s response at that time. Despite potentially creating benefits such as crime control and sentence reduction, some Blacks today are convinced that cooperation with government investigations and prosecutions should be avoided. One factor contributing to this perspective is America’s reliance on Black informants to police and socially control Blacks during slavery, the Civil Rights Movement, and the Wars on Drugs, Crime and Gangs. Notwithstanding this historical justification for non-cooperation, only a few informant law and policy scholars have examined closely …


Parallel Investigations Between Administrative And Law Enforcement Agencies: A Question Of Civil Liberties, Shiv Narayan Persaud Jan 2013

Parallel Investigations Between Administrative And Law Enforcement Agencies: A Question Of Civil Liberties, Shiv Narayan Persaud

Journal Publications

No abstract provided.


The First Amendment, Equal Protection, And Felon Disenfranchisement: A New Viewpoint, Janai S. Nelson Jan 2013

The First Amendment, Equal Protection, And Felon Disenfranchisement: A New Viewpoint, Janai S. Nelson

Faculty Publications

This Article engages the equality principles of the First Amendment and the Equal Protection Clause to reconsider the constitutionality of one of the last and most entrenched barriers to universal suffrage—felon disenfranchisement. A deeply racialized problem, felon disenfranchisement is additionally and independently a legislative judgment as to which citizen's ideas are worthy of inclusion in the electorate. Relying on a series of cases involving state interests in protecting the ballot and promoting its intelligent use, this Article demonstrates that felon disenfranchisement is open to attack under the Supreme Court's fundamental rights jurisprudence when it is motivated by a desire to …