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Child Pornography And The Restitution Revolution, Cortney E. Lollar
Child Pornography And The Restitution Revolution, Cortney E. Lollar
Law Faculty Scholarly Articles
Victims of child pornography are now successfully seeking restitution from defendants convicted of watching and trading their images. Restitution in child pornography cases, however, represents a dramatic departure from traditional concepts of restitution. This Article offers the first critique of this restitution revolution. Traditional restitution is grounded in notions of unjust enrichment and seeks to restore the economic status quo between parties by requiring disgorgement of ill-gotten gains. The restitution being ordered in increasing numbers of child pornography cases does not serve this purpose. Instead, child pornography victims are receiving restitution simply for having their images viewed. This royalty-type approach …
Un-Torturing The Definition Of Torture And Employing The Rule Of Immigration Lenity, Irene Scharf
Un-Torturing The Definition Of Torture And Employing The Rule Of Immigration Lenity, Irene Scharf
Faculty Publications
In the first three sections, I examine the background of the Convention in the context of international human rights instruments (Section I); the context for a critique of the CAT’s definition of torture, given the legislative history of the Convention and an existing statute that could aid in correcting the misinterpretation adversely affecting CAT enforcement (Section II); and the adverse international implication of the United States’ restrictive meaning of torture (Section III). In a concluding section (IV), I offer possible solutions to the problem, invoking a robust principle of Immigration Lenity to prevent the return of potential torture victims to …
Overcoming Overcriminalization, Stephen Smith
Overcoming Overcriminalization, Stephen Smith
Journal Articles
The literature treats overcriminalization (and, at the federal level, the federalization of crime) as a quantitative problem. Legislatures, on this view, have simply enacted too many crimes, and those crimes are far too broad in scope. This Article uses federal criminal law as a basis for challenging this way of conceptualizing the overcriminalization problem. The real problem with overcriminalization is qualitative, not quantitative: federal crimes are poorly defined, and courts all too often expansively construe poorly defined crimes. Courts thus are not passive victims in the vicious cycle of overcriminalization. Rather, by repeatedly interpreting criminal statutes broadly, courts have taken …