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Full-Text Articles in Law
Deterrence’S Difficulty, Neal K. Katyal
Deterrence’S Difficulty, Neal K. Katyal
Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works
We all crave simple elegance. Physicists since Einstein have been searching for a grand unified theory that will tie everything together in a simple model. Law professors have their own grand theories - law and economics's Coase Theorem and constitutional law's Originalism immediately spring to mind. Criminal law is no different, for the analogue is our faith in deterrence - the belief that increasing the penalty on an activity will mean that fewer people will perform it. This theory has much to commend it. After all, economists and shoppers have known for ages that a price increase in a good …
Making Constitutional Doctrine In A Realist Age, Victoria Nourse
Making Constitutional Doctrine In A Realist Age, Victoria Nourse
Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works
In this article the author considers three examples of modern constitutional doctrine that show how judges have stolen bits and pieces from popularized skepticisms about the job of judging and have molded this stolen rhetoric into doctrine. In the first example, she asks whether constitutional law's recent penchant for doctrinal rules based on "clear law" could have existed without the modern age's obsession with legal uncertainty. In the second, the author considers whether our contemporary rhetoric of constitutional "interests" and "expectations" reflects modern critiques of doctrine as failing to address social needs. In the third, she asks how an offhand …
Passion's Progress: Modern Law Reform And The Provocation Defense, Victoria Nourse
Passion's Progress: Modern Law Reform And The Provocation Defense, Victoria Nourse
Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works
Based on a systematic study of fifteen years of passion murder cases, this article concludes that reform challenges our conventional ideas of a "crime of passion" and, in the process, leads to a murder law that is both illiberal and often perverse. If life tells us that crimes of passion are the stuff of sordid affairs and bedside confrontations, reform tells us that the law's passion may be something quite different. A significant number of the reform cases the author has studied involve no sexual infidelity whatsoever, but only the desire of the killer's victim to leave a miserable relationship. …