Law Commons^™

Can You Be A Good Person And A Good Prosecutor?, Abbe Smith

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Somehow, it is understood that prosecutors have the high ground. Most people simply assume that prosecutors are the good guys, wear the white hats, and are on the "right" side. Most law students contemplating a career in criminal law seem to think this. It could be that most practicing lawyers think this, as well.

Prosecutors represent the people, the state, the government. This is very noble, important, and heady stuff. Prosecutors seek truth, justice, and the American way. They are the ones who stand up for the victims and would-be victims, the bullied and battered and burgled. They protect all …

Self-Defense And Subjectivity, Victoria Nourse

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The law of self-defense has rarely produced as much academic or popular heat as it has in the past two decades. Widely publicized trials, such as the Goetz and Menendez cases, have generated deep-seated fears of a law unmoored from principle. Those fears have generated a standard public critique--that the criminal law has become too soft and subjective, too wedded to syndrome science and prone to weak-kneed affection for defendants. The criminal law has lost its "objectivity," so the argument goes. The poster child, and even the alleged cause of this development, is the battered woman.

In this article, the …

The Bakaly Debacle: The Role Of The Press In High-Profile Criminal Investigations, Julie R. O'Sullivan

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Others have examined why prosecutors or law enforcement agents may be inclined to "leak" information regarding ongoing criminal investigations, documented the rules that govern federal prosecutors' interaction with the press in such circumstances, outlined the difficulties encountered in enforcing those rules, and critiqued the performance of Mr. Starr's office in this regard. In other words, the dynamic as it flows from governmental actors to the press has been scrutinized. I would like to suggest that a more searching examination be conducted of the press's role, and perhaps its responsibilities, in this context. Because I am neither a journalist nor a …

Faulty Adversarial Performance By Criminal Defenders In The Crown Court, Peter W. Tague

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Who is the more able advocate, the lawyer in the United States or the barrister in England and Wales? Answering that question is extremely difficult because of a multitude of differences in the procedural regimes in which each works and in the scope of each's responsibility. Yet, one facet stands out, like a full moon in a dark sky: The comparative number of defenders who on appeal have been accused of having provided inappropriate representation in the process leading to conviction . . . Part 1 discusses the procedural hurdles that make challenging the trial barrister's conduct more difficult than …

The Hyde Amendment And Prosecutorial Investigation: The Promise Of Protection For Criminal Defendants, Lynn R. Singband

Fordham Urban Law Journal

This Comment first describes federal prosecutors' broad charging discretion and the resulting potential for abuse. It then discusses how current interpretations of the Hyde Amendment have failed to establish a standard of conduct for federal prosecutors different from that established by preexisting laws, internal regulations, and ethics rules. Finally, it argues that the Hyde Amendment offers the courts an important opportunity to issue opinions detailing how federal prosecutors should exercise their charging discretion. This Comment concludes that courts should take advantage of this opportunity to establish a more exact standard of conduct for prosecutors conducting investigations and thereby offer defendants …

Judicial Fact-Finding And Sentence Enhancements In A World Of Guilty Pleas, Stephanos Bibas

All Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Apprendi V. New Jersey: Back To The Future?, Joseph L. Hoffmann

Articles by Maurer Faculty

No abstract provided.

"Project Exile" And The Allocation Of Federal Law Enforcement Authority, Daniel Richman

Faculty Scholarship

With each report of violent crime statistics (whether rising or falling) or of the latest firearms outrage, we hear the antiphony of the gun control debate. Advocates of increased federal regulation decry the inadequacies of a regime that permits relatively free access to firearms and argue that the availability of guns is itself a spur to more deadly violence. Advocates of minimal regulation, for their part, condemn measures that, they say, will primarily penalize law-abiding citizens, and instead call for more vigorous enforcement of existing laws, targeting "criminals," not their weapons. When the antiphony intrudes on funerals, the effect can …

Look Who's Extrapolating: A Reply To Hoffmann, Valerie West, Jeffery Fagan, James S. Liebman

Faculty Scholarship

In late March, a reporter called with news of a pirated copy of Professor Joseph Hoffinann's soon-to-be-published "attack" on our study, A Broken System: Error Rates in Capital Cases, 1973-1995. Did we care to comment? Obtaining our own copy revealed that Professor Hoffmann's fusillade missed its mark (he misstates what we did) and boomeranged (his mischaracterizations of our analysis accurately describe his own). We do care to comment, and Hoffmann and the Indiana Law Journal have graciously let us do so.

Hoffmann's main claim is that we "extrapolated" the 68% rate of reversible error we reported for capital verdicts …

Should An Effective International Criminal Court Have Primacy Or Be Complementary To National Courts? An Analysis Of Concurrent Jurisdiction In The Ad Hoc Tribunals And The Rome Statute, Godwin Yenika Fonye

LLM Theses and Essays

Concurrent criminal jurisdiction depicts a scenario where two or more judicial systems have the legal capacity to investigate, prosecute and punish an accused person for the same criminal acts under their respective, separate jurisdiction. This usually occurs between sovereign states. In the realm of crimes under international law, the distinguishing characteristic is the universal jurisdiction that is conferred on all States to prosecute and punish the perpetrators of such crimes. The "cumulative effect of these different principles of jurisdiction sometimes is to vest multiple states with concurrent jurisdiction to prosecute a given crime. This paper would attempt to analyze the …

Criminal Law In Cyberspace, Neal K. Katyal

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Two of the most talked-about crimes of the year, the ILoveYou computer worm and the denial of service attacks on Yahoo, eBay, and ETrade, suggest that a new form of crime is emerging: cybercrime. Thousands of these crimes occur each year, and the results are often catastrophic; in terms of economic damage, the ILoveYou worm may have been the most devastating crime in history, causing more than $11 billion in losses.

This paper asks how cybercrime is best deterred. It identifies five constraints on crime - legal sanctions, monetary perpetration cost, social norms, architecture, and physical risks - and explains …

Why Laws Work Pretty Well, But Not Great: Words And Rules In Legal Intrepretation, Lawrence Solan

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

The Jury In The 21st Century: An Interdisciplinary Conference: Introduction, Susan Herman, Lawerence M. Solan

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Formalism, Realism, And The War On Drugs, David Cole

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

One of the ways our legal system has avoided confronting this ugly reality is through a commitment to legal formalism. Legal formalism allows us to ignore the social determinants that my AUSA friend saw every day as he prosecuted federal drug cases. As my colleague Professor Michael Seidman has suggested, legal formalism, which has been effectively critiqued and displaced by legal realism in many other areas of law, continues to exercise considerable influence over the way we think about criminal law. This formalist approach, in my view, has strongly affected the way we approach the drug problem. One consequence is …

Playing God: An Essay On Law, Philosophy, And American Capital Punishment, Samuel J. Levine

Scholarly Works

This article looks at the capital sentencer's decision: Whether a death-eligible defendant will in fact receive the death sentence. Based in part on an examination of Jewish law and philosophy, Professor Levine identifies three particular areas in which it can be said that the Supreme Court requires the capital sentencer to "play God." First, capital sentencers are asked to ascertain the degree of a defendant's culpability by looking at factors that affect free will and victim impact evidence, implicating moral luck. Capital sentencers are also required to determine a person's total moral worth by considering character evidence. Finally, the Supreme …

Handling Cases Of Willful Exposure Through Hiv Partner Counseling And Referral Services, Lawrence O. Gostin, James G. Hodge Jr.

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Cases of willful exposure reveal the existing and future risks to the public health (especially women) which may be presented by individuals who willfully expose others to HIV through unsafe sexual or needle-sharing behaviors. In response to a documented case of willful exposure, a PCRS counselor or other public health official may, in his or her professional judgment, decide to act to avert a legitimate public health threat to known or unknown persons in the community. Yet handling such cases raises difficult issues in law, ethics, and public health practice. Public health authorities may be unable or ill-equipped to successfully …

A Man Lost In The Gray Zone, David Luban

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The Rudolf Kastner trial was one of the three great scandals that rocked Israeli party politics in the 1950s (the others were the negotiations with Germany for Holocaust reparations and the so-called "Lavon affair"). Although Leora Bilsky describes it as an "almost forgotten trial," it has not been forgotten by subsequent writers: it makes an important cameo appearance in Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem; it features prominently in Tom Segev's The Seventh Million (1991); Yehuda Bauer's Jews for Sale? (1994) takes pains to refute the charges against Kastner; and it inspired two novels - Amos Elon's Timetable (1980) and Neil Gordon's …

Free Exercise Rights Of Capital Jurors, Brian Galle

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The Supreme Court has said that the Constitution permits trial judges to exclude from the pool of potential capital trial jurors any persons whose views on the death penalty would likely substantially impair their ability to reach an impartial verdict. This Note argues that the Court's analysis to date is incomplete, in that it omits close evaluation of potential conflicts between such exclusions and the Free Exercise Clause. The Note argues further that a court should apply strict scrutiny to any state action, such as exclusion for cause, that burdens the use of religious beliefs in the mental processes of …

Transgressing The Border Between Protection And Empowerment For Domestic Violence Victims And Older Children: Empowerment As Protection In The Foster Care System, Susan Vivian Mangold

Journal Articles

No abstract provided.

Full Legal Representation For The Poor: The Clash Between Lawyer Values And Client Worthiness, Michelle S. Jacobs

UF Law Faculty Publications

This article seeks to expand the scope of our understanding of values and their connection to the work of poverty lawyers. The article explores the literature on poverty and moral worthiness. In order to bring clarity to the discussion, it examines social science research on defining "values" and detailing how they can affect behavior. Prof. Jacobs describes the reactions of clinical students to a classroom exercise, which asked them to describe the legal representation they would provide to hypothetical clients. This article describes how the link between students' values and broader societal beliefs affect the practices of the bar and …

Toward A Comparative Economics Of Plea Bargaining (With Thomas Miceli), Richard Adelstein

Richard Adelstein

A comparison of adversarial and inquisitorial approaches to criminal adjudication and its implications for plea bargaining.

The Evolving Concept Of Universal Jurisdiction (Symposium), Bartram Brown

Bartram Brown

No abstract provided.

The Introduction Of Jury Trials And Adversarial Elements Into The Former Soviet Union And Other Inquisitorial Countries, James W. Diehm

James W. Diehm

Wilde On Trial: Psychic Injury, Exhibitionism And The Law, Kirby Farrell Prof

kirby farrell

A reassessment of Oscar Wilde's conviction for sexual offenses. Wilde's trial responded to polarization in fantasies of respectability in late Victorian culture, with the fear of social death underlying anxieties about homosexuality.

6. Reducing Maltreated Children’S Reluctance To Answer Hypothetical Oath-Taking Competency Questions., Thomas D. Lyon, Karen J. Saywitz, Debra Kaplan, Joyce S. Dorado

Thomas D. Lyon