Law Commons^™

Doing More, Doing Better? A Critique Of The Criminalization Of Coercive Control, Janet Mosher, Shushanna Harris, Jennifer Koshan, Wanda Wiegers

All Papers

Canada recently stood on the verge of ushering in a new criminal offence related to coercive control in the context of intimate relationships. In this paper, we critically evaluate this development, drawing out lessons from past criminalization efforts (particularly their impact on Black women and communities). Our analysis raises significant questions about the potential of the proposed offence to deliver on the promises held out by politicians and frontline advocates. We argue that not only will these promises go largely unrealized, but the ongoing harms of criminalization will be intensified. Marginalized women and communities are the least likely to benefit, …

Crimes Of Violence And Violent Crime, Erin C. Blondel

Notre Dame Law Review

Why can’t federal law define “violence”? Major federal statutes turn on whether someone was convicted of a violent crime. But judges and scholars widely agree that the law defining violence is “chaos.” This Article treats the problem as one of statutory design and construction. What’s violent is a fact-based judgment call—it’s a standard meant to be interpreted case by case through factfinding and adjudication. But Supreme Court jurisprudence increasingly treats it like a rule, insisting that courts must define violence without the facts and discretion that would give that interpretation coherence across countless unique cases.

Chaos is not inevitable. Predicate …

Abortion Ally Or Abettor: Accomplice And Conspiracy Liability After Dobbs, Mary Fan

Articles

The bristle of state laws criminalizing abortion after Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization raises important questions about accomplice and conspiracy liability for helping people pursue reproductive freedoms out of state. Abortion funds, grassroots organizations, pilots, and other humanitarian volunteers are vital for people in need of abortions, who often are trapped by a lack of resources in abortion criminalization jurisdictions. Threats of prosecution are chilling and even shutting down assistance by abortion funds for travel to pursue reproductive freedoms. The liability questions after Dobbs arise against a backdrop of increasing prosecutions in Europe and the United States for crimes …

Solving The Public Defense Crisis In Kansas, Malia N. Brink, Pamela R. Metzger

Deason Center Reports

Kansas has a constitutional obligation to provide counsel to any arrested person who cannot afford to hire a private attorney. But attorney shortages in Kansas threaten this core constitutional right. According to the American Bar Association, there are an average of four attorneys per 1,000 people nationwide. However, only six of Kansas’s 105 counties have two or more attorneys per 1,000 people. In 44 counties, there is just one attorney or fewer per 1,000 residents. The situation is particularly worrisome in rural Kansas. In 2023, nearly half of Kansas’s population lived in rural counties, but 80% of its lawyers lived …

The End(S) Of Bankruptcy Exceptionalism: Purdue Pharma And The Problem Of Social Debt, Jonathan C. Lipson, Pamela Foohey

Cardozo Law Review

The Supreme Court’s recent 5-4 decision in the controversial chapter 11 bankruptcy reorganization of opioid-maker Purdue Pharma ends the use of nonconsensual third-party “releases,” which discharge (eliminate) liabilities of nondebtors who may share liability with a corporate debtor. Although the majority opinion is correct that the Bankruptcy Code does not permit this, it failed to recognize the problematic exceptionalism of the lower courts which approved those releases or the “social” qualities of Purdue Pharma’s mass tort liability.

Bankruptcy exceptionalism has been a contested concept since it emerged over fifteen years ago and reflects a willingness to bend the rule of …

We Need To Talk: Modernizing Attorney-Client Jail Communications, Cynthia Alkon

Faculty Scholarship

Attorney-client jail phone calls, video calls, and emails are all routinely recorded and monitored by jails, with numerous examples of jails and private telecommunications providers giving those recordings and emails to law enforcement and prosecutors. This widespread failure to protect the confidentiality of attorney-client communications prevents lawyers from being able to enjoy easy, quick, and regular communications with their clients. In practice, and despite the ever-expanding communication methods in the outside world, those held in jails in this country while their criminal cases are pending are effectively stuck in the nineteenth century when the only way to communicate was in …

Proving The Future In Criminal Cases, Christopher Slobogin

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

Expert opinion about dangerousness—the risk of reoffending—is commonly introduced at sentencing, criminal commitment proceedings, and some types of pretrial detention hearings. This Essay argues that the rules governing the admissibility of scientific evidence should apply to this testimony and that, on that assumption, such evidence must be (1) “material” (logically relevant, empirically generalizable, and epistemologically germane), (2) “probative” (a measure of accuracy, which is more stringent when the evidence is from an expert), (3) helpful to the factfinder (through promoting “incremental validity”), and (4) presented in a non-prejudicial manner (i.e., in a way that minimizes the possibility it will be …

Police Sexual Violence As Psychological Detention: Making Full Use Of Charter Rights, Sandrine Ampleman-Tremblay

Dalhousie Law Journal

This paper argues that individual responsibility has been overemphasized in cases of sexual violence by police. The fact that police officers are part of a state system calls for an examination of the role of the state in contributing to the risks of sexual violence by police. The paper thus contends that Canadian law requires methods to address state blame in such cases. It analyses psychological detention under section 9 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms as a means to draw a connection between police powers, sexual violence, and state blame. The suggested section 9 interpretation builds on …

Revisiting Reasonable Cybersecurity, Jeffrey L. Vagle

Cardozo Law Review

Prospective theories of cybersecurity liability have traveled over some well-worn paths over the past three decades, resulting in some successes, but also in at least as many cul-de-sacs and dead ends. Part of this problem can be found in the difficulty and complexity of the subject itself. Courts, legislators, and regulators all face comprehension difficulties when they attempt to fit our existing legal system around cybersecurity, often resulting in half-measures and generalized solutions that are challenging to apply to the widely different technical details behind each case. And in the background, we have a general reluctance to create legal regimes …

Respuesta A Una Crítica Política Y A Un Ataque Personal Contra Un Informe De Las Naciones Unidas Que Presenta Nueva Evidencia Sobre La Prostitución Como Causa Y Consecuencia De La Violencia Contra Las Mujeres Y Las Niñas, Reem Alsalem

Dignity: A Journal of Analysis of Exploitation and Violence

Reem Alsalem, Relatora Especial de las Naciones Unidas sobre la violencia contra las mujeres y las niñas, sus causas y consecuencias, responde a las acusaciones falsas y infundadas y a los ataques personales sobre su informe sobre Prostitución y Violencia contra la Mujer, presentado ante la 56ª sesión del Consejo de Derechos Humanos de las Naciones Unidas en Ginebra, 2024. Presenté nueva evidencia sobre la relación entre la violencia contra las mujeres y las niñas y la prostitución. Utilizando el derecho de los derechos humanos, el informe describe la prostitución como un sistema de abuso, explotación y violencia contra las …

Voices For Justice: Firsthand Accounts Of Innocent People Fighting For Access In New York’S Post-Conviction Process, Perlmutter Center For Legal Justice At Cardozo Law

Perlmutter Center Reports

In 2018, the New York State Court of Appeals’ decision in People v. Natascha Tiger created an insurmountable obstacle for wrongfully convicted individuals pursuing innocence claims. The ruling held that a guilty plea precluded persons accused of crime from challenging their conviction in the absence of newly discovered, exculpatory DNA evidence. This is a troubling fact given 97% of felony convictions and 99% of misdemeanor convictions in New York State are resolved by guilty plea. The National Registry of Exonerations documented that 24% of all exonerated people across the United States pled guilty to crimes they did not commit. According …

Extraterritorial Jurisdictions: Implementation Of Foreign Public Officials In United States, United Kingdom, And Indonesia, Jamin Ginting, Raden Febriarto Fadjar, Patrick Talbot

Indonesian Journal of International Law

Cross-border business transactions have the potential to be corrupted, especially in the form of bribery committed by actors from different countries and within different jurisdictions. The Indonesian Corruption Law has not regulated how to criminalize Indonesian public officials or certain private companies who bribe officials in other countries or vice versa. Although Indonesia has ratified the United Nation Convention Against Corruption, it has not adopted provision on bribery of foreign public officials. Among the international community, the regulations for bribery of foreign public officials have been started by the US Foreign Corrupt Practices Act of 1977. The United Kingdom also …

A Half Century Of Criminalizing Serious Mental Illness: Observations And Considerations, Arthur J. Lurigio

DePaul Journal of Health Care Law

This article describes the difficulties of working with people with serious mental illnesses (PSMIs) at every stage of the criminal justice process—from arrest to post- incarceration release from prison. The needs of PSMI for mental health and social services are complex and require different case management plans and strategies at various points in the process. Severe mental illnesses (SMIs), such as schizophrenia, major depression, and bipolar disorder, stem from abnormalities in the brain structure and neuroprocessing that cause significant distress and dysfunction. People with serious mental illnesses typically suffer from a variety of other related problems (e.g., addiction) that can …

Mental Health Courts: Is There Any Hope For Mental Illness In An Outdated Criminal Justice System?, Brock Imel

DePaul Journal of Health Care Law

Mental health awareness is an ever-growing field of study that has garnered more attention in America after the COVID-19 pandemic. As far back as colonial America, mental illness was considered taboo in society and often reprimanded with punishable crimes. This article seeks to divulge into the history of mental health and its relation to the law, as well as how the creation of mental health courts has led to a decrease in recidivism.

This article aims to provide the reader with an understanding of the evolving field of mental health courts and provide state legislatures foundational knowledge for creating and …

Prescription For Failure: Public Nuisance Claims Against The Opioid Industry, Francis A. Citera, Julia Steiner

University of Miami Law Review

Opioids have been used both medicinally and recreationally since ancient times. While their recreational functions have long since been denounced, their medicinal value remains legitimate. Yet, since the pain management revolution began in the mid-1990s, many Americans have become opioid-dependent—fueling an illicit drug market and costing many lives. The tragedy that is today’s opioid epidemic has prompted robust federal and state legislative and regulatory interventions in both the legal and illicit opioid markets—albeit with mixed success. As these initiatives have been slow to quell the opioid crisis, public nuisance claims have taken center stage. After the Big Tobacco litigation invoked …

Two Piecemeal Treatments For A System Addicted To Punishment, Myles Crandall

University of Miami Law Review

For decades, the American criminal legal system has failed to curtail illicit drug use and overdose deaths through punitive and selective enforcement. The federal government has prosecuted people and succeeded in securing many long prison sentences based on drug crimes. In the past two years, two amendments by the United States Sentencing Commission offered a measured reprieve through sentence reductions. Amendment 821 offered the possibility for sentence reductions based on recalculating the guidelines associated with certain prior offenses. Amendment 814 updated policy statements for assessing “extraordinary and compelling reasons” for a sentence reduction. These changes are not revolutionary; however, the …

Perttu V. Richards: Brief Of Law Professors As Amici Curiae In Support Of Respondent, Margo Schlanger

Appellate Briefs

Amici are professors of law who have studied, taught, and written about prisoner litigation and about rights to jury trials. They submit this brief to share their views, based on that experience, on the proper interpretation of the Prison Litigation Reform Act) in light of the important jury trial rights at stake and the practical realities of prisoner litigation.

Modern Research Issues And Problems Of The Sociology Of Crime And Future Visions: An Analytical Study, Samah Mohamed Abd Allatif

Journal of Police and Legal Sciences

The current study aimed to attempt to monitor the most important modern research issues and problems raised at the Arab and Western levels in the field of sociology of crime by identifying and classifying them and identifying the most important global theoretical and methodological trends used in studying and interpreting crime and presenting a critical vision of global studies and research in the field of sociology of crime. The study relied on the content analysis approach in its (qualitative) aspect in addressing all Arab and foreign research and studies published in local and Arab periodicals and magazines by using the …

Cyber Crimes And Mechanisms To Confront Them - The United Arab Emirates As À Model, Aicha Kada Benabdallah, Mohammed Samir Ayad

Journal of Police and Legal Sciences

The technological factor is a double-edged sword; It is a factor of strength for the state as a result of the development it achieves through exploiting modern technologies and information system, and a factor of weakness for it through exploiting modern technology against it to achieve special interests aimed at destabilizing the security and stability of states.

This research paper attempts to shed light on cybercrimes' various forms and characteristics. Today's crimes are different from yesterday's crimes. Considering that it is rapidly spreading and more complex; This is what puts countries in constant search for ways out and …

Evidence In Cybercrime, Maryam Ghanem Al Kaabi

Journal of Police and Legal Sciences

The research aims to clarify the rules of evidence in cybercrimes, and the importance of the research lies in that it deals with the rules for evidence in cybercrimes, by demonstrating the effectiveness of the application of the general rules of evidence contained in the Federal Code of Criminal Procedure on evidence in cybercrimes, and research on the adequacy of the rules of evidence in cybercrimes brought by the UAE legislator, and the research is important as it deals with a very important topic that benefits jurists and judicial officers. This study identifies the legal framework for proving cybercrime based …

Brief Of Law Professors As Amici Curiae In Support Of Respondent, Betsy Ginsberg

Amicus Briefs

Amici are professors of law who have studied, taught, and written about prisoner litigation and about rights to jury trials. They submit this brief to share their views, based on that experience, on the proper interpretation of the Prison Litigation Reform Act) in light of the important jury trial rights at stake and the practical realities of prisoner litigation.

Brief Of Law Professors As Amici Curiae In Support Of Respondent, Ira P. Robbins

Amicus Briefs & Court Filings

INTRODUCTION AND SUMMARY OF ARGUMENT: "The right to trial by jury is 'of such importance and occupies so firm a place in our history and jurisprudence that any seeming curtailment of the right' has always been and 'should be scrutinized with the utmost care." SEC v. Jarkesy, 144 S. Ct. 2117, 2128 (2024) (quoting Dimick v. Schiedt, 293 U.S. 474, 486 (1935)). The Seventh Amendment reflects and enshrines that tradition, providing that in "[s]uits at common law ... the right of trial by jury shall be preserved." U.S. Const. amend. VII (quoting Dimick; see also City of …

Decriminalizing Disease: A Health Justice Approach To Infectious Diseases And Criminal Law, Sean E. Bland

Arkansas Law Review

Infectious diseases, also called communicable diseases, are largely a public health issue and should not be criminalized. This Article seeks to re-frame the discussion around the legal framework for infectious diseases in a way that moves beyond a punishment mindset and toward a health justice mindset. The focus in this Article is on health justice rather than traditional understandings of public health, defined as the science and practice of improving the health of people and their communities. The Article makes three novel contributions. First, it applies a health justice framework to the critique of infectious disease criminalization. Second, the Article …

The Navajo Nation And The Colorado River: Their Current Statuses And The Tribe's Path Forward, Colton Gregg

American Indian Law Journal

No abstract provided.

The Effect Of Corona Pandemic On Crime Within The Family From The Researchers’ Point Of View In The Ministry Of Social Development In The Southern West Bank, Kifah Manasra, Muhammad Okkeh

Journal of the Arab American University مجلة الجامعة العربية الامريكية للبحوث

The study aimed to identify the extent to which the family crimes in the Palestinian society are spread due to the Corona pandemic. It also aimed to reveal the psychological, economic and social effects of the Corona pandemic on the crimes within the family in the Palestinian society in the Southern West Bank. The researcher s used a questionnaire to collect the data and the descriptive approach to analyze it. The purposive sample consisted of (74) researchers from the total population which was (120) researchers from the Ministry of Social Development in the governorates of Hebron and Bethlehem in the …

The Role Of Criminal Mediation In Achieving Criminal Justice For Juveniles (A Comparative Analytical Study Between Palestinian And Jordanian Legislations), Issam Al-Atrash

Journal of the Arab American University مجلة الجامعة العربية الامريكية للبحوث

This study aimed to identify the role of criminal mediation in achieving criminal justice for juveniles. To achieve this purpose, the researcher used the descriptive analytical approach, the comparative approach and the historical approach. The study also addressed the provisions of criminal mediation in the Palestinian Juvenile Law No. 4 of 2015, and the Jordanian Juvenile Law No. 32 of 2014 regarding the parties of the criminal mediation of the juveniles, the conditions of criminal mediation for the juveniles, and the consequences thereof. The study concluded that the most prominent result was that the criminal mediation of juveniles in the …

Law School News: Community Building Third-Year Gina George Takes Helm Of Student Bar Association 01-06-2025, Suzi Morales, Roger Williams University School Of Law

Life of the Law School (1993- )

No abstract provided.

Book Review, Jens Meierhenrich, The Violence Of Law: The Formation And Deformation Of Gacaca Courts In Rwanda (2024)., Mark A. Drumbl

Scholarly Articles

In The Violence of Law, Jens Meierhenrich—currently professor of international relations at the London School of Economics and Political Science—offers a detailed, erudite, and encyclopedic analysis of the gacaca system.

The Eighth Amendment’S Paper Tiger: Pain, Executions, And The Cruel And Unusual Punishment Clause, Alexandra L. Klein

Scholarly Articles

The Eighth Amendment prohibits “cruel and unusual punishments.” This prohibition applies to the way states carry out executions: states may impose capital punishment but may not do so in a way that is unconstitutionally cruel. Over a trilogy of cases that began with Baze v. Rees in 2008, the Court developed a test for analyzing whether a state’s proposed method of execution violated the Eighth Amendment. Under Baze/Glossip/Bucklew, a person challenging a state’s method of execution must show that the method of execution poses a severe risk of “superadded” pain and suffering that can be alleviated by a readily …

Criminal Caselaw Notebook 2025, Hon. Ronald Kessler

Washington State Books

This publication from King County Superior Court judge Ronald Kessler is updated semi-annually and is distributed free of charge. It includes citations to Washington state case law on a variety of criminal law topics.