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Full-Text Articles in Law

Death By Virus: Why The Prison Litigation Reform Act Should Be Suspended, Divya Sriharan Jan 2020

Death By Virus: Why The Prison Litigation Reform Act Should Be Suspended, Divya Sriharan

Center for Health Law Policy and Bioethics

In order to save the lives of inmates, as well as redress some of the harms the prison system and the pandemic have caused them, Congress must pass a bill to temporarily suspend the Prison Litigation Reform Act. As of August 13, 2020, 95,398 inmates have contracted COVID-19. Prisons refuse to adapt or implement measures to save lives. Because of the Prison Litigation Reform Act, it is near impossible for inmates to take their cases to court. The Prison Litigation Reform Act’s requirements include: exhausting all internal administrative remedies before filing in court, not allowing suits based on mental or …


Political Wine In A Judicial Bottle: Justice Sotomayor's Surprising Concurrence In Aurelius, Christina D. Ponsa-Kraus Jan 2020

Political Wine In A Judicial Bottle: Justice Sotomayor's Surprising Concurrence In Aurelius, Christina D. Ponsa-Kraus

Faculty Scholarship

For seventy years, Puerto Ricans have been bitterly divided over how to decolonize the island, a U.S. territory. Many favor Puerto Rico’s admission into statehood. But many others support a different kind of relationship with the United States: they believe that in 1952, Puerto Rico entered into a “compact” with the United States that transformed it from a territory into a “commonwealth,” and they insist that “commonwealth” status made Puerto Rico a separate sovereign in permanent union with the United States. Statehood supporters argue that there is no compact, nor should there be: it is neither constitutionally possible, nor desirable …


Newsroom: Margulies Cited On Military Commissions 11-04-2016, Peter S. Margulies Nov 2016

Newsroom: Margulies Cited On Military Commissions 11-04-2016, Peter S. Margulies

Life of the Law School (1993- )

No abstract provided.


Where Liberty Lies: Civil Society And Individual Rights After 9/11, David Cole Jan 2012

Where Liberty Lies: Civil Society And Individual Rights After 9/11, David Cole

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Had someone told you, on September 11, 2001, that the United States would not be able to do whatever it wanted in response to the terrorist attacks of that day, you might well have questioned their sanity. The United States was the most powerful country in the world, and had the world’s sympathy in the immediate aftermath of the attacks. Who would stop it? Al Qaeda had few friends beyond the Taliban. As a historical matter, Congress and the courts had virtually always deferred to the executive in such times of crisis. And the American polity was unlikely to object …


Litigation Strategies For Dealing With The Indigent Defense Crisis, Eve Brensike Primus Jan 2010

Litigation Strategies For Dealing With The Indigent Defense Crisis, Eve Brensike Primus

Articles

The indigent defense delivery system in the United States is in a state of crisis. Public defenders routinely handle well over 1,000 cases a year, more than three times the number of cases that the American Bar Association says one attorney can handle effectively. As a result, many defendants sit in jail for months before even speaking to their court-appointed lawyers. And when defendants do meet their attorneys, they are often disappointed to learn that these lawyers are too overwhelmed to provide adequate representation. With public defenders or assigned counsel representing more than 80% of criminal defendants nationwide, the indigent …


A Structural Vision Of Habeas Corpus, Eve Brensike Primus Jan 2010

A Structural Vision Of Habeas Corpus, Eve Brensike Primus

Articles

As scholars have recognized elsewhere in public law, there is no hermetic separation between individual rights and structural or systemic processes of governance. To be sure, it is often helpful to focus on a question as primarily implicating one or the other of those categories. But a full appreciation of a structural rule includes an understanding of its relationship to individuals, and individual rights can both derive from and help shape larger systemic practices. The separation of powers principle, for example, is clearly a matter of structure, but much of its virtue rests on its promise to help protect the …


Mr. Madison Meets A Time Machine: The Political Science Of Federal Sentencing Reform, Frank O. Bowman Iii Oct 2005

Mr. Madison Meets A Time Machine: The Political Science Of Federal Sentencing Reform, Frank O. Bowman Iii

Faculty Publications

This is the third in a series of articles analyzing the current turmoil in federal criminal sentencing and offering suggestions for improvements in the federal sentencing system. The first article, "The Failure of the Federal Sentencing Guidelines: A Structural Analysis," 105 COLUMBIA L. REV. 1315 (2005), analyzed the structural failures of the complex federal sentencing guidelines system, particularly those arising from imbalances among the primary institutional sentencing actors - Congress, the judiciary, the Justice Department, and the U.S. Sentencing Commission. The second, "Beyond BandAids: A Proposal for Reconfiguring Federal Sentencing After Booker," 2005 U. OF CHICAGO LEGAL FORUM 149 (2005), …


Beyond Bandaids: A Proposal For Reconfiguring Federal Sentencing After Booker, Frank O. Bowman Iii Jan 2005

Beyond Bandaids: A Proposal For Reconfiguring Federal Sentencing After Booker, Frank O. Bowman Iii

Faculty Publications

This Article proposes a simplified sentencing table consisting of nine base sentencing ranges, each subdivided into three sub-ranges. The base sentencing range would be determined by combining offense facts found by a jury or admitted in a plea with the defendant's criminal history. A defendant's placement in the sub-ranges would be determined by post-conviction judicial findings of sentencing factors. No upward departures from the base sentencing range would be permissible, but defendants might be sentenced below the low end of the base sentencing range as a result of an acceptance of responsibility credit or due to a downward departure motion. …


Function Over Formalism: A Provisional Theory Of The Constitutional Law Of Crime And Punishment, Frank O. Bowman Iii Oct 2004

Function Over Formalism: A Provisional Theory Of The Constitutional Law Of Crime And Punishment, Frank O. Bowman Iii

Faculty Publications

This Article is, in effect, the second half of the author's argument against the Supreme Court's interpretation of the Sixth Amendment in Blakely v. Washington. The first half appeared in "Train Wreck? Or Can the Federal Sentencing System Be Saved? A Plea for Rapid Reversal of Blakely v. Washington," 41 American Criminal Law Review 217 (2004), and made a pragmatic, consequentialist argument against the Blakely result. This Article takes the next step of providing an alternative constitutional model of criminal sentencing to that offered by Justice Scalia in Blakely. The model emphasizes that a good constitutional model should pay particular …


From Miranda To §3501 To Dickerson To...(Symposium: Miranda After Dickerson: The Future Of Confession Law), Yale Kamisar Jan 2001

From Miranda To §3501 To Dickerson To...(Symposium: Miranda After Dickerson: The Future Of Confession Law), Yale Kamisar

Articles

Once the Court granted [certiorari in Dickerson] court-watchers knew the hour had come. At long last the Court would have to either repudiate Miranda, repudiate the prophylactic-rule cases [the cases viewing Miranda's requirements as not rights protected by the Constitution, but merely "prophylactic rules"] or offer some ingenious reconciliation of the two lines of precedent. The Supreme Court of the United States, however, doesn't "have to" do anything, as the decision in Dickerson once again reminds us.


Miranda And Some Puzzles Of 'Prophylactic' Rules, Evan H. Caminker Jan 2001

Miranda And Some Puzzles Of 'Prophylactic' Rules, Evan H. Caminker

Articles

Constitutional law scholars have long observed that many doctrinal rules established by courts to protect constitutional rights seem to "overprotect" those rights, in the sense that they give greater protection to individuals than those rights, as abstractly understood, seem to require.' Such doctrinal rules are typically called "prophylactic" rules.2 Perhaps the most famous, or infamous, example of such a rule is Miranda v. Arizona,' in which the Supreme Court implemented the Fifth Amendment's privilege against self-incrimination4 with a detailed set of directions for law enforcement officers conducting custodial interrogations, colloquially called the Miranda warnings. 5


"Can (Did) Congress 'Overrule' Miranda?, Yale Kamisar Jan 2000

"Can (Did) Congress 'Overrule' Miranda?, Yale Kamisar

Articles

I think the great majority of judges, lawyers, and law professors would have concurred in Judge Friendly's remarks when he made them thirty-three years ago. To put it another way, I believe few would have had much confidence in the constitutionality of an anti-Miranda provision, usually known as § 3501 because of its designation under Title 18 of the United States Code, a provision of Title II of the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act of 1968 (hereinafter referred to as the Crime Act or the Crime Bill), when that legislation was signed by the president on June 19, …


Congress' Arrogance, Yale Kamisar Jan 2000

Congress' Arrogance, Yale Kamisar

Articles

Does Dickerson v. U.S., reaffirming Miranda and striking down §3501 (the federal statute purporting to "overrule" Miranda), demonstrate judicial arrogance? Or does the legislative history of §3501 demonstrate the arrogance of Congress? Shortly after Dickerson v. U.S. reaffirmed Miranda and invalidated §3501, a number of Supreme Court watchers criticized the Court for its "judicial arrogance" in peremptorily rejecting Congress' test for the admissibility of confessions. The test, pointed out the critics, had been adopted by extensive hearings and debate about Miranda's adverse impact on law enforcement. The Dickerson Court did not discuss the legislative history of §3501 at all. However, …


Crime And Punishment In The Federal Courts, Roger J. Miner '56 Jan 1991

Crime And Punishment In The Federal Courts, Roger J. Miner '56

Criminal Law

No abstract provided.