Law Commons^™

U.S. Judiciary Syllabus: True True Crime Zines, Jason Leggett

Open Educational Resources

An experimental, open education syllabus for a pilot zero textbook cost course, U.S. Judiciary using zines and true crime.

How Victim Impact Statements Promote Justice: Evidence From The Content Of Statements Delivered In Larry Nassar's Sentencing, Paul Cassell, Edna Erez

Utah Law Faculty Scholarship

Whether crime victims should present victim impact statements (VISs) at sentencing remains a subject of controversy in the criminal justice literature. But relatively little is known about the content of VISs and how victims use them. This article provides a content analysis of the 168 VISs presented in a Michigan court sentencing of Larry Nassar, who pleaded guilty to decades of sexual abuse of young athletes while he was treating them for various sports injuries. Nassar committed similar crimes against each of his victims, allowing a robust research approach to answer questions about the content, motivations for, and benefits of …

Women As Judges At International Criminal Tribunals, Milena Sterio

Law Faculty Articles and Essays

This Article analyzes the presence of female judges within international criminal tribunals, starting with the Yugoslavia and Rwanda Tribunals in the 1990s. In particular, the Article discusses specific numbers of female judges at the Yugoslavia and Rwanda Tribunals, the Special Court for Sierra Leone, the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia, the Special Tribunal for Lebanon, the newly created Kosovo Specialist Chambers, and the International Criminal Court.

While the presence of women as prosecutors, defense attorneys, victim representatives, and other professionals at these tribunals is equally important, this Article focuses on the number of female judges, as such data …

The Handmaid Of Justice: Power And Procedure In The Inferior Courts, Kellen R. Funk

Faculty Scholarship

Summing up the history of procedure from the codification movement of the nineteenth century to the Federal Rules practice of today, Robert Bone observed, “Each generation of procedure reformers, it seems, diagnoses the malady and proposes a cure only to have the succeeding generation’s diagnosis treat the cure as a cause of the malady.” While playfully highlighting the contingencies and unexpected consequences of procedural history, Professor Bone was not advocating a cyclical view of history, in which “cost and delay” continually recur as the bugaboos of procedural reformers who can’t quite figure out how to solve the problem. Instead, Bone …

Pretrial Detention And Bail, Megan Stevenson, Sandra G. Mayson

All Faculty Scholarship

Our current pretrial system imposes high costs on both the people who are detained pretrial and the taxpayers who foot the bill. These costs have prompted a surge of bail reform around the country. Reformers seek to reduce pretrial detention rates, as well as racial and socioeconomic disparities in the pretrial system, while simultaneously improving appearance rates and reducing pretrial crime. The current state of pretrial practice suggests that there is ample room for improvement. Bail hearings are often cursory, with no defense counsel present. Money-bail practices lead to high rates of detention even among misdemeanor defendants and those who …

Understanding The Determinants Of U.S. District Court Judges' Decisions On Patriot Act Cases, Daniel Mccarthy

Honors Projects

Prior research on federal court judges suggests that their judgments are not made solely on legal principles, but on the basis of political ideology and “strategic anticipation” of the actions of reviewing courts. This study seeks to empirically test the role these factors play in Federal District Court decisions involving the U.S.A. Patriot Act of 2001. The results indicate that both political policy preference and strategic anticipation have an effect on the judicial decisions of U.S. District Court judges. Due to statistical complications, however, it was not possible to determine their relative effects on the outcomes of Patriot Act cases.

Comments On [Israeli] Proposal For Structuring Judicial Discretion In Sentencing, Paul H. Robinson

All Faculty Scholarship

In this essay, Professor Robinson supports the current Israeli proposal for structuring judicial discretion in sentencing, in particular its reliance upon desert as the guiding principle for the distribution of punishment, its reliance upon benchmarks, or “starting-points,” to be adjusted in individual cases by reference to articulated mitigating and aggravating circumstances, and the proposal’s suggestion to use of an expert committee to draft the original guidelines.

Does Unconscious Racial Bias Affect Trial Judges?, Jeffrey J. Rachlinski, Sheri Johnson, Andrew J. Wistrich, Chris Guthrie

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

Race matters in the criminal justice system. Black defendants appear to fare worse than similarly situated white defendants. Why? Implicit bias is one possibility. Researchers, using a well-known measure called the implicit association test, have found that most white Americans harbor implicit bias toward Black Americans. Do judges, who are professionally committed to egalitarian norms, hold these same implicit biases? And if so, do these biases account for racially disparate outcomes in the criminal justice system? We explored these two research questions in a multi-part study involving a large sample of trial judges drawn from around the country. Our results …

The Politics Of Crime And The Threat To Judicial Independence, Jeannine Bell

Articles by Maurer Faculty

No abstract provided.

Free-Standing Due Process And Criminal Procedure: The Supreme Court's Search For Interpretive Guidelines, Jerold H. Israel

Articles

When I was first introduced to the constitutional regulation of criminal procedure in the mid-1950s, a single issue dominated the field: To what extent did the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment impose upon states the same constitutional restraints that the Fourth, Fifth, Sixth and Eighth Amendments imposed upon the federal government? While those Bill of Rights provisions, as even then construed, imposed a broad range of constitutional restraints upon the federal criminal justice system, the federal system was (and still is) minuscule as compared to the combined systems of the fifty states. With the Bill of Rights provisions …

Strong Criticism Of The American System Of Trial By Jury, Yale Kamisar

Articles

I grieve for my country to say that the administration of the criminal law in all the states in the Union (there may be one or two exceptions) is a disgrace to our civilization.

Book Review, Mark J. Loewenstein

Publications

No abstract provided.

Sentencing, The Dilemma Of Discretion, Jerold H. Israel

Book Chapters

[The following excerpts are taken from Professor Jerold Israel's revision of the late Hazel B. Kerper's Introduction to the Criminal Justice System ( West Publishing Co. 1979), with permission of the author and publisher. Footnotes have been omitted.] As we have seen, judges usually have substantial discretion in sentencing. Most states give them considerable leeway in choosing between probation and imprisonment, in setting the term of imprisonment under either an indeterminate or determinate sentencing structure, in deciding whether a young offender will be given the special benefits of a youthful offender statute, and in determining whether to impose consecutive or …

Has The Court Left The Attorney General Behind? The Bazelon-Katzenbach Letters On Poverty, Equality, And The Administration Of Criminal Justice, Yale Kamisar

Articles

Distribution of the first preliminary draft of the proposed American Law Institute Model Code of Pre-Arraignment Procedure last June touched off a brisk exchange of letters between Chief Judge David Bazelon of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, who maintained that the proposed code left a good deal to be desired, and Attorney General Nicholas deB. Katzenbach, who, although he did not explicitly treat any provision of the preliminary draft, sharply challenged the conception of equality underlying Bazelon's criticism of it. By now, both the code, and the Bazelon-Katzenbach correspondence which it evoked, are …