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Full-Text Articles in Law
Good Guys, Bad Guys -- And Miranda, Tamar R. Birckhead
Good Guys, Bad Guys -- And Miranda, Tamar R. Birckhead
Tamar R Birckhead
This op-ed argues that we as a society must get beyond our single-minded focus on the Miranda warnings and find a better way to elicit accurate information from suspects while lowering the risk of false confessions.
Children's Oppression, Rights And Liberation, Samantha Godwin
Children's Oppression, Rights And Liberation, Samantha Godwin
Samantha Godwin
This paper advances a radical and controversial analysis of the legal status of children. I argue that the denial of equal rights and equal protection to children under the law is inconsistent with liberal and progressive beliefs about social justice and fairness. In order to do this I first situate children’s legal and social status in its historical context, examining popular assumptions about children and their rights, and expose the false necessity of children’s current legal status. I then offer a philosophical analysis for why children’s present subordination is unjust, and an explanation of how society could be sensibly and …
Juvenile Justice Reform 2.0, Tamar R. Birckhead
Juvenile Justice Reform 2.0, Tamar R. Birckhead
Tamar R Birckhead
Before the 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education, the United States Supreme Court’s exercise of judicial review did not support the notion that constitutional litigation could be an effective instrument of social reform. The Court’s principled rejection of racially segregated public education, however, gave new legitimacy to the concept of judicial review, transforming it from an obstacle into a principal means of achieving social progress. Since then, federal courts have impacted public policy in many areas – from housing, welfare, and transportation to mental health institutions, prisons, and juvenile courts. Yet, there are inherent structural challenges to effecting …
Death Is Not So Different After All: Graham V. Florida And The Court's "Kids Are Different" Eighth Amendment Jurisprudence, Mary E. Berkheiser
Death Is Not So Different After All: Graham V. Florida And The Court's "Kids Are Different" Eighth Amendment Jurisprudence, Mary E. Berkheiser
Scholarly Works
In Graham v. Florida, the United States Supreme Court declared that life sentences without the possibility of parole for non-homicides are off limits for all juveniles. Following its lead in Roper v. Simmons, the landmark decision in which the Court abolished the juvenile death penalty, the Court expanded on its Eighth Amendment juvenile jurisprudence by ruling that locking up juveniles for life based on crimes other than homicides is cruel and unusual and, therefore, prohibited by the Eighth Amendment. With that ruling, the Court erected a categorical bar to incarcerating forever those not yet adults at the time …
Juvenile Incarceration And The Pains Of Imprisonment, Jeffrey Fagan, Aaron Kupchik
Juvenile Incarceration And The Pains Of Imprisonment, Jeffrey Fagan, Aaron Kupchik
Faculty Scholarship
After legislatures criminalized a major portion of juvenile delinquency in the 1980s and 1990s, large numbers of incarcerated youth began serving their sentences in adult correctional facilities. To understand the ramifications of this practice, prior research studies compared the correctional experiences of youth in juvenile and adult facilities. Yet this research often minimized the pains of imprisonment for youth in juvenile facilities, based on the contrast to adult facilities and the toxic conditions of confinement within them. In this Article, we contribute to this literature by analyzing data from interviews with 188 young men incarcerated in juvenile and adult facilities …
The "Youngest Profession": Consent, Autonomy, And Prostituted Children, Tamar R. Birckhead
The "Youngest Profession": Consent, Autonomy, And Prostituted Children, Tamar R. Birckhead
Tamar R Birckhead
Although precise estimates do not exist, the data suggests that the number of children believed to be at risk for commercial sexual exploitation in the United States is between 200,000 and 300,000 and that the average age of entry is between eleven and fourteen, with some as young as nine. The number of prostituted children who are criminally prosecuted for these acts is equally difficult to estimate. In 2008—the most recent year for which data is available—approximately 1500 youth under age eighteen were reported to the Federal Bureau of Investigation as having been arrested within United States borders for prostitution …