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Articles 31 - 60 of 250
Full-Text Articles in Law
Hassle, Jane Bambauer
Hassle, Jane Bambauer
Michigan Law Review
Before police perform a search or seizure, they typically must meet the probable cause or reasonable suspicion standard. Moreover, even if they meet the appropriate standard, their evidence must be individualized to the suspect and cannot rely on purely probabilistic inferences. Scholars and courts have long defended the distinction between individualized and purely probabilistic evidence, but existing theories of individualization fail to articulate principles that are descriptively accurate or normatively desirable. They overlook the only benefit that the individualization requirement can offer: reducing hassle. Hassle measures the chance that an innocent person will experience a search or seizure. Because some …
Due Process For Cash Civil Forfeitures In Structuring Cases, Timothy J. Ford
Due Process For Cash Civil Forfeitures In Structuring Cases, Timothy J. Ford
Michigan Law Review
On January 22, 2013, Tarik “Terry” Dehko sat down to pay the bills for his small Michigan grocery store when a federal agent entered his office. The agent told Dehko that the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) had executed a seizure warrant and taken the market’s entire bank account—more than $35,000. When Dehko asked how he could run his business without its bank account, the agent replied, “I don’t care.” The government did not charge Dehko with a crime that day. In fact, Dehko had never been charged with any crime in his life. Instead, the government waited until July 19 …
Law-Enforcement Officers And Self-Help Repossession: A State-Action Approach, Aaron Loterstein
Law-Enforcement Officers And Self-Help Repossession: A State-Action Approach, Aaron Loterstein
Michigan Law Review
Repossession of secured collateral is a fundamental component of the consumer credit industry. The Uniform Commercial Code authorizes a secured party to engage in self-help repossession of secured collateral under section 9-609, so long as the repossession takes place without "breach of the peace." While that term is undefined, several courts have adopted a counterintuitive rule, holding that a law-enforcement officer's presence during a self-help repossession - regardless of purpose or level of involvement - creates a breach of the peace. The Official Comments to the Code have seemingly endorsed this position as well. This Note rejects the primary justifications …
Criminal Justice, Local Democracy, And Constitutional Rights, Stephen J. Schulhofer
Criminal Justice, Local Democracy, And Constitutional Rights, Stephen J. Schulhofer
Michigan Law Review
Universally admired, and viewed with great affection, even love, by all who knew him, Harvard law professor Bill Stuntz died in March 2011 at the age of fifty-two, after a long, courageous battle with debilitating back pain and then insurmountable cancer. In a career that deserved to be much longer, Stuntz produced dozens of major articles on criminal law and procedure. He was a leader in carrying forward the work of scholars who had analyzed criminal justice through the lens of economic analysis, and he added his own distinctive dimension by insisting on the importance of political incentives, with their …
Waylaid By A Metaphor: A Deeply Problematic Account Of Prison Growth, John F. Pfaff
Waylaid By A Metaphor: A Deeply Problematic Account Of Prison Growth, John F. Pfaff
Michigan Law Review
The incarceration rate in the United States has undergone an unprecedented surge since the 1970s. Between 1925 and 1975, the U.S. incarceration rate hovered around 100 per 100,000. Since then, that rate soared to 504 in 2009, dropping only slightly to 500 in 2010. In absolute numbers, the U.S. prison population grew from 241,000 in 1975 to 1.55 million in 2010. Not just exceptional by historical standards, this boom is unparalleled globally: the United States has the highest incarceration rate in the world. Despite having just 5 percent of the world's population, it houses nearly 25 percent of the world's …
The Politics Of Privacy In The Criminal Justice System: Information Disclosure, The Fourth Amendment, And Statutory Law Enforcement Exemptions, Erin Murphy
Michigan Law Review
When criminal justice scholars think of privacy, they think of the Fourth Amendment. But lately its domain has become far less absolute. The United States Code currently contains over twenty separate statutes that restrict both the acquisition and release of covered information. Largely enacted in the latter part of the twentieth century, these statutes address matters vital to modern existence. They control police access to driver's licenses, educational records, health histories, telephone calls, email messages, and even video rentals. They conform to no common template, but rather enlist a variety of procedural tools to serve as safeguards - ranging from …
The Mosaic Theory Of The Fourth Amendment, Orin S. Kerr
The Mosaic Theory Of The Fourth Amendment, Orin S. Kerr
Michigan Law Review
In the Supreme Court's recent decision on GPS surveillance, United States v. Jones, five justices authored or joined concurring opinions that applied a new approach to interpreting Fourth Amendment protection. Before Jones, Fourth Amendment decisions had always evaluated each step of an investigation individually. Jones introduced what we might call a "mosaic theory" of the Fourth Amendment, by which courts evaluate a collective sequence of government activity as an aggregated whole to consider whether the sequence amounts to a search. This Article considers the implications of a mosaic theory of the Fourth Amendment. It explores the choices and puzzles that …
Dubious Delegation: Article Iii Limits On Mental Health Treatment Decisions, Adam Teitelbaum
Dubious Delegation: Article Iii Limits On Mental Health Treatment Decisions, Adam Teitelbaum
Michigan Law Review
A common condition of supervised release requires a defendant, post-incarceration, to participate in a mental health treatment program. Federal district courts often order probation officers to make certain decisions ancillary to these programs. However Article III delegation doctrine places limits on such actions. This Note addresses the constitutionality of delegating the "treatment program" decision, in which a probation officer decides which type of treatment the defendant must undergo; the choice is often between inpatient treatment and other less restrictive alternatives. The resolution of this issue ultimately depends on whether this decision constitutes a "judicial act." Finding support in lower court …
Empty Promises: Miranda Warnings In Noncustodial Interrogations, Aurora Maoz
Empty Promises: Miranda Warnings In Noncustodial Interrogations, Aurora Maoz
Michigan Law Review
You have the right to remain silent; anything you say can be used against you in a court of law. You have the right to an attorney; if you cannot afford an attorney, one will be provided to you at the state's expense. In 2010, the Supreme Court declined an opportunity to resolve the question of what courts should do when officers administer Miranda warnings in a situation where a suspect is not already in custody-in other words, when officers are not constitutionally required to give or honor these warnings. While most courts have found a superfluous warning to be …
A Tale Of Two Sciences, Erin Murphy
A Tale Of Two Sciences, Erin Murphy
Michigan Law Review
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times . .. . So might one describe the contrasting portraits of DNA's ascension in the criminal justice system that are drawn in David Kaye's The Double Helix and the Law of Evidence and Sheldon Krimsky and Tania Simoncelli's Genetic Justice: DNA Data Banks, Criminal Investigations, and Civil Liberties. For Kaye, the double helix stands as the icon of twenty-first-century achievement, a science menaced primarily by the dolts (lawyers, judges, and the occasional analyst) who misuse it. For Krimsky and Simoncelli, DNA is a seductive forensic tool that is …
The Problem Of Policing, Rachel A. Harmon
The Problem Of Policing, Rachel A. Harmon
Michigan Law Review
The legal problem of policing is how to regulate police authority to permit officers to enforce law while also protecting individual liberty and minimizing the social costs the police impose. Courts and commentators have largely treated the problem of policing as limited to preventing violations of constitutional rights and its solution as the judicial definition and enforcement of those rights. But constitutional law and courts alone are necessarily inadequate to regulate the police. Constitutional law does not protect important interests below the constitutional threshold or effectively address the distributional impacts of law enforcement activities. Nor can the judiciary adequately assess …
Prosecuting The Informant Culture, Andrew E. Taslitz
Prosecuting The Informant Culture, Andrew E. Taslitz
Michigan Law Review
Alexandra Natapoff, in her outstanding new book, Snitching: Criminal Informants and the Erosion of American Justice, makes a compelling case for reform of the system by which we regulate police use of criminal informants. Indeed, as other writers have discussed, law enforcement's overreliance on such informants has led to a "snitching culture" in which informant snitching replaces other forms of law enforcement investigation (pp. 12, 31, 88-89). Yet snitches, especially jailhouse snitches, are notoriously unreliable.
Don't Answer The Door: Montejo V. Louisiana Relaxes Police Restrictions For Questioning Non-Custodial Defendants, Emily Bretz
Don't Answer The Door: Montejo V. Louisiana Relaxes Police Restrictions For Questioning Non-Custodial Defendants, Emily Bretz
Michigan Law Review
In 2009, the Supreme Court held in Montejo v. Louisiana that a defendant may validly waive his Sixth Amendment right to counsel during police interrogation, even if police initiate interrogation after the defendant's invocation of the right at the first formal proceeding. This Note asserts that Montejo significantly altered the Sixth Amendment protections available to represented defendants. By increasing defendants' exposure to law enforcement, the decision allows police to try to elicit incriminating statements and waivers of the right to counsel after the defendant has expressed a desire for counsel. In order to protect the defendant's constitutional guarantee of a …
Can Criminal Law Be Controlled?, Darryl K. Brown
Can Criminal Law Be Controlled?, Darryl K. Brown
Michigan Law Review
It is a bizarre state of affairs that criminal law has no coherent description or explanation. We have standard tropes to define criminal law, but they obscure as much as they clarify and are honored in the breach as much as the rule. Crimes, for instance, are defined by wrongdoing and culpability; to be guilty, one must do a wrongful act in a blameworthy manner, that is, as a responsible agent without excuse or justification. And crimes define public wrongs, which are distinct from private wrongs. Further, we criminalize only harmful conduct, or risk-creating conduct, or immoral conduct, or conduct …
Why Care About Mass Incarceration?, James Forman Jr.
Why Care About Mass Incarceration?, James Forman Jr.
Michigan Law Review
Advocates for less punitive crime policies in the United States face long and dispiriting odds. The difficulty of the challenge becomes clear if we compare our criminal justice outcomes with those of other nations: We lock up more people, and for longer, than anyone else in the world. We continue to use the death penalty long after Europe abandoned it, we are the only country in the world to lock up juveniles for life, and we have prisoners serving fifty-year sentences for stealing videotapes from Kmart. Our courts offer little relief: the German Constitutional Court prohibits a sentence of life …
Relative Doubt: Familial Searches Of Dna Databases, Erin Murphy
Relative Doubt: Familial Searches Of Dna Databases, Erin Murphy
Michigan Law Review
The continued growth of forensic DNA databases has brought about greater interest in a search method known as "familial" or "kinship" matching. Whereas a typical database search seeks the source of a crime-scene stain by making an exact match between a known person and the DNA sample, familial searching instead looks for partial matches in order to find potential relatives of the source. The use of a familial DNA search to identify the alleged "Grim Sleeper" killer in California brought national attention to the method, which has many proponents. In contrast, this Article argues against the practice of familial searching …
Evaluating Punishment In Purgatory: The Need To Separate Pretrial Detainees' Conditions-Of-Confinement Claims From Inadequate Eighth Amendment Analysis, David C. Gorlin
Evaluating Punishment In Purgatory: The Need To Separate Pretrial Detainees' Conditions-Of-Confinement Claims From Inadequate Eighth Amendment Analysis, David C. Gorlin
Michigan Law Review
The Due Process Clause prohibits all "punishment" of pretrial detainees- individuals that are held by the Government, but not adjudged guilty of any crime. The Eighth Amendment only prohibits the infliction of "cruel and unusual punishments" upon convicted individuals. Despite the Supreme Court's insistence that the Due Process Clause, and not the Eighth Amendment, protects pretrial detainees from deplorable and harmful conditions of confinement, most federal circuits now assess pretrial detainees' claims under Eighth Amendment standards. Under the Eighth Amendment framework, pretrial detainees must establish that conditions subjected them to a substantial risk of serious harm, and that jailers were …
Law Enforcement In Subordinated Communities: Innovation And Response, Richard Delgado
Law Enforcement In Subordinated Communities: Innovation And Response, Richard Delgado
Michigan Law Review
Policing styles and policy reform today exhibit a ferment that we have not seen since the turbulent sixties. The reasons propelling reform include some of the same forces that propelled it then - minority communities agitating for a greater voice, demands for law and order - but also some that are new, such as the greater premium that society places on security in a post-9/11 world. Three recent books discuss this new emphasis on styles of policing. Each centers on policing in minority communities. Steve Herbert's Citizens, Cops, and Power: Recognizing the Limits of Community examines the innovation known as …
Proximate Cause In Constitutional Torts: Holding Interrogators Liable For Fifth Amendment Violations At Trial, Joel Flaxman
Proximate Cause In Constitutional Torts: Holding Interrogators Liable For Fifth Amendment Violations At Trial, Joel Flaxman
Michigan Law Review
This Note argues for the approach taken by the Sixth Circuit in McKinley: a proper understanding of the Fifth Amendment requires holding that an officer who coerces a confession that is used at trial to convict a defendant in violation of the right against self-incrimination should face liability for the harm of conviction and imprisonment. Part I examines how the Supreme Court and the circuits have applied the concept of common law proximate causation to constitutional torts and argues that lower courts are wrong to blindly adopt common law rules without reference to the constitutional rights at stake. It …
One Stop, No Stop, Two Stop, Terry Stop: Reasonable Suspicion And Pseudoephedrine Purchases By Suspected Methamphetamine Manufacturers, Andrew C. Goetz
One Stop, No Stop, Two Stop, Terry Stop: Reasonable Suspicion And Pseudoephedrine Purchases By Suspected Methamphetamine Manufacturers, Andrew C. Goetz
Michigan Law Review
This Note attempts to inject some clarity into courts' reasonable suspicion calculus for cold medicine purchases. It argues that the key factor in analyzing such purchases is whether the purchaser or purchasers appear to be circumventing pseudoephedrine purchasing restrictions in order to obtain inordinately large quantities of pseudoephedrine. Part I provides a general background on the domestic manufacture of methamphetamine in small, clandestine laboratories. Part II then examines the interplay between outward innocence and reasonable suspicion under the Supreme Court's Fourth Amendment jurisprudence. Finally, Part III establishes a framework for identifying purchasing strategies that methamphetamine manufacturers commonly use to circumvent …
Keeping The State Out: The Separation Of Law And State In Classical Islamic Law, Lubna A. Alam
Keeping The State Out: The Separation Of Law And State In Classical Islamic Law, Lubna A. Alam
Michigan Law Review
The implementation and enforcement of Islamic law, especially Islamic criminal law, by modem-day Muslim nation-states is fraught with controversy and challenges. In Pakistan, the documented problems and failures of the country's attempt to codify Islamic law on extramarital sexual relations have led to efforts to remove rape cases from Islamic law courts to civil law courts. In striking contrast to Pakistan's experience, the Republic of the Maldives recently commissioned a draft of a penal law and sentencing guidelines based on Islamic law that abides by international norms. The incorporation of Islamic law into the legal systems of various countries around …
Secondhand Smoke Signals From Prison, Scott C. Wilcox
Secondhand Smoke Signals From Prison, Scott C. Wilcox
Michigan Law Review
This Note argues that courts should acknowledge current societal and medical perspectives on second hand smoke (SHS) and afford real protection to prisoners against SHS through injunctive relief. Part I examines evidence that conclusively demonstrates the serious risk of harm posed by SHS to the health of inmates. It reports that inmates' long-term exposure to SHS increases their risk of contracting lung cancer, heart disease, and other potentially life threatening conditions. Part II argues that, as required by the Helling standard, contemporary society does not tolerate involuntary, long-term exposure to SHS and that prison officials exhibit deliberate indifference by allowing …
Crime, Criminals, And Competitive Crime Control, Wayne A. Logan
Crime, Criminals, And Competitive Crime Control, Wayne A. Logan
Michigan Law Review
Given the negative consequences of crime, it should come as no surprise that states will endeavor to make their dominions less hospitable to potential criminal actors. This predisposition, when played out on a national stage, would appear ripe for a dynamic in which states will seek to "out-tough" one another, leading to a spiral of detrimental competitiveness. Doran Teichman, in an article recently appearing in these pages, advances just such a view. Teichman posits that the decentralized structure of America's federalist system provides states with "an incentive to increasingly harshen" their crime control efforts, with the net result being excessive …
The Political Market For Criminal Justice, Rachel E. Barkow
The Political Market For Criminal Justice, Rachel E. Barkow
Michigan Law Review
In 2004, the number of individuals incarcerated in the United States exceeded the two million mark. The current incarceration rate in the United States is 726 per 100,000 residents, the highest incarceration rate in the Western world and a dramatic increase from just three decades ago. Not only are more people serving time, but sentences have markedly lengthened. What should we make of these trends? The answer has been easy for most legal scholars: to them, the incarceration rate in the United States is too high, and reforms are necessary to lower sentences. But many political leaders and voters reach …
Decentralizing Crime Control: The Political Economy Perspective, Doron Teichman
Decentralizing Crime Control: The Political Economy Perspective, Doron Teichman
Michigan Law Review
In an article recently published on the pages of this Law Review, The Market for Criminal Justice: Federalism, Crime Control, and Jurisdictional Competition ("The Market"), I put forward a theory of crime control in a decentralized government. Specifically, I made three distinct claims. First, criminal justice policies affect the geographic decision of criminals as to where to commit their crimes. Other things being equal, criminal activity will tend to shift to areas in which the expected sanction is lower. Second, local jurisdictions attempting to lower their crime rates will react to policies adopted by neighboring jurisdictions and try …
Facing Evil, Joseph E. Kennedy
Facing Evil, Joseph E. Kennedy
Michigan Law Review
It is no earthshaking news that the American public has become fascinated- some would say obsessed-with crime over the last few decades. Moreover, this fascination has translated into a potent political force that has remade the world of criminal justice. Up through the middle of the 1960s crime was not something about which politicians had much to say. What was there to say? "Crime is bad." "We do what we can about crime." "Crime will always be with us at one level or another." Only a hermit could have missed the transformation of crime over the last couple of decades …
Should Coercive Interrogation Be Legal?, Eric A. Posner, Adrian Vermeule
Should Coercive Interrogation Be Legal?, Eric A. Posner, Adrian Vermeule
Michigan Law Review
Most academics who have written on coercive interrogation believe that its use is justified in extreme or catastrophic scenarios but that nonetheless it should be illegal. They argue that formal illegality will not prevent justified use of coercive interrogation because government agents will be willing to risk criminal liability and are likely to be pardoned, acquitted, or otherwise forgiven if their behavior is morally justified. This outlaw and forgive approach to coercive interrogation is supposed to prevent coercive interrogation from being applied in inappropriate settings, to be symbolically important, and nonetheless to permit justified coercive interrogation. We argue that the …
Declining To State A Name In Consideration Of The Fifth Amendment's Self-Incrimination Clause And Law Enforcement Databases After Hiibel, Joseph R. Ashby
Declining To State A Name In Consideration Of The Fifth Amendment's Self-Incrimination Clause And Law Enforcement Databases After Hiibel, Joseph R. Ashby
Michigan Law Review
In response to a report of an argument on a public sidewalk, a police officer approaches two people standing in the vicinity of the reported dispute. The officer requests that each person provide her name so the officer can run the names through databases to which the police department subscribes. After searching each name through various databases, the officer might discover that one of the individuals made several purchases of cold medicine containing pseudoephedrine and that the other just received a license from the State to procure certain hazardous chemicals. These two people might be in the early stages of …
Deterrence Versus Brutalization: Capital Punishment's Differing Impacts Among States, Joanna M. Shepherd
Deterrence Versus Brutalization: Capital Punishment's Differing Impacts Among States, Joanna M. Shepherd
Michigan Law Review
Policymakers' false beliefs about capital punishment's universal deterrent effect may have caused many people to die needlessly. If deterrence is capital punishment's purpose then, in the majority of states where executions do not deter crime, executions kill convicts uselessly. Moreover, in the many states where the brutalization effect outweighs the deterrent effect, executions not only kill convicts needlessly but also induce the additional murders of many innocent people. After Part II discusses capital punishment's recent history in the United States, Part III reviews the conflict in recent studies on capital punishment and deterrence. Part IV explores differences in states' applications …
The Market For Criminal Justice: Federalism, Crime Control, And Jurisdictional Competition, Doron Teichman
The Market For Criminal Justice: Federalism, Crime Control, And Jurisdictional Competition, Doron Teichman
Michigan Law Review
Part I introduces the concepts of jurisdictional competition and crime displacement and argues that, as a positive matter, a decentralized criminal justice system may create a competitive process among the different units composing it, in which each such unit attempts to divert crime to neighboring communities. Part II then turns to evaluate the normative aspects of jurisdictional competition in the area of criminal justice. In this context I will show that competition can have both advantages and disadvantages. On one hand, the forces of competition might drive jurisdictions to fight crime efficiently, since any jurisdiction that functions inefficiently will suffer …