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Law Enforcement and Corrections

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Discrimination in criminal justice administration

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Can Our Shameful Prisons Be Reformed?, David Cole Jan 2009

Can Our Shameful Prisons Be Reformed?, David Cole

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

No abstract provided.


Formalism, Realism, And The War On Drugs, David Cole Jan 2001

Formalism, Realism, And The War On Drugs, David Cole

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

One of the ways our legal system has avoided confronting this ugly reality is through a commitment to legal formalism. Legal formalism allows us to ignore the social determinants that my AUSA friend saw every day as he prosecuted federal drug cases. As my colleague Professor Michael Seidman has suggested, legal formalism, which has been effectively critiqued and displaced by legal realism in many other areas of law, continues to exercise considerable influence over the way we think about criminal law. This formalist approach, in my view, has strongly affected the way we approach the drug problem. One consequence is …