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Full-Text Articles in Law
Whom Do Prosecutors Protect?, Vida Johnson
Whom Do Prosecutors Protect?, Vida Johnson
Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works
Prosecutors regard themselves as public servants who fight crime and increase community safety on behalf of their constituents. But prosecutors do not only seek to protect those they are supposed to serve. Instead, prosecutors often trade community safety, privacy, and even the constitutional rights of the general public to enlarge police power. Prosecutors routinely advocate for weaker public rights, shield police from public accountability, and fail to prosecute police when they break the law.
This Article will show how prosecutors often protect police at the expense of the public. This Article suggests a novel theory of evaluating the conduct of …
Teaching Case Theory, Binny Miller
Teaching Case Theory, Binny Miller
Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals
As the key means of framing a case, case theory is the central problem that lawyers confront in constructing a case, and many of the decisions made during the life of a case are decisions that rest on case theory. Building on the author's earlier scholarship on case theory, this essay articulates a concept of case theory called "storyline," and sets out a framework for teaching this concept. The framework for this process has three basic stages - imagining case theory, evaluating (and constructing) case theory, and choosing case theory. The material for this process is stories, which are the …
If Only I Had Known: The Challenges Of Representation, Jenny E. Carroll
If Only I Had Known: The Challenges Of Representation, Jenny E. Carroll
Faculty Scholarship
This Essay explores the challenges of that representation and the false dichotomies it creates—dichotomies that carry tremendous burdens for stakeholders—from my perspective as a public defender. It is the only perspective I know, and so it is an incomplete story. I cannot tell the whole story of representation no matter how generous the word count or deadline. I do not know it. Nor can I tell my complete story of what it was to be a representative. But this is a start. My story is written in the first person and tries at once both to be personal and to …
A Fiduciary Theory Of Prosecution, Bruce A. Green, Rebecca Roiphe
A Fiduciary Theory Of Prosecution, Bruce A. Green, Rebecca Roiphe
Articles & Chapters
Scholars have failed to arrive at a unifying theory of prosecution, one that explains the complex role that prosecutors play in our democratic system. This Article draws on a developing body of legal scholarship on fiduciary theory to offer a new paradigm that grounds prosecutors’ obligations in their historical role as fiduciaries. Casting prosecutors as fiduciaries clarifies the prosecutor’s obligation to seek justice, focuses attention on the duties of care and loyalty, and prioritizes criminal justice considerations over other public policy interests in prosecutorial charging and plea-bargaining decisions. As fiduciaries, prosecutors are required to engage in an explicit deliberative process …
Legal Beagle's Blog Archive For November 2015, Roger Williams University School Of Law
Legal Beagle's Blog Archive For November 2015, Roger Williams University School Of Law
Law Library Newsletters/Blog
No abstract provided.
Persuasive Visions: Film And Memory, Jessica Silbey
Persuasive Visions: Film And Memory, Jessica Silbey
Faculty Scholarship
This commentary takes a new look at law and film studies through the lens of film as memory. Instead of describing film as evidence and foreordaining its role in truth-seeking processes, it thinks instead of film as individual, institutional and cultural memory, placing it squarely within the realm of contestability. Paralleling film genres, the commentary imagines four forms of memory that film could embody: memorabilia (cinema verite), memoirs (autobiographical and biographical film), ceremonial memorials (narrative film monuments of a life, person or institution), and mythic memory (dramatic fictional film). Imagining film as memory resituates film’s role in law (procedural, substantive …
Improving Criminal Justice: How Can We Make The American Criminal Justice System More Just?, Joseph L. Hoffmann, Nancy J. King
Improving Criminal Justice: How Can We Make The American Criminal Justice System More Just?, Joseph L. Hoffmann, Nancy J. King
Articles by Maurer Faculty
No abstract provided.
Prosecutorial Regulation Versus Prosecutorial Accountability, Stephanos Bibas
Prosecutorial Regulation Versus Prosecutorial Accountability, Stephanos Bibas
All Faculty Scholarship
No government official has as much unreviewable power or discretion as the prosecutor. Few regulations bind or even guide prosecutorial discretion, and fewer still work well. Most commentators favor more external regulation by legislatures, judges, or bar authorities. Neither across-the-board legislation nor ex post review of individual cases has proven to be effective, however. Drawing on management literature, this article reframes the issue as a principal-agent problem and suggests corporate strategies for better serving the relevant stakeholders. Fear of voters could better check prosecutors, as could victim participation in individual cases. Scholars have largely neglected the most promising avenue of …
Rewarding Prosecutors For Performance, Stephanos Bibas
Rewarding Prosecutors For Performance, Stephanos Bibas
All Faculty Scholarship
Prosecutorial discretion is a problem that most scholars attack from the outside. Most scholars favor external institutional solutions, such as ex ante legislation or ex post judicial and bar review of individual cases of misconduct. At best these approaches can catch the very worst misconduct. They lack inside information and sustained oversight and cannot generate and enforce fine-grained rules to guide prosecutorial decisionmaking. The more promising alternative is to work within prosecutors' offices, to create incentives for good performance. This symposium essay explores a neglected toolbox that head prosecutors can use to influence line prosecutors: compensation and other rewards. Rewards …
The Politics Of Law And Film Study: An Introduction To The Symposium On Legal Outsiders In American Film, Jessica Silbey
The Politics Of Law And Film Study: An Introduction To The Symposium On Legal Outsiders In American Film, Jessica Silbey
Faculty Scholarship
The articles collected in this Symposium Issue on Legal Outsiders in American Film are examples of a turn in legal scholarship toward the analysis of culture. The cultural turn in law takes as a premise that law and culture are inextricably intertwined. Common to the project of law and culture is how legal and cultural discourse challenge or sustain communities, identities and relations of power. In this vein, each of the articles in this Symposium Issue look closely at a film or a set of films as cultural objects which, when engaged critically, help us think about law as an …
The Criminal Defense Lawyer's Reliance On Bias And Prejudice, Eva S. Nilsen
The Criminal Defense Lawyer's Reliance On Bias And Prejudice, Eva S. Nilsen
Faculty Scholarship
This Article is divided into three parts. Part I examines both the many contexts in which criminal defense lawyers and clinical students encounter bias and prejudice,12 and the commonly-raised objections to its exploitation. Part II looks at the way the tactical use of bias relates to a lawyer's duty of zealous advocacy. Here, the Article focuses on whether existing ethics rules provide guidance for a lawyer's use of bias and whether proposed rules aimed at eliminating such advocacy would improve or diminish justice. This article argues against such efforts because they impinge on legitimate lawyering, and they may distract …
Making Sense Of Criminal Law, James Boyd White
Making Sense Of Criminal Law, James Boyd White
Book Chapters
When a student comes to law school, he leaves behind a world he knows and understands and turns to another world, that of the law, which at the beginning he cannot comprehend. He is immersed in a body of literature that is at once assertive and confusing; he attends a series of classes in which his teacher seems to make the unsettling assumption that he already knows what he came to learn. One question he will naturally ask himself of all this - his experience of the law - is whether it makes any sense to him. And for a …
Note: United States V. Harvey: Are Criminal Defense Fees More Vulnerable Than Necessary?, Eric Easton
Note: United States V. Harvey: Are Criminal Defense Fees More Vulnerable Than Necessary?, Eric Easton
All Faculty Scholarship
In United States v. Harvey, the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit held that Congress may not constitutionally require convicted racketeers and drug traffickers to forfeit property used to pay legitimate defense attorney fees. To the extent that such forfeitures and related pre-conviction restraints on transfer are authorized by provisions of the Comprehensive Forfeiture Act of 1984 (the Act), those provisions violate an accused's right to counsel of choice as secured by the Sixth Amendment.This article argues that the court's holding in Harvey was more narrowly drawn than necessary, and that as a consequence criminal defense attorney …
Crime Talk, Rights Talk, And Double-Talk: Thoughts On Reading Encyclopedia Of Crime And Justice (Review Essay), Michael E. Tigar
Crime Talk, Rights Talk, And Double-Talk: Thoughts On Reading Encyclopedia Of Crime And Justice (Review Essay), Michael E. Tigar
Faculty Scholarship
No abstract provided.
Financial Screening In Criminal Cases—Impractical And Irrelevant, William H. Fortune
Financial Screening In Criminal Cases—Impractical And Irrelevant, William H. Fortune
Law Faculty Scholarly Articles
In 1970 Chief Justice Burger, commenting on the work of the ABA Advisory Committee, compared the criminal justice system to a three-legged stool, one leg the judge, the second leg the prosecution, and the third leg the defense lawyer: "We concluded very quickly that that third leg in this context was as essential as the third leg of a stool. We have not quite said it ought to be jurisdictional that you have three parts to this enterprise but we have come very, very close to it." It is time to admit the overriding social need for attorney representation and …