Law Commons^™

Analysis Of The Efficacy Of Criminal Court Mediation As A Tool Of Restorative Justice, Teresa Hoerres

Capstone Collection

This capstone research paper aims to capture the personal narratives of how participants of criminal court mediation in Brooklyn, New York actual experience the program. The program, which is facilitated by New York Peace Institute, is a cornerstone of the organization’s restorative justice program. Restorative justice has been gaining traction over the last few decades, and its application to criminal matters as an alternative dispute resolution (ADR) service, is unprecedented.

The research was conducted using a mixed methodology approach, relying on the researcher’s ethnographic observations of the criminal court mediation program from August 2013 through March 2014, as well as …

Social Hierarchies And The Formation Of Customary Property Law In Pre-Industrial China And England, Taisu Zhang

Faculty Scholarship

Comparative lawyers and economists have often assumed that traditional Chinese laws and customs reinforced the economic and political dominance of elites and, therefore, were unusually “despotic” towards the poor. Such assumptions are highly questionable: Quite the opposite, one of the most striking characteristics of Qing and Republican property institutions is that they often gave significantly greater economic protection to the poorer segments of society than comparable institutions in early modern England. In particular, Chinese property customs afforded much stronger powers of redemption to landowners who had pawned their land. In both societies, land-pawning occurred far more frequently among poorer households …

Shadow Dwellers: The Underregulated World Of State And Local Dna Databases, Stephen Mercer, Jessica D. Gabel

Faculty Publications By Year

No abstract provided.

Abolishing Jailhouse Snitch Testimony, Russell D. Covey

Faculty Publications By Year

Jailhouse snitch testimony is inherently unreliable. Snitches have powerful incentives to invent incriminating lies about other inmates in often well-founded hopes that such testimony will provide them with material benefits, including in many cases substantial reduction of criminal charges against them or of the time they are required to serve. At the same time, false snitch testimony is difficult, if not altogether impossible, for criminal defendants to impeach. Because such testimony usually pits the word of two individuals against one another, both of whose credibility is suspect, jurors have little ability to accurately or effectively assess or weigh the evidence. …

Kidnapping Incorporated: The Unregulated Youth-Transportation Industry And The Potential For Abuse, Ira Robbins

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

Strangers come into a child's room in the middle of the night, drag her kicking and screaming into a van, apply handcuffs, and drive her to a behavior modification facility at a distant location. What sounds like a clear-cut case of kidnapping is complicated by the fact that the child's parents not only authorized this intervention, but also paid for it. This scarcely publicized practice-known as the youth-transportation industry-operates on the fringes of existing law. The law generally presumes that parents have almost unlimited authority over their children, but the youth-transportation industry has never been closely examined regarding exactly what …

Disputed Paraphilia Diagnoses And Legal Decision Making: A Case Law Survey Of Paraphilia Nos, Nonconsent, Christopher M. King, Lindsey E. Wylie, Eve M. Brank, Kirk Heilbrun

Department of Psychology: Faculty Publications

Paraphilia diagnoses applied in forensic settings are an ongoing subject of debate among psycholegal professionals and scholars. Disagreements pertain to both means-related issues having to do with issues of diagnostic reliability and validity, and ends-related issues regarding the consequences inherent to the legal contexts in which the diagnoses arise. To provide a fresh outlook on some of the issues, the present study entailed a systematic survey of U.S. case law to investigate the history, extent, and nature of forensic uses of a controversial paraphilia diagnosis, paraphilia not otherwise specified, nonconsent. Descriptive analyses revealed that use of the diagnosis, which occurred …

“White Collar” Crimes, Samuel W. Buell

Faculty Scholarship

In addition to serving as a précis of the subject of ‘white collar’ crime, this chapter does three things. First, it deals with white collar crime’s longstanding definitional problem, rejecting several standard approaches and arguing that the category is most usefully understood according to the conceptual legal problem these offenses generate. White collar crimes, much more than other offenses, are committed in social settings in which undesirable behaviors are embedded within socially welcome conduct. Thus they are difficult to set apart and extract through clearly specified ex ante rules of law. Second, the chapter illustrates this definitional claim, and discusses …

Education And Training Of Specialist Sexual Offence Investigators In Victoria, Australia From 2009 To 2011, Jennifer Anne Turnley

Theses: Doctorates and Masters

The topic of training specifically designed for investigators of sexual offences has received little attention from academic researchers to date. Previous studies have not described training provided to police investigators of sexual offences in Australia. This thesis developed Turnley’s Framework for the Examination of Police Training in Sexual Assault Investigation, to examine and describe a Sexual Offences and Child Abuse Investigative Teams (SOCIT) Course, provided to Victorian Police from 2009 to 2011. This entailed triangulation of findings from non-participant observations of one SOCIT Course, with quantitative and qualitative data sourced though an in-depth interview with course trainers; feedback sheets voluntarily …

Commercial Sexual Exploitation Of Teens, Tamieka Meadows, Alexis Kennedy

McNair Poster Presentations

This research explores whether commercially sexually exploited children (CSEC) abuse drugs or face greater histories of abuse than their delinquent peers. This research will evaluate whether girls who are CSEC victims experience more abuse of drugs or experience more physical, emotional, or sexual abuse. The study also explores whether CSEC victims witnessed more abuse than non-CSEC victims. A survey of needs and issues facing delinquent girls was given to 130 girls between the ages of 13 to 18. Questions asked about their drug use, abuse history, and whether they witnessed abuse. This research found that many girls who are CSEC …

Rationalizing Voter Suppression: How North Carolina Justified The Nation's Strictest Voting Law, Megan C. Raymond

Scripps Senior Theses

In recent years, there has been a dramatic increase in instances of Republican-dominated state legislatures proposing changes to election law that some see as protecting electoral integrity and others understand as intended to suppress votes of traditionally Democratic constituencies. This thesis is a detailed collection of the rationales used to justify these changes, as examined through a case study of North Carolina’s enactment of the omnibus Voter Information Verification Act of 2013 (VIVA). By also including the arguments proffered during the legislative process by opponents of the law, and after evaluating the merits of the arguments on both sides, I …

La Tirania De La Invisibilidad: La Necesidad De Reconocer Y Analizar La Violencia De Genero En La Argentina, Laura Mallison

Scripps Senior Theses

This thesis examines gender violence in Argentina in the context of the historic continuum of gender inequality, with a more in-depth analysis of gender violence during the 1976-1983 dictatorship. I argue that gender violence is perpetuated and normalized by its lack of recognition as a political issue with ramifications extending to daily life. I use the construction of a collective memory of the Dictatorship as a framework for making the intricacies of gender violence more visible and provide a detailed analysis of two laws against gender violence to demonstrate its systematic nature. Ultimately, laws are not sufficient to address such …

Developing A Conceptual Framework For Modeling Deviant Cyber Flash Mob: A Socio-Computational Approach Leveraging Hypergraph Constructs, Samer Al-Khateeb, Nitin Agarwal

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

In a Flash Mob (FM) a group of people get together in the physical world perform an unpredicted act and disperse quickly. Cyber Flash Mob (CFM) is the cyber manifestation of flash mob coordinated primarily using social media. Deviant Cyber Flash Mob (or, DCFM) is a special case of CFM, which is categorized as the new face of transnational crime organizations (TCOs). The DCFM phenomenon can be considered as a form of a cyber-collective action that is defined as an action aiming to improve group’s conditions (such as, status or power). In this paper, we conduct a conceptual analysis of …

When Speech Isn't Free: Legal Barriers And Consequences Of Reporting Sexual Violence, Kevin M. Fleming

Departmental Honors Projects

Incidents of sexual violence continue to be a serious problem for society. Likewise, acts of sexual violence impose severe consequences for survivors. The consequences initially begin at the onset of the survivor’s journey to psychological recovery following the traumatic sexual assault. The consequences take on a unique set of characteristics when the survivor attempts to use the justice system to confront the perpetrator who committed the offense. These characteristics can transform an adversarial process into an isolated battle for the survivor. In the worst cases, the justice system empowers individuals who wish to silence survivors with free speech restrictions instead …

J. Skelly Wright And The Limits Of Liberalism, Louis Michael Seidman

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

This essay, written for a symposium on the life and work of United States Court of Appeals Judge J. Skelly Wright, makes four points. First, Judge Wright was an important participant in the liberal legal tradition. The tradition sought to liberate law from arid formalism and to use it as a technique for progressive reform. However, legal liberals also believed that there were limits on what judges could do–-limits rooted in both its liberalism and its legalism. Second, Wright occupied a position on the left fringe of the liberal legal tradition, and he therefore devoted much of his career to …

Friends Of Justice: Does Social Media Impact The Public Perception Of The Justice System?, Nicola A. Boothe-Perry

Journal Publications

Lawyers have long been recognized as being necessary in the effective functioning of an ordered society in roles as both officers of the court and, more broadly, as officers of the system of justice. In 2014, the ABA Task Force on the Future of Legal Education report noted that "[s]ociety has a deep interest in the competence of lawyers, in their availability to serve society and clients, in the broad public role they can play, and in their professional values." Values such as those noted in the Model Rules of Professional Conduct (advisor, counselor, and advocate) are instrumental in the …

The First Attempt At Federalizing Tort Law And Why It Failed.", Ian J. Drake

Department of Political Science and Law Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

In the 1970s, the US Congress meticulously considered the possibility of creating a federal law of torts. The federal effort began almost a decade after many state supreme courts had expanded manufacturer liability for defective products. The state-level expansion caused a reaction among state and federal legislatures. The initial federal presence took the form of investigatory efforts, but those were soon followed by legislative proposals. The federal legislative proposals occurred simultaneously with some states' efforts to enact their own products liability laws. Although the states' tort laws might present variations on a theme, the possibilities for federal intervention in the …

Book Review: American Jericho: A Book Review Of The Hanging Judge By Michael A. Ponsor, Giovanna Shay

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Watching The Watchers, Neil M. Richards

Scholarship@WashULaw

In this essay from Wired Magazine (UK)'s special edition, The Wired World in 2014, Prof. Richards argues that sousveillance–watching the watchers–is an important development that will be on the rise in 2014.

Systemic Barriers To Effective Assistance Of Counsel In Plea Bargaining, Peter A. Joy, Rodney J. Uphoff

Scholarship@WashULaw

In a trio of recent cases, Padilla v. Kentucky, Missouri v. Frye, and Lafler v. Cooper, the U.S. Supreme Court has focused its attention on defense counsel's pivotal role during the plea bargaining process . At the same time that the Court has signaled its willingness to consider ineffective assistance of counsel claims at the plea stage, prosecutors are increasingly requiring defendants to sign waivers that include waiving all constitutional and procedural errors, even unknown ineffective assistance of counsel claims such as those that proved successful in Padilla and Frye. Had Jose Padilla and Galin Frye been forced to sign …

Intellectual Freedom And Privacy, Neil M. Richards, Joanna Cornwell

Scholarship@WashULaw

This essay offers an account of the complex ways intellectual freedom and privacy are interrelated. We pay particular attention to both the constitutional dimensions of these important values, as well as the important roles that social and professional norms play in their protection in practice. Our examination of these issues is divided into three parts. Part I lays out the law and legal theory governing privacy as it relates to intellectual freedom. Part II examines a special context in which law and professional norms operate together to protect intellectual freedom through privacy–the library. Finally, Part III discusses how government actions …

Inmates For Rent, Sovereignty For Sale: The Global Prison Market, Benjamin Levin

Scholarship@WashULaw

In 2009, Belgium and the Netherlands announced a deal to send approximately 500 Belgian inmates to Dutch prisons, in exchange for an annual payment of £26 million. The arrangement was unprecedented, but justified as beneficial to both nations: Belgium had too many prisoners and not enough prisons, whereas the Netherlands had too many prisons and not enough prisoners. The deal has yet to be replicated, nor has it triggered sustained criticism or received significant scholarly treatment. This Article aims to fill this void by examining the exchange and its possible implications for a global market in prisoners and prison space. …

Financial Conglomerates And Information Barriers, Andrew F. Tuch

Scholarship@WashULaw

The organizational structure of financial conglomerates gives rise to fundamental regulatory challenges. Legally, the structure subjects firms to multiple, incompatible client duties. Practically, the structure provides firms with a huge reservoir of non-public information that they may use to further their self-interests, potentially harming clients and third parties. The primary regulatory response to these challenges and a core feature of the financial regulatory architecture is the information barrier or Chinese wall. Rather than examine measures to strengthen information barriers, to date legal scholars have focused on the circumstances in which to deny them legal effect, while economists have focused on …

Big Data Ethics, Neil M. Richards, Jonathan H. King

Scholarship@WashULaw

We are on the cusp of a “Big Data” Revolution, in which increasingly large datasets are mined for important predictions and often surprising insights. The predictions and decisions this revolution will enable will transform our society in ways comparable to the Industrial Revolution. We are now at a critical moment; big data uses today will be sticky and will settle both default norms and public notions of what is “no big deal” regarding big data predictions for years to come.

In this paper, we argue that big data, broadly defined, is producing increased powers of institutional awareness and power that …

Four Privacy Myths, Neil M. Richards

Scholarship@WashULaw

Any discussion about privacy today inevitably confronts a series of common arguments about the futility of privacy in our digital age. "Privacy is Dead," we hear, and "people (especially young ones) don’t care about privacy." What’s more, privacy just protects bad behavior because those of us with "nothing to hide have nothing to fear." And anyway, the argument goes, new privacy laws would be bad policy since "privacy is bad for business."

There are other common claims, but these four are perhaps the most common. They are also myths, and in this essay I show why. First, privacy can’t be …

The Four Freedoms And The Future Of Religious Liberty, John D. Inazu

Scholarship@WashULaw

The First Amendment’s rights of speech, press, religion, and assembly were once “interwoven” but distinct. Together, these freedoms advanced a pluralist skepticism of state orthodoxy that protected religious and other forms of liberty. The connections among these rights were evident at the Framing. They were also prominent during the 1930s and 1940s, when legal and political rhetoric recognized the “preferred position” of the “Four Freedoms.” We have lost sight of the Four Freedoms, supplanting their unified distinctiveness with an undifferentiated free speech framework driven by unsatisfying concepts like content neutrality and public forum analysis. It did not have to be …

More Is More: Strengthening Free Exercise, Speech, And Association, John D. Inazu

Scholarship@WashULaw

Prominent scholars have suggested that one important means of strengthening the First Amendment is by limiting its protections to “core” interests. Philip Hamburger has asserted the argument most forcefully. His generalized worry is that expanding the coverage of First Amendment rights can shift absolute protection of a defined core to contingent “balancing” for all claims asserted under those rights. In Hamburger’s words, “more is less.” We can think of cautions like these as arguments for rights confinement. On this view, legal doctrine will be most resilient to cultural pressures when it is construed narrowly. But the interplay between doctrine and …

The Far-Reaching Shadow Cast By Ferguson, Kimberly Jade Norwood

Scholarship@WashULaw

In the Dred Scott case, Justice Taney remarked that black people “had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.” In The Far-Reaching Shadow Cast by Ferguson, Professor Norwood questions whether, in today’s society, Justice Taney’s sentiment still holds true. Citing examples of recent police shootings and beatings of unarmed African-Americans and personal and family experiences, Professor Norwood argues that our country is broken and needs fixing. Professor Norwood concludes that we are not the ‘post-racial’ society we claim to be and that the Michael Brown shooting, among others, provides a watershed moment to confront our country’s underlying …

Is The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court Really A Rubber Stamp? Ex Parte Proceedings And The Fisc Win Rate, Conor Clarke

Scholarship@WashULaw

One of the most common criticisms of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court is that the court has approved more than 99% of the government’s 33,000 ex parte surveillance requests, a fact cited as extraordinary evidence that the court is nothing more than a rubber stamp. This Essay disputes that popular criticism in two ways. First, I argue that there are good reasons to expect ex parte processes to produce lopsided results, since the government selects applications based in part on the level of oversight the court applies – just as, in most other legal contexts, ‘the decision to litigate’ depends …

The Uneasy Case Against Auer And Seminole Rock, Conor Clarke

Scholarship@WashULaw

The deference regimes of Auer and Seminole Rock give an agency's interpretation of its own regulation "controlling weight unless [the interpretation] is plainly erroneous or inconsistent with the regulation." This doctrine has long been criticized for giving agencies an incentive to promulgate vague regulations. In this essay I critically review these objections to Auer and Seminole Rock against the backdrop of plausible alternative regimes and recent developments in the lower courts.

Merging And Dissolving Special Districts, Conor Clarke

Scholarship@WashULaw

Special district governments exist in every state, providing services ranging from protection against fire to protection against fire ants. These governments are easy to form, but often they are difficult to dissolve or consolidate. Nevertheless, in many states, the number of special district governments is declining. This Comment draws on statistical analyses and interviews with government officials to explain the cause of this decline. It also discusses how existing legal frameworks may be revised to facilitate the efficient consolidation and dissolution of special district governments.