Law Commons^™

Intimate Partner Violence: Criminal Justice Responses To High Lethality Cases, Victoria E. Collins

Sociology & Criminal Justice Theses & Dissertations

This study examines the relationship between the level of violence suffered by the victim in a domestic violence relationship and the criminal justice responses to that violence, namely arrest, prosecution and the issuance of protective orders. Data was obtained from a nonprofit domestic violence agency in Virginia Beach, Virginia. The data was collected by agency staff from victims seeking assistance. This study found that female victims of domestic violence that suffered higher levels of violence at the hands of their abuser were more likely to be issued a protective order. Female victims who suffered higher levels of violence were not …

Principios, Moral Y Positivismo Jurídico: Respuestas Y Redefinición Del Positivismo Contemporáneo [Principles, Morality And Legal Positivism], Jorge Luis Fabra-Zamora

Journal Articles

El objetivo de este escrito es hacer una esbozar la evolución del positivismo jurídico desde las críticas de Dworkin. La idea principal es servir como una introducción a este importante debate de la Filosofía del Derecho. El autor parte de una elucidación del Problema Original, analiza las respuestas incluyentes y excluyentes del Positivismo y Finaliza con la tesis que fueron los principios los causantes de la redefinición del Positivismo Jurídico.

[This paper seeks to sketch the evolución of Legal Positivism since Dworkin criticism. The main idea is to serve as an introduction of this current debate in Legal Philosophy. The …

Estimating The Differential Costs Of Criminal Activity For Juvenile Drug Court Participants: Challenges And Recommendations, Kathryn E. Mccollister, Michael T. French, Ashli J. Sheidow, Scott W. Henggeler, Colleen Halliday-Boykins

Sociology Faculty Articles and Papers

Juvenile drug court (JDC) programs have expanded rapidly over the past 20 years and are an increasingly popular option for rehabilitating juvenile offenders with substance use problems. Given the high cost of crime to society, an important economic question is whether and to what extent JDC programs reduce criminal activity among juvenile offenders. To address this question, the present study added an economic cost analysis to an ongoing randomized trial of JDC conducted in Charleston, South Carolina. Four treatment conditions were included in the parent study: Family Court with usual community-based treatment (FC, the comparison group), Drug Court with usual …

A Miscarriage Of Juvenile Justice: A Modern Day Parable Of The Unintended Results Of Bad Lawmaking, Amy Vorenberg

Law Faculty Scholarship

Sensationalized cases increasingly create the context for public policy discussion. Stories about violent crime are a common feature of the local evening news and their emotional nature can often create the hook politicians need to showcase their “tough on crime” agendas. Often anecdotal and lurid, stories of criminal misdeeds are widely used to convince the public of a need to create or change laws. This article demonstrates the perils of making law by extrapolating from a few random, albeit attention-grabbing, events. Specifically, the article examines the impact of a 1995 change in New Hampshire state law that lowered the age …

The Death Of The American Trial, Robert P. Burns

Faculty Working Papers

This short essay is a summary of my assessment of the meaning of the "vanishing trial" phenomenon. It addresses the obvious question: "So what?" It first briefly reviews the evidence of the trial's decline. It then sets out the steps necessary to understand the political and social signficance of our vastly reducing the trial's importance among our modes of social ordering. The essay serves as the Introduction to a book, The Death of the American Trial, soon to be published by the University of Chicago Press.

The Language Of Consent In Police Encounters, Janice Nadler, J.D. Trout

Faculty Working Papers

In this chapter, we examine the nature of conversations in citizen-police encounters in which police seek to conduct a search based on the citizen's consent. We argue that when police officers ask a person if they can search, citizens often feel enormous pressure to say yes. But judges routinely ignore these pressures, choosing instead to spotlight the politeness and restraint of the officers' language and demeanor. Courts often analyze the language of police encounters as if the conversation has an obvious, context-free meaning. The pragmatic features of language influence behavior, but courts routinely ignore or deny this fact. Instead, current …

Who Gets To Be The Expert?: Legal Research Skills Certification In Legal Education, Richard Leiter

Marvin and Virginia Schmid Law Library: Faculty Publications

This article considers the question of whether there is a need for law schools to offer certification for specialization in legal research skills and discusses various approaches to legal research skills cer­tification. The author argues that it is unnecessary to offer legal research certification as it is presupposed that a basic legal educa­tion should include instruction in how to find and read the law. Anything less is a failed legal education.

Exactly how special are legal research skills? Are they special enough to warrant certification? As a matter of fact, the act of legal researching is so intimately connected with …

The Safety Of A Nation Versus The Rights Of Suspected Terrorists, Michaela Clark

Undergraduate Review

On January twenty-second, 2009, newly elected President Barack Obama issued an executive order requiring the detention center holding alleged terrorists at Guantanamo Bay to be closed within one year. This proposal may potentially close a chapter on one of America’s most controversial efforts to combat terrorism. Throughout the Bush Administration’s “War on Terror” numerous laws were passed that gave the President and the Department of Defense power to determine who was an enemy combatant and detain indefinitely those they decided fit that profile. The issue of holding people the military deems a threat without giving them a traditional trial continues …

Detection Of Deception In Criminal Defendents: Treatment Or Trial?, Loran Noelle Bounds

Theses Digitization Project

The purpose of this study is to determine how to detect whether a person is faking a mental illness. An area that is often malingered is insanity, where criminal defendents will fake that they are mentally ill as to avoid imprisonment or the death penalty. The death penalty is one of the most difficult defenses to raise and is rarely successful.

Happiness And Punishment, John Bronsteen, Christopher Buccafusco, Jonathan Masur

Faculty Scholarship

This Article continues our project of applying new findings in the behavioral psychology of human happiness to some of the most deeply analyzed questions in law. When a state decides how to punish criminal offenders, at least one important consideration is the amount of harm any given punishment is likely to inflict. It would be undesirable, for example, to impose greater harm on those who commit less serious crimes or to impose harm that rises to the level of cruelty. Our penal system fits punishments to crimes primarily by adjusting the size of monetary fines and the length of prison …

Defining A Forensic Audit, G. S. Smith, D. L. Crumbley

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

Disclosures about new financial frauds and scandals are continually appearing in the press. As a consequence, the accounting profession's traditional methods of monitoring corporate financial activities are under intense scrutiny. At the same time, there is recognition that principles-based GAAP from the International Accounting Standards Board will become the recognized standard in the U.S. The authors argue that these two factors will change the practices used to fight corporate malfeasance as investigators adapt the techniques of accounting into a forensic audit engagement model.

Visualisation Of Honeypot Data Using Graphviz And Afterglow, Craig Valli

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

This research in progress paper explores the use of Graphviz and Afterglow for the analysis of data emanating from a honeypot system. Honeypot systems gather a wide range of data that is often difficult to readily search for patterns and trends using conventional log file analysis techniques. The data from the honeypots has been statically extracted and processed through Afterglow scripts to produce inputs suitable for use by the DOT graph based tools contained within Graphviz. This paper explores some of the benefits and drawbacks of currently using this type of approach.

Recruiting And Selecting Child Welfare Staff, Michelle Graef, Megan Paul, Tara L. Myers

Center on Children, Families, and the Law: Faculty Publications

In this chapter, the focus is on recruiting and selecting new staff and on the steps agencies can take to ensure that they are doing the best possible job to attract and hire a high-performing, committed workforce. This chapter reviews a number of strategies for improving recruitment and selection processes and provides case examples from the authors' work with child protection agencies in several states. These projects have been accomplished by a team of researchers at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln's Center on Children, Families, and the Law (CCFL). Some of the techniques described here will be familiar, whereas others are …

The Unjust Selection Of Justice Professionals: Balancing Fairness For Police Officer Applicants And The Potential Citizens They Will Serve, Robert W. Boyle

Master's Theses

This paper examines the effects on the community when its police officers are held to different physical standards based upon their sex. Through a Platonic analysis of the modern day "guardians of the city," it can be seen that the community is deprived of the strongest and best police force when the department compensates individuals based upon a "weakness" that thier class of applicants possesses. This process proves to be unfair to both the applicants and to the citizens they may subsequently serve.

Public Perceptions Of Registry Laws For Juvenile Sex Offenders, Carrie E. Reynolds, Cynthia J. Najdowski, Jessica M. Salerno, Margaret C. Stevenson, Tish R.A. Wiley, Bette L. Bottoms

Psychology Faculty Scholarship

Understanding jurors’ perceptions of juvenile defendants has become increasingly important as more and more juvenile cases are being tried in adult criminal court rather than family or juvenile court. Intellectual disability and child maltreatment are overrepresented among juvenile delinquents, and juveniles (particularly disabled juveniles) are at heightened risk for falsely confessing to crimes. In two mock trial experiments, we examined the effects of disability, abuse history, and confession evidence on jurors’ perceptions of a juvenile defendant across several different crime scenarios. Abused juveniles were treated more leniently than nonabused juveniles only when the juvenile’s crime was motivated by self-defense against …

The Deterrent Effect Of Death Penalty Eligibility: Evidence From The Adoption Of Child Murder Eligibility Factors, Michael D. Frakes, Matthew Harding

Faculty Scholarship

We draw on within-state variations in the reach of capital punishment statutes between 1977 and 2004 to identify the deterrent effects associated with capital eligibility. Focusing on the most prevalent eligibility expansion, we estimate that the adoption of a child murder factor is associated with an approximately 20% reduction in the homicide rate of youth victims. Eligibility expansions may enhance deterrence by (1) paving the way for more executions and (2) providing prosecutors with greater leverage to secure enhanced non-capital sentences. While executions themselves are rare, this latter channel is likely to be triggered fairly regularly, providing a reasonable basis …

Beyond Retroactivity To Realizing Justice: A Theory On The Principle Of Legality In International Criminal Law Sentencing, Shahram Dana

Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology

No abstract provided.

A Relational Sixth Amendment During Interrogation, Brooks Holland

Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology

No abstract provided.

Blue Sky Steroids, Geoffrey Rapp

Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology

No abstract provided.

The Manly Sports: The Problematic Use Of Criminal Law To Regulate Sports Violence, Jeffrey Standen

Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology

No abstract provided.

Deterrence In A Sea Of Just Deserts: Are Utilitarian Goals Achievable In A World Of Limiting Retributivism, Matthew Haist

Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology

No abstract provided.

Desistance And The Feared Self: Toward An Identity Theory Of Criminal Desistance, Ray Paternoster, Shawn Bushway

Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology

No abstract provided.

The Cognitive Psychology Of Mens Rea, Kevin Jon Heller

Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology

No abstract provided.

Adolescent Transfer, Developmental Maturity, And Adjudicative Competence: An Ethical And Justice Policy Inquiry , Brian G. Sellers, Bruce A. Arrigo

Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology

No abstract provided.

Do Executions Lower Homicide Rates: The Views Of Leading Criminologists', Michael L. Radelet, Traci L. Lacock

Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology

No abstract provided.

What Can Rico Not Do: Rico And The Non-Economic Intrastate Enterprise That Perpetrates Only Non-Economic Racketeering Activity, Brian Nisbet

Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology

No abstract provided.

When Is A Police Officer An Officer Of The Law: The Status Of Police Officers In Schools, Peter Price

Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology

No abstract provided.

Foreword

Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology

No abstract provided.

Off-Court Misbehavior: Sports Leagues And Private Punishment, Janine Young Kim, Matthew J. Parlow

Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology

No abstract provided.

The Criminalization Of Poverty, Kaaryn Gustafson

Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology

No abstract provided.