Law Commons^™

State Secrecy: A Literature Review, Stephane Lefebvre

Secrecy and Society

What is secrecy? What is a state secret? Which state secrets deserve protection from disclosures? How are state secrets protected from disclosure? In this review, I use these questions as an organizing framework to review the richness of a very disparate, largely US-centric, but also multidisciplinary literature. In doing so, I highlight the social nature of secrecy - that it is a social construct with social effects and consequences - and the need for further research to unveil those rationalities that specific discourses on state secrecy put forward to legitimize the nondisclosure of state secrets.

Ethics In An Echo Chamber: Legal Ethics & The Peremptory Challenge, Kayley A. Viteo

St. Mary's Journal on Legal Malpractice & Ethics

Abstract forthcoming.

Suspicion Encoded: Women Of Color And Biometric Technology In The United States, Lilith A. Saylor

sprinkle: an undergraduate journal of feminist and queer studies

This paper explores the commodification of privacy through biometric technology in the United States. It examines the impact of this technology on poor women of color (WOC), arguing that poor WOC face intersectional discrimination based on the convergence of sex, race, and class in their identities. I highlight the unique and powerful intrusion of biometric technology into the lives of poor WOC, and argue that the connection between data and the physical body created through biometric data has formed an environment in which the state wields unrestricted control in all spheres over the privacy of poor WOC.

The Torch (Winter 2021-2022), Crtp

Torch: The Civil Rights Team Project Newsletter

The Maine Office of the Attorney General administers the Civil Rights Team Project (CRTP). The CRTP’s mission is to increase the safety of elementary, middle school, and high school students by reducing bias-motivated behaviors and harassment in our schools. CRTP accomplishes this by supporting student civil rights teams in Maine schools. The CRTP and student teams are active in engaging school communities in thinking and talking about issues related to:

• Race and skin color
• National origin and ancestry
• Religion
• Disabilities
• Gender (including gender identify and expression)
• Sexual orientation

The Attorney General’s Office created the CRTP in 1996 as a pilot …

The Court Is In Recession: On The Implications Of The Covid-19 Pandemic For Indigent Defense Spending, Andrew L. B. Davies, Victoria M. Smiegocki, Hannah E. Hall

Other Deason Center Publications

What is the likely effect of the recession brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic on indigent defense budgets in the United States? To look forward, we look backward. We examine data on county-level spending on indigent defense in Texas during the Great Recession of 2007–2009. Redistributive policies—those which use taxpayer funds to support individuals who themselves pay little or no tax—are particularly susceptible to cuts during times of fiscal stress. Yet our analysis shows indigent defense policy, measured in terms of spending and access to counsel rates, was generally stable through the Great Recession years, even in counties hit hardest. …

“Born Under My Heart”: Adoptive Parents’ Use Of Metaphors To Make Sense Of Their Past, Present, And Future, Lucas Hackenburg, Toni Morgan, Eve Brank

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

Metaphors provide the opportunity to make sense of our experiences and share them with others. The current research qualitatively examined interviews with adoptive parents who had adopted through intercountry or private adoptions. Throughout their interviews, each participant used at least one metaphor in describing their experiences of adopting and raising their child. Overarchingly, the metaphor of “Adoption is a journey” encapsulated parents’ experiences. To demonstrate the journey, parents used metaphors to describe the past, present, and future. Metaphors of the past focused on their child’s trauma and the origin of how the child came to join their family. Metaphors used …

Assessing President Obama’S Appointment Of Women To The Federal Appellate Courts, Laura Moyer

Faculty and Staff Scholarship

A major legacy of the Obama presidency was the mark he left on the federal courts with respect to increasing judicial diversity. In particular, President Obama’s appointments of women to the federal judiciary exceeded all previous presidents in terms of both absolute numbers and as a share of all judges; he also appointed a record-setting number of women of color to the lower federal courts. In this Article, I take an intersectional approach to exploring variation in the professional backgrounds, qualifications, and Senate confirmation experiences of Obama’s female appeals court appointees, comparing them with George W. Bush and Bill Clinton …

Paradigm In Social Security Measures: Impetus For Policy Reform In Zimbabwe, Locary Kuponandishe Hlabanu

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

This study was intended to address lack of knowledge regarding how the social security system in Zimbabwe is perceived by recipients and government employees and what policy reforms could be sought. The study explored perceptions of participants regarding the existing social security system in Zimbabwe. The welfare state theory guided the detailed inquiry. A qualitative case study research design was used to extract feelings, thoughts, and intentions of recipients of social security and government employees and to explore how the results could be applied to improve social security policy in Zimbabwe. Data were collected from a nonrandom purposefully selected sample …

Subordination And Separation Of Powers, Matthew B. Lawrence

Faculty Articles

This Article calls for the incorporation of antisubordination into separation-ofpowers analysis. Scholars analyzing separation-of-powers tools—laws and norms that divide power among government actors—consider a long list of values ranging from protecting liberty to promoting efficiency. Absent from this list are questions of equity: questions of racism, sexism, and classism. This Article problematizes this omission and begins to rectify it. For the first time, this Article applies critical-race and feminist theorists’ subordination question—are marginalized groups disproportionately burdened?—to three important separation-of-powers tools: legislative appropriations, executive conditions, and constitutional entrenchment. In doing so, it reveals that each tool entails subordination by creating generalized …

The City's Second Amendment, David Fagundes, Darrell A.H. Miller

Faculty Articles

Cities are increasingly common sites of contestation over the scope and meaning of the Second Amendment. Some municipalities have announced their opposition to firearm restrictions by declaring themselves Second Amendment sanctuaries. Others have sought to curtail gun violence by passing restrictive local regulations. Still others have responded to police violence by moving to demilitarize, disarm, or even disband their police forces. The burgeoning post-Heller legal literature, though, has largely overlooked the relationship between cities, collective arms bearing, and the Second Amendment. In sum, to what extent do cities themselves have a right to keep and bear arms? This Article …

Law, Growth, And The Identity Hurdle: A Theory Of Legal Reform, Martin W. Sybblis

Faculty Articles

This Article offers a new theoretical approach to understanding resistance to legal change in the corporate and commercial context by introducing the sociological concept of "community economic identity" (CEI) into legal scholarship. I argue that community leaders (typically, but not exclusively, from the political, legal, and business spheres) generate public and recognizable identities-e.g., "Coal Country" or "Motor City"-with respect to some commercial activities. These identities influence how law reform is conceived and deployed within jurisdictional boundaries (i.e., country, state, town, region, etc.). CEI complicates the prevailing public choice narrative regarding the influence of special interests in the law reform process. …

Regulatory Competition And State Capacity, Martin W. Sybblis

Faculty Articles

This Article explores an underlying tension in the regulatory competition literature regarding why some jurisdictions are more attractive to firms than others. It pays special attention to offshore financial centers (OFCs). OFCs court the business of nonresidents, offer business friendly regulatory environments, and provide for minimal, if any, taxation on their customers. On the one extreme, OFCs are theorized as merely products of legislative capture— thereby lacking any meaningful agency of their own. On the other hand, OFCs are conceptualized as well-governed jurisdictions that attract investment because of the high quality of their laws and legal institutions—indicating some ability to …

Children In Custody: A Study Of Detained Migrant Children In The United States,, Emily Ryo, Reed Humphrey

Faculty Scholarship

Every year, tens of thousands of migrant children are taken into custody by U.S. immigration authorities. Many of these children are unaccompanied by parents or relatives when they arrive at the U.S. border. Others who are accompanied by parents or relatives are rendered unaccompanied when U.S. immigration authorities separate them upon apprehension. Together, these minors are called unaccompanied alien children (UACs) and transferred to the custody of the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR), unless and until their immigration cases are resolved or until the children can be placed with a sponsor in the United States pending the adjudication of their …

Neither “Post-War” Nor Post-Pregnancy Paranoia: How America’S War On Drugs Continues To Perpetuate Disparate Incarceration Outcomes For Pregnant, Substance-Involved Offenders, Becca S. Zimmerman

Pitzer Senior Theses

This thesis investigates the unique interactions between pregnancy, substance involvement, and race as they relate to the War on Drugs and the hyper-incarceration of women. Using ordinary least square regression analyses and data from the Bureau of Justice Statistics’ 2016 Survey of Prison Inmates, I examine if (and how) pregnancy status, drug use, race, and their interactions influence two length of incarceration outcomes: sentence length and amount of time spent in jail between arrest and imprisonment. The results collectively indicate that pregnancy decreases length of incarceration outcomes for those offenders who are not substance-involved but not evenhandedly -- benefitting white …

"Defund The (School) Police"? Bringing Data To Key School-To-Prison Pipeline Claims, Michael Heise, Jason P. Nance

Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology

Nationwide calls to “Defund the Police,” largely attributable to the resurgent Black Lives Matter demonstrations, have motivated derivative calls for public school districts to consider “defunding” (or modifying) school resource officer (“SRO/police”) programs. To be sure, a school’s SRO/police presence—and the size of that presence—may influence the school’s student discipline reporting policies and practices. How schools report student discipline and whether that reporting involves referrals to law enforcement agencies matters, particularly as reports may fuel a growing “school-to-prison pipeline.” The school-to-prison pipeline research literature features two general claims that frame debates about changes in how public schools approach student discipline …

#Aminext: The Link Between European Colonization And Gender-Based Violence In Contemporary South Africa, Jenna Meredith Pagel

Capstone Showcase

Alarmingly, the female murder rate in South Africa is five times the global average (BBC News 2019). According to data from 2017 and 2018, a woman is murdered every four hours in South Africa (Wilkinson 2019). More than 30 women were killed by their spouses in August 2019, and at least 137 sexual offenses are committed per day in South Africa (Francke 2019).

For this thesis, and in order to understand why South Africa has some of the highest rates of violence against women in the world, I consult a number of scholars who conclude that the overall issue of …

America’S Presidential Crisis Of Legitimacy: How The Electoral College Became Obsolete And How We Can Fix It, Julia Rose Foodman

Scripps Senior Theses

The goal of this thesis is to critique the current American Presidential electoral system, the Electoral College, and to show what an alternative could potentially mean for the American people. This paper seeks to answer the following questions: What are the main arguments for the Electoral College, why are they troubling, and how can we mend American Presidential elections for the greater purposes of political equality, democracy, and freedom? To do so, core arguments made by conservative pundits in favor of the Electoral College are outlined in order to bring attention to their logical, political, and moral inconsistencies. The inequalities …

Intellectual Property As A Determinant Of Health, Ana Santos Rutschman

All Faculty Scholarship

Public health literature has long recognized the existence of determinants of health, a set of socio-economic conditions that affect health risks and health outcomes across the world. The World Health Organization defines these determinants as “forces and systems” consisting of “factors combin[ing] together to affect the health of individuals and communities.” Frameworks relying on determinants of health have been widely adopted by countries in the global South and North alike, as well as international institutional players, several of which are direct or indirect players in transnational intellectual property (IP) policymaking. Issues raised by the implementation of IP policies, however, are …

How Law Made Neoliberalism, Jedediah S. Purdy, Amy Kapczynski, David Singh Grewal

Faculty Scholarship

We live in an era of intersecting crises-some new, some old but newly visible. At the time of writing, the COVID-19 pandemic has already caused nearly 500,000 deaths in the United States alone, with many more deaths on the horizon in the coming months. Since its arrival in the United States, the virus has intersected with and magnified long-neglected problems-radical disparities in access to healthcare and the fulfillment of basic needs that disproportionately impact communities of color and working-class Americans, alongside a crisis of care for the young, elderly, and sick that stretches families and communities to the breaking point

The 100-Year Life And The New Family Law, Elizabeth S. Scott, Naomi Cahn

Faculty Scholarship

This draft book chapter, prepared as part of a symposium on The 100-Year Life by Linda Gratton and Andrew Scott, reflects on the future of family law in an era of longer lives. Our analysis leads us to conclude that the 100-year life is indeed likely to have an impact on the nature, scope, and definition of family law, but that families will continue to function as the primary setting for intimacy and for caregiving and caretaking, whatever form those families take. Further, the importance to both individual and social welfare of family support throughout life points to a need …

A Gender And Race Theoretical And Probabilistic Analysis Of The Recent Title Ix Policy Changes, Jordan Wellington

Scripps Senior Theses

On May 6th, 2020, after extensive public comment and review, the Department of Education published the final rule for the new Title IX regulations, which took effect in schools on August 14th. Title IX is the nearly fifty year old piece of the Education Amendments that prohibits sexual discrimination in federally funded schools. Several of these changes, such as the inclusion of live hearings and cross examination of witnesses, have been widely criticized by victims’ rights advocates for potentially retraumatizing victims of sexual assault and discouraging students from pursuing a Title IX claim. While the impact of the new regulations …

Religion, Conscience, And The Law: Reasons, Bases, And Limits For Exemptions, Kent Greenawalt

Faculty Scholarship

Kent Greenawalt discusses the permissibility, scope, and rationale for law to provide exemptions to protect religious and nonreligious conscience in the United States. It may be difficult for the law to determine which sentiments amount to conscience given differences in individuals’ perception and the strength of their convictions. Even the notion of a religious conscience is complex. Religious citizens’ conclusions about matters of interest to religion may proceed from both religion and reason, or only from reason. It is not clear what should count as religious, given differences between denominations and their ideas over time. There are a host of …

Rights For The “Non-Conforming” Woman: The Intersectionality Of The Fight For Women’S Rights And Lgbtq+ Rights In Argentina, Talia C. Housman

Honors Theses

Argentina has faced many challenges throughout its history of activism as the people have pushed for an equal society. Different movements have sprung up over the years, but they have begun to twist together in recent times due to the need for support during repressive regimes. This brings into question the concept of intersectionality, which spans feminist, queer, and legal theory in its attempt to explain the need for overlap, modeling the natural development of personal identities and groups like family. The feminist movement and the LGBTQ+ movements have woven together in many rallies, especially during El Encuentro Nacional de …

Bringing Judaism Downtown: A Smart Growth Policy For Orthodox Jews, Michael Lewyn

Scholarly Works

Until the late 20th century, the most rigorously traditional Jews, haredi Jews (often referred to as “ultra-Orthodox”) tended to congregate in New York City. But as New York became more expensive and haredi population grew due to high birth rates, some haredi Jews (known collectively as “haredim”) moved to small towns and outer suburbs in search of cheaper land, sometimes creating towns dominated by haredim such as Kiryas Joel, New York and Lakewood, New Jersey. As haredi populations have continued to grow, their households now seek undeveloped land outside these enclaves. But as haredim move deeper into the countryside, zoning …

Analyzing Wrongful Convictions Beyond The Traditional Canonical List Of Errors, For Enduring Structural And Sociological Attributes, (Juveniles, Racism, Adversary System, Policing Policies), Leona D. Jochnowitz, Tonya Kendall

Touro Law Review

Researchers identify possible structural causes for wrongful convictions: racism, justice system culture, adversary system, plea bargaining, media, juvenile and mentally impaired accused, and wars on drugs and crime. They indicate that unless the root causes of conviction error are identified, the routine explanations of error (e.g., eyewitness identifications; false confessions) will continue to re-occur. Identifying structural problems may help to prevent future wrongful convictions. The research involves the coding of archival data from the Innocence Project for seventeen cases, including the one for the Central Park Five exonerees. The data were coded by Hartwick College and Northern Vermont University students …

Table Of Contents

Touro Law Review

No abstract provided.

Litigating Socio-Economic And Women’S Rights In Benin’S Constitutional Court, Alice J. Kang, Susanna D. Wing

Department of Political Science: Faculty Publications

Scholars debate the role of legal institutions in promoting human rights in Africa. Much of the discussion focuses on Anglophone countries and does not examine the gender of litigants. We propose a constitutionalism constrained perspective that argues that which and whose rights are adjudicated are shaped by the context of constitutional reform. Where reformists are primarily concerned with safeguarding civil and political rights, high courts may protect civil and political rights claims more often than socio-economic ones. Examining hundreds of human rights decisions issued by Benin’s Constitutional Court, we ask, which and whose rights does the court protect? We find …

Foucault’S Keystone: Confessions Of The Flesh, Bernard E. Harcourt

Faculty Scholarship

The fourth and final volume of The History of Sexuality offers the keystone to Michel Foucault’s critique of Western neoliberal societies. Confessions of the Flesh provides the heretofore missing link that ties Foucault’s late writings on subjectivity to his earlier critique of power. Foucault identifies in Augustine’s treatment of marital sexual relations the moment of birth of the modern legal actor and of the legalization of social relations. With the appearance of the modern legal subject, Foucault’s critique of modern Western societies is complete: it is now possible to see how the later emergence of an all-knowing homo oeconomicus strips …

Rwu Law Equity Scorecard February 2021, Roger Williams University School Of Law

Life of the Law School (1993- )

No abstract provided.

A Page-Turner With A Social Conscience: Requiem For A Female Serial Killer By Phyllis Chesler, Paula J. Caplan

Dignity: A Journal of Analysis of Exploitation and Violence

No abstract provided.