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State and Local Government Law

University of Michigan Law School

2010

Law reform

Articles 1 - 4 of 4

Full-Text Articles in Law

Presumed Guilty Until Proven Innocent: The Burden Of Proof In Wrongful Conviction Claims Under State Compensation Statutes, Daniel S. Kahn Oct 2010

Presumed Guilty Until Proven Innocent: The Burden Of Proof In Wrongful Conviction Claims Under State Compensation Statutes, Daniel S. Kahn

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

Despite significant efforts to uncover and prevent wrongful convictions, little attention has been paid to the compensation of wrongfully convicted individuals once they are released from prison. State compensation statutes offer the best path to redress because they do not require the claimant to prove that the state was at fault for the wrongful conviction and because they are not susceptible to the same political influences as other methods of compensation. However, even under compensation statutes, too many meritorious claims are dismissed, settled for far too little, or never brought in the first place. After examining the current statutory framework, …


Citizen Police: Using The Qui Tam Provision Of The False Claims Act To Promote Racial And Economic Integration In Housing, Jan P. Mensz Jul 2010

Citizen Police: Using The Qui Tam Provision Of The False Claims Act To Promote Racial And Economic Integration In Housing, Jan P. Mensz

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

Economic and racial integration in housing remains elusive more than forty years after the passage of the Fair Housing Act. Recalcitrant municipal governments and exclusionary zoning ordinances have played a large role in maintaining and exacerbating segregated housing patterns. After discussing some of the persistent causes of segregated housing patterns, this Note presents a novel approach to enforcing the Fair Housing Act and the "affirmatively furthering fair housing" requirement on recipients of federal housing grants. This Note presents a citizen suit that emerged from the Southern District of New York in Anti-Discrimination Center v. Westchester County, where a private …


A Structural Vision Of Habeas Corpus, Eve Brensike Primus Jan 2010

A Structural Vision Of Habeas Corpus, Eve Brensike Primus

Articles

As scholars have recognized elsewhere in public law, there is no hermetic separation between individual rights and structural or systemic processes of governance. To be sure, it is often helpful to focus on a question as primarily implicating one or the other of those categories. But a full appreciation of a structural rule includes an understanding of its relationship to individuals, and individual rights can both derive from and help shape larger systemic practices. The separation of powers principle, for example, is clearly a matter of structure, but much of its virtue rests on its promise to help protect the …


Message To Congress: Halt The Tax Exemption For Perpetual Trusts, Lawrence W. Waggoner Jan 2010

Message To Congress: Halt The Tax Exemption For Perpetual Trusts, Lawrence W. Waggoner

Articles

The federal estate tax is in abeyance this year. The popular press has picked up on the possibility that the estates of billionaires such as the late George Steinbrenner, who owned the New York Yankees, will escape the tax. The House Ways and Means Committee, chaired by Representative Sander Levin of Michigan, and the Senate Finance Committee, chaired by Senator Max Baucus of Montana, are now considering two questions: what the maximum rate and exemption will be when the estate tax returns and whether the tax will be reinstated for this year. Lurking behind the headlines but equally important is …