Law Commons^™

Florida's Stand Your Ground Regime: Legislative Direction, Prosecutorial Discretion, Public Pressures, And The Legitimization Of The Criminal Justice System, Mary Elizabeth Castillo

Journal of Legislation

This note seeks to examine the tripartite relationship between legislative delegation, prosecutorial discretion, and public pressures in the context of Florida's "Stand Your Ground" regime. In the context of high profile criminal cases, a prosecutor faces significant public and political pressures that may influence her exercise of discretion in that case. Ultimately, Castillo argues that when a prosecutor succumbs to these pressures, it undermines her expertise, experience and exercise of discretion, and undercuts the legitimacy of the criminal justice system as a whole.

Testing The Geographical Proximity Hypothesis: An Empirical Study Of Citations To Nonbinding Precedents By Indiana Appellate Courts, Kevin Bennardo

Notre Dame Law Review Reflection

This Article analyzes the citation patterns of the Indiana Supreme Court and the Indiana Court of Appeals from 2012 and 2013. The research underlying this Article involved a study of 1324 opinions from that time period. In those opinions, the Indiana appellate courts cited to out-of-state judicial decisions 738 times. This Article analyzes those citations to test the hypothesis that state courts are more likely to turn to decisions of geographically proximate state courts for guidance when homespun precedent is lacking. The evidence points to the conclusion that, while geographical proximity bears on persuasiveness, it does not cross regional divides. …

Reflections On Comity In The Law Of American Federalism, Gil Seinfeld

Notre Dame Law Review

Comity is a nebulous concept familiar to us from the law of international relations. Roughly speaking, it describes a set of reciprocal norms among nations that call for one state to recognize, and sometimes defer to, the laws, judgments, or interests of another. Comity also features prominently in the law of American federalism, but in that context, it operates within limits that have received almost no attention from scholarly commentators. Specifically, although courts routinely describe duties that run from one state to another, or from the federal government to the states, as exercises in comity, they almost never rely on …

A New Understanding Of Gang Injunctions, Wesley F. Harward

Notre Dame Law Review

There were over 1.4 million active gang members in the United States as of 2011—an increase of forty percent in gang membership from 2009. It is estimated that “[g]angs are responsible for an average of 48 percent of violent crime in most jurisdictions and up to 90 percent in several others.” Many of the more than 33,000 gangs are increasing in sophistication and organization. Additionally, these “[g]angs are increasingly engaging in nontraditional gang-related crime, such as alien smuggling, human trafficking, and prostitution.”

The rise in gang membership and gang violence “has overwhelmed conventional law enforcement techniques.” State legislatures, city attorneys, …

The Constraint Of Dignity: Lawrence V. Texas And Public Morality, Kristian R. Mukoski

Notre Dame Law Review

This Note will proceed in four parts. Part I will catalogue the jurisprudential and philosophical conflict over the legitimacy of morals legislation. Part II will examine the Supreme Court’s jurisprudence regarding reproductive and sexual liberty, noting the trend towards conflating liberty with autonomy that culminated in Lawrence v. Texas. Part III will closely scrutinize the characterization of liberty in Lawrence, demonstrating that it is restricted by associational and spatial limitations. Part IV will connect those limitations to the description of dignity Justice Kennedy employed in Lawrence and in other cases. This conception of dignity embodies substantive values concerning the appropriate …