Law Commons^™

Criminal Employment Law, Benjamin Levin

Publications

This Article diagnoses a phenomenon, “criminal employment law,” which exists at the nexus of employment law and the criminal justice system. Courts and legislatures discourage employers from hiring workers with criminal records and encourage employers to discipline workers for non-work-related criminal misconduct. In analyzing this phenomenon, my goals are threefold: (1) to examine how criminal employment law works; (2) to hypothesize why criminal employment law has proliferated; and (3) to assess what is wrong with criminal employment law. This Article examines the ways in which the laws that govern the workplace create incentives for employers not to hire individuals with …

Catalogs, Gideon Parchomovsky, Alex Stein

All Faculty Scholarship

It is a virtual axiom in the world of law that legal norms come in two prototypes: rules and standards. The accepted lore suggests that rules should be formulated to regulate recurrent and frequent behaviors, whose contours can be defined with sufficient precision. Standards, by contrast, should be employed to address complex, variegated, behaviors that require the weighing of multiple variables. Rules rely on an ex ante perspective and are therefore considered the domain of the legislator; standards embody a preference for ex post, ad-hoc, analysis and are therefore considered the domain of courts. The rules/standards dichotomy has become a …

Liability Insurance At The Tort-Crime Boundary, Tom Baker

All Faculty Scholarship

This essay explores how liability insurance mediates the boundary between torts and crime. Liability insurance sometimes separates these two legal fields, for example through the application of standard insurance contract provisions that exclude insurance coverage for some crimes that are also torts. Perhaps less obviously, liability insurance also can draw parts of the tort and criminal fields together. For example, professional liability insurance civilizes the criminal law experience for some crimes that are also torts by providing defendants with an insurance-paid criminal defense that provides more than ordinary means to contest the state’s accusations. The crime-tort separation in liability insurance …

Globalization, Legal Transnationalization And Crimes Against Humanity: The Lipietz Case, Vivian Grosswald Curran

Articles

Decided in June, 2006, the Lipietz case marks the unofficial entry into the French legal system of a tort action for complicity in crimes against humanity. It both departs from prior, established French law and reflects numerous mechanisms by which national law is transnationalizing. The case illustrates visible, invisible, substantive and methodological changes that globalization is producing as law's transnationalization changes national law. It also suggests some of the difficulties national legal systems face as their transnationalization produces legal change at a rate that outpaces the national capacity for efficient adaptation. The challenges illustrated by Lipietz, characteristic of globalization, include …

When Criminal And Tort Law Incentives Run Into Tight Budgets And Regulatory Discretion, William G. Childs

Faculty Scholarship

Eight-year-old Greyson Yoe was electrocuted while waiting to get on the "Scooters" bumper car ride at the Lake County Fair in northeastern Ohio. The failure to ground the ride structure and damage to a light fixture on the ride caused his death. The day before the electrocution, two inspectors from the Ohio Department of Agriculture (ODA) inspected the ride and passed it as "safe to operate." That inspection was superficial and grossly inadequate, and the completed inspection form had serious misrepresentations. Indeed, the inspectors later admitted that they never reviewed the key electrical items that they checked off on the …

Homicide On Holiday: Prosecutorial Discretion, Popular Culture, And The Boundaries Of The Criminal Law, Carolyn B. Ramsey

Publications

This article discusses prosecutors' discretion to press criminal charges against individuals who cause death during recreational activities. Based on newspaper sources, published opinions, and unpublished materials from cases that resulted in plea bargains, Homicide on Holiday continues the author's exploration of the relationship between the American public, criminal prosecutors, and the nature of the prosecutors' public role. It shows that, despite popular culture's glorification of risk and a nationwide trend in tort law toward sheltering sports co-participants from civil negligence liability, an exhilarating trip down a ski slope is increasingly likely to land a skier in jail if he collides …

Comment On The Tort/Crime Distinction: A Generation Later, Michael C. Harper

Faculty Scholarship

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Professor Epstein has used the occasion of this Symposium to again voice his disapproval of the modern regulatory state.' Those of you who know me will not be surprised to hear that I disagree with the bald assertions and assumptions he makes concerning that issue. In my view, compelling reasons justify the kinds of environmental and, at least in the absence of pervasive independent employee collective representation at the work place, worker safety laws attacked by Professor Epstein.² However, I will refrain from compounding the diversion by engaging Professor Epstein on these normative issues.

Instead, I will …

Does "Unlawful" Mean "Criminal"?: Reflections On The Disappearing Tort/Crime Distinction In American Law, John C. Coffee Jr.

Faculty Scholarship

What sense does it make to insist upon procedural safeguards in criminal prosecutions if anything whatever can be made a crime in the first place?
—Professor Henry M. Hart, Jr.

My thesis is simple and can be reduced to four assertions. First, the dominant development in substantive federal criminal law over the last decade has been the disappearance of any clearly definable line between civil and criminal law. Second, this blurring of the border between tort and crime predictably will result in injustice, and ultimately will weaken the efficacy of the criminal law as an instrument of social control. Third, …

Interrelations Of Criminal Law And Torts: Ii, Jerome Hall

Articles by Maurer Faculty

No abstract provided.

Interrelations Of Criminal Law And Torts: I, Jerome Hall

Articles by Maurer Faculty

No abstract provided.