Law Commons^™

Warranted Exclusion: A Case For A Fourth Amendment Built On The Right To Exclude, Mailyn Fidler

Law Faculty Scholarship

Searches intrude; fundamentally, they infringe on a right to exclude. So that right should form the basis of Fourth Amendment protections. Current Fourth Amendment doctrine-the reasonable expectation of privacy teststruggles with conceptual clarity and predictability. The Supreme Court's recent decision to overturn Roe v. Wade casts further doubt on the reception of other privacy-based approaches with this Court. But the replacement approach that several Justices on the Court favor, what I call the "maximalist" property approach, risks troublingly narrow results. This Article provides a new alternative: Fourth Amendment protection should be anchored in a flexible concept derived from property law-what …

The Trial Preparation Procedures–Criminal, William Rhee, L. Richard Walker

Law Faculty Scholarship

In an effort to provide scholarship immediately useful to the criminal trial advocate, this article proposes a detailed systems workflow to plan and coordinate preparing for federal criminal trials called the Trial Preparation Procedures–Criminal (or "TrialPrepPro–Criminal" for short). The TrialPrepPro–Criminal upon the Trial Preparation Procedures-Civil, expounded in an earlier article.

Although there is an abundance of anecdotal "learning from doing" trial preparation guidance, empirically testable "learning about doing" trial preparation guidance is rare. We present our TrialPrepPro to learn more about doing.

The TrialPrepPro are modeled after the battle-proven military decision-making process used, with modifications, by all U.S. military services, …

Supreme Court Struggles To Define 'Searches' As Technology Changes, Behzad Mirhashem

Law Faculty Scholarship

[Excerpt] "What the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution means when it protects citizens agains an unreasonable search by government agents isn't entirely clear. It certainly includes police physically entering a person's home, but for almost 100 years, the Supreme Court has tried to define what else might qualify, including keeping the law up-to-date with new technologies - as a recent case illustrates."

Up In Smoke? Unintended Consequences Of Retail Marijuana Laws For Partnerships, Lauren A. Newell

Law Faculty Scholarship

When Colorado citizens petitioned in 2012 to legalize the retail sale of marijuana in their state, Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper publicly opposed the ballot measure. He knew that state legalization of retail marijuana sales would be risky because the federal Controlled Substances Act makes selling marijuana a crime. He worried that being the first state to legalize retail marijuana sales would make Colorado the “experiment.” Governor Hickenlooper knew that this experiment would come with “unintended consequences.”

Governor Hickenlooper’s concerns were well founded. Scholars have identified a host of practical and legal problems caused by the combination of state marijuana legalization …

'White Collar Crime': Still Hazy After All These Years, Lucian E. Dervan, Ellen S. Podgor

Law Faculty Scholarship

With a seventy-five year history of sociological and later legal roots, the term “white collar crime” remains an ambiguous concept that academics, policy makers, law enforcement personnel and defense counsel are unable to adequately define. Yet the use of the term “white collar crime” skews statistical reporting and sentencing for this conduct. This Article provides a historical overview of its linear progression and then a methodology for a new architecture in examining this conduct. It separates statutes into clear-cut white collar offenses and hybrid statutory offenses, and then applies this approach with an empirical study that dissects cases prosecuted under …

Sentencing The Wolf Of Wall Street: From Leniency To Uncertainty, Lucian E. Dervan

Law Faculty Scholarship

This Symposium Article, based on a presentation given by Professor Dervan at the 2014 Wayne Law Review Symposium entitled "Sentencing White Collar Defendants: How Much is Enough," examines the Jordan Belfort (“Wolf of Wall Street”) prosecution as a vehicle for analyzing sentencing in major white-collar criminal cases from the 1980s until today. In Part II, the Article examines the Belfort case and his relatively lenient prison sentence for engaging in a major fraud. This section goes on to examine additional cases from the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s to consider the results of reforms aimed at “getting tough” on white-collar offenders. …

The Quest For Finality: Five Stories Of White Collar Criminal Prosecution, Lucian E. Dervan

Law Faculty Scholarship

In this symposium article, Professor Dervan examines the issue of finality and sentencing. In considering this issue, he argues that prosecutors, defendants, and society as a whole are drawn to the concept of finality in various ways during criminal adjudications. Further, far from an aspirational summit, he argues that some outgrowths of this quest for finality could be destructive and, in fact, obstructive to some of the larger goals of our criminal justice system, including the pursuit of truth and the protection of the innocent. Given the potential abstraction of these issues, Professor Dervan decided to discuss the possible consequences …

The Innocent Defendant’S Dilemma: An Innovative Empirical Study Of Plea Bargaining’S Innocence Problem, Lucian E. Dervan, Vanessa Edkins

Law Faculty Scholarship

In 1989, Ada JoAnn Taylor was accused of murder and presented with stark options. If she pleaded guilty, she would be rewarded with a sentence of ten to forty years in prison. If, however, she proceeded to trial and was convicted, she would likely spend the rest of her life behind bars. Over a thousand miles away in Florida and more than twenty years later, a college student was accused of cheating and presented with her own incentives to admit wrongdoing and save the university the time and expense of proceeding before a disciplinary review board. Both women decided the …

Pleading Innocents: Laboratory Evidence Of Plea Bargaining's Innocence Problem, Vanessa Edkins, Lucian E. Dervan

Law Faculty Scholarship

We investigated plea bargaining by making students actually guilty or innocent of a cheating offense and varying the sentence that they would face if found ‘guilty’ by a review board. As hypothesized, guilty students were more likely than innocent students to accept a plea deal (i.e., admit guilt and lose credit; akin to accepting a sentence of probation) (Chi-square=8.63, p<.01) but we did not find an effect of sentence severity. Innocent students, though not as likely to plead as guilty students, showed an overall preference (56% across conditions) for accepting a plea deal. Implications and future directions are discussed.

White Collar Over-Criminalization: Deterrence, Plea Bargaining, And The Loss Of Innocence, Lucian E. Dervan

Law Faculty Scholarship

Overcriminalization takes many forms and impacts the American criminal justice system in varying ways. This article focuses on a select portion of this phenomenon by examining two types of overcriminalization prevalent in white collar criminal law. The first type of over criminalization discussed in this article is Congress’s propensity for increasing the maximum criminal penalties for white collar offenses in an effort to punish financial criminals more harshly while simultaneously deterring others. The second type of overcriminalization addressed is Congress’s tendency to create vague and overlapping criminal provisions in areas already criminalized in an effort to expand the tools available …

The Method And Role Of Comparative Law, Edward J. Eberle

Law Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.