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Full-Text Articles in Law
Sex Offender Commitments: Debunking The Official Narrative And Revealing The Rules-In-Use, Eric S. Janus
Sex Offender Commitments: Debunking The Official Narrative And Revealing The Rules-In-Use, Eric S. Janus
Faculty Scholarship
Sex offender commitment laws present courts with a difficult choice: either allow creative efforts to prevent sexual violence or enforce traditional constitutional safeguards constraining the power of the state to deprive citizens of their Iiberty. Three state supreme courts have deflected this hard choice while upholding sex offender commitment schemes. As part of their ""official narrative"" that legitimizes sex offender commitments, the courts claim that society can have prevention and still maintain the primacy of the criminal justice system. This narrative neutralizes the conflict in values by claiming that sex offender commitments are just like mental illness commitments, a small, …
Toward A Conceptual Framework For Assessing Police Power Commitment Legislation, Eric S. Janus
Toward A Conceptual Framework For Assessing Police Power Commitment Legislation, Eric S. Janus
Faculty Scholarship
Recent litigation and scholarship have begun to focus on the substantive limits of the state's power to use civil commitment as a social control tool. Courts and commentators describe civil commitment as grounded on two powers of the state: the parens patriae interest and the police power. This Article seeks an analytical framework for defining the boundaries of police power commitments in which justification rests on the interests of the public rather than on the interests of the committed individual.