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Full-Text Articles in Law

Character Evidence As A Conduit For Implicit Bias, Hillel J. Bavli Jan 2023

Character Evidence As A Conduit For Implicit Bias, Hillel J. Bavli

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

The Federal Rules of Evidence purport to prohibit character evidence, or evidence regarding a defendant’s past bad acts or propensities offered to suggest that the defendant acted in accordance with a certain character trait on the occasion in question. However, courts regularly admit character evidence through an expanding set of legislative and judicial exceptions that have all but swallowed the rule. In the usual narrative, character evidence is problematic because jurors place excessive weight on it or punish the defendant for past behavior. Lawmakers rely on this narrative when they create exceptions. However, this account arguably misses a highly troublesome …


The Character Of Jury Exclusion, Anna Offit May 2022

The Character Of Jury Exclusion, Anna Offit

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

Encounters with the legal system are unevenly distributed throughout the American population, with Black and poor citizens targeted as disparate subjects of surveillance, arrest, and criminal conviction. At the same time, these encounters, as well as a stated belief in the unfairness of the legal system, are commonly viewed as legitimate grounds for excusal from jury service. This follows from an understanding of juror bias that assumes that people with negative experiences with legal actors—police and prosecutors, for example—will be less likely to trust and more likely to discount the contributions of those actors within the context of the jury …


Military Tribunals And Due Process In Post-Revolutionary Egypt, Bianca C. Isaias Jan 2015

Military Tribunals And Due Process In Post-Revolutionary Egypt, Bianca C. Isaias

The International Lawyer

No abstract provided.


Values And The Courts: Maintaining The Rule Of Law In The Global World, Honourable Beverley Mclachlin Jan 2015

Values And The Courts: Maintaining The Rule Of Law In The Global World, Honourable Beverley Mclachlin

The International Lawyer

No abstract provided.


Law, Facts, And Power, Elizabeth G. Thornburg Jan 2010

Law, Facts, And Power, Elizabeth G. Thornburg

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

The Supreme Court’s opinion in Ashcroft v. Iqbal is wrong in many ways. This essay is about only one of them: the Court’s single-handed return to a pleading system that requires lawyers and judges to distinguish between pleading facts and pleading law. This move not only resuscitates a distinction purposely abandoned by the generation that drafted the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, but also serves as an example of the very difficulties created by the distinction. The chinks in the law-fact divide are evident in Iqbal itself - both in the already notorious pleading section of the opinion, and in …