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University of Michigan Law School

Criminal Law

Criminal justice administration

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Why Care About Mass Incarceration?, James Forman Jr. Apr 2010

Why Care About Mass Incarceration?, James Forman Jr.

Michigan Law Review

Advocates for less punitive crime policies in the United States face long and dispiriting odds. The difficulty of the challenge becomes clear if we compare our criminal justice outcomes with those of other nations: We lock up more people, and for longer, than anyone else in the world. We continue to use the death penalty long after Europe abandoned it, we are the only country in the world to lock up juveniles for life, and we have prisoners serving fifty-year sentences for stealing videotapes from Kmart. Our courts offer little relief: the German Constitutional Court prohibits a sentence of life …


China Reexamined: The Worst Offender Or A Strong Contender?, Yang Wang Jan 2008

China Reexamined: The Worst Offender Or A Strong Contender?, Yang Wang

Michigan Law Review

These are the questions that Professor Randall Peerenboom sets out to answer from an American legal scholar's perspective in China Modernizes: Threat to the West or Model for the Rest. Peerenboom advances three main arguments in China Modernizes. First, to more accurately assess China's performance in its quest for modernization, one must "plac[e] China within a broader comparative context" (p. 10). Through a careful analysis of empirical data, Peerenboom observes that China outperforms many other countries at a similar income level on almost all key indicators of well-being and human rights, with the sole exception of civil and political …


Keeping The State Out: The Separation Of Law And State In Classical Islamic Law, Lubna A. Alam Apr 2007

Keeping The State Out: The Separation Of Law And State In Classical Islamic Law, Lubna A. Alam

Michigan Law Review

The implementation and enforcement of Islamic law, especially Islamic criminal law, by modem-day Muslim nation-states is fraught with controversy and challenges. In Pakistan, the documented problems and failures of the country's attempt to codify Islamic law on extramarital sexual relations have led to efforts to remove rape cases from Islamic law courts to civil law courts. In striking contrast to Pakistan's experience, the Republic of the Maldives recently commissioned a draft of a penal law and sentencing guidelines based on Islamic law that abides by international norms. The incorporation of Islamic law into the legal systems of various countries around …