Law Commons^™

The Right To Appeal, Cassandra Burke Robertson

Faculty Publications

It is time for the Supreme Court to explicitly recognize a constitutional right to appeal. Over the last century, both the federal and state judicial systems have increasingly relied on appellate remedies to protect essential rights. In spite of the modern importance of such remedies, however, the Supreme Court has repeatedly declined to recognize a due-process right to appeal in either civil or criminal cases. Instead, it has repeated nineteenth-century dicta denying the right of appeal, and it has declined petitions for certiorari in both civil and criminal cases seeking to persuade the Court to reconsider that position.

In this …

Prosecuting Those Bearing 'Greatest Responsibility': The Lessons Of The Special Court For Sierra Leone, Charles Chernor Jalloh

Faculty Publications

This Article examines the controversial article 1(1) of the Statute of the Special Court for Sierra Leone (SCSL) giving that tribunal the competence “to prosecute those who bear the greatest responsibility” for serious international and domestic crimes committed during the latter part of the notoriously brutal Sierra Leonean conflict. The debate that arose during the SCSL trials was whether this bare statement constituted a jurisdictional requirement that the prosecution must prove beyond a reasonable doubt or merely a type of guideline for the exercise of prosecutorial discretion. The judges of the court split on the issue. This paper is the …