Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®
Articles 1 - 12 of 12
Full-Text Articles in Law
The Effect Of Statutory Rape Laws On Teen Birth Rates, Michael D. Frakes, Matthew C. Harding
The Effect Of Statutory Rape Laws On Teen Birth Rates, Michael D. Frakes, Matthew C. Harding
Faculty Scholarship
Policymakers have often been explicit in expanding statutory rape laws to reduce teenage pregnancies and live births by teenage mothers, often with the goal of reducing associated welfare outlays. In this paper, we explore whether expansions in such laws are indeed associated with reductions in teen birth rates. In order to codify statutory-rape-law expansions, we use a national micro-level sample of sexual encounters to simulate the degree to which such encounters generally implicate the relevant laws. By codifying statutory-rape laws in terms of their potential reach into sexual encounters, as opposed to using crude binary treatment variables, this simulation approach …
Culpability And Modern Crime, Samuel W. Buell
Culpability And Modern Crime, Samuel W. Buell
Faculty Scholarship
Criminal law has developed to prohibit new forms of intrusion on the autonomy and mental processes of others. Examples include modern understandings of fraud, extortion, and bribery, which pivot on the concepts of deception, coercion, and improper influence. Sometimes core offenses develop to include similar concepts, such as when reforms in the law of sexual assault make consent almost exclusively material. Many of these projects are laudable. But progressive programs in substantive criminal law can raise difficult problems of culpability. Modern iterations of criminal offenses often draw lines using concepts involving relative mental states among persons whose conduct is embedded …
“White Collar” Crimes, Samuel W. Buell
“White Collar” Crimes, Samuel W. Buell
Faculty Scholarship
In addition to serving as a précis of the subject of ‘white collar’ crime, this chapter does three things. First, it deals with white collar crime’s longstanding definitional problem, rejecting several standard approaches and arguing that the category is most usefully understood according to the conceptual legal problem these offenses generate. White collar crimes, much more than other offenses, are committed in social settings in which undesirable behaviors are embedded within socially welcome conduct. Thus they are difficult to set apart and extract through clearly specified ex ante rules of law. Second, the chapter illustrates this definitional claim, and discusses …
Public Opinion And The Abolition Or Retention Of The Death Penalty Why Is The United States Different?, Sara Sun Beale
Public Opinion And The Abolition Or Retention Of The Death Penalty Why Is The United States Different?, Sara Sun Beale
Faculty Scholarship
What explains the difference between the United States and the many other countries that have abolished capital punishment? Because the United States and many other nations that have abolished the death penalty are democracies, there seems to be an obvious answer: abolition or retention reflects the preferences of the electorate. According to this view, the U.S. electorate is simply more punitive, and the question becomes explaining the difference in national attitudes. There is some truth to this explanation. As I have argued elsewhere, the U.S. public generally does favor punitive criminal justice policies. But that cannot be the whole story. …
The Story Of Ewing: Three Strikes Laws And The Limits Of The Eighth Amendment Proportionality Review, Sara Sun Beale
The Story Of Ewing: Three Strikes Laws And The Limits Of The Eighth Amendment Proportionality Review, Sara Sun Beale
Faculty Scholarship
In 1994 California enacted the nation's harshest "three strikes" law. Under this law, any felony can serve as a third strike, and conviction of a third strike requires a mandatory prison sentence of 25 years to life. In Ewing v. California, 538 U.S. 11 (2003), the Supreme Court held that sending a drug addict who shoplifted three golf clubs to prison for 25 years to life under the three strikes law did not violate the cruel and unusual punishment clause of the Eighth Amendment. The chapter for the forthcoming Criminal Law Stories tells the story of the Ewing case, describing …
The Federal Common Law Crime Of Corruption, Lisa Kern Griffin
The Federal Common Law Crime Of Corruption, Lisa Kern Griffin
Faculty Scholarship
This contribution to the North Carolina Law Review’s 2010 symposium, Adaptation and Resiliency in Legal Systems, considers the compatibility between the common law nature of honest services fraud and the dynamic quality of public integrity offenses. Corruption enforcement became a focal point of recent debates about over- criminalization because it typifies expansive legislative mandates for prosecutors and implicit delegations to courts. Federal prosecutions of political corruption have relied primarily on an open-textured provision: 18 U.S.C. § 1346, the honest services extension of the mail fraud statute. Section 1346 raises notice concerns because it contains few self-limiting terms, but it has …
The Upside Of Overbreadth, Samuel W. Buell
The Upside Of Overbreadth, Samuel W. Buell
Faculty Scholarship
Overbreadth in criminal liability rules, especially in federal law, is abundant and much lamented. Overbreadth is avoidable if it results from normative mistakes about how much conduct to criminalize or from insufficient care to limit open texture in statutes. Social planners cannot so easily avoid overbreadth if they cannot reach behaviors for which criminalization is well justified without also reaching behaviors for which it is not. This mismatch problem is acute if persons engaging in properly criminalized behaviors deliberately alter their conduct to avoid punishment and have resources to devote to avoidance efforts. In response to such efforts, legal actors …
When Does An Unsafe Act Become A Crime?, Charles J. Dunlap Jr.
When Does An Unsafe Act Become A Crime?, Charles J. Dunlap Jr.
Faculty Scholarship
No abstract provided.
Federal Use Of State Institutions In The Administration Of Criminal Justice, Paul D. Carrington
Federal Use Of State Institutions In The Administration Of Criminal Justice, Paul D. Carrington
Faculty Scholarship
No abstract provided.
Dual Sovereignty, Federalism And National Criminal Law: Modernist Constitutional Doctrine And The Nonrole Of The Supreme Court, William W. Van Alstyne
Dual Sovereignty, Federalism And National Criminal Law: Modernist Constitutional Doctrine And The Nonrole Of The Supreme Court, William W. Van Alstyne
Faculty Scholarship
This paper examines the growing movement away from the functional nature of federalism contained within the Constitution toward a federalist system that gives extensive discretion to Congress and is only limited by political checks. This political system of federalism has limited the role of the Court in national criminal law because of the deference the Court is expected to give Congress.
Crime Talk, Rights Talk, And Double-Talk: Thoughts On Reading Encyclopedia Of Crime And Justice (Review Essay), Michael E. Tigar
Crime Talk, Rights Talk, And Double-Talk: Thoughts On Reading Encyclopedia Of Crime And Justice (Review Essay), Michael E. Tigar
Faculty Scholarship
No abstract provided.
Main Trends In The Soviet Reform Of Criminal Law, Kazimierz Grzybowski
Main Trends In The Soviet Reform Of Criminal Law, Kazimierz Grzybowski
Faculty Scholarship
No abstract provided.