Law Commons^™

Dna Helps Clear Man's Name From Rape Charge After 24 Years, Colin Starger

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No abstract provided.

Flawed Coalitions And The Politics Of Crime, David Jaros

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Bipartisanship can be dangerous. In the late 1970s, liberal and conservative forces united to discard two centuries of federal sentencing practice and usher in an era of fixed guidelines that would reshape the criminal justice landscape. In the decades that followed, liberals would come to bitterly regret their alliance with conservative sentencing reformers. The guideline regime established by the Sentencing Reform Act ultimately advanced hardline conservative criminal justice goals that were antithetical to the objectives of many of the Act’s former liberal supporters.

Researchers have shown that a particular cognitive bias — cultural cognition — can explain why intense partisan …

Sharing Public Safety Helicopters, Henry H. Perritt Jr.

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No abstract provided.

Preempting The Police, David Jaros

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Fighting crime requires that we vest police with extensive discretion so that they can protect the public. Unfortunately, the nature of police work makes it difficult to ensure that law enforcement authority is not abused. This challenge is exacerbated by the fact that a great deal of questionable police activity exists in the legal shadows — unregulated practices that do not violate defined legal limits because they have generally eluded both judicial and legislative scrutiny. Local law enforcement strategies, like the maintenance of unauthorized police DNA databases and the routine practice of initiating casual street encounters, threaten fundamental notions of …

Foreword: The Death Penalty In Decline: From Colonial America To The Present, John Bessler

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This Article traces the history of capital punishment in America. It describes the death penalty's curtailment in colonial Pennsylvania by William Penn, and the substantial influence of the Italian philosopher Cesare Beccaria -- the first Enlightenment thinker to advocate the abolition of executions -- on the Founding Fathers' views. The Article also describes the transition away from "sanguinary" laws and punishments toward the "penitentiary system" and highlights the U.S. penal system's abandonment of non-lethal corporal punishments.

Marxist And Soviet Law, Stephen C. Thaman

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This chapter addresses both the Marxist critique of law before the Russian Revolution and the development of the Soviet Law Structure. It discusses the three main trends in Soviet Criminal Law before elucidating how these trends affected the General Part and the Special Part of Soviet Criminal Codes and overall Soviet criminal policy.

Further Reflections On The Pardoning Power: Reply To Hoskins And Drinan, Chad Flanders

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Galifianakis: "First question. In 2013, you pardoned a turkey. What do you have planned for 2014?"

Obama: "We'll probably pardon another turkey". ¹

First, let me express my gratitude to the incisive comments of Zach Hoskins and Cara Drinan. I have long been a fan of Hoskins' s work, and his forthcoming book on the collateral consequences of punishment promises to be pathbreaking.² The influence of Drinan's scholarship on the pardoning power³ is evident in my original essay⁴ and her newer work on the Graham case has again inspired me in new directions in my research.^{5 …}

Can Retributivism Be Saved?, Chad Flanders

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Retributive tbeory has long held pride of place among theories of criminal punishment in both philosophy and in law. It has seemed, at various times, either much more intuitive, or rationally persuasive, or simply more normatively right than other theories. But retributive theory is limited, both in theory and practice, and in many of its versions is best conceived not as a theory of punishment in its own right, but instead as shorthand for a set of constraints on the exercise of punishment. Whether some version of retributive theory is a live possibility in the contemporary world remains very much …

A Home With Dignity: Domestic Violence And Property Rights, Margaret E. Johnson

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This Article argues that the legal system should do more to address intimate partner violence and each party's need for a home for several reasons. First, domestic violence is a leading cause of individual and family homelessness. Second, the struggle over rights to a shared home can increase the violence to which the woman is subjected. And third, a woman who decides to continue to live with the person who abused her receives little or no legal support, despite the evidence that this decision could most effectively reduce the violence. The legal system's current failings result from its limited goals-achieving …