Law Commons^™

Teaching 'The Wire': Fiction As Pedagogical Tool, Roger Fairfax

Presentations

No abstract provided.

Searching For Solutions To The Indigent Defense Crisis In The Broader Criminal Justice Reform Agenda, Roger Fairfax

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

As we mark the fiftieth anniversary of the Gideon v. Wainwright decision, the nearly universal assessment is that our indigent defense system remains too under-resourced and overwhelmed to fulfill the promise of the landmark decision, and needs to be reformed. At the same time, fiscal necessity and moral outrage have prompted a historic reexamination of outdated policies that have led to an overreliance on incarceration and inefficiencies in the administration of criminal justice. This Essay argues that there are synergies between the indigent defense reform agenda and the broader criminal justice reform agenda, which places a premium on cost-effective, evidence-based, …

Drugs, Dignity And Danger: Human Dignity As A Constitutional Constraint To Limit Overcriminalization, Michal Buchhandler-Raphael

Scholarly Articles

This Article proposes a constitutional constraint to limit criminalization of victimless crimes and, particularly, to alleviate the pressures on the criminal justice system emanating from its continuous “war on drugs.” To accomplish this goal, the Article explores the concept of human dignity, a fundamental right yet to be invoked in the context of substantive criminal law. The U.S. Supreme Court’s jurisprudence invokes conflicting accounts of human dignity: liberty as dignity, on the one hand, and communitarian virtue as dignity, on the other. However, the Court has not yet developed a workable mechanism to reconcile these competing concepts in cases where …

Online Mental Disability Law Education, A Disability Rights Tribunal, And The Creation Of An Asian Disability Law Database: Their Impact On Research, Training And Teaching Of Law, Criminology Criminal Justice In Asia, Michael L. Perlin, Heather Ellis Cucolo, Yoshikazu Ikehara

Articles & Chapters

Two professors at New York Law School (NYLS) and the director of the Tokyo Advocacy Law Office are engaged in initiatives with the potential to have major influences on the study of law, criminology, and criminal justice: the creation of a Disability Rights Tribunal for Asia and the Pacific (DRTAP), and expansion of NYLS’s online mental disability law program (OMDLP) to include numerous Asian venues.

DRTAP seeks to create a sub-regional body (a Commission and eventually a Court) to hear violations of the UN’s Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. This will explicitly inspire scholarship about issues such …

Positive Obligations And Criminal Justice: Duties To Protect Or Coerce?, Liora Lazarus

All Faculty Publications

This chapter explores the relationship between criminal law, criminal process and human rights from a slightly different perspective. It demonstrates that while human rights may well be used to limit the excesses of security and law and order politics, the nature of the relationship between human rights and criminal justice cannot be captured alone by the view of rights as a limit on the coercive reach of the criminal law and criminal justice institutions. Increasingly, human rights, cast as positive rights, have resulted in claims for the extension of the criminal law, the creation of preventative duties or ‘protective policing …

The Exit Myth: Family Law, Gender Roles, And Changing Attitudes Toward Female Victims Of Domestic Violence, Carolyn B. Ramsey

Publications

This Article presents a hypothesis suggesting how and why the criminal justice response to domestic violence changed, over the course of the twentieth century, from sympathy for abused women and a surprising degree of state intervention in intimate relationships to the apathy and discrimination that the battered women' movement exposed. The riddle of declining public sympathy for female victims of intimate-partner violence can only be solved by looking beyond the criminal law to the social and legal changes that created the Exit Myth.

While the situation that gave rise to the battered women's movement in the 1970s is often presumed …

Interpersonal Power In The Criminal System, Kimberly A. Thomas

Articles

This Article identifies the workings of interpersonal power in the criminal system and considers the effect of these cases on criminal theory and practice. By uncovering this phenomenon, this Article hopes to spark a legal academic dialogue and inquiry that has, until now, been unspoken. This Article has roots in my former work as a Philadelphia public defender and in my current work as a clinical professor with students who appear in criminal and juvenile court. As an advocate for the poor in a busy courthouse, one of a lawyer's tasks is to discover the multiple "real" stories behind the …