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Full-Text Articles in Law
Lawyers Democratic Dysfunction, Leah Litman
Lawyers Democratic Dysfunction, Leah Litman
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As part of the symposium on Jack Balkin and Sandy Levinson’s Democracy and Dysfunction, this Article documents another source of the dysfunction that the authors observe—elite lawyers’ unwillingness to break ranks with other elite lawyers who participate in the destruction of various norms that are integral to a well-functioning democracy. These network effects eliminate the possibility of “soft” sanctions on norm violators such as withholding future professional advancement. Thus, rather than enforcing norms and deterring norm violations, the networks serve to insulate norm violators from any meaningful accountability.
Winks, Whispers, And Prosecutorial Discretion In Rural Iowa, 1925-1928, Emily Prifogle
Winks, Whispers, And Prosecutorial Discretion In Rural Iowa, 1925-1928, Emily Prifogle
Articles
Through the eyes of Charles Pendleton’s memoirs, this article walks through a rural community with a county attorney to consider how race, religion, gender, and sexuality influenced rural prosecutorial discretion in the early twentieth century. Rural communities like those in Buena Vista County, Iowa, where the article is centered, experienced “the law” through distinctly isolated geographies and social networks that lacked anonymity and thus shaped available methods of conflict resolution. But anonymity did not mean homogeneity. Ethnic, racial, and religious diversity created divisions within a community where social distance between individuals was small. Both onymity and diversity shaped who should …