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Full-Text Articles in Law
Reconceptualizing The Eighth Amendment: Slaves, Prisoners, And Cruel And Unusual Punishment, Alexander A. Reinert
Reconceptualizing The Eighth Amendment: Slaves, Prisoners, And Cruel And Unusual Punishment, Alexander A. Reinert
Articles
The meaning of the Eighth Amendment’s Cruel and Unusual Punishment Clause has long been hotly contested. For scholars and jurists who look to original meaning or intent, there is little direct contemporaneous evidence on which to rest any conclusion. For those who adopt a dynamic interpretive framework, the Supreme Court’s “evolving standards of decency” paradigm has surface appeal, but deep conflicts have arisen in application. This Article offers a contextual account of the Eighth Amendment’s meaning that addresses both of these interpretive frames by situating the Amendment in eighteenth and nineteenth-century legal standards governing relationships of subordination.
In particular, I …
Class Warfare: The Disappearance Of Low-Income Litigants From The Civil Docket, Myriam Gilles
Class Warfare: The Disappearance Of Low-Income Litigants From The Civil Docket, Myriam Gilles
Articles
In recent years, much attention has been paid to the startling disparities in income and wealth in contemporary U.S. society. The enormous concentration of economic power in the top 1% is the culmination of decades of significant income and wealth gains for the top, combined with stagnant or decreasing growth for the majority - a trend that continues apace. But nowhere is the gap more glaring than in the civil docket, where class actions brought by or on behalf of low-income consumers and employees are on the verge of disappearing.
To be sure, the decline in class actions is only …