Law Commons^™

Plea Bargaining And Disclosure In Germany And The United States: Comparative Lessons, Jenia I. Turner

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

This article analyzes recent trends in plea bargaining and disclosure of evidence in Germany and the United States. Over the last two decades, a number of U.S. jurisdictions have adopted rules requiring broader and earlier discovery in criminal cases. This development reflects a growing consensus that, in a system that resolves most of its cases through guilty pleas, early and extensive disclosure is necessary to ensure fair and informed outcomes.

The introduction of broader discovery in criminal cases in the United States aligns our rules more closely with German rules on access to the investigative file. At the same time, …

Evidence Laundering In A Post-Herring World, Kay L. Levine, Jenia I. Turner, Ronald F. Wright

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

The Supreme Court’s decision in Herring v. United States authorizes police to defeat the Fourth Amendment’s protections through a process we call evidence laundering. Evidence laundering occurs when one police officer makes a constitutional mistake when gathering evidence and then passes that evidence along to a second officer, who develops it further and then delivers it to prosecutors for use in a criminal case. When courts admit the evidence based on the good faith of the second officer, the original constitutional taint disappears in the wash.

In the years since Herring was decided, courts have allowed evidence laundering in a …

Interstate Conflict And Cooperation In Criminal Cases: An American Perspective, Jenia I. Turner

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

Over the last decade, the European Union has adopted legislation that calls for the mutual recognition of arrest warrants, investigation orders, and penal judgments. These laws have aimed to strengthen the Union’s response to transnational crime, and EU policymakers are currently considering legislation to further harmonize the Union's law enforcement efforts. This Article compares these developments within the EU to the U.S. legal framework on mutual recognition in criminal matters. It examines the individual, state and systemic interests that U.S. state courts have considered in deciding whether to recognize other states' judgments, warrants, or investigative actions. These competing interests have …

A Community Of Procedure Scholars: Teaching Procedure And The Legal Academy, Elizabeth G. Thornburg, Erik S. Knutsen, Carla Crifo, Camille Cameron

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

This article asks whether the way in which procedure is taught has an impact on the extent and accomplishments of a scholarly community of proceduralists. Not surprisingly, we find a strong correlation between the placement of procedure as a required course in an academic context and the resulting body of scholars and scholarship. Those countries in which more civil procedure is taught as part of a university degree — and in which procedure is recognized as a legitimate academic subject — have larger scholarly communities, a larger and broader corpus of works analyzing procedural issues, and a richer web of …

Prosecutors And Bargaining In Weak Cases: A Comparative View, Jenia I. Turner

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

One of the most controversial uses of prosecutorial discretion in plea bargaining concerns cases involving weak evidence of guilt. When a prosecutor bargains about the charges or even the facts in a case with weak evidence, at least three problems may arise. First, if the charge bargain is generous, it may coerce an innocent defendant to plead guilty. Second, such a bargain may let a guilty defendant off too easily, thus disserving the public and victim’s interests. Third, if the parties bargain about the facts, the result may distort the truth of the case.

In this book chapter, I examine …

Wto-Compliant Protection Of Fundamental Rights: Lessons From The Eu Privacy Directive, Carla L. Reyes

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

Nation states often create legislative schemes regulating services industries in order to protect fundamental rights such as human life, economic security, or human security. World Trade Organization members are constrained in their creation of such regulatory schemes by their obligations under the General Agreement on Trade in Services (‘GATS’). WTO members raised concerns about such constraints even before the creation of GATS. As a result, GATS contains clauses specifically designed to allow members enough regulatory latitude to protect important domestic social interests, such as fundamental rights, while simultaneously liberalising trade in services. WTO jurisprudence interpreting these clauses, however, has called …

The Case Of Colonel Abel, Jeffrey D. Kahn

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

In June 2010, journalists for the Associated Press reported the arrest of ten Russian spies, all suspected of being “deep-cover” illegal agents in the United States. Seeking to convey the magnitude of this event, the journalists wrote in the first paragraphs of their article that this “blockbuster series of arrests” might even be as significant as the FBI’s “famous capture of Soviet Col. Rudolf Abel in 1957 in New York.” Colonel Abel’s story of American justice at a time of acute anxiety about the nation’s security is one that continues to resonate today. The honor, and error, that is contained …

Presentation Of Jeffrey Kahn, Jeffrey D. Kahn

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

This short essay is based on remarks given at the Kennan Institute at the conference ‘The Russian Constitution at Fifteen: Assessments and Current Challenges to Russia’s Legal Development’. A central focus of these remarks is the undoing of the federal system described in the 1993 Constitution.

Notice Otherwise Given: Will In Absentia Trials At The Special Tribunal For Lebanon Violate Human Rights?, Chris Jenks

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

On March 1, 2009, the Special Tribunal for Lebanon (STL) commenced operations in the Netherlands. The mandate of the STL is to try those allegedly responsible for the 2005 bombing in Beirut which killed former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri. A collaborative effort between Lebanon and the United Nations, the STL is to be of “international character based on the highest standards of justice.” However, the STL’s in absentia trial provisions are based on a far different, and lower, standard. This article posits that the STL’s in absentia trial provisions violate human rights norms, indeed the U.N. expressly rejected such …

Toward A Sui Generis View Of Black Rights In Canada - Overcoming The Difference-Denial Model Of Countering Anti-Black Racism, Lolita Buckner Inniss

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

No abstract provided.

Judicial Participation In Plea Negotiations: A Comparative View, Jenia I. Turner

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

Current rules in most U.S. jurisdictions prohibit judges from becoming involved in plea negotiations and limit the judges' role to reviewing a plea bargain once it is presented by the parties. The enclosed article surveys three systems that provide for more significant judicial involvement - Germany, Florida, and Connecticut - and suggests that a judge's early input into plea negotiations can render the final disposition more accurate and procedurally just. Based on interviews with practitioners and a review of the case law, the article outlines a model for greater judicial involvement in plea negotiations.

Federalism, Democratization, And The Rule Of Law In Russia, Jeffrey D. Kahn

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

Combining the approaches of three fields of scholarship - political science, law and Russian area studies - the author of this 2002 Oxford University Press book explores the foundations and future of the Russian Federation. Russia's political elite have struggled to build an extraordinarily complex federal system, one that incorporates eighty-nine different units and scores of different ethnic groups, which sometimes harbor long histories of resentment against Russian imperial and Soviet legacies. This book examines the public debates, official documents and political deals that built Russia's federal house on very unsteady foundations, often out of the ideological, conceptual and physical …

Putin's Federal Reforms: A Legal-Institutional Perspective, Jeffrey D. Kahn

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

The first year of Putin's presidency proved to be the most concerted and fundamental shake-up of federal relations in Russia since the 1993 Constitution. This paper examines this transition in detail, focusing attention on the legal-institutional aspects of this dramatic shift in policy. First, the end of Yeltsin's 'parade' - of sovereignties, bilateral treaties and special agreements - is examined. Next, attention is paid to Putin's early decrees: 'positive' decrees creating the seven federal districts and federal envoys, and 'negative' decrees that annulled regional laws and legal acts judged by him not to be in conformity with federal law. Finally, …

What Is The New Russian Federalism?, Jeffrey D. Kahn

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

With the sudden rise of Vladimir Putin, Russian federalism made another volte-face. The ambiguous enforceability of Yeltsin's bilateral treaties with the Russian Federation’s non-Russian ethnic republics (formerly ASSRs) - never ratified by legislatures - was made clear by Putin's disregard for executive promises that no longer suited his interests. One of Putin's first presidential decrees, signed days after his inauguration, divided Russia into seven federal districts, each encompassing several republics, oblasts, and okrugs, and each headed by a presidential enforcer tasked to maintain the supremacy of federal law. Lists were rumoured to circulate in the Kremlin of regional leaders to …

The Recent Asian Financial Crises: Possible Lessons And Implications For South Africa, Joseph J. Norton

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

No abstract provided.

Towards An International Financial Centre For Greater China: Hong Kong And Infrastructural Reform, Joseph J. Norton

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

No abstract provided.

Comparing United States And New Zealand Legal Education: Are U.S. Law Schools Too Good?, Gregory S. Crespi

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

This Article offers a comparison of the legal education systems of the United States and New Zealand. While it was originally published in 1997 in the Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law, and has been largely overlooked in more recent years, it is germane to the current vigorous debate regarding what changes need to be made in American legal education. I highlight in this Article several significant differences between these two systems by contrasting their admissions policies, clinical programs, availability of "law-and-economics" electives, and staffing of required courses. Based on this analysis, I concluded that although American law schools were clearly …

As The World Turns: Revisiting Rudolf Schlesinger's Study Of The Uniform Commercial Code In The Light Of Comparative Law, Peter Winship

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

Problems of commercial law are apt to be similar or at least comparable in all commercial countries, so that in this field, perhaps more than in any other, foreign experience is likely to be instructive. As was said by a leading English scholar, "The value of comparative investigation of commercial law is so obvious as to make it unnecessary to labour the point."

External And Internal Crossroads For Banking Supervision In Southern Africa, Joseph J. Norton

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

No abstract provided.

United States Securities Laws: A Transnational Perspective, Joseph J. Norton

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

No abstract provided.