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Full-Text Articles in Law

Perjury! The Charges And The Defenses, Richard H. Underwood Jul 1998

Perjury! The Charges And The Defenses, Richard H. Underwood

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

Perjury is the most hotly debated topic in America today. In this witty and instructive article, the author explains what constitutes the crime of perjury, provides examples of how defendants have sometimes avoided conviction, and discusses the impact of federal and state statutes on prosecutors, defendants, witnesses, the judiciary, the legislature, and society.


The Enforcement Of Prisoners’ Rights In The United States: An Access To The Courts Issue, Roberta M. Harding May 1998

The Enforcement Of Prisoners’ Rights In The United States: An Access To The Courts Issue, Roberta M. Harding

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

This article examines how the development and status of the rights of incarcerated people is significantly effected by their ability to access the judiciary; specifically the federal judicial system. The relatively recent explosion in the American prison population provided the impetus for researching this topic. The objective was to examine whether this tremendous rise in the number of people incarcerated in U.S. penal facilities had impacted the posture of the rights afforded to these individuals. One conclusion reached was that the rise in the prison population had harshly eroded the right of access to the courts. The exploration of the …


Coping With "Loss": A Re-Examination Of Sentencing Federal Economic Crimes Under The Guidelines, Frank O. Bowman Iii Apr 1998

Coping With "Loss": A Re-Examination Of Sentencing Federal Economic Crimes Under The Guidelines, Frank O. Bowman Iii

Faculty Publications

This Article has three objectives. First, it attempts to rethink the sentencing of federal economic criminals in light of the basic purposes of sentencing and of the Guidelines' particular structure and objectives. Second, it examines the deficiencies in the current sentencing guidelines regarding theft, fraud, and other economic crimes, and the problem areas in the case law construing those guidelines. Third, it proposes and analyzes a consolidated guideline, together with accompanying application notes, for sentencing virtually all theft and fraud cases (a draft of which follows the text of this Article as Appendix A).


The Aba's Proposed Moratorium On The Death Penalty: The American Bar Association And Federal Habeas Corpus, Larry Yackle Jan 1998

The Aba's Proposed Moratorium On The Death Penalty: The American Bar Association And Federal Habeas Corpus, Larry Yackle

Faculty Scholarship

The ABA explains its proposed moratorium on capital punishment in part on the ground that recent decisions rendered by the Supreme Court and legislation enacted by Congress limit the ability of prisoners under sentence of death to challenge their sentences in the federal courts.' According to the ABA, the Supreme Court has placed numerous hurdles in the path of prisoners who apply to the federal courts for a writ of habeas corpus, claiming that their convictions were obtained or their sentences were imposed in violation of federal law. Congress, for its part, has added even more barriers in Title I …


The Federal System As Bill Of Rights: Original Understandings, Modern Misreadings, Thomas B. Mcaffee Jan 1998

The Federal System As Bill Of Rights: Original Understandings, Modern Misreadings, Thomas B. Mcaffee

Scholarly Works

In the modern era, we have almost completely lost track of the relationship that the Framers of the United States Constitution perceived between the structure of our federal system and the protection of popular rights. At least two obvious components of this confusion persist. First, as we have come to think of rights almost exclusively in terms of the claims of individuals against the government, we have lost the ability to hear the Framers' voices referring to rights held by the people in their collective capacity, including the rights of the people within each of the sovereign states to be …


Substantial Assistance And Sentence Severity: Is There A Correlation Substantial Assistance, Ian Weinstein Jan 1998

Substantial Assistance And Sentence Severity: Is There A Correlation Substantial Assistance, Ian Weinstein

Faculty Scholarship

How much more severe are sentences imposed in districts with low substantial assistance rates than those in which the rate is very high? In the aggregate, not at all. At first blush this may puzzle readers because substantial assistance (SA) departures are very unevenly distributed across districts and SA accounts for nearly two-thirds of all downward departures, almost 7,900 of the 12,000 in fiscal 1996. Although this pattern could result in gross disparities among districts, my analysis of inter-district sentencing patterns reveals no statistically significant correlation between the rate of SA departures and the average length of sentences imposed in …


Forum Shopping For Arbitration Decisions: Federal Courts' Use Of Antisuit Injunctions Against State Courts, Jean R. Sternlight Jan 1998

Forum Shopping For Arbitration Decisions: Federal Courts' Use Of Antisuit Injunctions Against State Courts, Jean R. Sternlight

Scholarly Works

Arbitration clauses, which are supposed to do away with litigation, have ironically spawned many complicated and expensive court fights. Some of the most complex cases involve both forum shopping by the parties and jurisdictional turf battles between federal and state courts. Federal courts have, on quite a few occasions, actually gone so far as to enjoin a state court from continuing to consider a pending case because the federal court concluded that the matter ought to be arbitrated. The Supreme Court, however, has never ruled on whether or when such "arbitral antisuit injunctions" are permissible. In Moses H. Cone Memorial …