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 At the same time, fiscal necessity and moral outrage have prompted a historic reexamination of outdated policies that have led to an overreliance on incarceration and inefficiencies in the administration of criminal justice.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, …

Forgotten Fathers, Daniel L. Hatcher

All Faculty Scholarship

Poor fathers like John are largely forgotten, written off as a subset of the unworthy poor. These fathers struggle with poverty – often with near hopelessness – within multiple systems in which they are either entangled or overlooked, such as child-support and welfare programs, family courts, the criminal justice system, housing programs, and the healthcare, education, and foster-care systems. For these impoverished fathers, the “end of men” is often not simply a question for purposes of discussion but a fact that is all too real. In the instances in which poor fathers are not forgotten, they are targeted as causes …

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 …

Did Print Media’S Coverage Of White-Collar Crime Change After The ‘Bernie Madoff Scandal’?, Susan Wennermark

Honors Projects

The question guiding this research is: What are the meanings associated with white-collar crime in the media, and how, if at all, have those meanings changed in the wake of the ‘Bernie Madoff scandal’? This analysis explores how the newspaper article was framed (either episodic or thematic) and what labels were used to describe the crime and actors involved. Articles between 2007 and 2011 were analyzed, covering the year before the scandal to two years after Madoff was convicted in 2009. For framing, this analysis found that, unlike stories on poverty or street crimes which focus more on episodic themes, …

Understanding The Determinants Of U.S. District Court Judges' Decisions On Patriot Act Cases, Daniel Mccarthy

Honors Projects

Prior research on federal court judges suggests that their judgments are not made solely on legal principles, but on the basis of political ideology and “strategic anticipation” of the actions of reviewing courts. This study seeks to empirically test the role these factors play in Federal District Court decisions involving the U.S.A. Patriot Act of 2001. The results indicate that both political policy preference and strategic anticipation have an effect on the judicial decisions of U.S. District Court judges. Due to statistical complications, however, it was not possible to determine their relative effects on the outcomes of Patriot Act cases.

Against Neorehabilitation, Jessica M. Eaglin

Articles by Maurer Faculty

In the face of severe budget constraints, bipartisan calls for reform, dropping crime rates, and judicial intervention, states are seriously considering and implementing criminal justice reform to manage prison populations for the first time in three decades. Scholars agree that states need a guiding theory to transform emergency and short-term reforms into a long-term shift in policy and practice away from mass incarceration. Numerous scholars advocate for a return to an improved theory of rehabilitation to guide the states in implementing such reform. This return-through neorehabilitation, or the rehabilitation of rehabilitation-centers on the use of evidence-based programming and predictive tools …

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 …

Neorehabilitation And Indiana's Sentencing Reform Dilemma, Jessica M. Eaglin

Articles by Maurer Faculty

No abstract provided.

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 …

On The Role Of Cost-Benefit Analysis In Criminal Justice Policy: A Response To The Imprisoner's Dilemma, Sonja B. Starr

Articles

With one in 100 adult Americans behind bars, and prison budgets consuming an increasing share of state budgets, few social policy issues compare in significance to the debate over which criminal offenders should be incarcerated and for how long. David Abrams' article, The Impriasoner's Dilemma: A Cost-Benefit Approach to Incarceration,' makes an important contribution to that debate, offering an economic approach to assessing the net benefits of holding or freeing prisoners on the incarceration margin. In this short Response, I first highlight several strengths of Abrams' piece and discuss the possible case that could be made for incorporating formal cost-benefit …

Plata V. Brown And Realignment: Jails, Prisons, Courts, And Politics, Margo Schlanger

Articles

The year 2011 marked an important milestone in American institutional reform litigation. That year, a bare majority of the U.S. Supreme Court, in an opinion in Brown v. Plata by Justice Anthony Kennedy, affirmed a district court order requiring California to remedy its longstanding constitutional deficits in prison medical and mental health care by reducing prison crowding. Not since 1978 had the Court ratified a lower court's crowding-related order in a jail or prison case, and the order before the Court in 2011 was fairly aggressive; theoretically, it could have (although this was never a real prospect) induced the release …

Effective Trial Counsel After Martinez V. Ryan: Focusing On The Adequacy Of State Procedures, Eve Brensike Primus

Articles

Everyone knows that excessive caseloads, poor funding, and a lack of training plague indigent defense delivery systems throughout the states, such that the promise of Gideon v. Wainwright is largely unfulfilled. Commentators have disagreed about how best to breathe life into Gideon . Many disclaim any possibility that federal habeas corpus review of state criminal cases could catalyze reform give n the many procedural obstacle s that currently prevent state prisoners from getting into federal court. But the Supreme Court has recently taken a renewed interest in using federal habeas review to address the problem of ineffective attorneys in state …