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Full-Text Articles in Law
Assessing Fourth Amendment Challenges To Dna Extraction Statutes After Samson V. California, Charles J. Nerko
Assessing Fourth Amendment Challenges To Dna Extraction Statutes After Samson V. California, Charles J. Nerko
Fordham Law Review
DNA plays an indespensable role in modern law enforcement, and courts uniformly find that DNA extraction statutes targeting criminals satisfy the Fourth Amendment. Courts differ on which Fourth Amendment test--totality of the circumstances or special needs--ought to be employed in this context. This Note concludes the courts should apply Samson v. California's less stringent totality of the circumstances test to analyze DNA extraction statutes in order to maintain the integrity of the special needs test.
Harmless Constitutional Error And The Institutional Significance Of The Jury, Roger A. Fairfax, Jr.
Harmless Constitutional Error And The Institutional Significance Of The Jury, Roger A. Fairfax, Jr.
Fordham Law Review
Appellate harmless error review, an early twentieth-century innovation prompted by concerns of efficiency and finality, had been confined to nonconstitutional trial errors until forty years ago, when the U.S. Supreme Court extended the harmless error rule to trial errors of constitutional proportion. Even as criminal procedural protections were expanded in the latter half of the twentieth century, the harmless error rule operated to dilute the effect of many of these constitutional guarantees--the Sixth Amendment right to jury trial being no exception. However, while a trade-off between important process values and the Constitution's protection of individual rights is inherent in the …
Voluntarism, Vulnerability, And Criminal Law: A Response To Professors Hills And O'Hear , Ethan J. Leib, Dan Markel, Jennifer M. Collins
Voluntarism, Vulnerability, And Criminal Law: A Response To Professors Hills And O'Hear , Ethan J. Leib, Dan Markel, Jennifer M. Collins
Faculty Scholarship
This Response addresses the criticisms of our project by Professors Rick Hills and Michael O'Hear. Before we address those challenges, we first want to reiterate our gratitude to the B.U. Law Review for hosting an exchange based on our article, Punishing Family Status (forthcoming BU LR, December 2008), and to Professors Hills and O'Hear for their careful and subtle analysis of that article. Additionally, it's worth recapitulating what our bottom-line conclusions are so we can better see if there are any practical disagreements with our critics. Summarizing quickly: we support decriminalization in the cases of parental responsibility laws (based on …
Punishing Family Status , Jennifer M. Collins, Ethan J. Leib, Dan Markel
Punishing Family Status , Jennifer M. Collins, Ethan J. Leib, Dan Markel
Faculty Scholarship
This Article focuses upon two basic but under-explored questions: when does, and when should, the state use the criminal justice apparatus to burden individuals on account of their familial status? We address the first question in Part I by revealing a variety of laws permeating the criminal justice system that together form a string of family ties burdens, laws that impose punishment upon individuals on account of their familial status. The seven burdens we train our attention upon are omissions liability for failure to rescue, parental responsibility laws, incest, bigamy, adultery, nonpayment of child support, and nonpayment of parental support. …
To Act Or Not To Act: Will New York's Defeated Death Penalty Be Resurrected? , Diana N. Huffman
To Act Or Not To Act: Will New York's Defeated Death Penalty Be Resurrected? , Diana N. Huffman
Fordham Urban Law Journal
Capital punishment has always been a topic of controversy in the United States. The debate about the death penalty, its value as a way to permanently incapacitate society's most dangerous criminals and its effectiveness as a deterrent to violent crime, has increased. This phenomenon is particularly visible in New York State, where, in 2004, the New York Court of Appeals struck down the State's death penalty statute as invalid under the New York Constitution. This Note describes the evolution of New York's 1995 death penalty statute, analyzing the way in which the state legislature could respond to the statute's unconstitutionality, …