Law Commons^™

Grand Jury Innovation: Toward A Functional Makeover Of The Ancient Bulwark Of Liberty, Roger Fairfax

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

The grand jury is a "much maligned" organ of the criminal justice system.' Regularly employed in only about half of the states and grudgingly tolerated in the federal system,2 the American grand jury for two centuries has been criticized as costly, ineffective, overly-compliant, and redundant. Prescriptions have ranged from reforms designed to improve the grand jury's performance of its traditional filtering and charging functions to the outright abolition of the grand jury. Consequently, much of the scholarly defense of the grand jury seemingly has done little more than attempt to justify its very existence.

This Article seeks to take the …

Returning Prosecutions To The States: A Proposal For A Criminal Justice Restoration Act, John A. Humbach

Elisabeth Haub School of Law Faculty Publications

The expensive and largely redundant Federal justice bureaucracy could be reduced to a fraction of its size by restoring to the states their traditional role of prosecuting crimes that fall under state jurisdiction. Returning criminal justice functions to the states can not only reduce the impact and effective reach of Federal power but can also achieve a surprisingly substantial decrease in Federal spending.

A small change in the wording of an existing Federal statute could accomplish the restoration.

This essay sets out and briefly analyses such a proposal.

Preventable Error: A Report On Prosecutorial Misconduct In California 1997–2009, Kathleen M. Ridolfi, Maurice Possley, Northern California Innocence Project

Northern California Innocence Project Publications

Preventable Error: A Report on Prosecutorial Misconduct in California 1997–2009 is the most comprehensive, up-to-date, quantitative and actionable study on the extent of prosecutorial misconduct in California, how the justice system identifies and addresses it, and its cost and consequences, including the wrongful conviction of innocent people. By shining a light on prosecutorial conduct, this groundbreaking research, the work of leading experts in the field from the highly respected legal resource, NCIP, will serve as a catalyst for reform.

Realism, Punishment & Reform [A Reply To Braman, Kahan, And Hoffman, "Some Realism About Punishment Naturalism”], Paul H. Robinson, Owen D. Jones, Robert O. Kurzban

All Faculty Scholarship

Professors Donald Braman, Dan Kahan, and David Hoffman, in their article "Some Realism About Punishment Naturalism," to be published in an upcoming issue of the University of Chicago Law Review, critique a series of our articles: Concordance and Conflict in Intuitions of Justice (http://ssrn.com/abstract=932067), The Origins of Shared Intuitions of Justice (http://.ssrn.com/abstract=952726), and Intuitions of Justice: Implications for Criminal Law and Justice Policy (http://.ssrn.com/abstract=976026). Our reply, here, follows their article in that coming issue. As we demonstrate, they have misunderstood our views on, and thus the implications of, widespread agreement about punishing the "core" of wrongdoing. Although much of their …

Do Judges Vary In Their Treatment Of Race?, David S. Abrams, Marianne Bertrand, Sendhil Mullainathan

All Faculty Scholarship

Are minorities treated differently by the legal system? Systematic racial differences in case characteristics, many unobservable, make this a difficult question to answer directly. In this paper, we estimate whether judges differ from each other in how they sentence minorities, avoiding potential bias from unobservable case characteristics by exploiting the random assignment of cases to judges. We measure the between-judge variation in the difference in incarceration rates and sentence lengths between African-American and White defendants. We perform a Monte Carlo simulation in order to explicitly construct the appropriate counterfactual, where race does not influence judicial sentencing. In our data set, …

Death Penalty Cases Impose Singular Burden, Judith L. Ritter, Ross Kleinstuber

Judith L Ritter

No abstract provided.

Justice For All: Victim Lost In The Legal Shuffle, Dana Harrington Conner

Dana Harrington Conner

No abstract provided.

A Criminal Justice System That Works, Alan E. Garfield

Alan E Garfield

No abstract provided.

The Construction Of Responsibility In The Criminal Law, Richard C. Boldt

Richard C. Boldt

No abstract provided.

Restitution, Criminal Law, And The Ideology Of Individuality, Richard C. Boldt

Richard C. Boldt

No abstract provided.

Crime And Sacred Spaces In Early Modern Poland, Magda Teter

Magda Teter

This principle of intersection between action and sacredness was shared by both Jews and Christians. Both Christian and Jewish religious elites highlighted differences between sacred. In Catholicism, validation of space required a consecration by a bishop in preparation for the ritual of the Eucharist. Church vessels were viewed as sacred in relation to the Eucharist. The Eucharist defined levels of sacredness. The controversy over the nature of the Eucharist during the Reformation, challenged the notion of Christian sacred place. After the Reformation, in the minds of the church, and in Poland increasingly also in the minds of the secular courts, …

Jamming The Revolving Door: Legislative Setbacks For Mental Health Court Systems In Virginia, Sheila Moheb

Law Student Publications

Part II of this comment will discuss the existing issues that effectuate the tension between the criminal justice system and mentally ill offenders, which provides important context to the debate surrounding the establishment of MHCs. Part III will examine the recent federal support for alternative approaches to handling mentally ill offenders and the different operational tactics implemented by existing MHC programs. Finally, Part IV will study the launch of Virginia’s first MHC in Norfolk, while exploring the latest legislative defeat in Virginia, Senate Bill 158 of the 2010 General Assembly, which sought to establish MHCs statewide.

Allshouse V. Pennsylvania, Brief Of The National Association Of Criminal Defense Lawyers, The Pennsylvania Association Of Criminal Defense Lawyers, The Public Defender Association Of Pennsylvania, And The Defender Association Of Philadelphia, As Amici Curiae On Behalf Of Petitioner, Jules Epstein

Jules Epstein

No abstract provided.

Constitutionality Of Cyberbullying Laws: Keeping The Online Playground Safe For Both Teens And Free Speech, Alison V. King

Vanderbilt Law Review

The Internet is a blessing and a curse. Along with the manifold benefits the Internet provides-electronic research, instantaneous news, social networking, online shopping, to name a few-comes a host of dangers: online harassment and cyberbullying, hacking, voyeurism, identity theft, phishing, and perhaps still more perils that have yet to appear. The Internet creates a virtual world that can result in very real consequences for people's lives. This creates a challenge for parents, schools, and policymakers attempting to keep pace with rapidly developing technologies and to provide adequate protections for children. The even greater challenge, however, is to balance these vital …

A Sense Of Duty: The Illusory Criminal Jurisdiction Of The U.S./Iraq Status Of Forces Agreement, Chris Jenks

San Diego International Law Journal

This Article will examine the Iraq SOFA’s use of duty status as a basis for determining which State has primary jurisdiction over U.S. service members for alleged criminal misconduct in Iraq. In the third section, the Article will briefly explain what a SOFA is, and how and why they are used, focusing on the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) SOFA. This section will also utilize examples of U.S. service member misconduct, both associated with and detached from official duty, to illustrate the application of an acts-based SOFA jurisdiction article. The fourth section turns to the Iraq SOFA’s status-based jurisdiction article, …

Punishment As Suffering, David C. Gray

Faculty Scholarship

In a series of recent high-profile articles, a group of contemporary scholars argue that the criminal law is a grand machine for the administration of suffering. The machine requires calibration, of course. The main standard we use for ours is objective proportionality. We generally punish more serious crimes more severely and aim to inflict the same punishment on similarly situated offenders who commit similar crimes. In the views of these authors, this focus on objective proportionality makes ours a rather crude machine. In particular, it ignores the fact that 1) different offenders may suffer to a different degree when subjected …

Accountability For System Criminality, Mark A. Drumbl

Scholarly Articles

Not available.

Taking Prevention Seriously: Developing A Comprehensive Response To Child Trafficking And Sexual Exploitation, Jonathan Todres

Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law

Millions of children are victims of trafficking and commercial sexual exploitation each year. Governments have responded with a range of measures, focusing primarily on seeking to prosecute perpetrators of these abuses and offering assistance to select victims. These efforts, while important, have done little to reduce the incidence of these forms of child exploitation. This Article asserts that a central reason why efforts to date may not be as effective as hoped is that governments have not oriented their approaches properly toward prioritizing prevention--the ultimate goal--and addressing these problems in a comprehensive and systematic manner. Instead, efforts to date have …

Realism, Punishment, And Reform, Owen D. Jones, Paul H. Robinson, Robert Kurzban

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

Professors Donald Braman, Dan Kahan, and David Hoffman, in their article "Some Realism About Punishment Naturalism," to be published in an upcoming issue of the University of Chicago Law Review, critique a series of our articles: Concordance and Conflict in Intuitions of Justice (http://ssrn.com/abstract=932067), The Origins of Shared Intuitions of Justice (http://ssrn.com/abstract=952726), and Intuitions of Justice: Implications for Criminal Law and Justice Policy (http://ssrn.com/abstract=976026). Our reply, here, follows their article in that coming issue.

As we demonstrate, they have misunderstood our views on, and thus the implications of, widespread agreement about punishing the "core" of wrongdoing. Although much of their …

Intuitions Of Punishment, Owen D. Jones, Robert Kurzban

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

Recent work reveals, contrary to wide-spread assumptions, remarkably high levels of agreement about how to rank order, by blameworthiness, wrongs that involve physical harms, takings of property, or deception in exchanges. In The Origins of Shared Intuitions of Justice (http://ssrn.com/abstract=952726) we proposed a new explanation for these unexpectedly high levels of agreement.

Elsewhere in this issue, Professors Braman, Kahan, and Hoffman offer a critique of our views, to which we reply here. Our reply clarifies a number of important issues, such as the interconnected roles that culture, variation, and evolutionary processes play in generating intuitions of punishment.

Liberty Lost: The Moral Case For Marijuana Law Reform, Eric Blumenson, Eva Nilsen

Indiana Law Journal

Marijuana policy analyses typically focus on the relative costs and benefits of present policy and its feasible alternatives. This Essay addresses a prior, threshold issue: whether marijuana criminal laws abridge fundamental individual rights, and if so, whether there are grounds that justify doing so. Over 700, 000 people are arrested annually for simple marijuana possession, a small but significant proportion of the 100 million Americans who have committed the same crime. In this Essay, we present a civil libertarian case for repealing marijuana possession laws. We put forward two arguments corresponding to the two distinct liberty concerns implicated by laws …

A Defensible Defense?: Reexamining Castle Doctrine Statutes, Benjamin Levin

Publications

Recent years have seen a proliferation of so-called “castle doctrine” statutes – laws that provide home dwellers with more expansive self-defense protections if they resort to lethal force in confrontations with intruders. The passage of such laws and subsequent uses of the defense have captured the public imagination, prompting significant media attention, as well as skeptical and critical scholarship from the legal academic community.

Considering the current prevalence of castle laws and the often polarized nature of the debate concerning their application, this Article argues that it is important to excavate the doctrine from the culture wars rhetoric in which …

When Family Matters, Alafair Burke

Hofstra Law Faculty Scholarship

In Privilege or Punish: Criminal Justice and the Challenge of Family Ties, Dan Markel, Jennifer Collins, and Ethan Leib make an important contribution to the growing literature on criminal law and families by documenting the ways that criminal law advantages and burdens actors based on familial status and identifying the potential harms that are unleashed when criminal law recognizes family status. This Feature seeks to complement that contribution by situating the authors’ observations within the context of two considerations beyond Privilege or Punish’s immediate focus: chronological trends and the practical realities that can shape application of formal law. By distinguishing …

The Excitement Of Interdictory Ideas: A Response To Professor Anders Walker, Marc O. Degirolami

Faculty Publications

The very first time that I taught criminal law, I would occasionally tell my six-year-old son, Thomas, about selected cases and situations that I had come across. Thomas enjoyed these discussions—more than I would have guessed: he was captivated by the horror of Dudley & Stephens, he was uncomfortably intrigued by shaming punishments, he was appropriately outraged at all manner of outcomes that seemed to him too harsh or too lenient. But most of all, he wanted to test his own burgeoning intuitions about right and wrong, good and evil, the permitted and the forbidden, against my "criminal law stories." …

The False Promise Of Retributive Proportionality, Aya Gruber

Publications

No abstract provided.

Lost In Translation?: An Essay On Law And Neuroscience, Stephen J. Morse

All Faculty Scholarship

The rapid expansion in neuroscientific research fuelled by the advent of functional magnetic resonance imaging [fMRI] has been accompanied by popular and scholarly commentary suggesting that neuroscience may substantially alter, and perhaps will even revolutionize, both law and morality. This essay, a contribution to, Law and Neuroscience (M. Freeman, Ed. 2011), will attempt to put such claims in perspective and to consider how properly to think about the relation between law and neuroscience. The overarching thesis is that neuroscience may indeed make some contributions to legal doctrine, practice and theory, but such contributions will be few and modest for the …

A Distributive Theory Of Criminal Law, Aya Gruber

Publications

In criminal law circles, the accepted wisdom is that there are two and only two true justifications of punishment-retributivism and utilitarianism. The multitude of moral claims about punishment may thus be reduced to two propositions: (1) punishment should be imposed because defendants deserve it, and (2) punishment should be imposed because it makes society safer. At the same time, most penal scholars notice the trend in criminal law to de-emphasize intent, centralize harm, and focus on victims, but they largely write off this trend as an irrational return to antiquated notions of vengeance. This Article asserts that there is in …

Treaties As Law And The Rule Of Law: The Judicial Power To Compel Domestic Treaty Implementation, William M. Carter Jr.

Articles

The Supremacy Clause makes the Constitution, federal statutes, and ratified treaties part of the "supreme law of the land." Despite the textual and historical clarity of the Supremacy Clause, some courts and commentators have suggested that the "non-self-executing treaty doctrine" means that ratified treaties must await implementing legislation before they become domestic law. The non-self-executing treaty doctrine has in particular been used as a shield to claims under international human rights treaties.

This Article does not seek to provide another critique of the non-self-executing treaty doctrine in the abstract. Rather, I suggest that a determination that a treaty is non-self-executing …

The Shadow Of State Secrets, Laura K. Donohue

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The shadow of state secrets casts itself longer than previously acknowledged. Between 2001 and 2009 the government asserted state secrets in more than 100 cases, while in scores more litigants appealed to the doctrine in anticipation of government intervention. Contractor cases ranged from breach of contract, patent disputes, and trade secrets, to fraud and employment termination. Wrongful death, personal injury, and negligence suits kept pace, extending beyond product liability to include infrastructure and services, as well as conduct of war. In excess of fifty telecommunications suits linked to the NSA warrantless wiretapping program emerged 2006-2009, with the government acting, variously, …

The Conscience Of A Prosecutor, David Luban

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

This essay, a version of the 2010 Tabor Lecture at Valparaiso Law School, examines issues about the role of a prosecutor in the adversary system through the lens of the following question: Should a prosecutor throw a case to avoid keeping men who he thinks are innocent in prison? This issue came to prominence in 2008, when Daniel Bibb, a New York City prosecutor, told newspaper reporters that he had done so in connection with a 1991 murder conviction that he had been assigned to reinvestigate after new evidence emerged that the wrong men had been convicted and were serving …