Law Commons^™

Marihuana: Legalización Uruguaya, Fernando Carrión Mena Arq.

Fernando Carrión Mena

Uruguay es un país pequeño con 3.3 millones habitantes distribuidos a lo largo de 176 mil kilómetros cuadrados, lo cual le convierte en el segundo país más diminuto de Sur América, después de Surinam. Es un país que está haciendo bien las cosas en su interior, tanto que se ha convertido en un referente mundial, por ejemplo, en el reconocimiento a los derechos civiles (matrimonio igualitario, derechos de género), en la calidad del Fútbol que tiene, en el respeto a la democracia, en la imagen austera que transmite su presidente y, ahora, en la regulación legal del canabis. Todo ello …

Blame Congress, Not Prosecutors, For The Absurdity Of Mandatory Minimums, Wes R. Porter

Publications

Contrary to public perception, prosecutors do not "coerce" or "threaten" otherwise innocent people to plead guilty using mandatory minimum sentences. "Mandatory minimums," as they are called, are minimum terms of imprisonment for specific offenses imposed by statute instead of a judge. Judge John Gleeson of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York joined the chorus of critics in an October 2013 court statement, when he said that "[p]rosecutors routinely threaten ultra-harsh, enhanced mandatory sentences that no one - not even the prosecutors themselves - thinks are appropriate." Of course, some federal prosecutors do act badly - …

The Solution To The Real Blackmail Paradox: The Common Link Between Blackmail And Other Criminal Threats, Ken Levy

Ken Levy

Disclosure of true but reputation-damaging information is generally legal. But threats to disclose true but reputation-damaging information unless payment is made are generally criminal. Most scholars think that this situation is paradoxical because it seems to involve illegality mysteriously arising out of legality, a criminal act mysteriously arising out of an independently legal threat to disclose conjoined with an independently legal demand for money. But this is not quite right. The real paradox raised by the different legal statuses of blackmail threats to disclose and disclosure itself involves a contradiction between our strong intuition that blackmail threats should be criminal …

Criminalizing Revenge Porn, Danielle Keats Citron, Mary Anne Franks

Danielle Keats Citron

Violations of sexual privacy, notably the non-consensual publication of sexually graphic images in violation of someone's trust, deserve criminal punishment. They deny subjects' ability to decide if and when they are sexually exposed to the public and undermine trust needed for intimate relationships. Then too they produce grave emotional and dignitary harms, exact steep financial costs, and increase the risks of physical assault. A narrowly and carefully crafted criminal statute can comport with the First Amendment. The criminalization of revenge porn is necessary to protect against devastating privacy invasions that chill self-expression and ruin lives.

Is Stop-And-Search Breaking Down Our Trust In The Police Force?, Sophie Banat

Sophie Banat

Stop & searching was introduced into the UK as a measure to help combat crime. The uncertainly on what constitutes a stop search has led to a high proportion of non arrests, leading to privacy and racial issues. This article briefly analyses the significance this has on the community and to what extent it is being used successfully.

Export Controls: A Contemporary History, Bert Chapman

Libraries Faculty and Staff Presentations

Provides highlights of my recently published book Export Controls: A Contemporary History. Describes the roles played by multiple U.S. Government agencies and congressional oversight committees in this policymaking arena including the Commerce, Defense, State, and Treasury Departments. It also reviews the roles played by international government organizations such as the Missile Technology Control Regime, export oriented businesses, and research intensive universities.

Do Experience Tables Matter, Peter B. Hoffman, Harvey M. Goldstein

Peter R. Hoffman

No abstract provided.

Casual Ostracism: Jury Exclusion On The Basis Of Criminal Convictions, Anna Roberts

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Optimal Warning Strategies: Punishment Ought Not To Be Inflicted Where The Penal Provision Is Not Properly Conveyed, Murat C. Mungan

Scholarly Publications

Law enforcers frequently issue warnings, as opposed to sanctions, when they detect first-time offenders. However, virtually all of the law and economics literature dealing with optimal penalty schemes for repeat offenders suggest that issuing warnings is a sub-optimal practice. Another observed phenomenon is the joint use of warnings and sanctions in law enforcement: person A may receive a sanction, whereas person B is only warned for committing the same offense. This situation can be explained through the use of hybrid warning strategies, a concept not yet formalized in the law enforcement literature, where law enforcers issue warnings to x% …

A Historical Comparative Analysis Of Executions In The United States From 1608 To 2009, Emily Jean Abili

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

The death penalty has been a contested issue throughout American history. The United States has been executing offenders since Jamestown became a colony in 1608 (Allen & Clubb, 2008). Since that time, many issues have been raised about the death penalty including whether or not it is moral, discriminatory, or a deterrent.

This study examines the history of executions, including lynchings, in the United States from 1608 to 2009 using a variety of sociological theories on law and society. Some of the research questions that guide this project are:

* What is the nature of change in the relative prevalence …

The Illusory Eighth Amendment, John F. Stinneford

UF Law Faculty Publications

Although there is no obvious doctrinal connection between the Supreme Court’s Miranda jurisprudence and its Eighth Amendment excessive punishments jurisprudence, the two are deeply connected at the level of methodology. In both areas, the Supreme Court has been criticized for creating “prophylactic” rules that invalidate government actions because they create a mere risk of constitutional violation. In reality, however, both sets of rules deny constitutional protection to a far greater number of individuals with plausible claims of unconstitutional treatment than they protect.

This dysfunctional combination of over- and underprotection arises from the Supreme Court’s use of implementation rules as a …

Hear Me Now: The Admission Of Expert Testimony On Battered Women's Syndrome—An Evidentiary Approach, Matthew Fine

William & Mary Journal of Race, Gender, and Social Justice

No abstract provided.

A Good Name: Applying Regulatory Takings Analysis To Reputation Damage Caused By Criminal History, Jamila Jefferson-Jones

West Virginia Law Review

No abstract provided.

The Paradoxes Of Restitution, Mark A. Edwards

West Virginia Law Review

Restitution following mass dispossession is often considered both ideal and impossible. Why? This Article identifies two previously unnamed paradoxes that undermine the possibility of restitution: the time-unworthiness paradox and the collective responsibility paradox. After developing these ideas, the Article examines them in the context of a particularly difficult and intractable case of dispossession and restitution. The Article draws upon interviews with restitution claimants whose stories reveal the paradoxes of restitution.

The Rise And Fall Of The Unwritten Law: Sex, Patriarchy, And Vigilante Justice In The American Courts, Lawrence M. Friedman, William E. Havemann

Buffalo Law Review

No abstract provided.

Shame, Memory, And The Unspeakable: The International Criminal Court As Damnatio Memoriae, Michael Blake

San Diego Law Review

The first [part] will discuss two ways of looking at the court and why the conventional justifications of punishment might not be adequate to justify what the court is doing. The second will examine the issue of the politically unspeakable and argue that the court’s mandate might indeed be the responsibility of making certain ideas and persons politically shameful. The final Part will try to give some justification for the claim that this mandate might give rise to a justification for the court’s existence. On the account I provide here, even if the court could not be justified with reference …

Actmissions, Luis E. Chiesa

West Virginia Law Review

Most observers agree that it is morally worse to cause harm by engaging in an act than to contribute to producing the same harm by an omission. As a result, American criminal law punishes harmful omissions less than similarly harmful acts, unless there are exceptional circumstances that warrant punishing them equally. Yet there are many cases in which actors cause harm by engaging in conduct that can be reasonably described as either an act or an omission. Think of a doctor who flips a switch that discontinues life support to a patient. If the patient dies as a result, did …

The Wrong Kind Of Innocence: Why United States V. Begay Warrants The Extension Of "Actual Innocence" To Exclude Erroneous, Non-Capital Sentences, Greg Siepel

West Virginia Law Review

No abstract provided.

Constitutionally Tailoring Punishment, Richard A. Bierschbach, Stephanos Bibas

All Faculty Scholarship

Since the turn of the century, the Supreme Court has begun to regulate non-capital sentencing under the Sixth Amendment in the Apprendi line of cases (requiring jury findings of fact to justify sentence enhancements) as well as under the Eighth Amendment in the Miller and Graham line of cases (forbidding mandatory life imprisonment for juvenile defendants). Though both lines of authority sound in individual rights, in fact they are fundamentally about the structures of criminal justice. These two seemingly disparate lines of doctrine respond to structural imbalances in non-capital sentencing by promoting morally appropriate punishment judgments that are based on …

Invisible Minority: People Incarcerated With Mental Illness, Developmental Disabilities, And Traumatic Brain Injury In Washington's Jails And Prisons, Bette Michelle Fleishman

Seattle Journal for Social Justice

No abstract provided.

Promising Protection: 911 Call Records As Foundation For Family Violence Intervention, James G. Dwyer

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Constitutionally Tailoring Punishment, Richard A. Bierschbach, Stephanos Bibas

Michigan Law Review

Since the turn of the century, the Supreme Court has regulated noncapital sentencing under the Sixth Amendment in the Apprendi line of cases (requiring jury findings of fact to justify sentence enhancements) as well as under the Eighth Amendment in the Miller and Graham line of cases (forbidding mandatory life imprisonment for juvenile defendants). Although both lines of authority sound in individual rights, in fact they are fundamentally about the structures of criminal justice. These two seemingly disparate doctrines respond to structural imbalances in noncapital sentencing by promoting morally appropriate punishment judgments that are based on individualized input and that …

Flawed Forensics And The Death Penalty: Junk Science And Potentially Wrongful Executions, Jessica Dwyer-Moss

Seattle Journal for Social Justice

No abstract provided.

Criminal Law, Franklin J. Hogue

Mercer Law Review

This Article reviews the most important criminal cases during this reporting period-from June 1, 2012 through May 31, 2013-that will likely have an effect upon the way prosecutors and defense attorneys approach criminal cases in Georgia.

Immigration Policing And Federalism Through The Lens Of Technology, Surveillance, And Privacy, Anil Kalhan

Anil Kalhan

With the deployment of technology, federal programs to enlist state and local police assistance with immigration enforcement are undergoing a sea change. For example, even as it forcefully has urged invalidation of Arizona’s S.B. 1070 and similar state laws, the Obama administration has presided over the largest expansion of state and local immigration policing in U.S. history with its implementation of the “Secure Communities” program, which integrates immigration and criminal history database systems in order to automatically ascertain the immigration status of every individual who is arrested and booked by state and local police nationwide. By 2012, over one fifth …

The Fda And The Ftc Join Forces,, Robert Sanger

Robert M. Sanger

To those of us in the trenches dealing with civil and criminal enforcement of government regulation, it is not surprising that more than one federal agency will join in an investigation. Sometimes this takes the form of a “tag along” where, for instance, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) may follow up on a Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) white collar fraud case to assert the claim that taxes were not paid on the ill-gotten proceeds of the transaction. There are other cases where two federal agencies both attempt to take the lead in an investigation and clash in a “turf” …

12. Interviewing Victims And Suspected Victims Who Are Reluctant To Talk., Irit Irit Hershkowitz, Michael E. Lamb, Thomas D. Lyon

Thomas D. Lyon

Summary Of Clancy V. State, 129 Nev. Adv. Op. 89, Jim Hoffman

Nevada Supreme Court Summaries

A three-judge panel of the Court considered three questions: (1) whether NRS 484E.010-030 require actual knowledge that an accident has occurred, or whether constructive knowledge is sufficient; (2) whether the definition of “involved in an accident” in the same statute is unconstitutionally vague or ambiguous; and (3) whether the evidence in this case was sufficient to support the guilty verdict handed down in the lower court.

Summary Of Clay V. Eighth Jud. Dist. Ct., 129 Nev. Adv. Op. 91, Joseph Peacock

Nevada Supreme Court Summaries

The Court determined one issue: whether NRS 62H.170(2)(c) or NRS 62H.170(3) permits the State to inspect a defendant’s sealed juvenile record to obtain information for use against that defendant in a subsequent criminal prosecution.

Summary Of Watters V. State, 129 Nev. Adv. Op. 94, Brian Vasek

Nevada Supreme Court Summaries

The Court determined whether the prosecution’s use of a PowerPoint slide during opening statement with the defendant’s booking photo and the word “guilty” superimposed across the photo was improper advocacy and undermined the defendant’s presumption of innocence.