Law Commons^™

Criminal Certification: Restoring Comity In The Categorical Approach, Joshua Rothenberg

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

Federal sentencing enhancements force federal courts to delve into the world of substantive state criminal law. Does a state assault statute require violent force or just offensive touching? Does a state burglary statute that criminalizes breaking into a car or a house require prosecutors to charge the location entered as an element? Whether a person with prior convictions convicted of violating 18 U.S.C. § 922(g) faces a minimum sentence of fifteen years and a maximum of life imprisonment rather than a maximum sentence of ten years turns upon the answers to these questions. Yet, state law often does not resolve …

Improving Access To Justice In State Courts With Platform Technology, J. J. Prescott

Articles

Access to justice often equates to access to state courts, and for millions of Americans, using state courts to resolve their disputes—often with the government—is a real challenge. Reforms are regularly proposed in the hopes of improving the situation (e.g., better legal aid), but until recently a significant part of the problem has been structural. Using state courts today for all but the simplest of legal transactions entails at the very least traveling to a courthouse and meeting with a decision maker in person and in a one-on-one setting. Even minimally effective access, therefore, requires time, transportation, and very often …

It Takes A Village: Designating "Tiny House" Villages As Transitional Housing Campgrounds, Ciara Turner

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

A relatively new proposal to reduce homelessness in the United States involves extraordinarily small dwellings. While the “tiny house” movement is intuitively appealing and has found sporadic success, strict housing codes, building codes, and zoning laws often destroy the movement before it can get off the ground. One possibility for getting around these zoning and building code challenges, without drastic overhauls to health and safety codes, is to create a new state-level zoning classification of “transitional campgrounds.” A new zoning classification would alleviate the issue because campgrounds are consistently subject to less strict building codes, which could permit tiny houses …

The Case For State Attorney General Enforcement Of The Voting Rights Act Against Local Governments, Perry Grossman

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

The summer of 2016 showed that racial discrimination in voting is alive and well, as federal courts across the country struck down state statutes that disproportionately disenfranchise minority voters, including voter ID laws, restrictions on early voting, and racially gerrymandered legislative districts. However, at the local level, discriminatory practices in the nation’s approximately 89,000 political subdivisions have gone largely uninvestigated and challenged. Recent conflicts between communities of color and law enforcement have highlighted the failure of local governments in places like Ferguson, Missouri to adequately represent the interests of minority voters. These failures of representation, which occur in progressive states …

Counting Zeros: The Every Student Succeeds Act And The Testing Opt-Out Movement, Paul A. Hoversten

Michigan Law Review Online

The story begins with threatening letters. In October 2014, the U.S. Department of Education reminded Colorado’s chief state school officer that the department “ha[d], in fact, withheld Title I, Part A administrative funds . . . from a number of States for failure to comply with the assessment requirements” under the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. Given the occasion, the department implied, it wouldn’t hesitate to be ruthless.

Colorado could be forgiven for assuming it was authorized to craft its own policies in this arena; according to the Wall Street Journal, the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) represented “the …