Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®

Law Commons

Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®

Articles 1 - 7 of 7

Full-Text Articles in Law

When Fines Don't Go Far Enough: The Failure Of Prison Settlements And Proposals For More Effective Enforcement Methods, Tori Collins Jan 2024

When Fines Don't Go Far Enough: The Failure Of Prison Settlements And Proposals For More Effective Enforcement Methods, Tori Collins

Maine Law Review

The Eighth Amendment’s Punishments Clause provides the basis on which prisoners may bring suit alleging unconstitutional conditions of confinement. Only a small number of these suits are successful. The suits that do survive typically end in a settlement in which prison authorities agree to address the unconstitutional conditions. However, settlements such as these are easily flouted for two primary reasons: prison authorities are not personally held liable when settlements are broken, and prisoners largely lack the political and practical leverage to self-advocate beyond the courtroom. Because of this, unconstitutional prison conditions may linger for years after prison authorities have agreed …


Taking It Too Far: Growth Management And The Limits To Land-Use Regulation In Maine, Michael A. Duddy Apr 2020

Taking It Too Far: Growth Management And The Limits To Land-Use Regulation In Maine, Michael A. Duddy

Maine Law Review

In 1989 Maine enacted the Comprehensive Planning and Land Use Regulation Act. The Act's legislative findings declared that “ the State has a vital interest in ensuring that a comprehensive system of land-use planning and growth management is established as quickly as possible.” However, whenever the state exercises its police power to regulate private land use, it faces a constitutional limit as to how far it can go. When the land-use restriction exceeds that limit, a regulatory taking occurs. This Comment argues that the Comprehensive Planning and Land Use Regulation Act, as it is being interpreted and implemented by state …


Taking It Too Far: Growth Management And The Limits To Land-Use Regulation In Maine, Michael A. Duddy Apr 2020

Taking It Too Far: Growth Management And The Limits To Land-Use Regulation In Maine, Michael A. Duddy

Maine Law Review

In 1989 Maine enacted the Comprehensive Planning and Land Use Regulation Act. The Act's legislative findings declared that “ the State has a vital interest in ensuring that a comprehensive system of land-use planning and growth management is established as quickly as possible.” However, whenever the state exercises its police power to regulate private land use, it faces a constitutional limit as to how far it can go. When the land-use restriction exceeds that limit, a regulatory taking occurs. This Comment argues that the Comprehensive Planning and Land Use Regulation Act, as it is being interpreted and implemented by state …


Sniffing Out The Fourth Amendment: United States V. Place-Dog Sniffs-Ten Years Later, Hope Walker Hall May 2018

Sniffing Out The Fourth Amendment: United States V. Place-Dog Sniffs-Ten Years Later, Hope Walker Hall

Maine Law Review

In the endless and seemingly futile government war against drugs, protections afforded by the Fourth Amendment of the United States Constitution may have fallen by the wayside as courts struggle to deal with drug offenders. The compelling government interest in controlling the influx of drugs all too often results in a judicial attitude that the ends justify the means. Judges can be reluctant to exclude evidence of drugs found in an unlawful search pursuant to the exclusionary rule, which provides that illegally obtained evidence may not be used at trial. The exclusion of drugs as evidence in drug cases often …


Standing Under State Search And Seizure Provision: Why The Minnesota Supreme Court Should Have Rejected The Federal Standards And Instead Invoked Greater Protection Under Its Own Constitution In State V. Carter, Rebecca C. Garrett Feb 2018

Standing Under State Search And Seizure Provision: Why The Minnesota Supreme Court Should Have Rejected The Federal Standards And Instead Invoked Greater Protection Under Its Own Constitution In State V. Carter, Rebecca C. Garrett

Maine Law Review

In State v. Carter, the Minnesota Supreme Court considered whether a criminal defendant had “standing” to challenge an alleged search under the Fourth Amendment and Article 1, Section 10 of the Minnesota Constitution. The defendant moved to suppress evidence obtained by a police officer who had peered in the window of an apartment where the defendant was participating in a drug-packaging operation with the apartment's leaseholder. A divided court held that the defendant had a legitimate expectation of privacy in the apartment. Therefore, the defendant had standing to challenge the legality of the police officer's observations pursuant to the Fourth …


Life In No Trump: Property And Speech Under The Constitution, Richard A. Esptein Feb 2018

Life In No Trump: Property And Speech Under The Constitution, Richard A. Esptein

Maine Law Review

The editors of the Maine Law Review have been kind enough to offer me the opportunity to respond to Laura Underkuffler's criticism of my work in her recent Godfrey Lecture, “When Should Rights ‘Trump’? An Examination of Speech and Property,” which appears in the preceding issue. In my earlier writings on constitutional law, more specifically, in my paper, Property, Speech and the Politics of Distrust, I took the position that modern Supreme Court jurisprudence had taken a turn for the worse insofar as it used different standards of review in passing on the constitutionality of legislation. The current position, roughly …


Alexis De Tocqueville And American Constitutional Law: On Democracy, The Majority Will, Individual Rights, Federalism, Religion, Civic Associations And Originalist Constitutional Theory, Philip C. Kissam Nov 2017

Alexis De Tocqueville And American Constitutional Law: On Democracy, The Majority Will, Individual Rights, Federalism, Religion, Civic Associations And Originalist Constitutional Theory, Philip C. Kissam

Maine Law Review

Count Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America has been said to be "at once the best book ever written on democracy and the best book ever written on America. " This praise should perhaps be tempered by consideration of Tocqueville' s purposes and the historical circumstances within which he worked and understood both democracy and America. Yet Tocqueville's insights into American democracy as of the 1830s undoubtedly constitute a rich source of constitutional thought-either as support for particular constitutional principles or as constitutional ideas that should be contested. In a recent notable instance, John McGinnis has argued that Tocqueville's ideas …