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Criminal law

2008

Selected Works

Articles 1 - 5 of 5

Full-Text Articles in Law

Taking The 'Hate' Out Of Hate Crimes: Applying Unfair Advantage Theory To Justify The Enhanced Punishment Of Opportunistic Bias Crimes, Jordan Woods Oct 2008

Taking The 'Hate' Out Of Hate Crimes: Applying Unfair Advantage Theory To Justify The Enhanced Punishment Of Opportunistic Bias Crimes, Jordan Woods

Jordan Blair Woods

Should bias crime perpetrators who, for personal gain, intentionally select victims from social groups that they perceive to be more vulnerable be punished similarly to typical bias crime perpetrators who are motivated by group hatred? In this Comment, I apply unfair advantage theory to argue that enhancing the punishment of opportunistic bias crimes is proper because of the perpetrators' motivations and the crimes' harmful effects. In its most basic form, unfair advantage theory justifies punishment based on the unfair advantage that criminals obtain over law-abiding members of society by violating the law. I contend that the enhanced punishment of opportunistic …

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Trapped In The Law? How Lawyers Reconcile The Legal And Social Aspects Of Their Work, Hadar Aviram Aug 2008

Trapped In The Law? How Lawyers Reconcile The Legal And Social Aspects Of Their Work, Hadar Aviram

Hadar Aviram

This Article addresses an immensely important, and often neglected, problem faced by legal practitioners in their daily professional lives: how do legal actors feel, and act, when the cases in which they are involved have evident, and disturbing, socio-economic implications? This situation is particularly uncomfortable for prosecutors, judges, and defense attorneys, whose criminal case workload often reflects much deeper social inequalities and problems, and whose defendant population is characterized by an overrepresentation of disempowered groups. Legal actors who engage daily with "the tip of the social iceberg" in the courtroom are keenly aware of the broader aspects of the problem; …

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The Rhetoric Of Self Defense, Janine Young Kim Dec 2007

The Rhetoric Of Self Defense, Janine Young Kim

Janine Kim

The rhetoric of self-defense is a powerful instrument in the hands of legal actors to shape our understanding of justified violence in society. This rhetoric is based not in the legal definition of self-defense but rather in the paradigmatic situation of deadly response to deadly attack, which offers useful guidance in interpreting the law's required elements. However, the paradigm also tends to embrace claims of morality and right that threaten to expand self-defense beyond recognition to consider inappropriate values such as vengeance and punishment.

In this Article, the author argues that self-defense should be viewed not only as a moral …

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Investigating The Continuity Of Sex Offending: Evidence From The Second Philadelphia Birth Cohort, Franklin E. Zimring, Wesley G. Jennings, Alex R. Piquero, Stephanie Hays Dec 2007

Investigating The Continuity Of Sex Offending: Evidence From The Second Philadelphia Birth Cohort, Franklin E. Zimring, Wesley G. Jennings, Alex R. Piquero, Stephanie Hays

Franklin E. Zimring

This study uses data from the Second Philadelphia Birth Cohort to examine the natural history of sex offenders and their involvement in sexual offending through age 26. Several key findings emerged from our effort. First, only one in ten of the 221 male and female juvenile sex offenders had a sex-related offense during the first eight years of adulthood. Second, 92% of all the cohort males with adult sex records had no prior juvenile sex offense. Third, a boy with no sex contacts but five or more total juvenile police contacts was more than twice as likely to commit a …

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Introduction, Crimtorts Symposium, Christopher J. Robinette Dec 2007

Introduction, Crimtorts Symposium, Christopher J. Robinette

Christopher J Robinette

Crimtorts is a word coined by Professors Thomas Koenig and Michael Rustad to describe the middle ground between criminal and tort law. Crimtorts is not a new body of law or even a new cause of action. Rather, crimtorts is an explicit recognition that criminal law principles of punishment and deterrence have been assimilated into tort law. The extent of the assimilation and its effects on the tort system are issues that merit robust consideration.

The Crimtorts symposium, held at the Widener University School of Law on February 25, 2008, took up this challenge. The participants were Professors Martha Chamallas, …

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