Law Commons^™

Privately Failing: Recidivism In Public And Private Prisons, Lee N. Gilgan

Lee N Gilgan

This study would add to available research regarding recidivism rates following incarceration in private prisons in contrast to incarceration in government-run prisons. This is a non-experimental meta-analysis viewing numerous studies discussing the effects of multiple covariants within public and private prisons. Based on the information and conclusion in these studies, we find that there is little overall consensus concerning the effects of increased privatization on recidivism. While many studies find certain aspects of privatization to have some potential effect on recidivism, there are many other aspects that either are out of scope or have a negative effect on recidivism. However, …

An Anachronism Too Discordant To Be Suffered: A Comparative Study Of Parliamentary And Presidential Approaches To Regulation Of The Death Penalty, Derek R. Verhagen

Derek R VerHagen

It is well-documented that the United States remains the only western democracy to retain the death penalty and finds itself ranked among the world's leading human rights violators in executions per year. However, prior to the Gregg v. Georgia decision in 1976, ending America's first and only moratorium on capital punishment, the U.S. was well in line with the rest of the civilized world in its approach to the death penalty. This Note argues that America's return to the death penalty is based primarily on the differences between classic parliamentary approaches to regulation and that of the American presidential system. …

The Rise Of Carrots And The Decline Of Sticks, Giuseppe Dari-Mattiacci, Gerrit De Geest

Giuseppe Dari-Mattiacci

There is a remarkable tendency in modern legal systems to increasingly use carrots. This trend is not limited to legal systems but can also be observed in, for instance, parenting styles, social control mechanisms, and even law schools’ teaching methods. Yet, at first glance, sticks appear to be a more efficient means of inducing people to comply with legal rules or social norms because they are not meant to be applied (thus minimizing transaction costs and risks) and may cause fewer unintended distributional distortions. So how can we justify the widespread use of carrots?

This Article shows that carrots can …

The Case Against Privatization, Avihay Dorfman, Alon Harel

Avihay Dorfman

This article develops a non-instrumental argument against privatization of certain forms of political violence. Its primary foci are the privatization of prisons and the use of mercenaries in wars. The article maintains that some governmental decisions simply cannot be executed by private entities. While private individuals may act in conformity with the state's orders, such conformity cannot count as an execution of the order of the state and cannot be attributed to the state. Conformity that does not constitute an execution of the state's order, in turn, fails to realize the ends for the sake of which the infliction of …

Criminal Punishment And The Pursuit Of Justice, Michele C. Materni

Mike C Materni

Since the beginning of recorded history societies have punished offenders while at the same time trying to justify the practice on moral and rational grounds and to clarify the relationship between punishment and justice. Traditionally, deontological justifications, utilitarian justifications, or a mix of the two have been advanced to justify the imposition of punishment upon wrongdoers. In this article, I advance a new conceptual spin on the mixed theorist approach to criminal punishment – one that can hopefully resonate not just among legal philosophers, but also among ordinary citi- zens, i.e. the people who are most affected by the criminal …

Criminal Affirmance: Going Beyond The Deterrence Paradigm To Examine The Social Meaning Of Declining Prosecution Of Elite Crime, Mary K. Ramirez

mary k ramirez

Recent financial scandals and the relative paucity of criminal prosecutions against elite actors that benefitted from the crisis in response suggest a new reality in the criminal law system: some wrongful actors appear to be above the law and immune from criminal prosecution. As such, the criminal prosecutorial system affirms much of the wrongdoing giving rise to the crisis. This leaves the same elites undisturbed at the apex of the financial sector, and creates perverse incentives for any successors. Their incumbency in power results in massive deadweight losses due to the distorted incentives they now face. Further, this undermines the …

Justice In The Shadowlands: Pretrial Detention, Punishment And The Sixth Amendment, Laura I. Appleman

Laura I Appleman

This Article contends that our current system of pretrial detention lies in shambles, routinely incarcerating the accused in horrifying conditions often far worse than those convicted offenders existing in prisons. Due to these punitive conditions of incarceration, pretrial detainees appear to have a cognizable claim for the denial of their Sixth Amendment jury trial right, which, at its broadest, forbids punishment for any crime unless a cross-section of the offender’s community adjudicates his crime and finds him guilty. This Article argues that the spirit of the Sixth Amendment jury trial right might apply to many pretrial detainees, due to both …

Breakthrough Science And The New Rehabilitation, Meghan J. Ryan

Meghan J. Ryan

Breakthroughs in pharmacology, genetics, and neuroscience are transforming how society views criminals and thus how society should respond to criminal behavior. Although the criminal law has long been based on notions of culpability, science is undercutting the assumption that offenders are actually responsible for their criminal actions. Further, scientific advances have suggested that criminals can be changed at the biochemical level. The public has become well aware of these advances largely due to pervasive media reporting on these issues and also as a result of the pharmaceutical industry’s incessant advertising of products designed to transform individuals by treating everything from …

Torture, Customary International Law, Promulgative Articulation, And Jus Cogens: Why And How Some United States Government Conduct Violates International And United States Law, Christopher L. Blakesley

Christopher L. Blakesley

This essay exposes the confusion over the meaning of customary international law and jus cogens that infests the writing of many international jurists, including scholars, and judges, especially those from the Common Law world. The essay shows how the essential idea behind customary international law, especially jus cogens in relation to crime is basic and easy to grasp, although some scholars claim that it is impenetrable. On the edges, of course, there is valuable disputation over nuance and the breath of the concepts. At bottom, however, the essence of the concepts is as basic as the deepest and most dearly …

Sexting: Risky Or [F]Risky? An Examination Of The Current And Future Legal Treatment Of Sexting In The United States, Krupa A. Shah

Krupa A. Shah

No abstract provided.

Modal Retributivism: A Theory Of Sanctions For Attempts And Other Criminal Wrongs, Anthony M. Dillof

Anthony M. Dillof

How much punishment, in terms of size and severity, should a person get committing for a given offense? Operating in a deontological framework, the article attempts to answer the question of criminal punishment severity in a unified, principled manner. There is a wide-spread intuition that when it comes to figuring out what punishment a person deserves, &#;harm matters.&#; The idea that Aharm matters@ is the basis for harm-based retributivism. The article begins by critiquing harm-based retributivism. Proponents of harm-based retributivism believe that attempts should be punished less than completed offenses, but how much less? One-half? Three-quarters? The problem with harm-based …

Book Review - When Brute Force Fails: How To Have Less Crime And Less Punishment, John J. Donohue

John Donohue

Two of the most dramatic social phenomena of the last half century in the United States are the substantial rise in crime that occurred during the 1960s and the equally dramatic drop in crime that began roughly contemporaneously with the advent of the Clinton Administration. The good news is that we have improved things from the violent and crime-filled days of the late 1980s and early 1990s; the bad news is that we have increased our prison population immensely in the effort. We may now be enjoying the return to the crime levels of the early 1960s, but we also …

Modal Retributivism: A Theory Of Sanctions For Attempts And Other Criminal Wrongs, Anthony M. Dillof

Anthony M. Dillof

How much punishment, in terms of size and severity, should a person get committing for a given offense? Operating in a deontological framework, the article attempts to answer the question of criminal punishment severity in a unified, principled manner. There is a wide-spread intuition that when it comes to figuring out what punishment a person deserves, harm matters. The idea that “harm matters” is the basis for harm-based retributivism. The article begins by critiquing harm-based retributivism. Proponents of harm-based retributivism believe that attempts should be punished less than completed offenses, but how much less? One-half? Three-quarters? The problem with harm-based …

Penalizing Punitive Damages: Why The Supreme Court Needs A Lesson In Law & Economics, Steve P. Calandrillo

Steve P. Calandrillo

Last fall’s landmark Supreme Court decision addressing punitive damages in the infamous Exxon Valdez oil spill case has brought the issue of punitive awards back into the legal limelight. Modern Supreme Court jurisprudence, most notably BMW, State Farm, Philip Morris, and now Exxon Valdez in 2008, have concluded that such judgments are justified to punish morally reprehensible behavior and to “send a message” to evildoers. However, the Court has increasingly emphasized that the U.S. Constitution’s Due Process Clause presumptively limits punitive awards, drawing an arbitrary line in the sand of no more than ten times actual damages.

This paper critically …

Happiness And Punishment (With J. Bronsteen & J. Masur), Christopher J. Buccafusco

Christopher J. Buccafusco

This article continues our project to apply groundbreaking new literature on the behavioral psychology of human happiness to some of the most deeply analyzed questions in law. Here we explain that the new psychological understandings of happiness interact in startling ways with the leading theories of criminal punishment. Punishment theorists, both retributivist and utilitarian, have failed to account for human beings' ability to adapt to changed circumstances, including fines and (surprisingly) imprisonment. At the same time, these theorists have largely ignored the severe hedonic losses brought about by the post-prison social and economic deprivations (unemployment, divorce, and disease) caused by …

Beyond Retroactivity To Realizing Justice: A Theory On The Principle Of Legality In International Criminal Law Sentencing, Shahram Dana

Shahram Dana

Only the innocent deserve the benefits of the principle of legality. This statement naturally offends our notions of justice. It would be unacceptable for courts of criminal justice to institutionalize such an approach. Yet, in the context of prosecuting mass atrocities, genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes, international criminal courts appear to be resigned to such a principle, if not openly embracing it. Although ranking among the most fundamental principles of criminal law, nulla poena sine lege (no punishment without law) receives surprisingly little attention in international criminal justice. Indeed, that it may be considered the 'poor cousin' of …

On The Boundaries Of Culture As An Affirmative Defense, Reid Griffith Fontaine, Eliot M. Held

Reid G. Fontaine

A “cultural defense” to criminal culpability cannot achieve true pluralism without collapsing into a totally subjective, personal standard. Applying an objective cultural standard does not rescue a defendant from the external imposition of values—the purported aim of the cultural defense—because a cultural standard is, at its core, an external standard imposed onto an individual. The pluralist argument for a cultural defense also fails on its own terms—after all, justice systems are themselves cultural institutions. Furthermore, a defendant’s background is already accounted for at sentencing. The closest thing to a cultural defense that a court could adopt without damaging the culpability …

Extraordinary And Compelling: A Re-Examination Of The Justifications For Compassionate Release, William W. Berry Iii

William W Berry III

Federal law, unbeknownst to many, includes a provision that permits the immediate release of federal prisoners. This safety valve provision requires that the Director of the Bureau of Prisons make a motion on behalf of the prisoner in order to secure the prisoner's compassionate release. Far from being a veiled version of parole, this compassionate release provision is to be used only in circumstances deemed "extraordinary and compelling." While the Bureau of Prisons has read this language very narrowly for many years, considering only terminally ill inmates as candidates for compassionate release, the Sentencing Commission modified its Guideline commentary in …

The Insanity Of Genius: Criminal Culpability And Right-Tail Psychometrics, James C. Oleson

James C Oleson

The article bridges criminology, criminal law, and penology by relating what little is known about the crimes of genius to the 2002 case Atkins v. Virginia. Noting that the IQ of the borderline genius is precisely as far from the mean as the IQ of the person with borderline mental retardation, it asks whether there are penological implications to high IQ. The article first asks whether geniuses should be punished like everyone else, then asks whether they should be punished more than others, and finally asks whether they should be punished less than others.

Most geniuses, I suggest, should be …