Constitutional Law Commons^™

Government Retention And Use Of Unlawfully Secured Dna Evidence, Wayne A. Logan

Scholarly Publications

No abstract provided.

The Civil Rights Approach To Campus Sexual Violence, Nancy Chi Cantalupo

Law Faculty Research Publications

No abstract provided.

Due Process And The Failure Of The Criminal Court, Steven Zeidman

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Cutting Cops Too Much Slack, Wayne A. Logan

Scholarly Publications

Police officers can make mistakes, which, for better or worse, the U.S. Supreme Court has often seen fit to forgive. Police, for instance, can make mistakes of fact when assessing whether circumstances justify the seizure of an individual or search of a residence; they can even be mistaken about the identity of those they arrest. This essay examines yet another, arguably more significant context where police mistakes are forgiven: when they seize a person based on their misunderstanding of what a law prohibits.

Domestic Violence And The Confrontation Clause: The Case For A Prompt Post-Arrest Confrontation Hearing, Robert M. Hardaway

Sturm College of Law: Faculty Scholarship

Part I and Part II of this article discuss the consequences of Crawford v. Washington for domestic violence victims and detail the problem of domestic violence in America, including the current prosecution strategies and challenges in domestic violence cases. Part III reviews the evolution of confrontation law jurisprudence. Part IV sets forth a proposed Crawford-compliant procedure that also protects domestic violence victims. Part V addresses anticipated objections to the prompt-post arrest confrontation hearing.

Confronting The Overcriminalization Of America, 48 J. Marshall L. Rev. 757 (2015), Timothy P. O'Neill

UIC Law Review

No abstract provided.

An Eighth Amendment Analysis Of Statutes Allowing Or Mandating Transfer Of Juvenile Offenders To Adult Criminal Court In Light Of The Supreme Court's Recent Jurisprudence Recognizing Developmental Neuroscience, Katherine I. Puzone

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

In The Beginning There Was None: Supreme Court Review Of State Criminal Prosecutions, Kevin C. Walsh

Scholarly Articles

This Article challenges the unquestioned assumption of all contemporary scholars of federal jurisdiction that section 25 of the Judiciary Act of 1789 authorized Supreme Court appellate review of state criminal prosecutions. Section 25 has long been thought to be one of the most important provisions of the most important jurisdictional statute enacted by Congress. The Judiciary Act of 1789 gave concrete institutional shape to a federal judiciary only incompletely defined by Article III. And section 25 supplied a key piece of the structural relationship between the previously existing state court systems and the new federal court system that Congress constructed …

Calling A Spade A Spade: Understanding Sex Offender Registration As Punishment And Implications Post-Starkey, Alex Duncan

Oklahoma Law Review

No abstract provided.

The Inalienable Right To Stand Your Ground, Joshua Prince, Allen Thompson

St. Thomas Law Review

This Article seeks to open a dialogue about an individual's inalienable Right to Self-Defense and the interplay between that Right and Stand Your Ground doctrines. In Section II, this Article will present an overview of what, precisely, a Stand Your Ground statute actually encompasses and permits, as many misconceptions have arisen as to the effect of a Stand Your Ground law. Due to the position many political groups have taken, as well as inaccurate news reporting by the media, there is a mistaken belief that Stand Your Ground laws allow a shooter to become "judge, jury, and executioner." In Section …

The Seductive Power Of Patriarchal Stories, Aviva A. Orenstein

Articles by Maurer Faculty

This essay develops a theme introduced in Rape and Culture of the Courtroom written by Andrew Taslitz. It examines the cases in which judges allow evidence of the victim’s sexual history and proclivities because, in their estimation, excluding such evidence would violate the constitution (an exception to rape shield in Fed. R. Evid 412). The review of these cases demonstrates the persistent power of patriarchal stories and documents how the constitutional exception sometimes indicates a resistance to the entire enterprise of rape shield. In particular, it focus on Gagne v. Booker, an en banc decision from the Sixth Circuit, …

Death Penalty Drugs And The International Moral Marketplace, James Gibson, Corinna Barrett Lain

Law Faculty Publications

Across the country, executions have become increasingly problematic as states have found it more and more difficult to procure the drugs they need for lethal injection.At first blush, the drug shortage appears to be the result of pharmaceutical industry norms; companies that make drugs for healing (mostly in Europe) have refused to be merchants of death. But closer inspection reveals that European governments are the true change agents here. For decades, those governments have tried-and failed-to promote abolition of the death penalty through traditional instruments of international law. Turns out that the best way to export their abolitionist norms was …

Immigration Law’S Looming Fourth Amendment Problem, Michael Kagan

Scholarly Works

In 2014, a wave of federal court decisions found that local police violate the Fourth Amendment when they rely on requests from the Department of Homeland Security to detain people suspected of being deportable immigrants. The problem with these requests, known as “detainers,” was that they were not based on any neutral finding of probable cause. But this infirmity is not unique to DHS requests to local police. It is characteristic of the normal means by which Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) arrests people and detains them at the outset of deportation proceedings. These decisions thus signal a glaring constitutional …

In The Beginning There Was None: Supreme Court Review Of State Criminal Prosecutions, Kevin C. Walsh

Law Faculty Publications

This Article challenges the unquestioned assumption of all contemporary scholars of federal jurisdiction that section 25 of the Judiciary Act of 1789 authorized Supreme Court appellate review of state criminal prosecutions. Section 25 has long been thought to be one of the most important provisions of the most important jurisdictional statute enacted by Congress. The Judiciary Act of 1789 gave concrete institutional shape to a federal judiciary only incompletely defined by Article III. And section 25 supplied a key piece of the structural relationship between the previously existing state court systems and the new federal court system that Congress constructed …

United States V. Batista, Constantine Loizides

NYLS Law Review

No abstract provided.

United States V. Castleman: The Meaning Of Domestic Violence, Emily J. Sack

Law Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

"Fuck Your Breath": Black Men And Youth, State Violence, And Human Rights In The 21st Century, Jeremy I. Levitt

Journal Publications

This polemical essay was written at the behest of Black men and youth, and it is dedicated to African American women who relentlessly fight to safeguard the rights and well-being of Black men, even when in the process their maltreatment and welfare are grossly overlooked and forgotten. Bree Newsome's courageous and necessary removal of the confederate flag in the South Carolina State House is a prime example of such fearless activism. Joanne Deborah Chesimard aka Assata Shakur's-a former leader of the revolutionary organization known as the Black Liberation Armyascendency to the FBI's Most Wanted Terrorist list is another tragically intoxicating …

Unwrapping The Box The Supreme Court Justices Have Gotten Themselves Into: Internal Confrontations Over Confronting The Confrontation Clause, Paul F. Rothstein

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Williams v. Illinois, handed down in 2012, is the latest in a new and revolutionary line of U.S. Supreme Court cases beginning with the 2004 decision of Crawford v. Washington which radically altered the Court's former approach to the Constitutional Confrontation Clause. That clause generally requires persons who make written or oral statements outside the trial, that may constitute evidence against a criminal defendant, to take the witness stand for cross-examination rather than those statements being presented at the trial only by the writing or by another person who heard the statement.

Previous to Crawford, under Ohio v. …

The Death Penalty On The Streets: What The Eighth Amendment Can Teach About Regulating Police Use Of Force, Jelani Jefferson Exum

Faculty Publications

(Excerpt)

The use of force by police officers has traditionally been analyzed through the lens of Fourth Amendment reasonableness. The Supreme Court has decided that the proper question regarding the excessiveness of police force is whether the police officer acted as a reasonable law enforcement officer. When that police force is fatal — what this Article deems the death penalty on the streets — the legal question is the same, leaving us with an analysis that requires a heavy reliance on the officer's version of events and a host of disagreement on what constitutes appropriate police action. Reasonable minds can, …

The Depth Of Endurance: A Critical Look At Prolonged Solitary Confinement In Light Of The Constitution And A Call To Reform, Shannon H. Church

Kentucky Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Substitute Arguments In Constitutional Law, Louis Michael Seidman

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

In this article, I argue that that substitution is crucial to our practice of constitutional law. Of course, if one wished, one could easily extend the domain of substitution beyond these boundaries. Substitute arguments are an important aspect of law more generally and, indeed, of life. I have nonetheless chosen to limit my discussion to constitutional substitution because, I believe, overt discussion of substitution in this particular area illuminates important aspects of our constitutional regime-–aspects that substitution itself regularly obscures. To put my central point directly, I hope to show that constitutional law amounts to one, giant substitute argument.

Catalogs, Alex Stein, Gideon Parchomovsky

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Biometric Passwords And The Privilege Against Self-Incrimination, Kara Goldman

Cardozo Arts & Entertainment Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Two Excursions Into Current U.S. Supreme Court Opinion-Writing, Paul F. Rothstein

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

In the last weeks in June, 2015, as the present term of the U.S. Supreme Court drew to a close, many controversial and important decisions were handed down by the Court. The substance of the decisions has been written about extensively. Two of the decisions in particular, though, caught my eye as a teacher of legal techniques, not for the importance of the subject of the particular decision, but for what they may illustrate in a teachable fashion about at least some opinion writing. The two cases are Ohio v. Clark (June 18, 2015) interpreting the Confrontation Clause of the …

For Whom The Data Tolls: A Reunified Theory Of Fourth And Fifth Amendment Jurisprudence, Bryan H. Choi

Publications

Data privacy demands a reunified theory of the Fourth and Fifth Amendments. Data technologies allow personal information to be disembodied from physical bodies and “possessed” simultaneously by both first persons and third parties. As a result, the government has been able to use a divide-and-conquer strategy to obtain incriminating evidence alternately from the data intermediary or from the suspect.

Currently, Fourth Amendment doctrine and Fifth Amendment doctrine work at cross-purposes. The privacy community has already sounded the alarm on the “third-party doctrine,” which allows the government to sidestep the Fourth Amendment when demanding evidence from third parties. But few have …

Storming The Castle: Fernandez V. California And The Waning Warrant Requirement, Joshua Bornstein

Loyola of Los Angeles Law Review

No abstract provided.

Using The Dna Testing Of Arrestees To Reevaluate Fourth Amendment Doctrine, Steven P. Grossman

All Faculty Scholarship

With the advent of DNA testing, numerous issues have arisen with regard to obtaining and using evidence developed from such testing. As courts have come to regard DNA testing as a reliable method for linking some people to crimes and for exonerating others, these issues are especially significant. The federal government and most states have enacted statutes that permit or direct the testing of those convicted of at least certain crimes. Courts have almost universally approved such testing, rejecting arguments that obtaining and using such evidence violates the Fourth Amendment.

More recently governments have enacted laws permitting or directing the …

Unequal Assistance Of Counsel, Peter A. Joy

Scholarship@WashULaw

There is now, and has always been, a double standard when it comes to the criminal justice system in the United States. The system is stacked against you if you are a person of color or are poor, and is doubly unjust if you are both a person of color and poor. The potential counterweight to such a system, a lawyer by one’s side, is unequal as well. In reality, the right to counsel is a right to the unequal assistance of counsel in the United States.

The unequal treatment based on the color of one’s skin is reflected by …

Terrorism Trials In Article Iii Courts, Laura K. Donohue

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Some individuals reject Article III courts as a forum for bringing terrorist suspects to justice on the grounds that the ordinary judicial system cannot handle such cases. As an empirical matter, this claim is simply false. Since 2001, myriad terrorism trials have progressed through the criminal system. The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) reports that between 2001 and 2010, there were 998 defendants indicted in terrorism prosecutions. Eighty-seven percent of the defendants were convicted on at least one charge. According to the Executive Office for the U.S. Attorneys, from FY 2004 to FY 2009, there were 3,010 terrorism prosecutions. It …

Sexual Assaults Among University Students: Prevention, Support, And Justice, Rebecca B. Reingold, Lawrence O. Gostin

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Sexual assault is common among college-aged women (18 to 25 years), with 1 in 5 reporting having experienced these crimes during their college years. Acute and long-term consequences of sexual assault may include physical trauma, sexually transmitted infections, posttraumatic stress disorder, depression, and substance abuse. Survivors have the option of reporting assaults to the university or to the police, but the goals of these 2 systems—and women’s experiences with them—can be quite different. The criminal justice system’s principal aim is to adjudicate guilt, but the university has the broader purpose of fostering a safe learning environment.

This article explores how …