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Michigan Law Review

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Articles 91 - 120 of 636

Full-Text Articles in Criminal Law

Ever The Twain Shall Meet, Fred S. Mcchesney May 2001

Ever The Twain Shall Meet, Fred S. Mcchesney

Michigan Law Review

Instinctively, corruption is deplorable. Nobody likes private citizens paying governmental officials for special favors. Few have deplored corruption longer or in greater detail than economist Susan Rose-Ackerman. In Corruption and Government, Professor Rose-Ackerman discusses how corruption starts ("causes"), why it is bad ("consequences"), and how to stop it ("reform"), principally from an economic perspective. Professor Rose-Ackerman's interest in corruption derives partly from her outside work with international agencies, especially time spent at the World Bank - "a transformative experience" (p. xi). Her twenty-two page bibliography ranges across sources in economics and politics, plus many documents from the World Bank and …


Science Gone Astray: Evolution And Rape, Elisabeth A. Lloyd May 2001

Science Gone Astray: Evolution And Rape, Elisabeth A. Lloyd

Michigan Law Review

Throughout A Natural History of Rape, coauthors Randy Thomhill and Craig Palmer resort to what is known among philosophers of science as "The Galileo Defense," which amounts to the following claim: I am telling the Truth and doing excellent science, but because of ideology and ignorance, I am being persecuted. The authors have repeated and elaborated upon this defense during the si:lable media flurry accompanying the book's publication in February 2000. Now, history has accepted this defense from Galileo. But in order for it to work for Thornhill and Palmer, of course, they must be telling the Truth and doing …


Are We Protecting The Wrong Rights?, Jennifer L. Saulino May 2001

Are We Protecting The Wrong Rights?, Jennifer L. Saulino

Michigan Law Review

Elizabeth Bartholet, in her book Nobody's Children, takes a strong step toward beginning a new kind of dialogue about abused and neglected children. She positions herself as a liberal who has come to terms with the fact that traditional liberal ideals are in conflict with the needs of abused and neglected children (p. 5). In doing so, she tries to convince her readers that, regardless of ideology, we all should have a different focus in the area of child abuse and neglect law. She uses Sabrina as one of several examples of how programs for abused and neglected children that …


Conjunction And Aggregation, Saul Levmore Feb 2001

Conjunction And Aggregation, Saul Levmore

Michigan Law Review

This Article begins with the puzzle of why the law avoids the issue of conjunctive probability. Mathematically inclined observers might, for example, employ the "product rule," multiplying the probabilities associated with several events or requirements in order to assess a combined likelihood, but judges and lawyers seem otherwise inclined. Courts and statutes might be explicit about the manner in which multiple requirements should be combined, but they are not. Thus, it is often unclear whether a factfinder should assess if condition A was more likely than not to be present - and then go on to see whether condition B …


Prosecution Of Minor Subcontractors Under The Major Fraud Act Of 1988, Chris Liro Dec 2000

Prosecution Of Minor Subcontractors Under The Major Fraud Act Of 1988, Chris Liro

Michigan Law Review

In the late 1980s, a series of well-publicized defense contractor abuses brought the ordinarily obscure topic of government contracting into the public eye. These abuses included not only instances of seemingly wasteful charges, like the infamous $600 toilet seat, approved by a complicit Department of Defense, but also examples of truly fraudulent activity such as knowingly overbilling and supplying inferior quality goods. The fraud cases grabbed the public attention for three primary reasons. First, enormous sums of money were involved. Second, the nature of the fraud often posed a direct danger to United States troops, potentially compromising "national security." Finally, …


Aggravated Assaults With Chairs Versus Guns: Impermissible Applied Double Counting Under The Sentencing Guidelines, Carolyn Barth Oct 2000

Aggravated Assaults With Chairs Versus Guns: Impermissible Applied Double Counting Under The Sentencing Guidelines, Carolyn Barth

Michigan Law Review

In a bar called Andrea's Attic, David and Victor were having a drink when they got into an argument. The argument escalated until Victor said something that infuriated David. David looked at Victor, and, wanting to hurt Victor, grabbed the nearest object, a chair, and then threw it at Victor. The chair hit Victor and he fell to the ground, but was not hurt. In a bar called Barb's Barn down the street, Valerie was having a drink. Dorothy walked into the bar, grabbed Valerie by the arm and dragged her outside onto the street. As Valerie was dragged, she …


"Ready? Induce. Sting!": Arguing For The Government's Burden Of Proving Readiness In Entrapment Cases, David D. Tawil Jun 2000

"Ready? Induce. Sting!": Arguing For The Government's Burden Of Proving Readiness In Entrapment Cases, David D. Tawil

Michigan Law Review

For over 100 years the United States judiciary has struggled with the sting and the entrapment defense, examining whether government agents deviously manufacture crimes or merely afford criminals the opportunity to commit them. The sentiments of Justice Holmes were rare for his time, but today they are reflected in a growing sympathy for sting victims. While courts are now more willing than ever to find entrapment, they still differ over the burden of proof that the government must satisfy to overthrow an entrapment defense. Specifically, courts disagree about whether the burden includes proof that the defendant had the ability and …


Rationalizing Juvenile Justice, Carolyn J. Frantz May 2000

Rationalizing Juvenile Justice, Carolyn J. Frantz

Michigan Law Review

Few issues have occupied the public mind so much in recent years as the problem of youth violence. Due to sensational school shootings and public paranoia about the violence of youth gangs, America is concerned - very concerned - about the growing criminality of its children. In our concern, we find ourselves caught in the classic conundrum of criminal responsibility: reconciling the unavoidable knowledge that much of human behavior is determined with our strong instincts about free will. We blame violent television and video games, we blame single mothers, we blame low church attendance, but when all is said and …


The Universal Grammar Of Criminal Law, Stuart P. Green May 2000

The Universal Grammar Of Criminal Law, Stuart P. Green

Michigan Law Review

There is something about the criminal law that invites comparative analysis. The interests it protects are so basic, and its concerns so fundamental, that it is natural to ask whether there are aspects of criminal law that are somehow universal. We want to know whether familiar concepts such as murder and manslaughter, intent and negligence, and insanity and mistake, are characteristic of other systems of criminal law as well, and, if so, what role they play there. In the last generation, no criminal law scholar has made better use of comparative law techniques than George Fletcher, the Cardozo Professor of …


Healing The Blind Goddess: Race And Criminal Justice, Mark D. Rosenbaum, Daniel P. Tokaji May 2000

Healing The Blind Goddess: Race And Criminal Justice, Mark D. Rosenbaum, Daniel P. Tokaji

Michigan Law Review

Once again, issues of race, ethnicity, and class within our criminal justice system have been thrust into the public spotlight. On both sides of the country, in our nation's two largest cities, police are being called to account for acts of violence directed toward poor people of color. In New York City, a West African immigrant named Amadou Diallo was killed by four white police officers, who fired forty-one bullets at the unarmed man as he stood in the vestibule of his apartment building in a poor section of the Bronx. Did race influence the officers' decisions to fire the …


The Perils Of Courtroom Stories, Stephan Landsman May 2000

The Perils Of Courtroom Stories, Stephan Landsman

Michigan Law Review

As Janet Malcolm1 tells it, Sheila McGough was a middle-aged single woman living at home with her parents and working as an editor and administrator in the publications department of the Carnegie Institute when she decided to switch careers and go to law school. She applied and was admitted to the then recently accredited law school at George Mason University. After graduation, she began a solo practice in northern Virginia that involved a significant amount of stateappointed criminal defense work. In 1986, approximately four years after her graduation from law school, McGough received a call requesting assistance from an incarcerated …


Sentencing Equality For Deportable Aliens: Departures From The Sentencing Guidelines On The Basis Of Alienage, Jason Bent Mar 2000

Sentencing Equality For Deportable Aliens: Departures From The Sentencing Guidelines On The Basis Of Alienage, Jason Bent

Michigan Law Review

Peter Bakeas, a thirty-three-year-old Greek citizen living in West Lynn, Massachusetts and working in an entry-level position at the First National Bank of Greece in Massachusetts, developed a cocaine habit he could not afford. Mounting debt from his cocaine habit pressured him to find alternative means for obtaining income. Bakeas, using his position at First National Bank of Greece, began to embezzle money from the accounts of a distant relative and some family friends. When his scheme was discovered, he confessed and made arrangements to repay the money he had taken. Bakeas pled guilty to embezzlement by a bank officer, …


Judicial Review & The Policy Of Federal Abstention: A Juvenile's Right To Ensure The Existence Of A "Substantial Federal Interest", Matthew Drexler Feb 2000

Judicial Review & The Policy Of Federal Abstention: A Juvenile's Right To Ensure The Existence Of A "Substantial Federal Interest", Matthew Drexler

Michigan Law Review

The problem of juvenile delinquency must be dealt with in an effective and meaningful manner if we are to reduce the ever increasing levels of crime and improve the quality of life in America. With these words, the United States Senate opened its report in support of the first major federal juvenile delinquency statute in almost forty years. The goal of the statute and of federal involvement in juvenile delinquency proceedings was to give the highest attention to preventing juvenile crime and to minimizing the involvement of juveniles in the juvenile and criminal justice systems. Until 1974, the federal government …


The Importance Of Being Biased, Anthony M. Dillof Jan 2000

The Importance Of Being Biased, Anthony M. Dillof

Michigan Law Review

The war against bias crimes is far from finished. In contrast, the battle over bias-crime laws is largely over. Bias-crime laws, as commonly formulated, increase the penalties for crimes motivated by bias. The Supreme Court has held that such laws do not violate the First Amendment. Virtually every state has enacted some sort of biascrime law. Even the federal government, which may consider itself without power to enact a general bias-crime law, has made bias a sentence-aggravating factor for the range of federal criminal offenses. Bias-crime laws thus are an established feature of the legal landscape. Against this background, Frederick …


The Offense: Interpreting The Indictment Requirement In 21 U.S.C. § 851, Christopher Serkin Dec 1999

The Offense: Interpreting The Indictment Requirement In 21 U.S.C. § 851, Christopher Serkin

Michigan Law Review

Congress enacted the Comprehensive Drug Abuse Prevention and Control Act of 1970 ("the Act") to unify and rationalize its treatment of drug offenses. The Act was an enormous piece of legislation, requiring months of congressional hearings before it was passed. Today, the Act encompasses over 150 sections of title 21 of the U.S. Code and regulates behavior ranging from manufacturing and mislabeling to prescribing controlled substances. Like any piece of complex legislation, the Act has spawned its share of litigation. One controversy has defied satisfactory resolution: the meaning of the innocuous phrase, "the offense," in section 851(a)(2). The statute's structure …


Pinochet And International Human Rights Litigation, Curtis A. Bradley, Jack L. Goldsmith Jun 1999

Pinochet And International Human Rights Litigation, Curtis A. Bradley, Jack L. Goldsmith

Michigan Law Review

The British House of Lords recently considered whether Augusto Pinochet was subject to arrest and possible extradition to Spain for alleged acts of torture and other egregious conduct carried out during his reign as Chile's head of state. The Law Lords held that a large majority of the charges against Pinochet were not proper grounds for extradition under British law. They also held, however, that Pinochet could potentially be extradited for alleged acts of torture committed after Britain's 1988 ratifica· tion of the Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment. In reaching this latter conclusion, …


The Standing Of The United States: How Criminal Prosecutions Show That Standing Doctrine Is Looking For Answers In All The Wrong Places, Edward A. Hartnett Jun 1999

The Standing Of The United States: How Criminal Prosecutions Show That Standing Doctrine Is Looking For Answers In All The Wrong Places, Edward A. Hartnett

Michigan Law Review

The Supreme Court insists that Article III of the Constitution requires a litigant to have standing in order for her request for judicial intervention to constitute a "case" or "controversy" within the jurisdiction of a federal court; it also insists that the "irreducible constitutional minimum" of standing requires (1) that the litigant suffer an "injury in fact"; (2) that the person against whom the judicial intervention is sought have caused the injury; and (3) that the requested judicial intervention redress the injury. The requisite injury in fact, the Court repeatedly declares, must be "personal," "concrete and particularized," and "actual or …


These Are The People In Your Neighborhood, Elliot Regenstein May 1999

These Are The People In Your Neighborhood, Elliot Regenstein

Michigan Law Review

The 1997 St. Louis Rams media guide contains a glowing description of the team's star rookie from the prior season. The guide highlights his brilliant college career, describes his solid first professional season, and mentions that he grew up in Los Angeles. In a gray box above his football statistics, it notes that he frequently visits the Emergency Children's Home (ECHO) for troubled youth, where he talks to kids and plays basketball with them. The description would all look pretty normal if it wasn't a portrait of Lawrence Phillips. Almost every other sporting publication has written of Phillips not as …


The Rise Of America's Two National Pastimes: Baseball And The Law, Cleta Deatherage Mitchell May 1999

The Rise Of America's Two National Pastimes: Baseball And The Law, Cleta Deatherage Mitchell

Michigan Law Review

Mark McGwire's seventieth home run ball sold at auction in January of this year for $3,005,000. In late 1998, Baltimore Orioles owner Peter Angelos sued a former Orioles manager and his daughter in the circuit court of Cook County, Illinois. Angelos alleged that the original lineup card from the 1995 game when Cal Ripken, Jr., broke Lou Gehrig's consecutive game record belongs to the Orioles, not to the former manager and certainly not to his daughter. There may be no crying in baseball, but there is money. And wherever earthly treasure gathers two or more, a legal system arises. From …


Punishing Hateful Motives: Old Wine In A New Bottle Revives Calls For Prohibition, Carol S. Steiker May 1999

Punishing Hateful Motives: Old Wine In A New Bottle Revives Calls For Prohibition, Carol S. Steiker

Michigan Law Review

Hate crimes are nothing new: crimes in which the victim is selected because of the victim's membership in some distinctive group (be it racial, ethnic, religious, or other) have been with us as long as such groups have coexisted within legal systems. What is relatively new is their recognition and designation as a discrete phenomenon. But as appellations like "sexual harassment" and "community policing" have begun to teach us, words are only the beginning of the life cycle of a new socio-legal concept. What follows are debates about whether the new category is really a coherent one, what activities should …


Rights And Wrongs, John C.P. Goldberg May 1999

Rights And Wrongs, John C.P. Goldberg

Michigan Law Review

If one were to ask an American lawyer or legal scholar for a definition of liberalism, her explanation would likely include mention of constitutional provisions such as the First and Fourth Amendments. This is because liberalism is today understood primarily as a theory of what government officials may not do to citizens. Its most immediate expression in law is thus taken to be those parts of the Bill of Rights that set limits on state action. This tendency to conceive of liberalism exclusively as a theory of rights against government is a twentieth century phenomenon. To be sure, liberalism has …


Reconceiving The Right To Present Witnesses, Richard A. Nagareda Mar 1999

Reconceiving The Right To Present Witnesses, Richard A. Nagareda

Michigan Law Review

Modem American law is, in a sense, a system of compartments. For understandable curricular reasons, legal education sharply distinguishes the law of evidence from both constitutional law and criminal procedure. In fact, the lines of demarcation between these three subjects extend well beyond law school to the organization of the leading treatises and case headnotes to which practicing lawyers routinely refer in their trade. Many of the most interesting questions in the law, however, do not rest squarely within a single compartment; instead, they concern the content and legitimacy of the lines of demarcation themselves. This article explores a significant, …


The Courage Of Our Convictions, Sherman J. Clark Jan 1999

The Courage Of Our Convictions, Sherman J. Clark

Michigan Law Review

This article argues that criminal trial juries perform an important but inadequately appreciated social function. I suggest that jury trials serve as a means through which we as a community take responsibility for - own up to - inherently problematic judgments regarding the blameworthiness or culpability of our fellow citizens. This is distinct from saying that jury trials are a method of making judgments about culpability. They are that; but they are also a means through which we confront our own agency in those judgments. The jury is an institution through which we as individuals take a turn acknowledging and …


Reflecting On The Subject: A Critique Of The Social Influence Conception Of Deterrence, The Broken Windows Theory, And Order-Maintenance Policing New York Style, Bernard E. Harcourt Nov 1998

Reflecting On The Subject: A Critique Of The Social Influence Conception Of Deterrence, The Broken Windows Theory, And Order-Maintenance Policing New York Style, Bernard E. Harcourt

Michigan Law Review

In 1993, New York City began implementing the quality-of-life initiative, an order-maintenance policing strategy targeting minor misdemeanor offenses like turnstile jumping, aggressive panhandling, and public drinking. The policing initiative is premised on the broken windows theory of deterrence, namely the hypothesis that minor physical and social disorder, if left unattended in a neighborhood, causes serious crime. New York City's new policing strategy has met with overwhelming support in the press and among public officials, policymakers, sociologists, criminologists and political scientists. The media describe the "famous" Broken Windows essay as "the bible of policing" and "the blueprint for community policing." Order-maintenance …


Rush To Closure: Lessons Of The Tadić Judgment, Jose E. Alvarez Jun 1998

Rush To Closure: Lessons Of The Tadić Judgment, Jose E. Alvarez

Michigan Law Review

In 1993 and 1994, following allegations of mass atrocities, including systematic killings, rapes, and other horrific forms of violence in Rwanda and the territories of the former Yugoslavia, two ad hoc international war crimes tribunals were established to prosecute individuals for grave violations of international humanitarian law, including genocide. As might be expected, advocates for the creation of these entities - the first international courts to prosecute individuals under international law since the trials at Nuremberg and Tokyo after World War II - aspired to grand goals inspired by, but extending far beyond, the pedestrian aims of ordinary criminal prosecutions. …


The Color Line Of Punishment, Jerome H. Skolnick May 1998

The Color Line Of Punishment, Jerome H. Skolnick

Michigan Law Review

If "the color line," (in W.E.B. Du Bois's 1903 phrase and prophecy) was to be the twentieth century's greatest challenge for the domestic life and public policy of the United States, the law has had much to do with drawing its shape. No surprise, this. By now, legal theorists accept that law does not advance in preordained fashion, immune from the sway of political interest, belief systems and social structure. Still, it is hard to exaggerate how powerfully the law has shaped the life chances of Americans of African heritage, for good or ill, and in ways that we scarcely …


The Anatomy Of Disgust In Criminal Law, Dan M. Kahan May 1998

The Anatomy Of Disgust In Criminal Law, Dan M. Kahan

Michigan Law Review

My goal in this review is to call attention to a defect in the dominant theories of criminal law and to identify a resource for remedying it. The defect is the absence of a sophisticated account of how disgust does and should influence legal decisionmaking. The corrective resource is William Miller's The Anatomy of Disgust. To make my claims more vivid, consider two stories. Both involve men who were moved to kill by disgust toward homosexuality.


Police And Thieves, Rosanna Cavallaro May 1998

Police And Thieves, Rosanna Cavallaro

Michigan Law Review

What is it about New York City that has, in the last few years, spawned a series of books attacking the criminal justice system and describing a community in which victims' needs are compelling while the rights of the accused are an impediment to justice? Why does this apocalyptic vision of the system persist, despite statistics demonstrating the sharpest decline in the city's and the nation's crime rates in decades? What explains the acute detachment from the accused that is at the core of this series of books? In Virtual Justice: The Flawed Prosecution of Crime in America, Richard Uviller …


Process, The Constitution, And Substantive Criminal Law, Louis D. Bilionis Mar 1998

Process, The Constitution, And Substantive Criminal Law, Louis D. Bilionis

Michigan Law Review

Criminal law scholars have pined for a substantive constitutional criminal law ever since Henry Hart and Herbert Packer first embraced the notion in the late 1950s and early 1960s. To this day, scholars continue to search for a theory fhat giv:es content to, in Hart's words, "the unmistakable indications that the Constitution means something definite and spμiething serious when it speaks of 'crime.'" To their dismay, the Supreme Court has - with two exceptions - seemingly resisted the notion. The two exceptions are familiar. First came the 1957 case of Lambert v. California, in which the Court came as close …


Plain Meaning, Practical Reason, And Cuplability: Toward A Theory Of Jury Interpretation Of Criminal Statutes, Darryl K. Brown Mar 1998

Plain Meaning, Practical Reason, And Cuplability: Toward A Theory Of Jury Interpretation Of Criminal Statutes, Darryl K. Brown

Michigan Law Review

In one of the few existing recordings of American juries deliberating in an actual criminal case, Wisconsin v. Reed, we observe jurors struggling with how they should apply a statute in a case in which the facts are not in real dispute. The defendant is charged with felon in possession of a gun, and all agree that he has a felony record and owned a pistol until he turned it over to the police upon their request. The statute contains three elements. The defendant must (a) have a felony conviction, (b) have possessed a gun, and (c) have known that …