Criminal Law Commons^™

Constitutionality Of Cyberbullying Laws: Keeping The Online Playground Safe For Both Teens And Free Speech, Alison V. King

Vanderbilt Law Review

The Internet is a blessing and a curse. Along with the manifold benefits the Internet provides-electronic research, instantaneous news, social networking, online shopping, to name a few-comes a host of dangers: online harassment and cyberbullying, hacking, voyeurism, identity theft, phishing, and perhaps still more perils that have yet to appear. The Internet creates a virtual world that can result in very real consequences for people's lives. This creates a challenge for parents, schools, and policymakers attempting to keep pace with rapidly developing technologies and to provide adequate protections for children. The even greater challenge, however, is to balance these vital …

A Sense Of Duty: The Illusory Criminal Jurisdiction Of The U.S./Iraq Status Of Forces Agreement, Chris Jenks

San Diego International Law Journal

This Article will examine the Iraq SOFA’s use of duty status as a basis for determining which State has primary jurisdiction over U.S. service members for alleged criminal misconduct in Iraq. In the third section, the Article will briefly explain what a SOFA is, and how and why they are used, focusing on the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) SOFA. This section will also utilize examples of U.S. service member misconduct, both associated with and detached from official duty, to illustrate the application of an acts-based SOFA jurisdiction article. The fourth section turns to the Iraq SOFA’s status-based jurisdiction article, …

Punishment As Suffering, David C. Gray

Faculty Scholarship

In a series of recent high-profile articles, a group of contemporary scholars argue that the criminal law is a grand machine for the administration of suffering. The machine requires calibration, of course. The main standard we use for ours is objective proportionality. We generally punish more serious crimes more severely and aim to inflict the same punishment on similarly situated offenders who commit similar crimes. In the views of these authors, this focus on objective proportionality makes ours a rather crude machine. In particular, it ignores the fact that 1) different offenders may suffer to a different degree when subjected …

Accountability For System Criminality, Mark A. Drumbl

Scholarly Articles

Not available.

Liberty Lost: The Moral Case For Marijuana Law Reform, Eric Blumenson, Eva Nilsen

Indiana Law Journal

Marijuana policy analyses typically focus on the relative costs and benefits of present policy and its feasible alternatives. This Essay addresses a prior, threshold issue: whether marijuana criminal laws abridge fundamental individual rights, and if so, whether there are grounds that justify doing so. Over 700, 000 people are arrested annually for simple marijuana possession, a small but significant proportion of the 100 million Americans who have committed the same crime. In this Essay, we present a civil libertarian case for repealing marijuana possession laws. We put forward two arguments corresponding to the two distinct liberty concerns implicated by laws …

A Distributive Theory Of Criminal Law, Aya Gruber

Publications

In criminal law circles, the accepted wisdom is that there are two and only two true justifications of punishment-retributivism and utilitarianism. The multitude of moral claims about punishment may thus be reduced to two propositions: (1) punishment should be imposed because defendants deserve it, and (2) punishment should be imposed because it makes society safer. At the same time, most penal scholars notice the trend in criminal law to de-emphasize intent, centralize harm, and focus on victims, but they largely write off this trend as an irrational return to antiquated notions of vengeance. This Article asserts that there is in …

The Shadow Of State Secrets, Laura K. Donohue

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The shadow of state secrets casts itself longer than previously acknowledged. Between 2001 and 2009 the government asserted state secrets in more than 100 cases, while in scores more litigants appealed to the doctrine in anticipation of government intervention. Contractor cases ranged from breach of contract, patent disputes, and trade secrets, to fraud and employment termination. Wrongful death, personal injury, and negligence suits kept pace, extending beyond product liability to include infrastructure and services, as well as conduct of war. In excess of fifty telecommunications suits linked to the NSA warrantless wiretapping program emerged 2006-2009, with the government acting, variously, …

The Excitement Of Interdictory Ideas: A Response To Professor Anders Walker, Marc O. Degirolami

Faculty Publications

The very first time that I taught criminal law, I would occasionally tell my six-year-old son, Thomas, about selected cases and situations that I had come across. Thomas enjoyed these discussions—more than I would have guessed: he was captivated by the horror of Dudley & Stephens, he was uncomfortably intrigued by shaming punishments, he was appropriately outraged at all manner of outcomes that seemed to him too harsh or too lenient. But most of all, he wanted to test his own burgeoning intuitions about right and wrong, good and evil, the permitted and the forbidden, against my "criminal law stories." …

Taking Prevention Seriously: Developing A Comprehensive Response To Child Trafficking And Sexual Exploitation, Jonathan Todres

Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law

Millions of children are victims of trafficking and commercial sexual exploitation each year. Governments have responded with a range of measures, focusing primarily on seeking to prosecute perpetrators of these abuses and offering assistance to select victims. These efforts, while important, have done little to reduce the incidence of these forms of child exploitation. This Article asserts that a central reason why efforts to date may not be as effective as hoped is that governments have not oriented their approaches properly toward prioritizing prevention--the ultimate goal--and addressing these problems in a comprehensive and systematic manner. Instead, efforts to date have …

Liberty Lost: The Moral Case For Marijuana Law Reform, Eva Nilsen

Faculty Scholarship

Marijuana policy analyses typically focus on the relative costs and benefits of present policy and its feasible alternatives. This Essay addresses a prior, threshold issue: whether marijuana criminal laws abridge fundamental individual rights, and if so, whether there are grounds that justify doing so. Over 700, 000 people are arrested annually for simple marijuana possession, a small but significant proportion of the 100 million Americans who have committed the same crime. In this Essay, we present a civil libertarian case for repealing marijuana possession laws. We put forward two arguments corresponding to the two distinct liberty concerns implicated by laws …

Realism, Punishment, And Reform, Owen D. Jones, Paul H. Robinson, Robert Kurzban

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

Professors Donald Braman, Dan Kahan, and David Hoffman, in their article "Some Realism About Punishment Naturalism," to be published in an upcoming issue of the University of Chicago Law Review, critique a series of our articles: Concordance and Conflict in Intuitions of Justice (http://ssrn.com/abstract=932067), The Origins of Shared Intuitions of Justice (http://ssrn.com/abstract=952726), and Intuitions of Justice: Implications for Criminal Law and Justice Policy (http://ssrn.com/abstract=976026). Our reply, here, follows their article in that coming issue.

As we demonstrate, they have misunderstood our views on, and thus the implications of, widespread agreement about punishing the "core" of wrongdoing. Although much of their …

The Conscience Of A Prosecutor, David Luban

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

This essay, a version of the 2010 Tabor Lecture at Valparaiso Law School, examines issues about the role of a prosecutor in the adversary system through the lens of the following question: Should a prosecutor throw a case to avoid keeping men who he thinks are innocent in prison? This issue came to prominence in 2008, when Daniel Bibb, a New York City prosecutor, told newspaper reporters that he had done so in connection with a 1991 murder conviction that he had been assigned to reinvestigate after new evidence emerged that the wrong men had been convicted and were serving …

Why Care About Mass Incarceration?, James Forman Jr.

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The United States incarcerates more of its citizens than any other nation in the world. Paul Butler’s Let’s Get Free: A Hip-Hip Theory of Justice makes an important contribution to the debate about the crime policies that have produced this result. Butler began his career as a federal prosecutor who believed that the best way to serve Washington, D.C’s low-income African-American community was to punish its law-breakers. His experiences—including being prosecuted for a crime himself—eventually led him to conclude that America incarcerates far too many nonviolent offenders, especially drug offenders. Let’s Get Free offers a set of reforms for reducing …

A Defensible Defense?: Reexamining Castle Doctrine Statutes, Benjamin Levin

Publications

Recent years have seen a proliferation of so-called “castle doctrine” statutes – laws that provide home dwellers with more expansive self-defense protections if they resort to lethal force in confrontations with intruders. The passage of such laws and subsequent uses of the defense have captured the public imagination, prompting significant media attention, as well as skeptical and critical scholarship from the legal academic community.

Considering the current prevalence of castle laws and the often polarized nature of the debate concerning their application, this Article argues that it is important to excavate the doctrine from the culture wars rhetoric in which …

The False Promise Of Retributive Proportionality, Aya Gruber

Publications

No abstract provided.

When Family Matters, Alafair Burke

Hofstra Law Faculty Scholarship

In Privilege or Punish: Criminal Justice and the Challenge of Family Ties, Dan Markel, Jennifer Collins, and Ethan Leib make an important contribution to the growing literature on criminal law and families by documenting the ways that criminal law advantages and burdens actors based on familial status and identifying the potential harms that are unleashed when criminal law recognizes family status. This Feature seeks to complement that contribution by situating the authors’ observations within the context of two considerations beyond Privilege or Punish’s immediate focus: chronological trends and the practical realities that can shape application of formal law. By distinguishing …

Retributivism Refined - Or Run Amok?, Kenneth Simons

Faculty Scholarship

What would the criminal law look like if we took retributivist principles very seriously? In their book, Crime and Culpability: A Theory of Criminal Law, the authors - Larry Alexander and Kimberly Kessler Ferzan, with contributions by Stephen J. Morse - provide a controversial set of answers. Whether a criminal act does ordoes not result in harm should not affect the actor’s punishment. Only the last act of risk creation should suffice for liability. Conscious awareness of risk should always be necessary. And all of criminal law, each and every category of mens rea and actus reus, should be reduced …

Race And The Doctrine Of Self Defense: The Role Of Race In Determining The Proper Use Of Force To Protect Oneself, Richard Klein

Scholarly Works

No abstract provided.

Race And The Doctrine Of Self Defense: The Role Of Race In Determining The Proper Use Of Force To Protect Oneself, Richard Klein

Journal of Race, Gender, and Ethnicity

No abstract provided.

How (Not) To Think Like A Punisher, Alice G. Ristroph

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

This article examines the several and sometimes contradictory accounts of sentencing in proposed revisions to the Model Penal Code. At times, sentencing appears to be an art, dependent upon practical wisdom; in other instances, sentencing seems more of a science, dependent upon close analysis of empirical data. I argue that the new Code provisions are at their best when they acknowledge the legal and political complexities of sentencing, and at their worst when they invoke the rhetoric of desert. When the Code focuses on the sentencing process in political context, it offers opportunities to deploy both practical wisdom and empirical …

No Rational Basis: The Pragmatic Case For Marijuana Law Reform, Eric D. Blumenson, Eva Nilsen

Faculty Scholarship

This article presents a critique of marijuana prohibition and suggests some alternative regulatory approaches that would be more productive and consonant with justice. Part I relies on a forty-year empirical record to demonstrate that (1) reliance on a law enforcement approach has aggravated rather than mitigated the risks involved with marijuana use, and (2) criminalization, which results in the arrest of more than 700, 000 Americans annually for possession of any amount of marijuana, is an inhumane and destructive response to an act that almost 100 million Americans have committed. Part II assesses the relative merits of several alternative reform …

Modes Of Discretion In The Criminal Justice System, Roger Fairfax

Presentations

No abstract provided.

Parents, Children, And The Law Of Assault, Hamish Stewart

Dalhousie Law Journal

The debate concerning the constitutionality and the possible repeal of s. 43 of the Criminal Code, the so-called "spanking" provision, has raised an important issue: when a parent touches a child without the child's consent, under what conditions is the parent's conduct an assault? Supporters of the'repeal of s. 43 have suggested that parents are protected from inappropriate prosecutions by the exercise of prosecutorial discretion and by the common law defences of de minimis non curat lex and necessity But prosecutorial discretion is not a suitable substitute for a proper definition of the scope of criminal liability,and the defences ofde …

Dan Freed: My Teacher, My Colleague, My Friend, Ronald Weich

All Faculty Scholarship

At a recent meeting of the National Association of Sentencing Commissions, Yale professor Dan Freed was honored during a panel discussion titled "Standing on the Shoulders of Sentencing Giants," Dan Freed is indeed a sentencing giant. but he is the gentlest giant of all. It is hard to imagine that a man as mild-mannered, soft-spoken, and self-effacing as Dan Freed has had such a profound impact on federal sentencing law and so many other areas of criminal justice policy, Yet he has.

I've been in many rooms with Dan Freed over the years — classrooms, boardrooms, dining rooms, and others. …

Violence On The Brain: A Critique Of Neuroscience In Criminal Law, Amanda C. Pustilnik

Faculty Scholarship

Is there such a thing as a criminally "violent brain"? Does it make sense to speak of "the neurobiology of violence" or the "psychopathology of crime"? Is it possible to answer on a physiological level what makes one person engage in criminal violence and another not, under similar circumstances?

This Article first demonstrates parallels between certain current claims about the neurobiology of criminal violence and past movements that were concerned with the law and neuroscience of violence: phrenology, Lombrosian biological criminology, and lobotomy. It then engages in a substantive review and critique of several current claims about the neurological bases …

From Philly To Fayetteville: Reflections On Teaching Criminal Law In The First Year, Brian Gallini

School of Law Faculty Publications and Presentations

How exactly should we teach the first-year criminal law course? How many credits should the course receive? What should go in the syllabus? How much of what is in the syllabus must be covered? In this essay, I humbly offer some thoughts – from the “newbie’s” standpoint – for your consideration in response to each of these questions. I conclude with some limited comments (reminders?) directed gently to my senior colleagues about teaching this generation of first-year law students.

Step Out Of The Car: License, Registration, And Dna Please, Brian Gallini

School of Law Faculty Publications and Presentations

No Arkansas appellate court has examined the constitutionality of the recently enacted House Bill 1473 – better known as “Juli’s Law” – which allows officers to take DNA samples from suspects arrested for capital murder, murder in the first degree, kidnapping, sexual assault in the first degree, and sexual assault in the second degree. This Essay contends that Juli’s Law violates the Fourth Amendment of the federal constitution. Part I highlights certain features of the statute and explores the rationale underlying its enactment. Part II discusses the only published decision upholding the practice of taking of DNA samples from certain …

Foreword: Criminal Law Issue, Alfredo Garcia

St. Thomas Law Review

It is my pleasure to write the foreword to this inaugural criminal law issue. The issue consists of four timely and incisive articles that underscore the importance of the procedural and fair trial guarantees embodied, respectively, in the Fourth and Sixth Amendments to the United States Constitution. A common theme underlies the message conveyed by the distinguished authors: the extent to which the interpretation of criminal procedural rights by both the Supreme Court and state appellate courts affect the everyday administration of justice in the United States.

Christian V. State: An Unnecessary Overcorrection Threatens The Law Of Criminal Assault, Christopher Dahl

Maryland Law Review

No abstract provided.

Book Review, Kenneth S. Gallant, The Principle Of Legality In International And Comparative Criminal Law (2009), Mark A. Drumbl

Scholarly Articles

Not available.