Criminal Law Commons^™

Reply To Richard A. Leo And Jon B. Gould, Samuel R. Gross, Barbara O'Brien

Articles

The following is a letter to the Ohio State Journal of Criminal Law received from Professors Samuel Gross and Barbara O'Brien, responding to an article published in the Journal in Fall 2009 by Professors Richard Leo and Jon Gould. This letter is followed by a reply from Professors Leo and Gould. Professors Gross and O'Brien did not see the reply prior to the Journal going to press. As we have indicated before, we welcome letters to the Journal from readers on any topic covered in a prior issue. - Editors

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 …

Mainstreaming Civil Rights In The Law School Curriculum: Criminal Law And Procedure, Tamara F. Lawson

Articles

No abstract provided.

The Autobiography Of An Execution By David Dow, Nicole P. Dyszlewski

Law Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Sex Representation On The Bench: Legitimacy And International Criminal Courts, Nienke Grossman

All Faculty Scholarship

This essay examines the relationship between legitimacy and the presence of both male and female judges on international criminal court benches. It argues that sex representation – an approximate reflection of the ratio of the sexes in the general population – on the bench is an important contributor to legitimacy of international criminal courts. First, it proposes that sex representation affects normative legitimacy because men and women bring different perspectives to judging. Consequently, without both sexes, adjudication is inherently biased. Second, even if one rejects the proposition that men and women "think differently", sex representation affects sociological legitimacy because sex …

Balancing Liberty, Dignity And Safety: The Impact Of Domestic Violence Lethality Screening, Margaret E. Johnson

All Faculty Scholarship

This Article undertakes the first ever analysis of the consequences of the justice and legal system’s extensive use of lethality assessment tools for women subjected to abuse. An increasing number of states are now requiring their police, prosecutors, civil attorneys, advocates, service providers, and court personnel to assess women in order to obtain a score that indicates the woman’s lethality risk because of domestic violence. The mandated danger assessment screen of all women subjected to violence focuses only on the risk of homicide and thereby limits the definition of what is domestic violence. In addition, the accompanying protocol for the …

Security Council Resolution 1820: An Imperfect But Necessary Resolution To Protect Civilians From Rape In War Zones, Melissa Goldenberg Goldstoff

Cardozo Journal of Equal Rights & Social Justice

The note examines the significance and limitations of UN Security Council Resolution 1820, which recognizes rape as a war crime and a threat to international security. While the Resolution is a crucial step forward in protecting women during armed conflicts, it is argued to be imperfect due to its incomplete implementation mechanisms and potential to undermine earlier resolutions like Resolution 1325, which emphasizes women's roles in peace-building.

Bringing Our Kids Home: International Parental Child Abduction & Japan's Refusal To Return Our Children, Robin S. Lee

Cardozo Journal of Equal Rights & Social Justice

The note examines Japan's refusal to ratify the Hague Convention on the Civil Aspects of International Child Abduction, highlighting how this decision creates a legal haven for parental child abductions. It explores the cultural, legal, and systemic factors in Japan that facilitate these abductions and the challenges faced by foreign parents in retrieving their children. The note also discusses potential solutions and international efforts to pressure Japan into adhering to the Convention.

Accrediting The Accreditors: A New Paradigm For Correctional Oversight, Lynn S. Branham

All Faculty Scholarship

Correctional accreditation processes can be revamped to bring more transparency and accountability into the operation of correctional facilities and to help ensure that they comport with sound correctional practices, legal requirements, and basic human-rights precepts. Becoming accredited is now largely optional, and correctional accreditation processes are fee-based. Consequently, correctional accrediting entities are vulnerable to pressures to water down accreditation standards and make accreditation procedures more lax. The federal government should therefore adopt two requirements. First, prisons, jails, and other correctional facilities should have to be accredited by a certified accrediting entity in order to be eligible to receive federal funds. …

Can Retributivism Be Progressive? A Reply To Professor Gray And Jonathan Huber, Chad Flanders

All Faculty Scholarship

Professor David Gray and Jonathan Huber have done a great service in their Response to my Article, “Retribution and Reform.” They have helped me to see the wrong turns in my argument and the areas in which my argument needs to be clarified and amplified. In this brief Reply, I attempt to respond to some of their concerns.

Retribution And Reform, Chad Flanders

All Faculty Scholarship

What is the relationship of punishment theory to punishment practice? What should this relationship be? The last twenty years have seen an amazing rise in sophisticated and elegant theories of retributive justice of a Kantian, and more recently, an expressivist variety - a “retributivist revival.” As pure philosophical theorizing goes, this must surely be counted as real progress. But, those same twenty years have also seen increases in the length of criminal sentences, in the amount of activity subject to criminal sanction, and in the sheer number of people behind bars. Professor James Q. Whitman has famously said that we …

The One State Solution To Teaching Criminal Law, Or Leaving The Common Law And The Mpc Behind, Chad Flanders

All Faculty Scholarship

How should criminal law be taught to first-year law students? Professors preparing their classes for the first time, and even veterans of many semesters of criminal law, find themselves facing a dilemma. On the one hand, the common law is no longer good - law in nearly every state; it has been superseded by statute. Even states that leave a large role for the common law usually have a combination of common law and statutory law or strongly limit the scope of the common law. On the other hand, there is no uniform code that actually exists as law in …

Policymaking By The Japanese Judiciary In The Criminal Justice Field, Daniel H. Foote

Articles

When one speaks of policymaking by the judiciary, the image that often comes to tnind is the U.S. judiciary, especially the Supreme Court of the United States. That reaction is understandable. Examples abound of policymaking by courts in the United States; and a seemingly never-ending stream of books and articles discuss, analyze, and, depending on the authors'point of view, praise or decry "policymaking" or "judicial activism" by U.S. courts. The field of criminal justice frequently is offered as a prominent example of judicial policymaking in the United States. Expansion in due process protections and other rights for criminal suspects and …

A Post-Race Equal Protection?, Mario L. Barnes, Erwin Chemerinsky, Trina Jones

Articles

No abstract provided.

Gimme Some More: Centering Gender And Inequality In Criminal Justice And Discretion Discourse, Shaun Ossei-Owusu

American University Journal of Gender, Social Policy & the Law

No abstract provided.

Meditaciones Postmodernas Sobre El Castigo: Acerca De Los Límites De La Razón Y De Las Virtudes De La Aleatoriedad (Una Polémica Y Un Manifiesto Para El Siglo Xxi), Bernard E. Harcourt

Faculty Scholarship

Abstract in Spanish
Durante la Modernidad, el discurso sobre la pena ha girado circularmente en torno a tres grupos de interrogantes. El primero, surgido de la propia Ilustración, preguntaba: ¿En qué basa el soberano su derecho de penar? Nietzsche con mayor determinación, pero también otros, argumentaron que la propia pregunta implicaba ya su respuesta. Con el nacimiento de las ciencias sociales, este escepticismo hizo surgir un segundo conjunto de interrogantes: ¿Cuál es, entonces, la verdadera función de la pena? ¿Qué es lo que hacemos cuando penamos? Una serie de críticas ulteriores – de metanarrativas, funcionalistas o de objetividad científica – …

Federal Prosecution Of State And Local Officials Using Honest Services Mail Fraud: Where's The Line?, George E.B. Holding, Dennis M. Duffy, John Stuart Bruce

Campbell Law Review

Although there is little dispute that the mail fraud statute has become a valuable part of a federal prosecutor's arsenal, for years legal scholars have debated the extent to which the mail fraud statute should be used to prosecute corrupt state and local officials. In recent years, largely in response to the large number of high profile honest services fraud prosecutions, even members of the mainstream news media are beginning to seek guidance regarding the definition of honest services mail fraud. As noted by Professor George Brown, though the controversy over whether the national government should be responsible for prosecuting …

Cell Phone - A "Weapon" Of Mass Discretion, Mark L. Mayakis

Campbell Law Review

Initially, this Comment will discuss the development of the search incident to arrest exception from the warrant requirement and how this exception has been generally defined and judicially interpreted. The next section will include a discussion of how the search incident to arrest exception has been applied to searches of the content stored within pagers. This Comment will then explain how modern cell phones have created difficulties for courts applying the search incident to arrest exception, causing these courts to diverge down two different lines of reasoning, ultimately reaching opposite conclusions. Finally, this Comment will reiterate the necessity that the …

Tax Fraud In The Sales Tax: Zappers — What Are They? How Can Puerto Rico Block Them?, Richard Thompson Ainsworth

Faculty Scholarship

The Sales and Use Tax is an essential part of Puerto Rico’s revenue profile. Effective only recently (November 15, 2006) the Impuesto a las Ventas y Uso (IVU) was expected to raise between $2.3 and $1.05 billion annually, and has already become the Commonwealth’s fourth largest revenue source. Actual revenue results for 2007-2008 came in at $1.1 billion, which admittedly is closer to the low end than the high end of what is possible, but now that the tax is in place the next pressing question is how can its performance be improved?

This paper generally proposes that Puerto Rico …

The Contradictions Of Juvenile Crime & Punishment, Jeffery Fagan

Faculty Scholarship

Juvenile incarceration in the United States is, at first glance, distinctly different from its adult counterpart. While some juvenile facilities retain the iconic aesthetic of adult incarceration – orange jumpsuits, large cellblocks, uniformed guards, barbed wire, and similar heavy security measures – others have trappings and atmospherics more reminiscent of boarding schools, therapeutic communities, or small college campuses. These compact, benign settings avoid the physical stigmata of institutional life and accord some autonomy of movement and intimacy in relations with staff. They also give primacy to developmentally appropriate and therapeutic interventions.

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

Scholarship@WashULaw

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 Structural Causes Of Mortgage Fraud, Jim Smith

Scholarly Works

Mortgage fraud, often a violation of federal and state criminal statutes, covers a number of different types of behavior, all of which have the common denominator of conduct that has the intent or effect of impairing the value of residential mortgage loans. Mortgage fraud has become prevalent over the past decade and shows no signs of diminishing despite the collapse of domestic housing markets during the past two years. This paper analyzes the complex relationships between prime mortgage loan markets, subprime markets, and various types of mortgage fraud. This paper concludes that the root causes of mortgage fraud are associated …

The Case For Criminalising Primary Infringements Of Copyright – Perspectives From Singapore, Cheng Lim Saw

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

Hitherto, criminal liability only attached to, inter alia, the commercial manufacture, importation, distribution and sale of infringing copies of copyright material.1 In the noncommercial context, it was also a criminal offence to distribute infringing materials that had a prejudicial impact on the copyright owner.2 The defendant therefore could not be subject to criminal prosecution for infringing acts that were not motivated by profit or that did not involve “prejudicial” distribution. Only civil liability attached to copyright infringements for what may be loosely termed “non-commercial” purposes. All this, of course, changed when the United States–Singapore Free Trade Agreement (USSFTA) was concluded …

International Decision, African Court On Human And Peoples’ Rights, Michelot Yogogombaye V. Republic Of Senegal, Charles Chernor Jalloh

Faculty Publications

State Parties have automatic access to the African Court on Human and Peoples’ Rights, based in Arusha, Tanzania. In stark contrast, individuals and NGOs (i.e. those most likely to bring cases alleging human rights violations), can only initiate proceedings if the respondent State has entered a special declaration accepting the Court’s competence to receive such cases. Predictably, in a continent rife with human rights violations, only a few African States have accepted the Court’s jurisdiction to hear such (individual or NGO) petitions since its formal creation in June 1998. After years without hearing any cases, the Court finally received a …

The Role Of The Family In Criminal Law, Gerard V. Bradley

Journal Articles

Privilege or Punish: Criminal Justice and the Challenge of Family Ties. Dan Markel, Jennifer M. Collins & Ethan J. Leib. Oxford University Press, 2009.

The authors of Privilege or Punish (PoP) pose two questions, one descriptive and the other morally evaluative. "First, how does the criminal justice system in this country approach the issue of family status? Second, how should family status be recognized, if at all, in a criminal justice system situated within a liberal democracy committed to egalitarian principles of nondiscrimination?"

The Order-Maintenance Agenda As Land Use Policy, Nicole Stelle Garnett

Journal Articles

Debates about the broken windows hypothesis focus almost exclusively on whether the order-maintenance agenda represents wise criminal law policy — specifically on whether, when, and at what cost, order-maintenance policing techniques reduce serious crime. These questions are important, but incomplete. This Essay, which was solicited for a symposium on urban-development policy, considers potential benefits of order-maintenance policies other than crime-reduction, especially reducing the fear of crime. The Broken Windows essay itself urged that attention to disorder was important not just because disorder was a precursor to more serious crime, but also because disorder undermined residents’ sense of security. The later …

Responses To The Ten Questions, Mary Ellen O'Connell

Journal Articles

The Journal of the National Security Forum (JNSF) Board of Editors posed ten questions on national security to a group of national-security law experts. Professor Mary Ellen O’Connell’s answers to the ten questions are presented.

Reconceptualizing Vagrancy And Reconstructing The Vagrant: A Socio-Legal Analysis Of Criminal Law Reform In Canada, 1953-1972, Prashan Ranasinhe

Osgoode Hall Law Journal

This article explores significant reforms to the vagrancy section of the Criminal Code during the mid-to-late twentieth century. By locating the reforms within their unique social, political, and economic climates, I examine how they reconceptualized the offence of vagrancy and concomitantly reconstructed the vagrant as a social problem. The reforms played a seminal role in reducing the number of vagrancy offences, eventually leading to the demise of vagrancy in the criminal law. Yet, while the "vagrant" ceased to exist in the law, the law still continues to preserve vestiges of the vagrant in a highly gendered manner.

Does An Individual Government Official Qualify For Immunity Under The Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act?: A Human Rights-Based Approach To Resolving A Problematic Circuit Split, Heather L. Williams

Maryland Law Review

No abstract provided.

The Contradictions Of Juvenile Crime & Punishment, Jeffrey Fagan

Faculty Scholarship

This essay explores the contradictions and puzzles of modern juvenile justice, and illustrates the enduring power of the child-saving philosophy of the juvenile court in an era of punitiveness toward offenders both young and old. The exponential growth in incarceration in the U.S. since the 1970s has been more restrained for juveniles than adults, even in the face of a youth violence epidemic that lasted for nearly a decade. Rhetoric has grown harsher in the wake of moral panics about youth crime, juvenile codes now express the language of retribution and incapacitation, yet the growth in incarceration of juveniles was …