Criminal Law Commons^™

Policing Sex: The Colonial, Apartheid, And New Democracy Policing Of Sex Work In South Africa, India Thusi

Articles by Maurer Faculty

In Part I of this Article, I discuss the perception that sex work was a “necessary evil” under the Dutch East India Company. In Part II, I discuss British colonial rule and the influence of the Victorian era on the policing of sex work. In Part III, I discuss the Union of South Africa and the mass hysteria following the rise of the “black peril.” Part IV discusses the apartheid era and the impact of the Immorality Act on the policing of sex workers. Part V focuses on the new democratic era and the introduction of the human rights framework. …

The Upside Down Mississippi Problem: Addressing Procedural Disparity Between Federal And State Criminal Defendants In Concurrent Jurisdiction Prosecutions, Jordan Gross

Faculty Law Review Articles

State constitutional rights and procedural protections, of course, can only be asserted in state criminal prosecutions. As a result, where a defendant is prosecuted in federal court for conduct over which both a state and the federal government have criminal jurisdiction, he or she may be at a distinct disadvantage simply because of the fortuity or misfortune of having attracted the attention of federal prosecutors. And, upon conviction, a defendant will likely face a drastically harsher sentence than that which a state court would have imposed for the same conduct. The cumulative impact, therefore, of Congress's federalization, nationalization and standardization …

The Overlooked Benefits Of The Blackstone Principle, John Bronsteen

Faculty Publications & Other Works

No abstract provided.

The Myth Of The Double- Edged Sword: An Empirical Study Of Neuroscience Evidence In Criminal Cases, Deborah W. Denno

Faculty Scholarship

This Article presents the results of my unique study of 800 criminal cases addressing neuroscience evidence over the past two decades (1992–2012). Many legal scholars have theorized about the impact of neuroscience evidence on the criminal law, but this is the first empirical study of its kind to systematically investigate how courts assess the mitigating and aggravating strength of such evidence. My analysis reveals that neuroscience evidence is usually offered to mitigate punishments in the way that traditional criminal law has always allowed, especially in the penalty phase of death penalty trials. This finding controverts the popular image of neuroscience …

The Prior Convictions Exception: Examining The Continuing Viability Of Almendarez-Torres Under Alleyne, Meg E. Sawyer

Washington and Lee Law Review

No abstract provided.

Assumed Sane, Fatma Marouf

Scholarly Works

In 2014, the Board of Immigration Appeals (BIA) held in Matter of G-G-S- that a noncitizen’s mental health status at the time of an offense is irrelevant to determining whether the offense is a “particularly serious crime” for immigration purposes. Since a “particularly serious crime” is a bar to asylum and withholding of removal, it can result in a noncitizen’s deportation to a country where he or she faces a serious risk of persecution. In deciding that immigration judges “are constrained by how mental health issues were addressed as part of the criminal proceedings,” the BIA failed to recognize the …

Non-State Armed Groups And The Role Of Transnational Criminal Law During Armed Conflict, Christopher L. Blakesley, Dan E. Stigall

Scholarly Works

With the ascendance of the terrorist group known as the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), the international community has struggled to adapt to the new international security context. Among the challenges that are currently being confronted are questions relating to how states may effectively facilitate international cooperation to counter ISIS (especially among countries in the Middle East and North Africa). Within this context, guidance from the United Nations on international cooperation posits that “[t]he universal counter-terrorism conventions and protocols do not apply in situations of armed conflict” – a legal position that would serve to stymie important cooperative …

Advocacy As An Exercise In Virtue: Lawyering, Bad Facts, And Furman's High-Stakes Dilemma, Linda H. Edwards

Scholarly Works

Two of the conversations benefitting most from Jack Sammons's scholarship are conversations about legal rhetoric and about virtue ethics. Legal rhetoric is the study of the conventions of legal argument, specifically, the art of identifying and evaluating the best available means of persuasion and implementing those means effectively in light of audience, purpose, and occasion. Virtue ethics approaches moral reflection by asking what sort of person a particular moral choice encourages the actor to become. It focuses on consequences to the moral agent herself rather than directly focusing on consequences to others. The goal is to become a virtuous person, …

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 …

Taking Pedophilia Seriously, Margo Kaplan

Washington and Lee Law Review

This Article pushes lawmakers, courts, and scholars to reexamine the concept of pedophilia in favor of a more thoughtful and coherent approach. Legal scholarship lacks a thorough and reasoned analysis of pedophilia. Its failure to carefully consider how the law should conceptualize sexual attraction to children undermines efforts to address the myriad of criminal, public health, and other legal concerns pedophilia raises. The result is an inconsistent mix of laws and policies based on dubious presumptions. These laws also increase risk of sexual abuse by isolating people living with pedophilia from treatment.

The Article makes two central arguments: (1) although …

Comment On The Prior Convictions Exception: Examining The Continuing Viability Of Almendarez-Torres Under Alleyne, Kevin Flynn

Washington and Lee Law Review

No abstract provided.

Introduction: War Measures And The Repression Of Radicalism, 1914-1939, Barry Wright, Eric Tucker, Susan Binnie

Articles & Book Chapters

This fourth volume in the Canadian State Trials series, Security, Dissent, and the Limits of Toleration in War and Peace, 1914–1939, brings readers to the period of the First World War and the inter-war years. it follows an approach similar to that of others in the series. the central concern remains the legal responses of Canadian governments to real and perceived threats to the security of the state. the aim is to provide a representative and relatively comprehensive examination of Canadian experiences with these matters, placed in broader historical and comparative context.

Proceedings Of The Ninth International Humanitarian Law Dialogs, International Criminal Law: Year In Review 2014–2015, Mark A. Drumbl

Scholarly Articles

This publication is based on Professor Drumbl's remarks on September 1, 2015, at the Ninth International Humanitarian Law Dialogs held in Chautauqua, New York.

What I do not want to do is review and repeat what has already been said about the international arena. I thought what I would do is boil it down to a couple observations that I have about the activities at the international institutions over the past year, and discuss four elements that have emerged.

One is transition. What I mean by this is that the work of a number of the international institutions is winding …

(Elephant) Death And Taxes: Proposed Tax Treatment Of Illegal Ivory, Angela Ostrowski

Animal Law Review

African elephants are poached for their ivory at alarming rates. If the cur­rent level of poaching continues, it is projected they will be extinct from the wild in the year 2025. Preserving the African elephant species is important from an animal rights, conservation, ecological, economical, and crime pre­vention perspective. The current penalties and fines for the illegal trade in ivory are not enough of a deterrent. One method of deterrence that has not yet been explored is the imposition of tax consequences on the illegal ivory trade. This Article proposes a number of ways to use the tax system to …

Temporal Arbitrariness: A Back To The Future Look At A Twenty-Five-Year-Old Death Penalty Trial, Mary Kelly Tate

Law Faculty Publications

his essay grapples with a previously unexamined feature of the death penalty: temporal arbitrariness. How does the circumstance of time affect capital defendants? What might this mean for the stability of our notions of justice? I explore these questions using a 25-year-old death penalty trial as a case study, examining the procedural and factual highlights of the case and situating it in its temporal milieu. I then explore how the roles of doctrine, policy, and cultural attitudes would dramatically alter the nature and probable outcome of the case today, illustrating how temporal arbitrariness further exposes the death penalty’s unsteady administration …

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 …

Foreword, J. Amy Dillard

University of Baltimore Law Review

No abstract provided.

The Twilight Zone: Perspectives From A Man On Death Row, Leah Stiegler

Law Student Publications

This interview was conducted through a series of written correspondences between Gerald Dean Cruz and Leah Stiegler, the Allen Chair Editor for Volume 49 of the University of Richmond Law Review. This exchange was reproduced, in excerpts, for the sole purpose of giving readers a rare glimpse into the perspective of a death row inmate.

Making Sure We Are Getting It Right: Repairing "The Machinery Of Death" By Narrowing Capital Eligibility, Ann E. Reid

Law Student Publications

This comment argues that, starting with the framework of the federal system, there is a way to reconcile modern concerns about the death penalty with society's need for leverage over those criminals who truly are the worst of the worst-those who present grave threats to society even after incarceration. This reconciliation can be achieved by amending the Federal Death Penalty Act to require prosecutors to establish one additional element before they can secure a capital conviction: future dangerousness of the defendant in prison..

Who Is Best Suited To Combat Sexual Violence On College Campuses?: An Analysis Of H.B. 1785, Susana Bass

Law Student Publications

Virginia House Bill 1785, requiring campus police to notify the Commonwealth's Attorney of any victim-initiated sexual assault investigations, is a positive step forward in helping to combat sexual assault on Virginia college campuses. Under this legislation, victims of sexual assault are much more likely to receive the protection and justice they deserve. Part II of this comment outlines current federal law that intends to address sexual assault on college campus and whether these laws have been effective in preventing sexual assault. Part III details Virginia House Bill 1785 introduced in the 2015 Virginia General Assembly Session to address sexual assault …

Human Rights Thinking And The Laws Of War, David Luban

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

In a significant early case, the ICTY commented: “The essence of the whole corpus of international humanitarian law as well as human rights law lies in the protection of the human dignity of every person…. The general principle of respect for human dignity is . . . the very raison d'être of international humanitarian law and human rights law.”

Is it true that international humanitarian law and international human rights law share the same “essence,” and that essence is the general principle of respect for human dignity? Is it true that, in the words of Charles Beitz, humanitarian law is …

The Financial Action Task Force: International Regulatory Convergence Through Soft Law, Nicholas W. Turner

NYLS Law Review

No abstract provided.

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.

Shifting Our Focus From Retribution To Social Justice: An Alternative Vision For The Treatment Of Pregnant Women Who Harm Their Fetuses, April L. Cherry

Journal of Law and Health

The ways in which society responds to pregnant women whose behavior purportedly harms their fetuses can be explored from a variety of legal vantage points. This article argues that the criminal law model currently used is ineffective. The assignment of criminal liability to pregnant women is often rooted in fetal personhood and maternal deviance discourse. Criminal law solutions fail because they fail to take into account the fact that maternal behavior is often the result of a myriad of the social and economic conditions over which pregnant women have little or no control. The criminal law model, therefore, simply punishes …

Ultracrepidarianism In Forensic Science: The Hair Evidence Debacle, David H. Kaye

Faculty Scholarship

For over 130 years, scientific sleuths have been inspecting hairs under microscopes. Late in 2012, the FBI, the Innocence Project, and the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers joined forces to review thousands of microscopic hair comparisons performed by FBI examiners over several of those decades. The results have been astounding. Based on the first few hundred cases in which hairs were said to match, it appears that examiners “exceeded the limits of science” in over 90% of their reports or testimony. The disclosure of this statistic has led to charges that the FBI “faked an entire field of forensic …

"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 …

Lawyer Ethics And The Financial Action Task Force: A Call To Action, Jack P. Sahl

NYLS Law Review

No abstract provided.

Explaining Inhumanity: The Use Of Crime-Definition Experts At International Criminal Courts, Caroline Davidson

Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law

International criminal courts must not only decide the guilt or innocence of defendants in immensely serious cases, but also make good law in the process. To help them do so, these courts have turned to experts. This Article identifies a type of expert witness that, thus far, has escaped scholarly attention: the crime-definition expert. Crime-definition experts have provided expert reports and testimony to international criminal courts on the meaning of the very crimes with which defendants are charged, including genocide, forced marriage, and recruitment and use of child soldiers. This Article critically evaluates the risks associated with using crime-definition experts …

Anti-Rape Culture, Aya Gruber

Publications

No abstract provided.