Jurisprudence Commons^™

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 …

Gatsby And Tort, Robin West

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The Great Gatsby is filled with potential tort claims, from drunken or reckless driving to assault and battery. In a pivotal passage Nick Carraway, the narrator of The Great Gatsby, judges Daisy and Tom as “careless people,” who “destroy creatures and leave others to clean up the mess.” The carelessness, negligence, and recklessness portrayed by Fitzgerald’s characters shows an absence of due care, long regarded as the foundation for tort law. Although there are torts, tortfeasors, and tortious behavior aplenty in The Great Gatsby, the novel is void of even a mention of tort law. Why?

The first part of …

Why Instrumentalism Matters, Kyron J. Huigens

Articles

Alon Harel argues that the acts of a public official acting with "fidelity of deference," are "necessary," "non-contingent," "intrinsic," "constitutive," integrative," "expressive," or "inherent" features of legal punishment. Accordingly, he calls his argument "noninstrumental." This can be taken as an argument for logical necessity, definition, extension, or modest or immodest conceptual necessity. Only the last interpretation fits Harel's text, but such an argument fails because instrumentality is necessarily present in any event in the natural world, including punishment. Harel does not say which aspects of natural instrumentality he means to exclude from his argument, or how, or why.

When Theory Met Practice: Distributional Analysis In Critical Criminal Law Theorizing, Aya Gruber

Publications

Progressive (critical race and feminist) theorizing on criminal law exists within an overarching American criminal law culture in which the U.S penal system has become a "peculiar institution" and a defining governance structure. Much of criminal law discourse is subject to a type of ideological capture in which it is natural to assume that criminalization is a valid, if not preferred, solution to social dysfunction. Accordingly, progressives’ primary concerns about harms to minority victims takes place in a political-legal context in which criminalization is the technique of addressing harm. In turn, progressive criminal law theorizing manifests some deep internal tensions. …

Law In Ancient Egyptian Fiction, Russ Versteeg

Georgia Journal of International & Comparative Law

No abstract provided.

Brown V. Plata: Renewing The Call To End Mandatory Minimum Sentencing, Steven Nauman

Florida Law Review

After more than twenty years of litigation, the United States Supreme Court finally determined whether California’s overcrowded prison system created a constitutional violation in Brown v. Plata. With prisons and jails across the country operating at well over 100% capacity, the Court concluded what advocates had been screaming for over a decade: prison overcrowding cannot be tolerated, and the only remedy is to reduce prison populations. What the Court failed to resolve, however, was what the primary cause of prison overcrowding is and how states and the federal government are supposed to comply with capacity expectations amid concerns for …

Bringing Our Children Back From The Land Of Nod: Why The Eighth Amendment Forbids Condemning Juveniles To Die In Prison For Accessorial Felony Murder, Mariko K. Shitama

Florida Law Review

Over 2,589 individuals sit in prison, where they have been condemned to die for crimes they committed before their eighteenth birthday. At least a quarter of these individuals received this sentence for accessorial felony murder, or a crime in which they did not kill or intend to kill the victim. Beginning with Roper v. Simmons in 2005 and continuing with Graham v. Florida in 2010, recent Eighth Amendment jurisprudence has recognized that juveniles are fundamentally different from adults in ways that limit the constitutionality of imposing adult punishment on them. In June 2012, the Supreme Court held that sentencing juveniles …

Democracy In Disguise: Assessing The Reforms To The Fundamental Rights Provisions In Guyana, Arif Bulkan

Georgia Journal of International & Comparative Law

No abstract provided.

Vladimir Putin And The Rule Of Law In Russia, Jeffrey Kahn

Georgia Journal of International & Comparative Law

No abstract provided.

A Judicial Cure For The Disease Of Overcriminalization, Stephen F. Smith

Journal Articles

The dangers of “overcriminalization” are widely appreciated across the political spectrum, but confusion remains as to its cause. Standard critiques fault legislatures alone. The problem, however, is not simply that too many criminal laws are on the books, but that they are poorly defined in ways that give unwarranted sweep to the criminal law, raising the danger of punishment absent or in excess of moral blameworthiness. Instead of narrowing ambiguous criminal laws to more appropriate bounds, courts frequently expand them, even when this ratchets up the punishment that offenders face, and fail to insist on proof of sufficiently culpable states …

Challenging Unjust Convictions Under Section 1983, Leon Friedman

Touro Law Review

No abstract provided.

Appellate Division, Second Department, Smith V. Marrus, Elaine Yang

Touro Law Review

No abstract provided.

Does Religion Have A Role In Criminal Sentencing?, Jack B. Weinstein

Touro Law Review

No abstract provided.

An Analysis Of Death Penalty Decisions From The October 2006 Supreme Court Term, Richard Klein

Touro Law Review

No abstract provided.

Criminal Procedure Decisions From The October 2006 Term, Susan N. Herman

Touro Law Review

No abstract provided.

The Special Tribunal For Lebanon: A Defense Perspective, Charles Chernor Jalloh

Articles

This Article analyzes the absence of organs tasked with guaranteeing the rights of the defense in international criminal law. It explains the historical origins of the problem, tracing it back to the genesis of modern prosecutions at the Nuremberg International Military Tribunal. It then explains how the organizational charts of the UN courts for the former Yugoslavia, Rwanda, and Sierra Leone omitted the defense and essentially treated it as a second class citizen before the eyes of the law. This sets the stage for the author to show why the creation of the first full-fledged defense organ in international criminal …

Remaking Mexico: Law Reform As Foreign Policy, Deborah M. Weissman

Cardozo Law Review

No abstract provided.

The Surprising Acquittals In The Gotovina And Perisic Cases: Is The Icty Appeals Chamber A Trial Chamber Is Sheep's Clothing, Mark A. Summers

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

The Contract: Between Contract Law And Criminal Jurisprudence, Roni Rosenberg

St. Thomas Law Review

The structure of the essay is as follows: Part I presents the general legal premise that enables the conviction of one who has caused harm by an omission in cases where the duty to act originates in a contractual obligation and highlights U.S. case law on this topic. Part II distinguishes between the duty to act that originates in a contract and a similar duty that is mentioned in case law and literature: the actual assumption of responsibility for a potential victim. Part III introduces various scenarios to assist in examining which contracts can serve as a source of a …

Person(S) Of Interest And Missing Women: Legal Abandonment In The Downtown Eastside, Elaine Craig

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

Women are disappearing. Sixty-nine of them disappeared from the Downtown Eastside of Vancouver between 1997 and 2002. Northern communities in British Columbia believe that more than 40 women have gone missing from the Highway of Tears in the past thirty years. The endangered do not come from every walk of life. Most of these women are Aboriginal. Many of them are poor. To be more precise then, poor women and Aboriginal women are disappearing. Aboriginal women in particular are the targets of an irrefutable epidemic of violence in Canada today.

Robert Pickton is thought to have murdered almost 50 of …

Book Review: American Jericho: A Book Review Of The Hanging Judge By Michael A. Ponsor, Giovanna Shay

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Autopsy Reports And The Confrontation Clause: A Presumption Of Admissibility, Daniel J. Capra, Joseph Tartakovsky

Faculty Scholarship

Courts nationwide are divided over whether autopsy reports are “testimonial” under the Sixth Amendment’s Confrontation Clause. Resolving that split will affect medical examiners as dramatically as Miranda did police. This article applies the latest Supreme Court jurisprudence to the work of modern medical examiners in a comprehensive inquiry. It argues that autopsy reports should be presumed non-testimonial—a presumption overcome only by a showing that law enforcement involvement materially influenced the examiner’s autopsy report.

The Trickle-Down War, Rosa Brooks

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The history of the European nation-state, wrote political sociologist Charles Tilly, is inextricably bound up with the history of warfare. To oversimplify Tilly’s nuanced and complex arguments, the story goes something like this: As power-holders (originally bandits and local strongmen) sought to expand their power, they needed capital to pay for weapons, soldiers and supplies. The need for capital and new recruits drove the creation of taxation systems and census mechanisms, and the need for more effective systems of taxation and recruitment necessitated better roads, better communications and better record keeping. This in turn enabled the creation of larger and …

Rethinking Domestic Violence, Rethinking Violence, Aya Gruber

Publications

No abstract provided.

Caressing The Big Fish? A Critique Of Icc Trial Chamber V(A)'S Decision To Grant Ruto's Request For Excusal From Continuous Presence At Trial, Thomas Obel Hansen

Cardozo Journal of International and Comparative Law

The article critiques the ICC Trial Chamber V(a)'s decision to excuse William Ruto from continuous presence at his trial, arguing that this decision misinterprets Articles 63 and 27 of the Rome Statute. The Chamber's reliance on "exceptional circumstances" and Ruto's official status as Vice President of Kenya undermines the principle of equality before the law and sets a problematic precedent for future cases involving high-ranking officials.

The One Or The Many, Jens David Ohlin

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

The following Review Essay, inspired by Tracy Isaacs’ new book, Moral Responsibility in Collective Contexts, connects the philosophical literature on group agency with recent trends in international criminal law. Part I of the Essay sketches out the relevant philosophical positions, including collectivist and individualist accounts of group agency. Particular attention is paid to Kornhauser and Sager’s development of the doctrinal paradox, Philip Pettit’s deployment of the paradox towards a general argument for group rationality, and Michael Bratman’s account of shared or joint intentions. Part II then analyzes, with cautious support, Isaacs’ two-level solution, which entails both individual and collective …

Inchoate Crimes Revisted: A Behavioral Economics Perspective, Manuel A. Utset

University of Richmond Law Review

No abstract provided.

California And Uncle Sam's Tug-Of-War Over Mary Jane Is Really Harshing The Mellow, Daniel Mortensen

Journal of the National Association of Administrative Law Judiciary

No abstract provided.

The Asymmetry Of Ronald Dworkin's Rights Thesis In Criminal Cases: A Troublesome Exception, H. Scott Fairley

Pepperdine Law Review

No abstract provided.

The Policeman's Duty And The Law Pertaining To Citizen Encounters, Charles M. Oberly Iii

Pepperdine Law Review

In this article the author, by case analysis, identifies the confusion facing police officers when dealing with stop and frisk situations and suggests adoption of the Model Rules of Stop and Frisk as a possible solution to the problem.