Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Toward A Better Criminal Legal System: Improving Prisons, Prosecution, And Criminal Defense, David A. Harris, Created And Presented Jointly By Students From State Correctional Institution - Greene, Waynesburg, Pa, And University Of Pittsburgh School Of Law, Chief Editor: David A. Harris

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During the Fall 2023 semester, 15 law (Outside) students from the University of Pittsburgh School of Law and 13 incarcerated (Inside) students from the State Correctional Institution – Greene, in Waynesburg, Pennsylvania, took a full semester class together called Issues in Criminal Justice and Law. The class, occurring each week at the prison, utilized the Inside-Out Prison Exchange pedagogy, and was facilitated by Professor David Harris. Subjects include the purposes of prison, addressing crime, the criminal legal system and race, and issues surrounding victims and survivors of crime. The course culminated in a Group Project; under the heading “improving the …

Creating A Better, Fairer Criminal Justice System, David A. Harris, Created And Presented Jointly By Students From State Correctional Institution - Greene, Waynesburg, Pa, And University Of Pittsburgh School Of Law, Chief Editor: David A. Harris

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In the Fall 2022 semester, 14 law (Outside) students from the University of Pittsburgh School of Law and 14 incarcerated (Inside) students at the State Correctional Institution at Greene, in Waynesburg, Pennsylvania, took a full-semester class together called "Issues in Criminal Justice and the Law." The class, taught and facilitated by Professor David Harris, utilized the Inside-Out Prison Exchange Program pedagogy, emphasizing dialogic learning and peer teaching. The semester culminated with a group project, with the topic selected by the students: "creating a better, fairer criminal justice system." Members of the class organized themselves into small groups, each working for …

Urgenda Vs. Juliana: Lessons For Future Climate Change Litigation Cases, Paolo Davide Farah, Imad Antoine Ibrahim

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No abstract provided.

A Hague Parallel Proceedings Convention: Architecture And Features, Paul Herrup, Ronald A. Brand

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In Paul Herrup and Ronald A. Brand, A Hague Convention on Parallel Proceedings, 63 Harvard International Law Journal Online 1(2022), available at https://harvardilj.org/2022/02/a-hague-convention-on-parallel-proceedings/ and https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3894502, we argued that the Hague Conference on Private International Law should not undertake a project to require or prohibit exercise of original jurisdiction in national courts. Rather, the goal of current efforts should be to improve the concentration of parallel litigation in a “better forum,” in order to achieve efficient and complete resolution of disputes in transnational litigation. The Hague Conference is now taking this path. As the Experts Group and Working Group …

Changing Every Wrong Door Into The Right One: Reforming Legal Services Intake To Empower Clients, Jabeen Adawi

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It’s recognized that people affected by poverty often have numerous overlapping legal needs and despite the proliferation of legal services, they are unable to receive full assistance. When a person is faced with a legal emergency, rarely is there an equivalent to a hospital’s emergency room wherein they receive an immediate diagnosis for their needs and subsequent assistance. In this paper, I focus on the process a person goes through to find assistance and argue that it is a burdensome, and demoralizing task of navigating varying protocols, procedures, and individuals. While these systems are well intentioned from the lawyer’s perspective, …

Nazi Stolen Art: Uses And Misuses Of The Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act, Vivian Grosswald Curran

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U.S. courts in Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act (“FSIA”) cases must interpret a comprehensive statute which has been said to stand or fall on its terms. At the same time, in Nazi-looted art cases, they do not ignore entirely the backdrop of the U.S.’ adoption of international principles and declarations promising to ensure the return of such art. To some extent, such an undertaking has been incorporated into a statutory amendment of the FSIA. The years 2021 and 2022 have seen major developments in the FSIA both at the U.S. Supreme Court and in the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals in …

White Vigilantism And The Racism Of Race-Neutrality, Christian Sundquist

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Race-neutrality has long been touted in American law as central to promoting racial equality while guarding against race-based discrimination. And yet the legal doctrine of race-neutrality has perversely operated to shield claims of racial discrimination from judicial review while protecting discriminators from liability and punishment. This Article critiques the doctrine of race-neutrality by examining the law’s response to white vigilantism in the much-publicized criminal trials of Kyle Rittenhouse and that of Ahmaud Arbery’s assailants.

The Second Founding And The First Amendment, William M. Carter Jr.

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Constitutional doctrine generally proceeds from the premise that the original intent and public understanding of pre-Civil War constitutional provisions carries forward unchanged from the colonial Founding era. This premise is flawed because it ignores the Nation’s Second Founding: i.e., the constitutional moment culminating in the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments and the civil rights statutes enacted pursuant thereto. The Second Founding, in addition to providing specific new individual rights and federal powers, also represented a fundamental shift in our constitutional order. The Second Founding’s constitutional regime provided that the underlying systemic rules and norms of the First Founding’s Constitution …

The Vulnerable Sovereign, Ronald A. Brand

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The connection between sovereignty and law is fundamental for both domestic (internal sovereignty) and the international (external sovereignty) purposes. As the dominant forms of government have evolved over time, so has the way in which we think about sovereignty. Consideration of the historical evolution of the concept of sovereignty offers insight into how we think of sovereignty today. A term that was born to represent the relationship between the governor and the governed has become a term that is used to represent the relationships between and among states in the global legal order. This article traces the history of the …

Fair Play: Notes On The Algorithmic Soccer Referee, Michael J. Madison

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The soccer referee stands in for a judge. Soccer’s Video Assistant Referee (“VAR”) system stands in for algorithms that augment human deciders. Fair play stands in for justice. They are combined and set in a polycentric system of governance, with implications for designing, administering, and assessing human-machine combinations.

Reimagining The Death Penalty: Targeting Christians, Conservatives, Spearit

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This Article is an interdisciplinary response to an entrenched legal and cultural problem. It incorporates legal analysis, religious study and the anthropological notion of “culture work” to consider death penalty abolitionism and prospects for abolishing the death penalty in the United States. The Article argues that abolitionists must reimagine their audiences and repackage their message for broader social consumption, particularly for Christian and conservative audiences. Even though abolitionists are characterized by some as “bleeding heart” liberals, this is not an accurate portrayal of how the death penalty maps across the political spectrum. Abolitionists must learn that conservatives are potential allies …

Uncovering Juror Racial Bias, Christian Sundquist

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The presence of bias in the courtroom has the potential to undermine public faith in the adversarial process, distort trial outcomes, and obfuscate the search for justice. In Pena-Rodriguez v. Colorado (2017), the U.S. Supreme Court held for the first time that the Sixth and Fourteenth Amendments required post-verdict judicial inquiry in criminal cases where racial bias clearly served as a “significant motivating factor” in juror decision-making. Courts will nonetheless likely struggle in interpreting what constitutes a "clear statement of racial bias" and whether such bias constituted a "significant motivating factor" in a juror's verdict. This Article will examine how …

The Circulation Of Judgments Under The Draft Hague Judgments Convention, Ronald A. Brand

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The 2018 draft of a Hague Judgments Convention adopts a framework based largely on what some have referred to as “jurisdictional filters.” Article 5(1) provides a list of thirteen authorized bases of indirect jurisdiction by which a foreign judgment is first tested. If one of these jurisdictional filters is satisfied, the resulting judgment is presumptively entitled to circulate under the convention, subject to a set of grounds for non-recognition that generally are consistent with existing practice in most legal systems. This basic architecture of the Convention has been assumed to be set from the start of the Special Commission process, …

Online Dispute Resolution, Ronald A. Brand

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This chapter was prepared from a presentation given by the author at the 2019 Summer School in Transnational Commercial Law & Technology, jointly sponsored by the University of Verona School of Law and the Center for International Legal Education (CILE) of the University of Pittsburgh School of Law. In the paper, I review online dispute resolution (ODR) by considering the following five questions, which I believe help to develop a better understanding of both the concept and the legal framework surrounding it:

A. What is ODR?

B. Who does ODR?

C. What is the legal framework for ODR?

D. What …

An Unfinished Dialogue: Congress, The Judiciary, And The Rules For Federal Judicial Misconduct Proceedings, Arthur D. Hellman

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Federal judges can be impeached and removed from office for “high crimes and misdemeanors,” but what can be done to investigate and remedy less serious misconduct? Congress gave its answer 40 years ago when it passed the Judicial Conduct and Disability Act of 1980. The Act emerged from a series of complex interactions between Congress and the judiciary that could hardly be replicated today. Initially there was strong support, particularly in the Senate, for a centralized, “strictly adjudicatory” system, including a provision for removal of judges without impeachment. Over the course of several years, however, the judiciary persuaded Congress to …

Introduction, Shari S. Diamond, Richard O. Lempert

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Experts bedeviled the legal system long before seventeenth-century Salem, when the town's good citizens relied on youthful accusers and witchcraft experts to identify the devil's servants in their midst. As in Salem, claims of expertise have often been questioned and objections raised about the bases of expert knowledge. Expertise, then and now, did not have to be based on science; but the importance of science and the testimony of scientific experts has since medieval times been woven into the fabric of the English jurisprudence that Americans inherited. In cases as long ago as 1299 we find examples of courts seeking …

The Persuasive Authority Of Internationalized Criminal Tribunals, Elena Baylis

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After a period in which it seemed as though hybrid criminal tribunals were waning, proposals for such tribunals are proliferating again. The recent success of the Extraordinary African Chambers in trying Hisséne Habré highlights the resurgent trend toward ad hoc internationalized courts and chambers to try cases of genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity. The international community could make strategic choices in designing this new generation of tribunals to maximize their effectiveness. One way that international courts spread their influence is through their persuasive authority. Even if their decisions are not binding on the concerned national courts, by persuading …

Evolving Standards Of Domination: Abandoning A Flawed Legal Standard And Approaching A New Era In Penal Reform, Spearit

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This Article critiques the evolving standards of decency doctrine as a form of Social Darwinism. It argues that evolving standards of decency provided a system of review that was tailor-made for Civil Rights opponents to scale back racial progress. Although as a doctrinal matter, evolving standards sought to tie punishment practices to social mores, prison sentencing became subject to political agendas that determined the course of punishment more than the benevolence of a maturing society. Indeed, rather than the fierce competition that is supposed to guide social development, the criminal justice system was consciously deployed as a means of social …

Empirical Doctrine, Jessie Allen

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We can observe and measure how legal decision makers use formal legal authorities, but there is no way to empirically test the determinative capacity of legal doctrine itself. Yet, discussions of empirical studies of judicial behavior sometimes conflate judges’ attention to legal rules with legal rules determining outcomes. Doctrinal determinacy is not the same thing as legal predictability. The extent to which legal outcomes are predictable in given contexts is surely testable empirically. But the idea that doctrine’s capacity to produce or limit those outcomes can be measured empirically is fundamentally misguided. The problem is that to measure doctrinal determinacy, …

What Internationals Know: Improving The Effectiveness Of Post-Conflict Justice Initiatives, Elena Baylis

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The field of post-conflict or transitional justice has developed rapidly over the last thirty years. The United States, the United Nations, and many other international organizations, governments, and institutions have contributed to hundreds of international criminal trials and rule of law programs. International staff, known as “internationals,” travel among post-conflict states and international criminal tribunals to carry out these initiatives. In addition to being a field of work, post-conflict justice also constitutes an emergent body of legal knowledge, composed of substantive standards, rules of procedure, best practices, and other elements. Just as the programs and institutions of post-conflict justice have …

Muslim Radicalization In Prison: Responding With Sound Penal Policy Or The Sound Of Alarm?, Spearit

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This article assesses radicalization among Muslim prisoners in the post- 9/11 era by analysis of ethnographic data in light of the available research. There are two primary motives that drive this inquiry: (1) to determine whether prisons are “fertile soil for jihad” as claimed, and (2) to the extent prisoner radicalization does occur, determine the ideological motives. In the last decade, politicians and analysts have clamored about the “danger” and “threat” posed by Islam in American prisons. Yet these characterizations sit in tension with several decades of sustained Islamic outreach in prison to support inmate rehabilitation and re-entry. They also …

Function And Dysfunction In Post-Conflict Justice Networks And Communities, Elena Baylis

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The field of post-conflict justice includes many well-known international criminal law and rule of law initiatives, from the International Criminal Court to legal reform programs in Afghanistan and Iraq. Less visible, but nonetheless vital to the field, are the international staff (known as internationals) who carry out these transitional justice enterprises, and the networks and communities of practice that connect them to each other. By sharing information, collaborating on joint action, and debating proposed legal rules within their networks and communities, internationals help to develop and implement the core norms and practices of post-conflict justice. These modes of collaboration are …

Tortifying Retaliation: Protected Activity At The Intersection Of Fault, Duty, And Causation, Deborah L. Brake

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In University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center v. Nassar, the Supreme Court broke its string of plaintiff victories in the eight retaliation cases it has decided since 2005. In its 2013 decision in that case, the Court rejected a mixed motive framework for Title VII’s retaliation provision, a part of the statute that Congress did not amend in 1991 when it adopted the motivating factor standard for proving discrimination under Title VII. For help construing what “because of” means in the retaliation claim, the Court looked to tort law, which it read as requiring plaintiffs to prove but-for causation …

Victory Without Success? – The Guantanamo Litigation, Permanent Preventive Detention, And Resisting Injustice, Jules Lobel

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When the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) brought the first habeas cases challenging the Executive’s right to detain prisoners in a law free zone at Guantanamo in 2002, almost no legal commentator gave the plaintiffs much chance of succeeding. Yet, two years later in 2004, after losing in both the District Court and Court of Appeals, the Supreme Court in Rasul v. Bush handed CCR a resounding victory. Four years later, the Supreme Court again ruled in CCR’s favor in 2008 in Boumediene v. Bush, holding that the detainees had a constitutional right to habeas and declaring the Congressional …

Special Report: Kosovo After The Icj Opinion, Introduction, Ronald A. Brand

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On October 22-25, 2012, judges, government officials, and scholars from Kosovo and the United States gathered at the University of Pittsburgh for a conference on “Kosovo after the ICJ Opinion.” The conference was organized by the Center for International Legal Education (CILE) at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law, and the University of Prishtina Faculty of Law. It was co-sponsored by the Ministry of Justice, Kosovo; the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Kosovo; the Forum for Civic Initiatives, Kosovo; the American Society of International Law (ASIL); and the Center for Russian and Eastern European Studies at the University of Pittsburgh …

The Paradox Of Political Power: Post-Racialism, Equal Protection, And Democracy, William M. Carter Jr.

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Racial minorities have achieved unparalleled electoral success in recent years. Simultaneously, they have continued to rank at or near the bottom in terms of health, wealth, income, education, and the effects of the criminal justice system. Social conservatives, including those on the Supreme Court, have latched onto evidence of isolated electoral success as proof of “post-racialism,” while ignoring the evidence of continued disparities for the vast majority of people of color.

This Essay will examine the tension between the Court's conservatives' repeated calls for minorities to achieve their goals through the political process and the Supreme Court's increasingly restrictive "colorblind" …

The Persistence Of Proximate Cause: How Legal Doctrine Thrives On Skepticism, Jessie Allen

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This Article starts with a puzzle: Why is the doctrinal approach to “proximate cause” so resilient despite longstanding criticism? Proximate cause is a particularly extreme example of doctrine that limps along despite near universal consensus that it cannot actually determine legal outcomes. Why doesn’t that widely recognized indeterminacy disable proximate cause as a decision-making device? To address this puzzle, I pick up a cue from the legal realists, a group of skeptical lawyers, law professors, and judges, who, in the 1920s and 1930s, compared legal doctrine to ritual magic. I take that comparison seriously, perhaps more seriously, and definitely in …

The Thirteenth Amendment And Interest Convergence, William M. Carter Jr.

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The Thirteenth Amendment was intended to eliminate the institution of slavery and to eliminate the legacy of slavery. Having accomplished the former, the Amendment has only rarely been extended to the latter. The Thirteenth Amendment’s great promise therefore remains unrealized.

This Article explores the gap between the Thirteenth Amendment’s promise and its implementation. Drawing on Critical Race Theory, this Article argues that the relative underdevelopment of Thirteenth Amendment doctrine is due in part to a lack of perceived interest convergence in eliminating what the Amendment’s Framers called the “badges and incidents of slavery.” The theory of interest convergence, in its …

Judges' Gender And Employment Discrimination Cases: Emerging Evidence-Based Empirical Conclusions, Pat K. Chew

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This article surveys the emerging empirical research on the relationship between the judges' gender and the results in employment discrimination cases.

The Will Of The (Iraqi) People, Haider Ala Hamoudi

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While there has been much literature on the Iraqi constitution of both the scholarly and popular media variety, attention to contemporary Iraqi judicial decisions, and in particular those of the Iraqi Federal Supreme Court, has been far less pronounced. In fact, my own search has not led me to a single published law review article on the subject. There is some irony to this – it is, after all, rather difficult to address the concept of constitutionalism in any state without reference to constitutional praxis, and the judiciary is, at the very least, an integral participant in that praxis. I …