Legal Studies Commons^™

Empirical Research On Consumer Arbitration: What The Data Reveals, Sarah R. Cole, Kristen M. Blankley

Nebraska College of Law: Faculty Publications

In 2007, Public Citizen, a “national, non-profit public interest organization,” issued a report entitled “The Arbitration Trap: How Credit Card Companies Ensnare Consumers,” concluding that the arbitration process routinely exploits consumers. Public Citizen drew this sweeping conclusion after analyzing approximately 34,000 points of data the National Arbitration Foundation (“NAF”) collected about its California arbitrations.

Unfortunately, Public Citizen’s analysis of the NAF data does not support its conclusions primarily because its conclusions cannot be extended beyond the set of cases the data contains, i.e., collection cases filed by creditors, including credit card companies, against consumers with outstanding balances on their accounts. …

A Proposed Program To Reduce Risk Of Recidivism For First Time Juvenile Sex Offenders, Lorna E. Grant

Contemporary Issues in Juvenile Justice

This proposed pilot project is intended for juvenile sex offenders and their parents. The program aims to guide juvenile sex offenders into successful reintegration into their communities, and prevent re-incarcera-tion/relapse of juveniles released from juvenile correctional facilities and the family court using a multi-sys-temic approach. A developmental evaluation is proposed to be conducted from the behavioral objectives approach to measure the effectiveness of a 12-months pilot program.

A Miscarriage Of Juvenile Justice: A Modern Day Parable Of The Unintended Results Of Bad Lawmaking, Amy Vorenberg

Law Faculty Scholarship

Sensationalized cases increasingly create the context for public policy discussion. Stories about violent crime are a common feature of the local evening news and their emotional nature can often create the hook politicians need to showcase their “tough on crime” agendas. Often anecdotal and lurid, stories of criminal misdeeds are widely used to convince the public of a need to create or change laws. This article demonstrates the perils of making law by extrapolating from a few random, albeit attention-grabbing, events. Specifically, the article examines the impact of a 1995 change in New Hampshire state law that lowered the age …

The Death Of The American Trial, Robert P. Burns

Faculty Working Papers

This short essay is a summary of my assessment of the meaning of the "vanishing trial" phenomenon. It addresses the obvious question: "So what?" It first briefly reviews the evidence of the trial's decline. It then sets out the steps necessary to understand the political and social signficance of our vastly reducing the trial's importance among our modes of social ordering. The essay serves as the Introduction to a book, The Death of the American Trial, soon to be published by the University of Chicago Press.

The Language Of Consent In Police Encounters, Janice Nadler, J.D. Trout

Faculty Working Papers

In this chapter, we examine the nature of conversations in citizen-police encounters in which police seek to conduct a search based on the citizen's consent. We argue that when police officers ask a person if they can search, citizens often feel enormous pressure to say yes. But judges routinely ignore these pressures, choosing instead to spotlight the politeness and restraint of the officers' language and demeanor. Courts often analyze the language of police encounters as if the conversation has an obvious, context-free meaning. The pragmatic features of language influence behavior, but courts routinely ignore or deny this fact. Instead, current …

Reducing Disparities In The Adult Criminal Justice System: Creating A Model For Denver County, Shelley Siman

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Overrepresentation in the criminal justice system of people who are marginalized by society has been researched for decades. Major challenges as they relate to overrepresentation of people of color in the system include a silo approach to research which leans towards analyzing system decision points in a vacuum, the misuse of official statistics to determine who is involved in crime, and the difficulty in translating solutions to the problem into practice. Disparate treatment of people of color in the American criminal justice system has also been reported by the United Nation's International Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination as …

The Effectiveness Of Using Homicide And Auto Theft Rates As Indicators Of Violent And Property Crime In The United States, Joseph Allan Schwartz

Theses Digitization Project

The primary goal of this study is to determine whether the use of homicide and motor vehicle theft rates can predict overall violent and property crime rates respectively. Recent studies indicate that homicide rates seem to act as a primary and reliable representation of other violent crime rates, while motor vehicle theft rates seem to act as a primary representation of other property crime rates. This research for the author's thesis indicates otherwise. Measures considered include the Uniform Crime Report, the National Crime Victimization Survey, and the National Incident-Based Reporting System.

Who Gets To Be The Expert?: Legal Research Skills Certification In Legal Education, Richard Leiter

Marvin and Virginia Schmid Law Library: Faculty Publications

This article considers the question of whether there is a need for law schools to offer certification for specialization in legal research skills and discusses various approaches to legal research skills cer­tification. The author argues that it is unnecessary to offer legal research certification as it is presupposed that a basic legal educa­tion should include instruction in how to find and read the law. Anything less is a failed legal education.

Exactly how special are legal research skills? Are they special enough to warrant certification? As a matter of fact, the act of legal researching is so intimately connected with …

Homeland Security And The Police Mission, Stephen A. Morreale, David E. Lambert

Criminal Justice Faculty Publications

The terrorist attacks on America are seen as a pivotal period for the nation and for policing. They have thrust policing into a new mission that will have a wide ranging impact on the police role, organizational strategies, staffing, training and policy. State, local and tribal police are now at the forefront of Homeland Security activities, yet there remains a great deal of uncertainty about their mission.The ramp-up efforts by federal and state government are reminiscent of the staging for civil defense in the 1960's. As a result of 9/11, there has been an invigoration for cities and towns to …

Quantitative Evaluation On Indigent Criminal Defense Funding, Ralph E. Mckinney, Lawrence P. Shao

Management Faculty Research

This article takes a quantitative approach to build upon McKinney and Shao's (2008) qualitative contribution concerning resource a/location of indigent criminal defense programs. By compating public funds of multiple societies over time, we are able to add important knowledge surrounding property rights valuations using a new concept called GDP Indexed Purchasing Power Parity. The findings of this study show that GDP-PPP provides for better indigent criminal defense analysis than per capita figures.

The Safety Of A Nation Versus The Rights Of Suspected Terrorists, Michaela Clark

Undergraduate Review

On January twenty-second, 2009, newly elected President Barack Obama issued an executive order requiring the detention center holding alleged terrorists at Guantanamo Bay to be closed within one year. This proposal may potentially close a chapter on one of America’s most controversial efforts to combat terrorism. Throughout the Bush Administration’s “War on Terror” numerous laws were passed that gave the President and the Department of Defense power to determine who was an enemy combatant and detain indefinitely those they decided fit that profile. The issue of holding people the military deems a threat without giving them a traditional trial continues …

Peacemaking Criminology, Joseph Moloney

Undergraduate Review

This article is focused on exploring the practical implications of applying Pepinsky and Quinney’s (1991) theory of ‘peacemaking criminology’ to criminal justice policies. Peacemaking criminology is a perspective on crime that suggests that alternative methods can be used to create peaceful solutions to crime. Peacemaking criminology can be implemented in society to reduce the amount of violence in the criminal justice field, and I argue that this perspective on crime can improve the administration of equitable justice more so than the current approach. The implementation of peacemaking criminology would be a radically different approach than current practices and methods of …

Duty To Warn And Protect, George T. Williams, Lori L. Ellison

Counseling Faculty Research

Professional counselors, spurred by the courts, have a dual ethical and legal responsibility to protect others from potentially dangerous clients, to protect clients from being harmed by others, and to protect clients from themselves. The delicate balance between confidentiality and the duty to warn and protect others must be handled on a case-by-case basis. The majority of individual state laws require counselors to breach confidentiality in order to warn and protect someone who is in danger. All states and U.S. jurisdictions now have mandatory reporting statutes for suspected physical, sexual, or emotional child abuse or neglect. There are also several …

Detection Of Deception In Criminal Defendents: Treatment Or Trial?, Loran Noelle Bounds

Theses Digitization Project

The purpose of this study is to determine how to detect whether a person is faking a mental illness. An area that is often malingered is insanity, where criminal defendents will fake that they are mentally ill as to avoid imprisonment or the death penalty. The death penalty is one of the most difficult defenses to raise and is rarely successful.

Constructing Crime: Neighborhood Characteristics And Police Recording Behavior, Sean P. Varano, Joseph A. Schafer, Jeffrey Michael Cancino, Marc L. Swatt

Justice Studies Faculty Publications

It has long been acknowledged that police officers have substantial levels of discretion in their day-to-day activities. There is a well developed body of literature that considers how this discretion is exercised across a broad array of situations including the decision to arrest, use force, and grant citizen requests for official action. Using both social disorganization and conflict theories as conceptual models, the purpose of this study was to determine if neighborhood characteristics affect police reporting behavior across a wide cross-section of reported call types. The findings indicated that reporting behavior widely varies across crime types with a greater percentage …

An Examination Of Delinquency And Victimization Using Social Bonding And Routine Activities, Everette B. Penn, Jennifer Tanner

Contemporary Issues in Juvenile Justice

The study examined the relationship between juvenile delinquency and juvenile victimization using an integration of social bond theory and routine activities perspectives. Data were obtained from the Monitoring the Future (MTF) series of surveys given annually to a nationally representative sample of students. The MTF survey is from the 2005 group of surveys given to tenth grade students. The version of the survey was administered to 5,577 tenth grade students. This research examined the link between a student's commitment to school and guardianship. Specifically, it determined the amount of delinquency to which a student is involved and the extent of …

Editor’S Statement, David Polizzi

Journal of Theoretical and Philosophical Criminology

No abstract provided.

Kill Method: A Provocation, Jeff Ferrell

Journal of Theoretical and Philosophical Criminology

No abstract provided.

Quantitative Versus Qualitative Methods: Understanding Why Quantitative Methods Are Predominant In Criminology And Criminal Justice, George E. Higgins

Journal of Theoretical and Philosophical Criminology

No abstract provided.

Qualitative Versus Quantitative Methods: Understanding Why Qualitative Methods Are Superior For Criminology And Criminal Justice, Richard Tewksbury

Journal of Theoretical and Philosophical Criminology

No abstract provided.

Inescapable Morality: Responding To The Qualitative Versus Quantitative Issue, Matthew R. Draper

Journal of Theoretical and Philosophical Criminology

No abstract provided.

Fear Of Crime And Punishment, Annalise Acorn

Journal of Theoretical and Philosophical Criminology

No abstract provided.

Lethal Injection And The Problem Of Constitutional Remedies, Eric Berger

Nebraska College of Law: Faculty Publications

I. An Overview of Lethal Injection............................................................... 263
A. The Three-Drug Protocol.............................................................................. 263
B. The Supreme Court’s Fractured Decision in Baze v. Rees ............................273
II. Remedial Anxieties and Lethal Injection ................................................ 280
A. How Remedy Constrains the Right............................................................... 280
1. Remedial Concerns in Baze................................................................. 283
2. Remedial Concerns in Other Lethal Injection Cases ......................... 286
3. Concerns About Delay......................................................................... 293
B. The Structural Injunction’s Shadow over Lethal Injection........................... 296
III. Political Process Failures and the Need for Judicial Intervention.....................................................................................................301
IV. The Modesty of Lethal Injection Remedies..............................................314
A. Remedial Options .......................................................................................... 315

Thoughts On Lb 36: Problems With The Proposed Bill To Institute Lethal Injection In Nebraska, Eric Berger

Nebraska College of Law: Faculty Publications

In February 2008, the Nebraska Supreme Court held in State v. Mata that Nebraska’s electrocution procedure violated the Nebraska constitution’s prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment. Mata left Nebraska in the curious position of having the death penalty on the books without a constitutional method of executing death sentences. In December 2008, Nebraska Attorney General Jon Bruning submitted a report to the Governor recommending that Nebraska adopt lethal injection as a new means to carry out a sentence of death. General Bruning’s report included LB 36, a proposed statute that would institute lethal injection in Nebraska.

On January 29, 2009, …

Paper Women: The Representation Of Female Offenders In Irish Newspapers, Lynsey Black

Dissertations

Reductionistic definitions characterise many of the representations of women in our society. From superficial depictions of women as sex objects to the elevation of motherhood as a paragon of womanhood, women navigate myriad roles available to them exclusively because of their gender. Female offenders are potentially more vulnerable to such limitations of representation due to their relative invisibility. Society is largely unacquainted with the realities of circumstance for such women, who are therefore reliant upon media outlets to inform the public. The operation of this process in Ireland has not been the subject of extensive research, and the current study …

Probation Revocations Based On Technical Violations: Do Probation Officers Contribute To Higher Rates?, Amanda Kent

Criminology & Criminal Justice Theses - Archive

A recent report by The Pew Center on the States (2009) indicated 1 in 31 adults are under the control of the correctional system nationwide. In Texas, it is reported that 1 in 22 adults are under the control of the correctional system or rather in prison, jail, on probation or parole (The Pew Center on the States, 2009). The prisons in Texas and throughout the nation are becoming overcrowded which presents a problem for administrators and the public alike. Texas has experienced an increase of 310% in their prison population between 1985 and 2005 and it is expected to …

Dishonest Associates In The Workplace: The Correlation Between Motivation And Opportunity In Retail Among Employee Theft, Edith Marie Fikes

Criminology & Criminal Justice Theses - Archive

White-collar crime is a major loss to the economy, employers, and consumers. It is a crime that often goes undetected, and when detected, employers rarely file charges, so estimates as to how often it occurs are hard to come by. White-collar crime is a very broad category so the focus of this study was on a sector of white-collar crime, retail employee theft. Cressey's (1973) fraud triangle contained three components: motivation, opportunity, and rationalization. Cressey (1973) claimed that if any of one of these three components did not exist, then the crime would not occur. In this study, retail employee …

Happiness And Punishment, John Bronsteen, Christopher Buccafusco, Jonathan Masur

Faculty Scholarship

This Article continues our project of applying new findings in the behavioral psychology of human happiness to some of the most deeply analyzed questions in law. When a state decides how to punish criminal offenders, at least one important consideration is the amount of harm any given punishment is likely to inflict. It would be undesirable, for example, to impose greater harm on those who commit less serious crimes or to impose harm that rises to the level of cruelty. Our penal system fits punishments to crimes primarily by adjusting the size of monetary fines and the length of prison …

The Deterrent Effect Of Death Penalty Eligibility: Evidence From The Adoption Of Child Murder Eligibility Factors, Michael D. Frakes, Matthew Harding

Faculty Scholarship

We draw on within-state variations in the reach of capital punishment statutes between 1977 and 2004 to identify the deterrent effects associated with capital eligibility. Focusing on the most prevalent eligibility expansion, we estimate that the adoption of a child murder factor is associated with an approximately 20% reduction in the homicide rate of youth victims. Eligibility expansions may enhance deterrence by (1) paving the way for more executions and (2) providing prosecutors with greater leverage to secure enhanced non-capital sentences. While executions themselves are rare, this latter channel is likely to be triggered fairly regularly, providing a reasonable basis …

Defining A Forensic Audit, G. S. Smith, D. L. Crumbley

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

Disclosures about new financial frauds and scandals are continually appearing in the press. As a consequence, the accounting profession's traditional methods of monitoring corporate financial activities are under intense scrutiny. At the same time, there is recognition that principles-based GAAP from the International Accounting Standards Board will become the recognized standard in the U.S. The authors argue that these two factors will change the practices used to fight corporate malfeasance as investigators adapt the techniques of accounting into a forensic audit engagement model.