Legal Studies Commons^™

American Gangsters: Rico, Criminal Syndicates, And Conspiracy Law As Market Control, Benjamin Levin

Scholarship@WashULaw

In an effort to re-examine legal and political decisions about criminalization and the role of the criminal law in shaping American markets and social institutions, this Article explores the ways in which criminal conspiracy laws in the United States have historically been used to subdue non-state actors and informal markets that threatened the hegemony of the state and formal market. To this end, the Article focuses primarily on the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO) as illustrative of broader trends in twentieth century criminal policy. Enacted in 1970, RICO provides criminal sanctions for individuals engaged in unacceptable organized activities …

Keep Your Update To Yourself, Neil M. Richards

Scholarship@WashULaw

An essay from Wired Magazine (UK)'s special edition, The Wired World in 2013. The essay makes the argument that frictionless sharing of reading habits should decline in 2013.

De-Naturalizing Criminal Law: Of Public Perceptions And Procedural Protections, Benjamin Levin

Scholarship@WashULaw

In this essay, I examine and challenge the rhetorical trope of the guilty going free by emphasizing the institutional and political intricacies that comprise the criminal justice system and necessarily under-gird a determination of “guilt”. My goal, at its essence, is to de-naturalize the criminal law and discussions of the criminal justice system in the context of this symposium. I aim to emphasize that a guilty verdict is the result of a series of (politically-inflected) decisions about how to draft criminal statutes, how to structure a trial, and how to select a jury. De-naturalizing criminal law is, of course, a …

The Dangers Of Surveillance, Neil M. Richards

Scholarship@WashULaw

From the Fourth Amendment to George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, our culture is full of warnings about state scrutiny of our lives. These warnings are commonplace, but they are rarely very specific. Other than the vague threat of an Orwellian dystopia, as a society we don’t really know why surveillance is bad, and why we should be wary of it. To the extent the answer has something to do with “privacy,” we lack an understanding of what “privacy” means in this context, and why it matters. Developments in government and corporate practices have made this problem more urgent. Although we have …

Three Paradoxes Of Big Data, Neil M. Richards, Jonathan H. King

Scholarship@WashULaw

Big data is all the rage. Its proponents tout the use of sophisticated analytics to mine large data sets for insight as the solution to many of our society’s problems. These big data evangelists insist that data-driven decision making can now give us better predictions in areas ranging from college admissions to dating to hiring to medicine to national security and crime prevention. But much of the rhetoric of big data contains no meaningful analysis of its potential perils, only the promise. We don’t deny that big data holds substantial potential for the future, and that large dataset analysis has …

The Perils Of Social Reading, Neil M. Richards

Scholarship@WashULaw

Our law currently treats records of our reading habits under two contradictory rules: rules mandating confidentiality and rules permitting disclosure. Recently, the rise of the social Internet has created more of these records and more pressures on when and how they should be shared. Companies like Facebook, in collaboration with many newspapers, have ushered in the era of “social reading,” in which what we read may be “frictionlessly shared” with our friends and acquaintances. Disclosure and sharing are on the rise.

This Article sounds a cautionary note about social reading and frictionless sharing. Social reading might have some appeal, but …

The Freedom Of The Church (New Revised Standard Version), John D. Inazu

Scholarship@WashULaw

Significant discussion about the “freedom of church” has recently emerged at the intersection of law and religion scholarship and political theology. That discussion gained additional traction with the Supreme Court’s ruling in Hosanna-Tabor v. E.E.O.C., which recognized the First Amendment’s “special solicitude” for religious organizations. But the freedom of the church is at its core a theological concept, and its potential integration into our constitutional discourse requires a process of translation. The efficacy of any background political concept as legal doctrine will ultimately stand or fall on something akin to what Frederick Schauer has called “constitutional salience.”

The existing debate …

Virtual Assembly, John D. Inazu

Scholarship@WashULaw

This Article provides one of the first scholarly considerations of the constitutional boundaries for online groups. It explores both why and how we should protect these groups by asking two related questions. The first question is theoretical: do online groups implicate the kinds of values that warrant elevated constitutional protection. The second question is doctrinal: what is the best framework for providing constitutional protection to these groups. The Article argues that we should protect online groups because they advance important First Amendment values and because the line between our offline and our online groups is collapsing. Turning to the doctrinal …

Building A Taxonomy Of Litigation: Clusters Of Causes Of Action In Federal Complaints, Christina L. Boyd, David A. Hoffman, Zoran Obradovic, Kosta Ristovski

Scholarship@WashULaw

This project empirically explores civil litigation from its inception by examining the content of civil complaints. We utilize spectral cluster analysis on a newly compiled federal district court dataset of causes of action in complaints to illustrate the relationship of legal claims to one another, the broader composition of lawsuits in trial courts, and the breadth of pleading in individual complaints. Our results shed light not only on the networks of legal theories in civil litigation but also on how lawsuits are classified and the strategies that plaintiffs and their attorneys employ when commencing litigation. This approach permits us to …

Economic Theory Lost In Translation: Will Behavioral Economics Reshape The Compelled Commercial Speech Doctrine, Kyle Rozema

Scholarship@WashULaw

This Article consolidates the economic and legal theory needed to properly analyze the impact of salience measures on the commercial speech doctrine. By walking through various First Amendment scenarios, this Article describes and differentiates between the two main governmental interests motivating graphic image requirements on cigarette labels: reducing smoking and informing consumers. The Article then sets up a game-theoretic model of the compelled commercial speech doctrine and uses Bayesian inference to make assumptions about how the Supreme Court would rule if it eventually rules on similar graphic images placed on cigarette labels. Solving the model by way of forward induction …

Litigating Toward Settlement, Christina L. Boyd, David A. Hoffman

Scholarship@WashULaw

Civil litigation typically ends when the parties compromise. While existing theories of settlement primarily focus on information exchange, we instead examine how motion practice, especially non-discovery motions, can substantially shape parties’ knowledge about their cases and thereby influence the timing of settlement. Using docket-level federal district court data, we find a number of strong effects regarding how motions can influence this process, including that the filing of a motion significantly speeds case settlement, that granted motions are more immediately critical to settlement timing than motions denied, and that plaintiff victories have a stronger effect than defendant victories. These results provide …

Globalization And Law: Law Beyond The State, Ralf Michaels

Faculty Scholarship

The chapter provides an introduction into law and globalization for sociolegal studies. Instead of treating globalization as an external factor that impacts the law, globalization and law are here viewed as intertwined. I suggest that three types of globalization should be distinguished—globalization as empirical phenomenon, globalization as theory, and globalization as ideology. I go on to discuss one central theme of globalization, namely in what way society, and therefore law, move beyond the state. This is done along the three classical elements of the state—territory, population/citizenship, and government. The role of all of these elements is shifting, suggesting we need …

The Lawyer's Toolbox: Teaching Students About Risk Allocation, Dana Malkus, Scott Stevenson, Eric J. Gouvin, Usha Rodrigues

All Faculty Scholarship

This Article is the transcript of a panel presented at Emory’s Third Biennial Conference on Transactional Education. The panel focuses on techniques for teaching risk allocation as part of transactional skills classes. The panelists describe their approaches to teaching risk allocation, from syllabus design to final evaluations. How can a professor help students to understand the basic concepts of risk, the role risk plays in business and legal decisions, and how they can help clients manage risk. The techniques for teaching risk allocation include hypotheticals, visual aids, and hands-on assignments. The panelists each take their students down a different path …

Human Trafficking In Poland: Further Victimization Of Female Victims Of Human Trafficking For Sexual Exploitation, Katarzyna Peninska

Master's Theses

Poland is a source, destination, and transit country for human trafficking. The country is taking steps to address this crime, but it offers very little benefits to the victims. Currently, the victims are only allowed to stay temporarily in Poland if they testify against their traffickers. During their cooperation with the prosecution they rarely receive legal representation or psychological help. This thesis posed the question of whether Polish laws and the Polish system further victimize female victims of human trafficking for sexual exploitation. The research was conducted in Poland between May and July of 2012. The first part of the …

Why Eu Work-Family Reconciliation Policies Fail In Italy: A Feminist Legal Analysis, Chrystal Orozco

Master's Theses

Following the establishment of the European Parental Leave Directive (96/34/EC), the female employment rate in Italy is still ranked the third lowest in the European Union (EU) and Italian women continue to do twice as much household work as Italian men. Parents, especially women, struggle to find a balance between professional work and their family lives in a society that encourages the traditional gendered roles of the housewife and the breadwinner. The following study is a theoretical analysis of the Parental Leave Directive and the potential domestic influences that may prevent Italy from progressing socially towards gender equality. This study …

Nebraska Sex Offender Registry Study: Interim Report, Ryan E. Spohn

Reports

Sexual victimization is of great concern to the public, as evidenced by the legislative attention it has received over the last twenty years (Adkins, Huff, and Stageberg 2000; Levenson 2006; Sample and Kadleck 2008; Schram and Milloy 1995; Walker et al. 2005; Zevit 2006). To help increase public safety and address public concern, corrections departments nationwide have adopted some form of risk classification and assessment instrument for offenders who have been convicted of sex crimes (Richardson and Huebner 2006). Some of the most popular risk assessment instruments include the STATIC 99, RRASOR, MnSOST, SORAG, and ASRS (Richardson and Huebner 2006; …

Nebraska Offender Registry Study: Interim Report, Consortium For Crime And Justice Research, University Of Nebraska At Omaha, Ryan E. Spohn

Reports

Sexual victimization is of great concern to the public, as evidenced by the legislative attention it has received over the last twenty years (Adkins, Huff, and Stageberg 2000; Levenson 2006; Sample and Kadleck 2008; Schram and Milloy 1995; Walker et al. 2005; Zevit 2006). To help increase public safety and address public concern, corrections departments nationwide have adopted some form of risk classification and assessment instrument for offenders who have been convicted of sex crimes (Richardson and Huebner 2006). Some of the most popular risk assessment instruments include the STATIC 99, RRASOR, MnSOST, SORAG, and ASRS (Richardson and Huebner 2006; …

Corporal Punishment And Aggression In Adulthood: A Product Of Social Learning, Derek R. Schneider

Regis University Student Publications (comprehensive collection)

The focus of my study will be on the relationship between child abuse and aggression in adulthood. Individuals who support corporal punishment are more likely to support using violence against other adults, as compared to those that do not support corporal punishment. In other words, adults that are likely to use violence to resolve conflict with children are more inclined to use violence to resolve conflicts with other adults. Bandura (1977) explained that human behavior is learned observationally through modeling. The idea of modeling involves observing others and beginning to form an idea of how new behaviors are performed; on …

Fetal Attraction: A Descriptive Study Of Patterns In Fetal Abductions, Kerry E. Arquette

Regis University Student Publications (comprehensive collection)

Fetal abduction is a crime in which a perpetrator forcibly takes an unborn baby from the womb of another woman. The act is always done without the permission of the pregnant woman, is always violent, and is often deadly for the mother or baby, or both. Based upon available data, the crime of fetal abduction is rare and relatively new, but publicized incidences in the United States of America are growing, which raises the question, "Why?" In order to answer that and other questions surrounding fetal abduction it is necessary to know more about the crime and the criminals. This …

The Use Of Familial Dna Searches: A Policy Analysis, Caroline O. Moorman

Regis University Student Publications (comprehensive collection)

Many cases go unsolved every day in the United States; some due to a lack of technological advancement in forensic science. When a person is killed, raped, or in danger of physical harm, it is the responsibility of law enforcement and their collaborative agencies to find and apprehend the responsible parties. The use of familial DNA searches in the United States is a relatively new investigative technique. Traditionally, DNA samples found at a crime scene are run through a national Combined DNA Index System (CODIS) to look for possible matches. When a sample does not return a positive hit, investigators …