Legal Studies Commons^™

Sidestepping Deference: How United States V. Ressam Encourages Overly Stringent Review Of Sentencing Decisions, Joseph Leavitt

BYU Law Review

No abstract provided.

Characteristics Of Inmates In The Cook County Jail, David E. Olson

Criminal Justice & Criminology: Faculty Publications & Other Works

Provides a detailed description of the characteristics of those admitted to and released from the Cook County Jail in 2010.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton And The Notion Of A Legal Class Of Gender, Tracy A. Thomas

Akron Law Faculty Publications

In the mid-nineteenth century, Elizabeth Cady Stanton used narratives of women and their involvement with the law of domestic relations to collectivize women. This recognition of a gender class was the first step towards women’s transformation of the law. Stanton’s stories of working-class women, immigrants, Mormon polygamist wives, and privileged white women revealed common realities among women in an effort to form a collective conscious. The parable-like stories were designed to inspire a collective consciousness among women, one capable of arousing them to social and political action. For to Stanton’s consternation, women showed a lack of appreciation of their own …

What Kind Of Right Is The Right To The City?, Kafui A. Attoh

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Rethinking Prison Education In The Era Of Mass Incarceration. President Travis' Speech On Rethinking Prison Education, At The Cuny Graduate Center On 2/4/11., Jeremy Travis

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Do Oregonians Know About The Crime Drop?, Brian Renauer

Criminal Justice Policy Research Institute Research Briefs

The violent crime rate in Oregon has not been this low since 1969, forty years ago. FBI 2009 Uniform Crime Statistics show Oregon’s crime rate continues to drop as does the nation’s. Crime rates are at the lowest levels since the 1960’s. Violent crime in Oregon dropped 2.1% from 2008 to 2009. In 2009, Oregon ranked 38th in the nation for violent crime rate.

Federalizing Legal Ethics, Nationalizing Law Practice, And The Future Of The American Legal Profession In A Global Age, Eli Wald

San Diego Law Review

This Article is organized as a response to Zaharias’s influential paper, revisiting each of his four analytical steps. Following Zacharias, Part II documents the growing nationalization and globalization of law practice, and argues that the transformation of law practice renders the state-based regulation of lawyers ineffective. Part III parts ways with Zacharias’s thesis. It asserts that nationalizing, by federalizing, legal ethics is not warranted by changing practice realities and that, worse, federalizing legal ethics without more will leave some of the most troubling aspects of the transformation of law practice, including client needs, unaddressed. Instead, Part III argues that the …

Confidentiality And Common Sense: Insights From Philosophy, Thomas Morawetz

San Diego Law Review

In this Article, I will consider two aspects of the controversy that help explain why it is static. I will consider the significance of empirical evidence that lawyers and clients find the rules morally troubling. Zacharias plausibly assumes that such evidence carries compelling weight. I will also look at the nature of morality itself and the extent to which professional rules should be expected to conform to morality.

Globalization And Eligibility To Deliver Legal Advice: Inbound Legal Services Provided By Corporate Counsel Licensed Only In A Country Outside The United States, Carol A. Needham

San Diego Law Review

The regulation of cross-border delivery of legal services remains in flux. Clients in the United States, particularly sophisticated corporate clients, should be allowed to utilize the special expertise possessed by lawyers licensed outside the United States. Key reforms that at this point are gaining traction include the following: allowing lawyers licensed outside the United States to qualify for limited licenses as in-house counsel; broadening the scope of practice so that all foreign legal consultants are allowed to give legal advice related to third-country and international law; and allowing fly in, fly out practice while temporarily present in the host state. …

Facing The Unfaceable: Dealing With Prosecutorial Denial In Postconviction Cases Of Actual Innocence, Aviva Orenstein

San Diego Law Review

This Article develops a question that intrigued Fred: prosecutors’ duties postconviction to prisoners who might be innocent. Although Fred wrote about a panoply of questions that arise regarding the prosecutor’s duty to “do justice” after conviction, this Article will address one specific area of concern: how and why prosecutors resist allowing DNA testing and, more startlingly, deny the obvious implications of DNA evidence when that evidence exonerates the convicted.

Part II of this Article briefly summarizes two of Fred’s major articles on the subject of prosecutorial ethics. Part III documents the problem of postconviction DNA exonerations and prosecutors’ varied reactions. …

Three Concepts Of Roles, W. Bradley Wendel

San Diego Law Review

There is something distinctive about the law, legal reasoning, and the role of lawyers. That distinctiveness is captured by the idea that normative reasoning by citizens in communities is necessarily aimed at discovering what rights and obligations everyone ought to have, consistent with the interests of other citizens. It is implausible to believe that ordinary moral reasoning is well-suited to working out a scheme of public entitlements that is suited to regulating the interactions among citizens who disagree about what their entitlements ought to be. The law has authority to the extent it enables people to do better than they …

Jurisdiction‐Granting: Legislative Capacity And Ideological Distance, Seth W. Greenfest

Political Science Faculty Publications

This paper examines the conditions under which Congress passes jurisdiction-granting legislation, legislation that expands the discretion of the federal district courts by designating them as venues in which policy questions are to be heard. This project extends existing research that has demonstrated that Congress manipulates the parameters of jurisdiction by examining the manner in which Congress routinely engages in this activity. I construct and evaluate a comprehensive dataset of laws in which Congress grants jurisdiction to the district courts for the period between 1949 and 2000 with the goal of explaining conditions under which Congress grants jurisdiction Two explanations are …

Constraints On State-Level Foreign Policy: (Re) Justifying, Refining And Distinguishing The Dormant Foreign Affairs Doctrine, Matthew Schaefer

Nebraska College of Law: Faculty Publications

A reassessment of United States' constitutional constraints on state-level foreign policy is sorely needed. State engagement in foreign policy was rarely significant until the 1960s. Since that time, state involvement has rapidly expanded in both sheer magnitude and the types of activities undertaken. The most prominent and problematic among these state and local activities in the past fifty-plus years has been three waves of state and local sanction initiatives targeting countries ruled by regimes with repugnant human rights policies. In the mid-1980s, over half of the states and at least 100 localities adopted sanctions legislation against South Africa, most often …

The Federal Common Law Of Vicarious Fiduciary Liability Under Erisa, Colleen E. Medill

Nebraska College of Law: Faculty Publications

Absent a federal common law rule of vicarious fiduciary liability, a corporate employer, in its nonfiduciary capacity as the settlor of its ERISA plan, may design the documents that govern the employer's plan as a shield against fiduciary responsibility for the actions of the employer's own internal fiduciary employees. This Article explores the potential for development of another area of federal common law under ERISA - the incorporation of respondeat superior liability principles to impose ERISA fiduciary liability ("vicarious fiduciary liability") upon a corporation for the fiduciary activities of its employees or agents. This claims and remedies system requires that …

"Trophy Husbands" & "Opt-Out" Moms, Beth Burkstrand-Reid

Nebraska College of Law: Faculty Publications

Before women were "opting out" of the workforce (as depicted by the New York Times)' to stay at home with their children, a subset of fathers had already done so. The 2002 Fortune cover story titled Trophy Husbands documented the "dramatic shift afoot" of well-off, educated men leaving paid work in order to tend to the home and kids in support of their powerful wives' careers:3 "Trophy Husbands? Arm candy? Are you kidding? While their fast-track wives go to work, stay-at-home husbands mind the kids. They deserve a trophy for trading places. The article portrayed these men as taking …

The More Things Change ... : Abortion Politics & The Regulation Of Assisted Reproductive Technology, Beth Burkstrand-Reid

Nebraska College of Law: Faculty Publications

Comparing abortion and assisted reproductive technology (ART)--especially controversial techniques like cytoplasm donation--may be detrimental to both. Each technology forces society to confront the deepest issues concerning the beginning of life and, for women, forces them to consider when motherhood begins and what responsibilities might flow from it. Abortion rights advocates must push the inception of motherhood to a point as late in the gestational process as possible so as to avoid thorny issues of fetal personhood. Fertility doctors and their patients may have just as strong of an interest in recognizing an earlier start to motherhood, as a way of …

Teaching Controversial Topics, Jennifer S. Hendricks, Beth Burkstrand-Reid, June Carbone

Nebraska College of Law: Faculty Publications

At the 2009 Future of Family Law Education conference at the William Mitchell School of Law, the authors participated in a panel discussing strategies for teaching controversial topics, which focused on teaching reproductive rights and related gender issues. This essay collects some of the strategies discussed at the conference. First we address what constitutes a “controversial” legal topic, outlining the several different ways in which a topic might be or become controversial within the context of a particular class. Next, we discuss the importance of laying the groundwork, throughout the semester, for the anticipated—and unanticipated— discussions surrounding controversial topics and …

Mudslinging On The Missouri: Can Endangered Species Survive The Clean Water Act?, Sandra Zellmer

Nebraska College of Law: Faculty Publications

This Article analyzes the perceived conflict between the CWA's demand for clean water, which in some, but not all, cases means clear water, and the "no jeopardy" requirement of the Endangered Species Act (ESA), and determines that the two statutes are not in conflict at all. Under the CWA, water quality managers are tasked with creating standards that promote a river's uses. Native species habitat is one use that must be protected under the CWA, just as it must be protected under the ESA. Water quality standards should promote that use by recognizing that the Missouri River, and others like …

Throwing Precaution To The Wind: Nepa And The Deepwater Horizon Blowout, Sandra Zellmer, Joel A. Mintz, Robert Glicksman

Nebraska College of Law: Faculty Publications

On April 20, 2010, British Petroleum's ("BP") Deepwater Horizon oil platform exploded, killing eleven workers. When the platform sank to the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico two days later, oil erupted out of the riser-a 5000-foot pipe connecting the platform to the well on the ocean floor. Efforts to stem the flow failed when a safety device, the "blowout preventer," could not be activated. Finally, after a number of attempts to stop the leak, BP capped the well on July 15. Nearly five million barrels of oil were released over the course of eighty-six days, making the Deepwater Horizon …

Keeping A Secret From Yourself? Confidentiality When The Same Neutral Serves Both As Mediator And As Arbitrator In The Same Case, Kristen M. Blankley

Nebraska College of Law: Faculty Publications

As the alternative dispute resolution field has grown, parties have designed their own processes from established processes in an attempt to best serve their process needs. One such hybrid process is mediationarbitration, called “med-arb” for short. Med-arb involves a single neutral who first serves as a mediator, and if the parties reach an impasse in mediation, the neutral then serves as an arbitrator to resolve the dispute. Although the literature has given some attention to the benefits and drawbacks of med-arb, this Article examines the process in light of broad mediation confidentiality and privilege statutes. Because these laws have no …