Legal Studies Commons^™

Redefining Rehabilitation: Evaluating The Washtenaw County Pre-Plea Diversion Program, William Ellsworth

CMC Senior Theses

The Washtenaw County (MI) Prosecutor’s Office’s Pre-Plea Diversion Program (PPDP) aims to divert eligible misdemeanor defendants from the criminal justice system, offering rehabilitative programming to reduce reoffending and minimize the collateral consequences of a criminal conviction with case dismissal. This research assessed whether PPDP participants were less likely to be re-arrested in the six months following program completion compared to a sample of defendants facing similar charges within the same court. It was hypothesized that the PPDP would effectively reduce re-arrest, with community service and mental health counseling proving particularly impactful. Employing a quasi-experimental design, data from 90 successfully diverted …

Nebraska Department Of Correctional Services Classification And Crowding Project Technical Report, Zachary Hamilton, Alex Kigerl, Baylee Allen-Flores, Addison Kobie, John Ursino, Amber Krushas, Brian Gildea, Ryan E. Spohn

Reports

In response to recent reports and noted issues of prison crowding, NDCS (Nebraska Department of Correctional Services) contracted with NCJR (Nebraska Center for Justice Research) to investigate the impacts of crowding. Going beyond the CSG, CJI, and Master Plan reports (Council of State Governments, 2015; Criminal Justice Institute, 2022; Dewberry, 2023; JFA, 2020), NDCS requested NCJR identify which facilities and populations are impacted greatest via crowding. Further, findings provide areas of recommended changes needed to ease growth and help maintain safety and functionality of NDCS institutions. As part of Phase I, we completed a process evaluation, which included a review …

Cultivating Attentiveness To Law In India Through Legal Anthropology, Deepa Das Acevedo, Jahnavi Chamarthi

Faculty Articles

This Article reviews and analyses scholarship at the intersection of anthropology and law. The first half of the Article provides context for understanding the boundaries, animating concerns, and tensions that have characterised the anthropology of law as an area of interdisciplinary inquiry. We focus especially on the subdiscipline’s Anglo-American history and show how a promising early period of engagement dissipated as both anthropologists and legal scholars lost enthusiasm for each others’ insights and methods. Then, we expand our analysis outward. Because legal anthropology belongs within, and is increasingly attentive to, the broader field of law and society scholarship, we explore …

The New Straightjackets: How Prisons Have Come To Be The Mental Illness Solution, Parker A. Wolfe

Soaring: A Journal of Undergraduate Research

This paper examines the current mental health resources that are available in prisons, as well as the correlation between deinstitutionalization and the rise of individuals struggling with mental illness within prison walls.

Judicial Independence: An Important Yet Fragile Concept Needed For The Democracy Of The United States, Michael Johnson Jr

Capstone Showcase

My thesis explores the processes by which jurists are appointed to the bench to various State Supreme Courts through several selection methods. I delve deep into the extensive and intricate history surrounding judicial independence as an institutional concept, which has caused signs of concern for many legal and institutional scholars. My research aims to address the question: To what extent do the methods and mechanisms intended to safeguard judicial independence effectively fulfill their purpose? To answer this question, I use a pattern matching method to analyze a selection of six summary judgment cases–chosen randomly–from each state. Three cases where the …

The Violence Of Numbers: A Critical Appraisal Of The Justice Capabilities Framework, Abhineet Maurya

Socio-Legal Review

Systems of indicators and international rankings have today become a new mode of evaluating social, political, and economic life. In the context of measuring the rule of law and justice delivery systems at a local as well as a global level, such indicators enable empirically grounded solutions to justice reform issues. However, scholars like Siddharth Peter de Souza argue that the existing discourse concerning the rule of law and access to justice indicators promote a specific vision of a well functioning justice system grounded in western normative considerations. de Souza, in his book Designing Indicators for a Plural Legal World …

Crj 63 - An Introuction To The Criminal Justice System, Grace Trotman

Open Educational Resources

This course provides a study of the elements that comprise the criminal justice system: the police, courts, and corrections. Attention is given to civil liberties issues, which involve the procedural due process rights of criminally accused persons. Students undertake an intellectual journey through the criminal justice system to fortify their knowledge of the law and protections guaranteed under the Bill of Rights as they apply to the agencies that comprise the criminal justice system.

Law Library Blog (January 2024): Legal Beagle's Blog Archive, Roger Williams University School Of Law

Law Library Newsletters/Blog

No abstract provided.

The Devil In The Details: Sex Work Legalization, Sexual Violence, And Moral Subjectivity, Molly Hauf

Departmental Honors Projects

Prostitution legislation has re-emerged in public and academic discourse in recent decades after relative silence on the issue since the mid-twentieth century, spurred by Sweden’s adoption of prostitution decriminalization - the first known legislation criminalizing the buyers of sex (rather than the sellers) to be actualized in legislation. Since then, scholarship examining the population-level effects of such legal changes has found evidence that changes in legislation affect rates of sexual violence, although the causal credibility and generalizability of some of this scholarship is disputed. Additionally, much of the previous scholarship examining this question used relatively small sample sizes that include …

When Ballots Are Blank: Write-In’S Serving Local Government And The Implications For A Healthy And Vibrant Democracy, Thomas J. Ruter

School of Business Student Theses and Dissertations

Our democracy depends on having a supply of candidates running for elected office, but in some instances, no one wants to run. This phenomenological study asks what the effects on a healthy and vibrant democracy are if ballots are blank and the seat is filled through write-in or appointment. Rooted in democratic theory, this study explores small, rural city elections where write-ins won election. Understudied, local governments are responsible for decisions affecting the lives of millions of people each day. Workforce scarcity, the alienation of young Americans from politics, government bashing, nasty campaigns, threats of physical harm, and other barriers …

Second-Tier Marriages, Jeremiah A. Ho

All Faculty Scholarship

This Essay interrogates the reasoning behind the retrenchment toward LGBTQ rights progress that has taken place since marriage equality. With marriage rights for same-sex couples now "on the books," the Supreme Court's treatment of same-sex couples in both Masterpiece Cakeshop, Ltd. v. Colorado Civil Rights Comm'n and 303 Creative LLC v. Elenis reveals the status quo's hesitancy to recognize same-sex relationships on equal footing. Retrenchment, however, only describes the moment itself; it alludes to but offers no comprehensive or satisfying theory that identifies the motives behind the moves. This Essay theorizes from within the context of the Supreme Court's LGBTQ …

Predictors Of Identity Crime Victimization Of Adolescent Youth In Foster Care, John Gyourko, Greg Ridgeway

Department of Social Work - Faculty Scholarship

Identity crimes pose serious risks and challenges for youth in foster care. As young people move through various out-of-home placements and schools, their personal data are often widely disseminated, difficult to secure, and thus vulnerable to theft and misuse. When they transition from foster care to adulthood, identity crime victims with compromised credit histories may be denied loans, employment, and/or housing during the already-precarious period of emerging adulthood. Even though federal law requires state child welfare agencies to conduct annual credit checks for adolescent youth in foster care, little is known about the factors contributing to risk of identity crime …

Rethinking Antebellum Bankruptcy, Rafael I. Pardo

Scholarship@WashULaw

Bankruptcy law has been repeatedly reinvented over time in response to changing circumstances. The Bankruptcy Act of 1841—passed by Congress to address the financial ruin caused by the Panic of 1837—constituted a revolutionary break from its immediate predecessor, the Bankruptcy Act of 1800, which was the nation’s first bankruptcy statute. Although Congress repealed the 1841 Act in 1843, the legislation lasted significantly longer than recognized by scholars. The repeal legislation permitted pending bankruptcy cases to be finally resolved pursuant to the Act’s terms. Because debtors flooded the judicially understaffed 1841 Act system with over 46,000 cases, the Act’s administration continued …

Private Sector Participants In International Rulemaking: Governance Models, Melissa (M.J.) Durkee

Scholarship@WashULaw

International organizations seeking to develop a principled approach to stakeholder participation in rulemaking processes should consider for-profit stakeholders, which can be influential participants. This chapter evaluates potential governance models for their effectiveness in facilitating the benefits and restraining the harms of for-profit influence in rulemaking processes, recommending a balanced approach. A successful governance model should also acknowledge that for-profit stakeholders can use a variety of channels to communicate their input, including individual business entities, trade and industry associations, other non-governmental groups, academics and think tanks, and domestic officials. Because of these sometimes invisible links between for-profit actors and other kinds …

Legitimacy And The Major Questions Doctrine, Ronald M. Levin

Scholarship@WashULaw

Questions about the legitimacy of recent Supreme Court decisions are occupying an increasingly prominent place in public law discourse. Last February, a widely discussed feature in the New York Times quoted several well-known law professors' laments that multiple decision by the newly empowered conservative majority of the Court have departed so far from accepted constitutional premises that the professor could not figure out how to teach them to their students

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With due respect to the Chief Justice, I will explain here why the MQD is itself among the few legal developments that I would describe as giving rise to …

Introduction To The Symposium On Digital Evidence, Melissa (M.J.) Durkee, Tamar Megiddo

Scholarship@WashULaw

The past few decades have seen radical advances in the availability and use of digital evidence in multiple areas of international law. Witnesses snap cellphone photos of unfolding atrocities and post them online, while others share updates in real time through messaging apps. Immigration officers search cell phones. Private citizens launch open-source online investigations. Investigators scrape social media posts. Digital experts verify authenticity with satellite geolocation. These new types of evidence and digitally facilitated methods and patterns of evidence gathering and analysis are revolutionizing the everyday practice of international law, drawing in an ever-wider circle of actors who can contribute …

The Ambivalent Logics Of Business Representation In International Organizations, Melissa (M.J.) Durkee

Scholarship@WashULaw

The United Nations and its bodies have 'opened up' to a broad range of non-state actors over the last three decades, including for-profit actors and their representatives. The shift is reflected in the UN's sustainable development goals and the Global Compact, emphasizing public-private partnerships; in greater participation of corporations at treaty conferences; in trade group roles as observers at organizations; and in multi-stakeholder projects. Yet international organizations have generally not developed robust responses to legitimacy concerns about businesses becoming closely involved in lawmaking and governance projects. These concerns focus on interest group capture, entrenchment of western economic elites, creeping privatization, …

Against Engagement, Neil M. Richards, Woodrow Hartzog

Scholarship@WashULaw

In this Article, we focus on a key dimension of commercial surveillance by data-intensive digital platforms that is too often treated as a supporting cast member instead of a star of the show: the concept of engagement. Engagement is, simply put, a measure of time, attention, and other interactions with a service. The economic logic of engagement is simple: more engagement equals more ads watched equals more revenue. Engagement is a lucrative digital business model, but it is problematic in several ways that lurk beneath the happy sloganeering of a “free” internet.

Our goal in this Article is to isolate …

Limitations Of The “Four-Fifths Rule” And Statistical Parity Tests For Measuring Fairness, Pauline Kim, Manish Raghavan

Scholarship@WashULaw

To ensure the fairness of algorithmic decision systems, such as employment selection tools, computer scientists and practitioners often refer to the so-called “four-fifths rule” as a measure of a tool’s compliance with anti-discrimination law. This reliance is problematic because the “rule” is in fact not a legal rule for establishing discrimination, and it offers a crude test that will often be over- and under-inclusive in identifying practices that warrant further scrutiny. The “four-fifths rule” is one of a broader class of statistical tests, which we call Statistical Parity Tests (SPTs), that compare selection rates across demographic groups. While some SPTs …

The Riddle Of Race-Based Redistricting, Travis Crum

Scholarship@WashULaw

The Supreme Court has adopted divergent interpretations of the Equal Protection Clause as applied to race and redistricting. Vote dilution doctrine requires mapmakers to consider race to ensure that racial minorities are not packed or cracked. Congress, moreover, has embraced vote dilution doctrine in Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. By contrast, racial gerrymandering doctrine triggers strict scrutiny if mapmakers subordinate traditional redistricting principles to race, thereby threatening Section 2’s constitutionality.

To resolve this doctrinal riddle, this Essay examines whether, as originally understood, the Fourteenth or Fifteenth Amendment governed the use of race during redistricting. The Equal Protection Clause …