By Max Minzner. Full text here. This Article explores an important but understudied structural choice: the decision to vest enforcement authority in administrative agencies. Each year, agencies routinely bring enforcement actions producing billions of dollars in civil penalties and industry-reshaping consent decrees. Where do they get this power? Congress grants enforcement authority to administrative agencies because…

By Paul MacMahon. Full text here. American contract law includes a duty of good faith and fair dealing in the performance of every contract. The duty appears, on first reading, to authorize judges to attach sanctions whenever one party to a contract acts unreasonably towards another. But judicial practice very often falls short of such an…

By Mark Haase. Full text here. Civil death is a legal status with roots in ancient Greece and brought to the American colonies from England. It deprived individuals convicted of certain offenses, often those with capital or life sentences, of all of their legal rights. Although civil death mostly disappeared in the mid-twentieth century, one of…

By Christopher Uggen & Robert Stewart. Full text here. While there has been great legal, media, and policy interest in the collateral effects of imprisonment, far less attention has been devoted to collateral consequences during and after periods of community supervision. Such consequences are wide-ranging, placing limits on education, employment, family rights, gun ownership, housing, immigration…

By Jessica M. Eaglin. Full text here. Economic sanctions in the United States justice system have acquired newfound attention from the public and policymakers across the country in recent years. As states reconsider excessively severe sentences for low level offenders captured in the justice system, there is a renewed interest in using alternatives to incarceration—including…

By R. Barry Ruback. Full text here. A consideration of economic sanctions must distinguish between the types and purposes of the different sanctions.  Costs and fees refer to charges the offender must pay to reimburse the state for the administrative costs of operating the criminal justice system, although there is some variance in how the terms…

By Kevin R. Reitz. Full text here.  It is well known that the United States. is the most punitive society in the world in the use of incarceration, and is in the “upper” tier of worldwide severity in use of the death penalty. Very recently, awareness has been growing that the United States, is equally exceptional…

By Ronald P. Corbett, Jr. Full text here. Since its inception in the mid-1800s, probation has been the sentence of choice in America’s criminal courts, accounting for approximately two-thirds of those under state correctional control, the balance of offenders incarcerated. As such, probation has been widely conceived of as a grant of leniency, a humane alternative…

By Judge Steven S. Alm. Full text here. Traditional felony probation programs in the United States often suffer from poor probationer compliance. In spite of dedicated and skilled probation officers using Evidence Based Principles, many probationers fail to successfully complete probation nationwide. Part of this systemic problem is an inability of Probation Officers and the Court…

By Cecelia Klingele. Full text here. One of the most popular program models in criminal justice today is that popularized by Hawaii Opportunity Probation with Enforcement (HOPE). HOPE and other programs like it grow out of research suggesting that the most effective way to prevent violations of conditions of supervision is to more accurately detect them,…