Zimring on Mass Incarceration: Empirical Pessimism and Cautious Reformist Optimism
By Robert Weisberg. Full Text. This Article places Professor Zimring’s treatment of the boom in imprisonment that led to mass incarceration in the wider context of his decades-long contemplation of our ability to understated changes in crime and punishment. His earlier studies of the great crime decline that began in the 1990s provides a revealing,…
Continue ReadingWhy the Policy Failures of Mass Incarceration Are Really Political Failures
By John F. Pfaff. Full Text. In his forthcoming book, The Insidious Momentum of Mass Incarceration, Franklin Zimring argues that the most effective way to end mass incarceration is to target the policy failures that drive it. He focuses in particular on the “prosecutorial free lunch”: prosecutors are county-funded officials who can send as many…
Continue ReadingDealing with Mass Incarceration
By Alfred Blumstein. Full Text. In today’s highly polarized political environment, one of the few issues which garners widespread agreement is the desire to reduce prison populations. Thus, it is rather disconcerting to see the recent stability of the incarceration rate since 2000. This raises the concern that this could be a reflection of a…
Continue ReadingPrisoners of Politics: Breaking the Cycle of Mass Incarceration
By Rachel E. Barkow. Full text.
Continue Reading“Wreaking Extraordinary Destruction”: Defendant’s Irreplaceability as Presumptively Reasonable Grounds for Downward Departure in Sentencing
By Jackie Fielding. Full Text Despite the media attention afforded to the recent family separation crisis at the southern border of the United States, there is a much more prevalent and common form of family separation: parental incarceration. The United States is the largest incarcerator worldwide, and the surge in the incarceration of women has…
Continue ReadingA Blueprint for States To Solve the Mandatory Arbitration Problem While Avoiding FAA Preemption
By Sam Cleveland. Full Text. Employers are increasingly using mandatory pre-dispute arbitration clauses in employment contracts. Doing so gives employers benefits, such as privacy, the ability to select the arbitrators, and repeat players benefits, but they often leave employees without meaningful recourse when they are wronged, especially when class action waivers are used. This effect…
Continue ReadingSoft Law as Governing Law
By Steven L. Schwarcz. Full Text. International business transactions increasingly are being conducted under “soft law”—a term referring to non-state rules that may be aspirational or reflect best practices but are not yet legally enforceable. In part, this shift reflects a decline in cross-border treaty-making, which needs widespread consensus and is subject to lengthy negotiations.…
Continue ReadingContracting Our Way to Inequality: Race, Reproductive Freedom, and the Quest for the Perfect Child
By Camille Gear Rich. Full Text. This Article asks a fundamental question: Why does a society ostensibly committed to racial equality allow players in the assisted reproductive technology (ART) market to buy and sell race? As consumers in the ART market well know, human gametes (both eggs and sperm) are packaged, marketed, and sometimes priced…
Continue ReadingJumping Hurdles To Sue the Police
By Sunita Patel. Full Text. The view that the Supreme Court has limited judicial review of unconstitutional government practices is evident in varied quarters of legal scholarship. With respect to structural reform litigation against the police there are good reasons for pessimism, particularly when considering three particular lines of Supreme Court case law. City of…
Continue ReadingFighting for Attention: Democracy, Free Speech, and the Marketplace of Ideas
By G. Michael Parsons. Full Text. The marketplace of ideas features prominently in First Amendment doctrine, with the Supreme Court invalidating laws that purportedly interfere with the free flow of information through society. Yet, the modern version of the market metaphor rests entirely upon contradictory conceptual assumptions, false empirical premises, and an unsupported historical narrative.…
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