Law & Policy最新文献

The collateral consequences of justice involvement have become the subject of much reform activity in recent years. Drawing from a sample of 284 news articles, the present study uses content analysis methods to identify and examine the dominant frames that characterize collateral consequences in public discourse as a problematic feature of criminal justice policy and practice. The analysis finds that reform discourse draws primarily on a formal penal benchmark of gross disproportionality, which highlights the extreme disconnect between minor direct punishments for low-level offenses and the long-term collateral barriers that a person faces because of their criminal record. Gross disproportionality corresponds to a vision of reform that seeks to recalibrate collateral consequences according to the structure of direct punishment, an approach that may render collateral consequences more formally penal as a result of the reform process itself.

For more than two decades after Gregg v. Georgia (1976), use of the death penalty greatly expanded across the United States. Since 2000, however, it has declined significantly. Perhaps the most notable explanation for this decline is the contemporary focus on wrongful convictions. In this paper, we aim to contextualize the modern death penalty decline, and its connection with innocence, through the theoretical lens of social movements and collective action. We argue that dual opportunities reshaped the modern anti-death penalty movement. First, the McCleskey v. Kemp (1987) ruling affirmed the federal courts' resistance to abolition and inspired activists to begin shifting toward state-level political abolitionism. Activists then took advantage of the developing interest in wrongful convictions. Specifically, innocence-related abolitionist activities in Illinois reinvigorated the anti-death penalty movement, expanded the advocacy network, and fundamentally reframed the debate around capital punishment in the United States. We suggest that, collectively, these dual opportunities reshaped the anti-death penalty movement into one that emphasized strategies reaching beyond constitutionality and propelled the movement into the twenty-first century with a foundation for successful political abolitionism.

Formal complaints and disciplinary processes constitute a mandatory aspect of organizational responses for addressing sexual harassment in many jurisdictions. However, previous research has found that reporting parties are not well served by such processes. In particular, Ahmed (Complaint!; 2021) argues that the institutional climate that enables harassment or discrimination to occur—including its gendered dynamics—also shapes how complaints about harassment are handled. Building on Ahmed's work, this article analyses how gender “gets into” formal reporting processes for sexual harassment within organizations. It draws on interviews with 18 students and staff who went through a formal institutional reporting process for gender-based violence or harassment in UK higher education between 2016 and 2021. Using Connell's theorization of “gender regimes,” we outline how “dimensions of gender” within organizations affected different stages of formal reporting processes, including how evidence was gathered during reporting processes, as well as how it was assessed. These findings demonstrate that gender regimes—via gender relations of power, gendered “attachments and investments,” and “gender-neutral” processes—can override formal processes and affect outcomes of sexual harassment reporting. These findings explain how gender regimes contribute to the failure of sexual harassment complaints to be upheld within organizations.

This article develops a reconceptualization of “invisible crimes” and their relation to punitive politics. Analysis and comparison of three cases of criminalization in the United States suggests that when legislation criminalizes easily concealed, pervasive, and morally ambiguous (nondirectly victimizing) behaviors, the negative consequences disproportionately impact poor, vulnerable, and marginalized groups, while benefitting comparatively powerful groups. Normative recommendations relating to the “rule of law” are discussed.

Supreme Court justices' opinions shape the contours of case law binding throughout the United States. Importantly though, justices do not write their opinions de novo. Rather, they routinely draw on lower court judges' opinion language when crafting opinions. In doing so, justices stretch the substantive impact of lower court judges' reasoning beyond the boundaries of their circuits. However, justices do not draw equally on lower court opinions; while previous work often ties this to judges' professional qualifications, we draw on work stressing female supervisors are more likely to enforce professional norms on subordinates. We argue female justices are more likely to draw upon lower court opinions complying with professional norms because of greater implicit norm internalization over the course of their careers. We test this proposition with a quantitative textual analysis of the justices' opinions and lower court opinions. We find support for our argument. This raises normative concerns about the overall impact of greater judicial diversity.

This paper adds to the existing knowledge on migration and the law by empirically exploring the legal consciousness of 33 refugees and asylum seekers in Greece, more specifically, by discussing how their experiences, self-identity and expectations of the law inform their reactions to the restrictions imposed upon them. The findings suggest that (1) legal knowledge is acquired in the countries of origin and from contact with smugglers, other migrants, law enforcement agents and staff from NGOs; (2) this knowledge allows them to forge an identity as “rights-bearers,” which (3) together with perceptions and expectations of human rights law and European Union policies on migration, (4) empower them to claim protection from the Greek state, and (5) legitimizes their actions, even if these sometimes involve subterfuge. Despite their particularly vulnerable positions, refugees and asylum seekers are, therefore, not mere passive receivers of state power, but also try to use the law to overcome adversity, in an almost game-like fashion.

Increasingly scholars have argued that, if the United States is to reduce Black–White disparities in incarceration, it is necessary to move away from race-neutral efforts and ensure that policies consider race. Despite this perspective, criminal legal policies have almost exclusively been race-neutral, with one general exception at the state level: racial impact statement reform. Although racial impact statement reform exists now in 10 states, no scholarship has empirically examined the implications of this approach for racial disparities in imprisonment. Using a mixed methods approach, we begin to fill this gap by examining the implications of Minnesota's racial impact statement reform on Black–White imprisonment rate disparities. Our quasi-experimental results do not suggest that Minnesota's reform reduced Black–White disparities in imprisonment. Our legislative analysis suggests that the null effects we observed were likely due to the fact that racial impact statements are responses to legislation that has already been proposed, and that the legislation proposed in Minnesota was not sufficient to significantly address Black–White imprisonment disparities, regardless of the extent to which these statements impacted the votes of legislators.