When Law Fails

Download or read book When Law Fails written by Charles J. Ogletree, Jr. and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2009-01-01 with total page 361 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since 1989, there have been over 200 post-conviction DNA exonerations in the United States. On the surface, the release of innocent people from prison could be seen as a victory for the criminal justice system: the wrong person went to jail, but the mistake was fixed and the accused set free. A closer look at miscarriages of justice, however, reveals that such errors are not aberrations but deeply revealing, common features of our legal system. The ten original essays in When Law Fails view wrongful convictions not as random mistakes but as organic outcomes of a misshaped larger system that is rife with faulty eyewitness identifications, false confessions, biased juries, and racial discrimination. Distinguished legal thinkers Charles J. Ogletree, Jr., and Austin Sarat have assembled a stellar group of contributors who try to make sense of justice gone wrong and to answer urgent questions. Are miscarriages of justice systemic or symptomatic, or are they mostly idiosyncratic? What are the broader implications of justice gone awry for the ways we think about law? Are there ways of reconceptualizing legal missteps that are particularly useful or illuminating? These instructive essays both address the questions and point the way toward further discussion. When Law Fails reveals the dramatic consequences as well as the daily realities of breakdowns in the law’s ability to deliver justice swiftly and fairly, and calls on us to look beyond headline-grabbing exonerations to see how failure is embedded in the legal system itself. Once we are able to recognize miscarriages of justice we will be able to begin to fix our broken legal system. Contributors: Douglas A. Berman, Markus D. Dubber, Mary L. Dudziak, Patricia Ewick, Daniel Givelber, Linda Ross Meyer, Charles J. Ogletree, Jr., Austin Sarat, Jonathan Simon, and Robert Weisberg.

Download or read book Failing Law Schools written by Brian Z. Tamanaha and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2012-06-18 with total page 253 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “An essential title for anyone thinking of law school or concerned with America's dysfunctional legal system.” —Library Journal On the surface, law schools today are thriving. Enrollments are on the rise and law professors are among the highest paid. Yet behind the flourishing facade, law schools are failing abjectly. Recent front-page stories have detailed widespread dubious practices, including false reporting of LSAT and GPA scores, misleading placement reports, and the fundamental failure to prepare graduates to enter the profession. Addressing all these problems and more is renowned legal scholar Brian Z. Tamanaha. Piece by piece, Tamanaha lays out the how and why of the crisis and the likely consequences if the current trend continues. The out-of-pocket cost of obtaining a law degree at many schools now approaches $200,000. The average law school graduate’s debt is around $100,000—the highest it has ever been—while the legal job market is the worst in decades. Growing concern with the crisis in legal education has led to high-profile coverage in the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times, and many observers expect it soon will be the focus of congressional scrutiny. Bringing to the table his years of experience from within the legal academy, Tamanaha provides the perfect resource for assessing what’s wrong with law schools and figuring out how to fix them. “Failing Law Schools presents a comprehensive case for the negative side of the legal education debate and I am sure that many legal academics and every law school dean will be talking about it.” —Stanley Fish, Florida International University College of Law

Download or read book The Failure of Corporate Law written by Kent Greenfield and published by ReadHowYouWant.com. This book was released on 2010-10-21 with total page 562 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When used in conjunction with corporations, the term public is misleading. Anyone can purchase shares of stock, but public corporations themselves are uninhibited by a sense of societal obligation or strict public oversight. In fact, managers of most large firms are prohibited by law from taking into account the interests of the public in de...

Download or read book When All Else Fails written by David A. Moss and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2004-10-25 with total page 472 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of the most important functions of government—risk management—is one of the least well understood. Moving beyond familiar public functions—spending, taxation, and regulation—Moss spotlights government's pivotal role as a risk manager, revealing the nature and extent of this function, which touches almost every aspect of economic life.

Download or read book The Collapse of Constitutional Remedies written by Aziz Z. Huq and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2021 with total page 193 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This book describes and explains the failure of the federal courts of the United States to act and to provide remedies to individuals whose constitutional rights have been violated by illegal state coercion and violence. This remedial vacuum must be understood in light of the original design and historical development of the federal courts. At its conception, the federal judiciary was assumed to be independent thanks to an apolitical appointment process, a limited supply of adequately trained lawyers (which would prevent cherry-picking), and the constraining effect of laws and constitutional provision. Each of these checks quickly failed. As a result, the early federal judicial system was highly dependent on Congress. Not until the last quarter of the nineteenth century did a robust federal judiciary start to emerge, and not until the first quarter of the twentieth century did it take anything like its present form. The book then charts how the pressure from Congress and the White House has continued to shape courts behaviour-first eliciting a mid-twentieth-century explosion in individual remedies, and then driving a five-decade long collapse. Judges themselves have not avidly resisted this decline, in part because of ideological reasons and in part out of institutional worries about a ballooning docket. Today, as a result of these trends, the courts are stingy with individual remedies, but aggressively enforce the so-called "structural" constitution of the separation of powers and federalism. This cocktail has highly regressive effects, and is in urgent need of reform"--

Download or read book When Brute Force Fails written by Mark A. R. Kleiman and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2009-08-17 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Cost-effective methods for improving crime control in America Since the crime explosion of the 1960s, the prison population in the United States has multiplied fivefold, to one prisoner for every hundred adults—a rate unprecedented in American history and unmatched anywhere in the world. Even as the prisoner head count continues to rise, crime has stopped falling, and poor people and minorities still bear the brunt of both crime and punishment. When Brute Force Fails explains how we got into the current trap and how we can get out of it: to cut both crime and the prison population in half within a decade. Mark Kleiman demonstrates that simply locking up more people for lengthier terms is no longer a workable crime-control strategy. But, says Kleiman, there has been a revolution—largely unnoticed by the press—in controlling crime by means other than brute-force incarceration: substituting swiftness and certainty of punishment for randomized severity, concentrating enforcement resources rather than dispersing them, communicating specific threats of punishment to specific offenders, and enforcing probation and parole conditions to make community corrections a genuine alternative to incarceration. As Kleiman shows, "zero tolerance" is nonsense: there are always more offenses than there is punishment capacity. But, it is possible—and essential—to create focused zero tolerance, by clearly specifying the rules and then delivering the promised sanctions every time the rules are broken. Brute-force crime control has been a costly mistake, both socially and financially. Now that we know how to do better, it would be immoral not to put that knowledge to work.

Download or read book Breached! written by Daniel J. Solove and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2022 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Web-based connections permeate our lives - and so do data breaches. Given that we must be online for basic communication, finance, healthcare, and more, it is remarkable how many problems there are with cybersecurity. Despite the passage of many data security laws, data breaches are increasingat a record pace. In Breached!, Daniel Solove and Woodrow Hartzog, two of the world's leading experts on cybersecurity and privacy issues, argue that the law fails because, ironically, it focuses too much on the breach itself.Drawing insights from many fascinating stories about data breaches, Solove and Hartzog show how major breaches could have been prevented through inexpensive, non-cumbersome means. They also reveal why the current law is counterproductive. It pummels organizations that have suffered a breach, butdoesn't recognize other contributors to the breach. These outside actors include software companies that create vulnerable software, device companies that make insecure devices, government policymakers who write regulations that increase security risks, organizations that train people to engage inrisky behaviors, and more.The law's also ignores the role that good privacy practices can play. Although humans are the weakest link for data security, the law remains oblivious to the fact that policies and technologies are often designed with a poor understanding of human behavior. Breached! corrects this course byfocusing on the human side of security. This book sets out a holistic vision for data security law - one that holds all actors accountable, understands security broadly and in relationship to privacy, looks to prevention rather than reaction, and is designed with people in mind. The book closes witha roadmap for how we can reboot law and policy surrounding cybersecurity so that breaches become much rarer events.