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High Time to Revisit Federal Drug Sentencing: The Confusing Interplay Between Controlled Substances and Career Offender Sentence Enhancements
Get PDFThe 1970s in the United States were largely defined by wars, both foreign and domestic: the Vietnam War and the War on Drugs, respectively. As part of President Richard Nixon’s anti-drug offensive, Congress enacted the Controlled Substances Act (CSA), part of the Comprehensive Drug Abuse Prevention and Control Act of 1970. The CSA organized—and criminalized—various drugs into schedules based on their permissible uses and potential for abuse. As states enacted their own versions of the CSA, some states chose to criminalize additional substances that were not included in the CSA.
The Sentencing Reform Act of 1984 and the United States Sentencing Guidelines (Guidelines) followed the CSA. Under federal law, criminal defendants may be subject to a “career offender” sentencing enhancement, which can substantially increase incarceration time, if they have at least two prior felony drug or violent crime convictions. The sentencing guidelines are vague and currently allow state court drug convictions, predicated on substances that are not criminalized under the CSA, to create the basis for a career offender sentencing enhancement under federal law. This Note suggests that the United States Sentencing Commission should revise the Guidelines to make clear that only convictions for drugs that are criminalized under the CSA may serve as predicate offenses for federal sentence enhancements. That is, where states choose to enact drug laws that criminalize more substances than the CSA, convictions under those overbroad laws cannot serve as the basis for a federal career offender sentence enhancement
Solar Farms in Georgia: Why We Need To Start Thinking About the End
Get PDFDespite the lack of a renewable energy mandate or a statewide carbon-cutting goal, Georgia’s renewable energy development, particularly utility-scale solar installations, is expected to increase exponentially. In the rush to join this renewable energy development surge, utilities, solar developers, and local governments must prudently consider how to manage this growth wisely and prevent avoidable costs in preparing for the inevitable decommissioning of these solar installations. Although Georgia is one of the nation’s leading states for solar power with its abundant land and sunshine, it lacks statewide policies addressing decommissioning concerns. A statewide decommissioning policy that requires some form of decommissioning plan and financial assurance can protect developers from unanticipated litigation that could detrimentally affect solar development. This Note examines the potential challenges utilities, developers, and local governments may face at the decommissioning stage and proposes a statewide decommissioning policy that would protect Georgia’s economy and communities with a predictable regulatory environment
New Developments in Payment Systems and Services Affecting Low-Income Consumers: Challenges and Opportunities
No full textThe consumer financial services industry has taken advantage of digital technology to transform the way it provides services to consumers using payment systems. After describing this new digital environment, the article describes its impact on lowincome consumers. It examines statutes and regulations that offer limited protection for low-income consumers as well as gaps in those laws. Next, the article discusses three approaches to protecting low-income consumers along with the benefits and limitations of each. One way low-income consumers can be protected is through enforcement of consumer protection laws by administrative agencies. A second is by enacting new statutes and regulations to fill gaps in the law. A third is for the government to establish its own financial services systems. The article then examines three proposals for new financial services systems. These proposals will fail to adequately protect low-income consumers, however, unless lawmakers require institutions providing these services to include low-income consumers in their decision-making process and to justify their actions based on low-income consumer impact assessments
Canary in a Coal Mine: What It Means to Lose a Constitutional Right
Get PDFRemarks on Dobbs v. Jackson Women\u27s Health Organization by Mary Ziegler at the 66th Henry J. Miller Distinguished Lectur
Toward a More Comprehensive Plea Bargaining Regulatory Regime
No full textAmerica’s plea-bargaining system is famously informal. While there is a smattering of state and federal regulation of guilty pleas, the practice of plea-bargaining itself remains almost entirely untouched by law. Because plea bargaining is the mechanism by which the vast majority of criminal convictions are secured -- upwards of 95% by most estimates -- this means that almost all criminal convictions are the product of an essentially unregulated, and in many ways entirely lawless, process. There is an increasing awareness of the harmful effects of an unregulated plea bargaining system and the ways that this lack of regulation enables highly coercive practices that effectively deprive most criminal defendants of their constitutional right to trial. The corrosive effect of plea-bargaining’s dominance is unmistakable and the continuing lack of meaningful regulation of it threatens the basic integrity of the criminal legal system.
This Article argues that it is imperative that policymakers take this threat seriously and urges them to take steps to impose real regulation on the plea-bargaining practice. The Article identifies several reforms that might be taken. These include requiring all plea offers to be in writing and filed in court, standardizing the timing and content of plea agreements, limiting the kinds of rights that criminal defendants can be required to waive in order to obtain a plea agreement, and shifting sentencing hearings from post-trial to pre-trial to ensure that defendants are aware of the consequences of their plea decisions. The filing requirement would also facilitate creation of meaningful mechanisms to regulate the magnitude of the sentencing differential between plea and trial sentences. This latter goal is critical to ameliorate the highly coercive aspects of present plea bargain practice, since more than any other factor it is the threat of heavy trial penalties that undermine the value of a defendant’s constitutional right to trial. Implementation of these reforms would go a long way toward bringing much needed procedural formality to the informal practice of plea bargaining and would help establish a more rational regulatory system of plea bargaining practice. It is also hoped that these reforms might help reverse the longstanding trend toward ever more vanishing criminal trials
Technology and Consumer Protection: Unintended Consequences
No full textA recent Restatement of the Law of Consumer Contracts relies upon caselaw containing not a single instance of touching or tapping on a tablet or smartphone screen.
In recent years, financial institutions have used advances in technology to make dramatic changes in the consumer payment landscape and electronic commerce. Consumers have largely welcomed new payment services such as to peer-to-peer payments (P2P), new devices—such as smart phones—to make payments, and new types of “money,” such as cryptocurrencies and other blockchain assets. However, when the financial services industry develops a new product or service, fraudsters inevitability find ways to scam consumers. With their skills and sophistication, fraudsters have specifically targeted some payment products such as P2P
A New Phenomenon in Legal Writing: Storytelling in Complaint Introductions, Part II
No full textIn the last decade, some lawyers have begun to use storytelling techniques in an unexpected place: complaints, and specifically, complaint introductions
Property, Viewed from Below, reviewing Sherally Munshi, \u3ci\u3eDispossession: An American Property Law Tradition\u3c/i\u3e, 110 Geo. L.J. 1021 (2022)
No full textQuestion and Answer Session
No full textThe Heckerling Institute presents the most important developments in the areas of estate planning and estate, gift and income taxation. Now in its fifty-seventh year, the Heckerling Institute is widely regarded as the premier estate planning program in the country. This publication w/index contains articles based on the podium lectures delivered at the Heckerling Institute