Hauptman-Woodward Medical Research Institute
Digital Commons @ University at Buffalo School of LawNot a member yet
8606 research outputs found
Sort by
Defunding Police Agencies
Get PDFThis Article contextualizes the police defunding movement and the backlash it has generated. The defunding movement emerged from the work of Black-led activists to reassert democratic control over policing and shift resources to social service agencies and other institutions serving community needs. In reaction, states have enacted anti-defunding bills checking local government reduction of law enforcement budgets. These anti-defunding measures continue a long tradition of state and federal control over local police spending, subverting local democratic control over police agencies. These limits include direct legal constraints on local police spending and indirect constraints through grants and authorization to collect fines, fees, and forfeitures. These mechanisms form a ratchet, bribing local governments to increase police spending and then mandating them to maintain it, at the eventual cost of cutting social services. This leaves cities little choice but to try to police their way out of the problems of poverty and inequality. Thus, constraints on local police funding help explain the decades-long shift of resources from social welfare to law enforcement. The problem revealed by the defunding controversy is not just the size of police budgets but also the perverse process determining those budgets. Before police agencies can be right-sized or reformed, police budgeting must be put in the hands of the people policed
Amphibious Legal Geographies: Toward Land–Sea Regimes
Get PDFPublished as ine introduction to Laws of the Sea: Interdisciplinary Currents, Irus Braverman, ed.
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book discusses the juridical thinking that has enshrined the land/sea divide into contemporary governmental infrastructures, disciplinary traditions, and regulatory apparatuses, and charts the disastrous implications that such a legal fixation on the land/sea binary has wrought on human and other-than-human lifeworlds. As the collection proceeds, a second broad theme emerges, building on the first: when one rethinks the abstraction of law as played out on the ground, the “ground” itself shifts and fundamental divisions between land and sea that serve as the foundations of Western law are undermined. “A first step in this process,” as John Gillis states in his archeological challenge to the Garden of Eden myth, “is to recognize that land and water are opposites but inseparable parts of an ecological continuum”.https://digitalcommons.law.buffalo.edu/book_sections/1435/thumbnail.jp
Preface
Get PDFPublished in Buddhism and Comparative Constitutional Law, Tom Ginsburg & Benjamin Schonthal, eds.https://digitalcommons.law.buffalo.edu/book_sections/1439/thumbnail.jp
May It Please the Court: A Longitudinal Study of Judicial Citation to Academic Legal Periodicals
No full textPublished in The Role of Citation in the Law: A Yale Law School Symposium, Michael Chiorazzi, ed.
Part I of this article examines the proportion of reported opinions from U.S. federal and state courts between 1945 and 2018 that cite at least one academic legal periodical, while Part II applies that data beginning in 1970 to compare the proportion of opinions that cite to the flagship journals of 17 law schools selected and hierarchically categorized based on their U.S. News & World Reports rankings. Representing the most elite schools are Harvard Law Review and Yale Law Journal, the two longest running student-edited journals at arguably the two most prestigious law schools in the United States, followed by journals from three exemplar schools from the “Top 14,” and three law schools from each of the rankings\u27 four tiers. This article explores these trends in the context of changes in technology, the judiciary, legal scholarship, and academic legal publishing.https://digitalcommons.law.buffalo.edu/law_librarian_book_sections/1006/thumbnail.jp
Focusing Presidential Clemency Decision-Making
Get PDFThe Article II Pardon Clause grants the President authority to award clemency to any offender. The clause contains only two limitations. The President cannot excuse someone from responsibility for a state offense, nor can he prevent Congress from impeaching and removing a federal official. Otherwise, the President’s authority is plenary. The clause authorizes the President to grant clemency as he sees fit, but the clause does not tell him when he should feel that way.
Historically, Presidents have generally used their authority for legitimate reasons, such as freeing someone who was wrongfully convicted, who is suffering under an unduly onerous punishment, or who deserves to be forgiven. Nevertheless, no President—nor the Department of Justice Pardon Attorney, who is ostensibly responsible for managing the clemency process—has ever recommended a rigorous standard for use when making clemency decisions. The Pardon Attorney has compiled a list of relevant factors, which is quite useful, but that list does not identify which factors are necessary and sufficient, nor does it assign those factors particular weights or an ordinal relationship. The result is that a President is left to act like a chancellor in equity by relying on his subjective assessment of the “totality of the circumstances.”
This Article offers a way to make clemency decisions in a reasonable, orderly manner that would systematize and regularize the Pardon Attorney’s recommendation process and presidential decision-making. Pardons and commutations differ from each other in material ways, and Presidents should analyze them separately. In the case of pardons, Presidents should answer a series of questions—an algorithm, if you will—that would guide them when deciding whether to forgive an offender. In the case of commutations, Presidents should make decisions on a category-by-category basis, rather than try, in effect, to resentence each offender. Together, those approaches would help Presidents make objectively based decisions that are consistent with longstanding rationales for punishment and the purposes of the criminal justice system. The hope is that, in so doing, Presidents will be able act justly and persuade the public that the clemency system is open to all, not merely to the President’s financial or political allies, cronies, supporters, or friends. The focused approaches suggested here should help Presidents create the fact and appearance of objectivity in clemency decision-making
Mapping Racial Capitalism: Implications for Law
Get PDFThe theory of racial capitalism offers insights into the relationship between class and race, providing both a structural and a historical account of the ways in which the two are linked in the global economy. Law plays an important role in this. This article sketches what we believe are two key structural features of racial capitalism: profit-making and race-making for the purpose of accumulating wealth and power. We understand profit-making as the extraction of surplus value or profits through processes of exploitation, expropriation, and expulsion, which are grounded in a politics of race-making. We understand race-making as including racial stratification, racial segregation, and the creation of sacrifice zones, which reflect the strategies and outcomes of profit-making. The structural features of racial capitalism thus are mutually constitutive: profit-making processes create and reinforce the making of racial meaning, while race-making, underwritten by white supremacy, structures and facilitates the economic processes of profit-making. Together, they constitute a global system dependent on the unbridled extraction of wealth from both humans and nature