Is life without parole the perfect compromise to the death penalty? Or is it as ethically fraught as capital punishment? This comprehensive, interdisciplinary anthology treats life without parole as "the new death penalty." Editors Charles J. Ogletree, Jr. and Austin Sarat bring together original work by prominent scholars in an effort to better understand the growth of life without parole and its social, cultural, political, and legal meanings. What justifies the turn to life imprisonment? How should we understand the fact that this penalty is used disproportionately against racial minorities? What are the most promising avenues for limiting, reforming, or eliminating life without parole sentences in the United States? Contributors explore the structure of life without parole sentences and the impact they have on prisoners, where the penalty fits in modern theories of punishment, and prospects for (as well as challenges to) reform.

In this series of chapters on contract damages issues, Victor P. Goldberg provides a framework for analyzing the problems that arise when determining damages, and applies it to case law in both the USA and the UK. In analyzing direct damages, the author treats the problem as pricing the option to terminate. This sheds light on the question of the date at which damages should be measured and the role of post-breach information in damage assessment. It shows how the treatment of the so-called lost volume seller in both countries results in the court constructing an absurd contract, setting an option price with perverse characteristics. Goldberg then considers two questions regarding consequential damages--the enforceability of consequential damages exclusion clauses and whether the lost profits claims of new businesses should be rejected. Contracts professors, judges, lawyers and law students will be inspired by this volume to rethink the law of contract damages.

Professional Emotions in Court examines the paramount role of emotions in the legal professions and in the functioning of the democratic judicial system. Based on extensive interview and observation data in Sweden, the authors highlight the silenced background emotions and the tacitly habituated emotion management in the daily work at courts and prosecution offices. Following participants 'backstage' - whether at the office or at lunch - in order to observe preparations for and reflections on the performance in court itself, this book sheds light on the emotionality of courtroom interactions, such as professional collaboration, negotiations, and challenges, with the analysis of micro-interactions being situated in the broader structural regime of the legal system - the emotive-cognitive judicial frame - throughout. A demonstration of the false dichotomy between emotion and reason that lies behind the assumption of a judicial system that operates rationally and without emotion, Professional Emotions in Court reveals how this assumption shapes professionals' perceptions and performance of their work, but hampers emotional reflexivity, and questions whether the judicial system might gain in legitimacy if the role of emotional processes were recognized and reflected upon.

It is essential that those in the criminal justice system understand the tasks that police dogs perform and the evidence that their work produces. Police and Military Dogs: Criminal Detection, Forensic Evidence, and Judicial Admissibility examines the use of police and military dogs for a wide variety of functions and explores canine biology and behavior as it applies to police work. The book begins with an overview of the changes that have occurred in the field in the past four decades as discoveries have been made about canine capabilities. The author examines how a canine handler's work with a skilled police dog can affect the subsequent investigation and prosecution of the crime. He discusses optimal procedures for finding and processing evidence and describes the boundaries of admissibility of evidence produced by police dogs. The book examines the many diverse detection functions police dogs are being trained to perform, ranging from cadaver detection to the discovery of explosives. It also describes the use of dogs to apprehend criminals and in search and rescue operations. Written for a wide audience including canine handlers, forensic scientists, attorneys, and the judiciary, this volume covers topics pertinent to all aspects of the police dog in contemporary law enforcement.

This book provides a systematic and interdisciplinary examination of law and legal institutions in Malaysia. It examines legal issues from historical, social, and political perspectives, and discusses the role of law in relation to Malaysian multiculturalism, religion, politics, and society. It shows how the Malaysian legal system is at the heart of debates about how to deal with the country's problems, which include ethnic and religious divisions, uneven and unsustainable development, and political authoritarianism; and it argues that the Malaysian legal system has much to teach other plural polities, nations within the common law tradition, and federal states.

One of the most important problems faced by the United States is addressing its broken criminal justice system. This collection of essays offers a thorough examination of incarceration as a form of punishment. In addition to focusing on the philosophical aspects related to punishment, the volume's diverse group of contributors provides additional background in criminology, economics, law, and sociology to help contextualize the philosophical issues. The first group of essays addresses whether or not our current institutions connected with punishment and incarceration are justified in a liberal society. The next set of chapters explores the negative effects of incarceration as a form of punishment, including its impact on children and families. The volume then describes how we arrived at our current situation in the United States, focusing on questions related to how we view prisons and prisoners, policing for profit, and the motivations of prosecutors in trying to secure convictions. Finally, Rethinking Punishment in the Era of Mass Incarceration examines specific policy alternatives that might offer solutions to our current approach to punishment and incarceration.

Environmental mediation continues to develop and evolve in different jurisdictions across the world in order to prevent potential environmental conflicts or to resolve the conflicts while avoiding the inherent drawbacks of an adjudicated solution. This book takes a comparative approach to explore the legal framework of environmental mediation with a focus on the judicial, administrative and private procedures and the criteria for accrediting mediators in a range of jurisdictions across the world. It also examines practical considerations for environmental mediators while analysing the effectiveness of different mediation processes.

What if data-intensive technologies' ability to mould habits with unprecedented precision is also capable of triggering some mass disability of profound consequences? What if we become incapable of modifying the deeply-rooted habits that stem from our increased technological dependence? On an impoverished understanding of habit, the above questions are easily shrugged off. Habits are deemed rigid by definition: 'as long as our deliberative selves remain capable of steering the design of data-intensive technologies, we'll be fine'. To question this assumption, this open access book first articulates the way in which the habitual stretches all the way from unconscious tics to purposive, intentionally acquired habits. It also highlights the extent to which our habit-reliant, pre-reflective intelligence normally supports our deliberative selves. It is when habit rigidification sets in that this complementarity breaks down. The book moves from a philosophical inquiry into the 'double edge' of habit - its empowering and compromising sides - to consideration of individual and collective strategies to keep habits at the service of our ethical life. Allowing the norms that structure our forms of life to be cotton-wooled in abstract reasoning is but one of the factors that can compromise ongoing social and moral transformations. Systems designed to simplify our practical reasoning can also make us 'sheep-like'. Drawing a parallel between the moral risk inherent in both legal and algorithmic systems, the book concludes with concrete interventions designed to revive the scope for normative experimentation. It will appeal to any reader concerned with our retaining an ability to trigger change within the practices that shape our ethical sensibility. The eBook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by the Mozilla Foundation.

American criminal justice is a dysfunctional mess. Cops are too violent, the punishments are too punitive, and the so-called Land of the Free imprisons more people than any other country in the world. Understanding why means focusing on color-not only on black or white (which already has been studied extensively), but also on green. The problem is that nearly everyone involved in criminal justice-including district attorneys, elected judges, the police, voters, and politicians-faces bad incentives. Local towns often would rather send people to prison on someone else's dime than pay for more effective policing themselves. Local police forces can enrich themselves by turning into warrior cops who steal from innocent civilians. Voters have very little incentive to understand the basic facts about crime or how to fix it-and vote accordingly. And politicians have every incentive to cater to voters' worst biases. Injustice for All systematically diagnoses why and where American criminal justice goes wrong, and offers functional proposals for reform. By changing who pays for what, how people are appointed, how people are punished, and which things are criminalized, we can make the US a country which guarantees justice for all. Key Features: Shows how bad incentives, not "bad apples," cause the dysfunction in American criminal justice Focuses not only on overincarceration, but on overcriminalization and other failures of the criminal justice system Provides a philosophical and practical defense of reducing the scope of what's considered criminal activity Crosses ideological lines, highlighting both the weaknesses and strengths of liberal, conservative, and libertarian agendas Fully integrates tools from philosophy and social science, making this stand out from the many philosophy books on punishment, on the one hand, and the solely empirical studies from sociology and criminal science, on the other Avoids disciplinary jargon, broadening the book's suitability for students and researchers in many different fields and for an interested general readership Offers plausible reforms that realign specific incentives with the public good.

Current estimates indicate that approximately 2.2 million people are incarcerated in federal, state, and local correctional facilities across the United States. There are another 5 million under community correctional supervision. Many of these individuals fall into the classification of special needs or special populations (e.g., women, juveniles, substance abusers, mentally ill, aging, chronically or terminally ill offenders). Medical care and treatment costs represent the largest portion of correctional budgets, and estimates suggest that these costs will continue to rise. In the community, probation and parole officers are responsible for helping special needs offenders find appropriate treatment resources. Therefore, it is important to understand the needs of these special populations and how to effectively care for and address their individual concerns. The Routledge Handbook of Offenders with Special Needs is an in-depth examination of offenders with special needs, such as those who are learning-challenged, developmentally disabled, and mentally ill, as well as substance abusers, sex offenders, women, juveniles, and chronically and terminally ill offenders. Areas that previously have been unexamined (or examined in a limited way) are explored. For example, this text carefully examines the treatment of gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender offenders, and racial and gender disparities in health care delivery, as well as pregnancy and parenthood behind bars, homelessness, and the incarceration of veterans and immigrants. In addition, the book presents legal and management issues related to the treatment and rehabilitation of special populations in prisons/jails and the community, including police-citizen interactions, diversion through specialty courts, obstacles and challenges related to reentry and reintegration, and the need for the development and implementation of evidence-based criminal justice policies and practices. This is a key collection for students taking courses in prisons, penology, criminal justice, criminology, and related areas of study, and an essential resource for academics and practitioners working with offenders with special needs.

Interactional Justice explores how defence lawyers accomplish their role in interaction with others and highlights the ways in which they do loyalty work - constructing and conveying loyalty in emotionally and interactionally constraining situations. By drawing on extensive ethnographic fieldnotes and interviews with lawyers, this sociological study brings their loyalty work to life and reveals to the reader the unwritten rules of emotional interactions. It presents how defence lawyers socially construct their duty of loyalty by negotiating informal and implicit professional and social expectations. This accomplishment demands emotion work and face work in order to perform a role which includes defending clients accused of heinous crimes and "losing" the majority of cases. As the defence team is central to this, the ways of doing teamwork are illustrated. Teamwork is also found to be essential between legal professionals to ensure that a criminal trial runs smoothly. All of this takes place within an overarching framework - the emotional regime of law - which aims to uphold the illusionary dichotomy between rationality and emotionality thus quietening the role of emotions. Loyalty and teamwork are features of many professions, workplaces, and aspects of social life making this book an essential tool for understanding strategies for their accomplishment. Focusing on courtroom emotions and interactions, the book suggests how trials can be made more user-friendly and provides guidance for newly qualified legal professionals. The use of ethnographic fieldnotes and interviews provides scholars and students in the social sciences, teaching, law, and medicine with a colourful monograph which reveals and explains emotion and interaction rules. It also makes this book a useful tool for teaching and understanding qualitative research methods.

This book investigates what happens to criminal evidence after the conclusion of legal proceedings. During the criminal trial, evidentiary material is tightly regulated; it is formally regarded as part of the court record, and subject to the rules of evidence and criminal procedure. However, these rules and procedures cannot govern or control this material after proceedings have ended. In its 'afterlife', criminal evidence continues to proliferate in cultural contexts. It might be photographic or video evidence, private diaries and correspondence, weapons, physical objects or forensic data, and it arouses the interest of journalists, scholars, curators, writers or artists. Building on a growing cultural interest in criminal archival materials, this book shows how in its afterlife, criminal evidence gives rise to new uses and interpretations, new concepts and questions, many of which are creative and transformative of crime and evidence, and some of which are transgressive, dangerous or insensitive. It takes the judicial principle of open justice - the assumption that justice must be seen to be done - and investigates instances in which we might see too much, too little or from a distorted angle. It centres upon a series of case studies, including those of Lindy Chamberlain and, more recently, Oscar Pistorius, in which criminal evidence has re-appeared outside of the criminal process. Traversing museums, libraries, galleries and other repositories, and drawing on extensive interviews with cultural practitioners and legal professionals, this book probes the legal, ethical, affective and aesthetic implications of the cultural afterlife of evidence.

Sociolinguists and lawyers will find insight and relevance in this account of the language of the courtroom, as exemplified in the criminal trial of O.J. Simpson. The trial is examined as the site of linguistic power and persuasion, focusing on the role of language in (re)presenting and (re)constructing the crime. In addition to the trial transcripts, the book draws on Simpson's post-arrest interview, media reports and post-trial interviews with jurors.

This revised second edition takes account of developments in the field of dispute resolution, including mediation and arbitration. The book presents a concise account of the English system of civil litigation, covering court proceedings in England and Wales. It is an original and important study of a system which is the historical root of the US litigation system. The volume offers a comprehensive and properly balanced account of the entire range of dispute resolution techniques. As the first (revised) book on this subject to be published in the USA, it enables American lawyers to gain an overview of the main institutions of English Civil Procedure, including mediation and arbitration. It will render the English system of civil justice accessible to law students in the US, practitioners of law, professors, judges, and policy-makers.

The third volume in the Interviews with Global Leaders in Policing, Courts, and Prisons series, Trends in the Judiciary: Interviews with Judges Across the Globe, this book provides an insider's view of the judicial system. Offering interviews from judges in Africa, Asia, Australasia, Europe, North America, and the West Indies, it explores the behind-the-scenes motivations of judges on a global scale, delving into the interviewees' opinions on diverse legal systems, the interpretation of legal developments, and current issues in criminal law. Readers of this text will be experience the judicial system from within-the plans, protests, and thought processes of practicing judges. Criminal justice students and practitioners alike will benefit from this unique examination of judges around the world.

The Handbook on Risk and Need Assessment: Theory and Practice covers risk assessments for individuals being considered for parole or probation. Evidence-based approaches to such decisions help take the emotion and politics out of community corrections. As the United States begins to back away from ineffective, expensive policies of mass incarceration, this handbook will provide the resources needed to help ensure both public safety and the effective rehabilitation of offenders. The ASC Division on Corrections & Sentencing Handbook Series will publish volumes on topics ranging from violence risk assessment to specialty courts for drug users, veterans, or the mentally ill. Each thematic volume focuses on a single topical issue that intersects with corrections and sentencing research.

Children who come into conflict with the law are more likely to have experienced violence or adversity than their non-offending peers. Exacerbating the deleterious effects of this childhood trauma, children's contact with the criminal justice system poses undue risks of physical, sexual, and psychological violence. This book examines the specific forms of violence that children experience through their contact with the criminal justice system. Comprising contributions from leading scholars and practitioners in children's rights and youth justice, this book profiles evidence-based prevention strategies and case studies from around the world. It illustrates the diversity of contexts in which various forms of violence against children unfold and advances knowledge about both the nature and extent of violence against children in criminal justice settings, and the specific situational factors that contribute to, or inhibit, the successful implementation of violence prevention strategies. It demonstrates that specialised child justice systems, in which children's rights are upheld, are crucial in preventing the violence inherent to conventional criminal justice regimes. Written in a clear and accessible style, this book will be of interest to students and researchers engaged in studies of criminology and criminal justice, youth justice, victimology, crime prevention, and children's rights.

While evidence-based policy is an emerging rhetoric of the desire by and for governments to develop policies based on the best available evidence, drug policy is an area where particular challenges abound. This book is a detailed and comprehensive examination of the contours of drug policy development through the consideration of the particular roles of science, media, and interest groups. Using Belgium as the primary case-study, supplemented by insights gathered from other countries, the author contributes to a richer understanding of the science-policy nexus in the messy, real-world complexities of drug policy. Change or Continuity in Drug Policy: The Roles of Science, Media, and Interest Groups is the first book to bring together policy and media theories, knowledge utilisation models, and public scholarship literature. As such, the book provides unique insights relevant to aspects of change or continuity in drug policies in Europe and beyond. This book will be of great value to undergraduate and graduate students, as well as to academics, practitioners and policymakers with interest in the science-policy nexus with a particular focus on the drug policy domain.

Working within the framework of law and politics, JUDICIAL PROCESS: LAW, COURTS, AND POLITICS IN THE UNITED STATES combines detailed information about the major structures and processes of the American judiciary with an insider's understanding of the importance of courthouse dynamics. From the organization and procedures of the various courts to the current applications of specific laws, the 7th Edition explores the roles and impact of the judicial system. Throughout the text, the authors not only explain what the legal rules are but also explore each rule's underlying assumptions, history, and goals, providing a complete and balanced look at the role of the judicial system today.

Measuring Judicial Activism supplies empirical analysis to the widely discussed concept of judicial activism at the United States Supreme Court. Complaints about activist Court decisions are common within contemporary political discourse, but these objections often have little substantive meaning beyond the speaker's disagreement with particular case outcomes. Frequently debated by legal scholars, judicial activism is shaped by the participants' ideological perspectives as well as by their subjective views regarding ambiguous constitutional provisions. Although no study can be perfectly objective, Measuring Judicial Activism seeks to move beyond these more subjective debates by conceptualizing activism in non-ideological terms, identifying specific empirical dimensions to the concept, and measuring those dimensions using systematic social scientific techniques. In so doing, the book allows the authors to assess the relative "activism" of recent justices on the Court.
Stefanie Lindquist and Frank B. Cross's work is guided theoretically by the notion that, at its core, the concept of activism involves concerns over the judiciary's institutional aggrandizement at the expense of the elected branches. An important corollary idea is that such efforts are particularly "activist" when they further the justices' own policy or ideological objectives. From these core theoretical ideas, the authors identify specific empirical manifestations that reflect the expansion of judicial power. In particular, the authors evaluate the Court's exercise of judicial review to invalidate legislative and executive action. Lindquist and Cross also analyze the justices' willingness to expand the Court's power by granting litigants increased access to the courts and overruling the Court's own precedents. In these contexts, Measuring Judicial Activism considers the extent to which these actions are consistent with the justices' ideological predilections.

This volume in ABC-CLIO's About Federal Government set looks at the history and daily operations of the federal judiciary, from district courts, to courts of appeal, to the Supreme Court. The Judicial Branch of Federal Government: People, Process, and Politics shows how the federal courts act as interpreters of the law, definers of rules, and shapers of policy, covering the judiciary throughout U.S. history and as it functions today. In one concise yet comprehensive resource, The Judicial Branch of Federal Government describes the constitutionally ascribed roles and structures of the courts. It looks at the men and women who serve on the federal bench (who they are and how they are appointed), as well as the fascinating relationship of the federal courts with the legislative and executive branches and with the 50 state court systems. Provides a detailed timeline of the legislative history of the federal courts, from the Supreme Court to the district courts by state Primary sources include Article III of the U.S. Constitution, the Judiciary Acts of 1789 and 1801, the Evarts Act of 1891 (creation of Circuit Courts of Appeals), the Judiciary Act of 1911 (disbanding the old Circuit Courts), landmark cases such as Marbury v. Madison (judicial review) and a complete listing of all who served as federal judges by name and by the court they served in

This volume considers the application of dispute resolution theory and practice to international conflicts and explores the uses of formal processes such as diplomacy or treaty formation, as well as more informal processes such as multiple-track private negotiations or peace workshops. The volume also presents materials on more innovative forms of complex transnational or sub-national conflict resolution, such as transitional and restorative justice institutions and processes, both formal (truth and reconciliation commissions) and indigenous and informal (Rwandan gacaca). The articles are selected from both public and private international law settings and query whether universal principles of multi-national dispute resolution are possible or whether each conflict is likely to be sui generis or requiring deep contextual analysis and integrity. They also explore the dialogic, as well as dialectical, relationships in the development of conflict resolution theory and practice in multi-cultural and multi-disciplinary settings and show that the application of dispute resolution theories from multiple sources and cultures (both Western and Eastern, as well as Northern and Southern) to multiple sites of conflicts (including courts, tribunals and other forms of dispute resolution at different levels and from multiple jurisdictions) raises important dilemmas of universalism and particularism in international conflict resolution.