Addressing the Tension Between the Clergy-Communicant Privilege and the Duty to Report Child Abuse in State Statutes

Every state provides some statutory form of an evidentiary clergy-communicant privilege to protect certain types of conversations between clergy members and individuals. Likewise, every state imposes a statutory obligation on certain individuals to report suspected child abuse. The relationship between clergy privilege statutes and child abuse reporting requirements has received much attention recently due to the numerous allegations of child sexual misconduct by clergy members. This Article surveys the variations on clergy privileges and child abuse reporting statutes in the fifty states. The Article then discusses the varying approaches the states take in addressing the relationship between the obligation to report and the clergy privilege. A majority of states expressly exempt clergy-privileged information from reporting requirements; some states expressly abrogate the clergy privilege in the child abuse reporting context; and a third group of states do not confront the issue at all. This Article argues that there is a need for uniformity and proposes a partial-abrogation solution that will help alleviate the tension between the clergy privilege and mandatory reporting requirements

Uncovering the Legislative Histories of the Early Mail Fraud Statutes: The Origin of Federal Auxiliary Crimes Jurisdiction

The federal crime of mail fraud is generally viewed as the original federal auxiliary jurisdiction crime, that is, a crime that does not protect direct federal interests against harm. Rather, it functions as an auxiliary to state crime enforcement. In the almost 150 years since Congress enacted the mail fraud statute, federal auxiliary crimes have proliferated and have become the most important part of federal criminal jurisdiction—so that, today, they largely duplicate state crimes. It is important to know how this form of federal criminal jurisdiction originated. Mail fraud is a crime that scholars, judges, and lawyers have viewed as having almost no legislative histories linked to its original enactment in 1872 and its two revisions in 1889 and 1909. The details of its origins have remained generally unknown. This paper breaks new ground by uncovering a rich set of legislative history details related to each of those three early statutes. Inter alia, these legislative history materials reveal that the original mail fraud provision might not have been drafted and enacted except for the fortuitous timing of the addition of a criminal penalty to a closely related statute. It also explains how mail fraud came to be the original federal auxiliary jurisdiction crime; that was not the original intention

Using process algebra to develop predator-prey models of within-host parasite dynamics

As a first approximation of immune-mediated within-host parasite dynamics we can consider the immune response as a predator, with the parasite as its prey. In the ecological literature of predator-prey interactions there are a number of different functional responses used to describe how a predator reproduces in response to consuming prey. Until recently most of the models of the immune system that have taken a predator-prey approach have used simple mass action dynamics to capture the interaction between the immune response and the parasite. More recently Fenton and Perkins (2010) employed three of the most commonly used functional response terms from the ecological literature. In this paper we make use of a technique from computing science, process algebra, to develop mathematical models. The novelty of the process algebra approach is to allow stochastic models of the population (parasite and immune cells) to be developed from rules of individual cell behaviour. By using this approach in which individual cellular behaviour is captured we have derived a ratio-dependent response similar to that seen in previous models of immune-mediated parasite dynamics, confirming that, whilst this type of term is controversial in ecological predator-prey models, it is appropriate for models of the immune system