“The Lord Speaks Through Me”: Moving Beyond Conventional Law School Pedagogy and the Reasons for Doing So

Maintenance of status quo law school curricular design and delivery, along with the continued marginalization of live client clinic programs, and the discordant objectives of law schools as compared to the expectations of Bar passage, serve to stifle the role of juridic practitioners in the service of justice. Decades of careful scholarship regarding the problems associated with the quality of legal education have repeatedly called for curricular revisions that should enhance the knowledge and skill base of graduates, develop their level of preparedness to actually serve in the profession, and demonstrate care for students. And while there has been a commitment on behalf of law schools to establish experiential educational opportunities through participation in live client clinics, far too often these clinics appear as appendages to the core curriculum and are marginalized as a result. This essay has two objectives – to address the serious and well-known shortcomings associated with law school pedagogy, and to stimulate consideration of alternate pedagogical methods that draw upon student development theory to enhance what education scholars know about cognition

Contemporary Perspectives on Wrongful Conviction: An Introduction to the 2015 Innocence Network Conference, Orlando, Florida

The Innocence Network is “an affiliation of organizations from all over the world dedicated to providing pro bono legal and investigative services to individuals seeking to prove innocence of crimes for which they have been convicted, and working to redress the causes of wrongful convictions.” Beginning in 1999 and 2000 in Chicago, Illinois, a small group of interested legal and social science scholars and clinic directors met at the Northwestern University School of Law to discuss ways to investigate and litigate claims of actual innocence. The first recognized National Innocence Conference took place at the California Western School of Law in 2002, and included 130 registered attendees. The Innocence Network, building upon the successful 2002 conference, formally established an advisory Board of Directors in 2005. An annual Innocence Network conference has been held each year since 2002, with the May 2015 conference in Orlando, Florida, generating more than 500 attendees, including 150 exonerees

Contemporary Perspectives on Wrongful Conviction: An Introduction to the 2015 Innocence Network Conference, Orlando, Florida

The Innocence Network is “an affiliation of organizations from all over the world dedicated to providing pro bono legal and investigative services to individuals seeking to prove innocence of crimes for which they have been convicted, and working to redress the causes of wrongful convictions.” Beginning in 1999 and 2000 in Chicago, Illinois, a small group of interested legal and social science scholars and clinic directors met at the Northwestern University School of Law to discuss ways to investigate and litigate claims of actual innocence. The first recognized National Innocence Conference took place at the California Western School of Law in 2002, and included 130 registered attendees. The Innocence Network, building upon the successful 2002 conference, formally established an advisory Board of Directors in 2005. An annual Innocence Network conference has been held each year since 2002, with the May 2015 conference in Orlando, Florida, generating more than 500 attendees, including 150 exonerees

The Emperor’s New Clothes: Intellectual Dishonesty and the Unconstitutionality of Plea Bargaining

United States Supreme Court and jurisprudential rationalizations for the constitutionality, centrality, and finality of plea-bargaining signify intellectual dishonesty, ignorance of human behavior and decision-making, and a statesanctioned threat to personhood and liberty in the United States of America. It is the Author’s purpose to expose the imperious practice of plea-bargaining for what it is—a cynical and intellectually dishonest institutional remedy for an unwieldy judicial system that has knowingly rationalized the practice to facilitate expedient resolution of ever-increasing caseloads. In order to establish plea practice as constitutional, the Supreme Court was forced to employ a jurisprudential discourse that shifted from the due-process language found in criminal law, especially the protections afforded by the Fifth and Sixth Amendments, towards contract law where defendants personifying homo economicus are “free” to negotiate away their rights. Beginning in 1930, and again in 1970, the Supreme Court applied an entirely novel standard to the adjudication of criminal cases, and it rationalized its decision on the need for efficiency. What is at stake is nothing less than the integrity of the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and whatever still remains of an American sense of personhood under the law. The erosion of our rights that are so intimately associated with freedom due to plea-bargaining is an unprecedented injustice that cannot continue

Shedding the Burden of Sisyphus: International Law and Wrongful Conviction in the United States

Efforts to address the scourge of wrongful conviction in the United States would benefit from a theoretical framework for applying international law. Mythology has long been acknowledged as perhaps the most effective way to propagate values within a culture and to the external world. A new sort of mythology—one that can seamlessly accommodate local cultural variations—should be mobilized to enforce transcultural values and norms. This conception of mythology calls for the primacy of justice, the abrogation of sovereignty to the extent it precludes justice, and cultural variation within the parameters of human rights. Although the United States was founded on the law of nations and the U.S. Supreme Court has long extended comity to international law, in recent years American jurisprudence—particularly in the Supreme Court—has assumed an isolationist approach. This regrettable development is largely responsible for the systemic failures in the criminal justice system that have allowed wrongful conviction to become the pervasive problem that it is today

Employee drug testing: An economic segmentation and worker power analysis

This analysis of employee drug testing examines both the decision to implement, and the form of drug testing programs dependent upon the location of firms within the dual economy. A review of the economic segmentation literature is followed by some discussion of internal labor markets and the relation between the two. The contemporary segmentation literature stressing the significance of industry location, worker power, and the state has been employed to discern the potential impact of employee drug testing on the social relations of production within industries by economic sector. A number of bivariate relationships were identified to contextualize the implementation of drug testing programs by sector. In addition, logistic regression was used to identify the impact of worker power, which in almost all cases proved to be consistently opposed to drug testing, and in some instances impacted the form of the testing program. Finally, theoretically consistent results appeared in the likelihood of adopting drug testing programs, firms willing to hire applicants who test positive, and in predicting exactly who would be tested. Data gathered on the role of the state suggests that where state purchases of goods within an industry is substantial, drug testing will be the rule