One Rule of Law Project in Post-Soviet Russia

One Rule of Law Project in Post-Soviet Russia is published as Chapter 9 of the book At Home Abroad: Friendship First - A Look at Rule of Law Projects and Other International Insights, (ed. Joseph Nadeau, New York: Austin Macauley Publishers LLC, 2019). This book provides personal insights into an international cooperative effort to promote the rule of law in emerging democracies around the world. Professor Scherr\u27s chapter examines the cultural context within a study of the rule-of-law project that was conducted between 1999 and 2004 in Vologda, Russia

Brief for Professor Albert E. Scherr as Amicus Curiae in Support of Petitioner

INTRODUCTION AND SUMMARY OF ARGUMENT Professor Scherr agrees with petitioner that review is warranted because the Maryland Court of Appeals decision is erroneous. The Fourth Amendment does not sanction police harvesting of DNA without probable cause and a warrant and without the subject’s knowledge or consent, to be used however the authorities deem appropriate and without restriction. The Maryland Court of Appeals’ decision is contrary to the Supreme Court’s jurisprudence as articulated in the Riley v. California – Maryland v. King – United States v. Jones trilogy. This case fits squarely in the center of the triangle formed by that trilogy. The petition should be accepted to remedy this conflict at the intersection of this Court’s jurisprudence on the newest forensic technology and the Fourth Amendment. Professor Scherr also agrees with the petitioner that this Court should accept this petition to resolve a conflict between a Federal Court of Appeals and a state court of appeals. In United States v. Davis, 690 F.3d 226 (4th Cir. 2012), the Fourth Circuit found that the police implicated the suspect’s Fourth Amendment privacy interest when it sought to obtain a DNA profile from his blood found on clothing it held legally. In this case the Maryland Court of Appeals found the opposite. As surreptitious harvesting cases continue to enter the criminal justice system, it is an opportune time for this Court to resolve this conflict and offer guidance to state and federal courts

Criminal Legal Reform in New Hampshire: One Law Professor\u27s Activism

Criminal legal reform is a perpetual work in progress. The system itself is, at best, maddeningly imperfect. It too often fails to produce anything close to justice. Structural problems afflict the system in a way that incarcerates too many people, particularly people of color. For example, over the last thirty years, the Innocence Project has demonstrated imperfections in the system caused by faulty eyewitness identification procedures by ineffective assistance of counsel, by prosecutorial misconduct, by shoddy forensic practices and by police behavior that produced false confessions. That the United States has well over fifty-one independent criminal legal systems frustrates efforts at reform. Though the federal system covers the entire country other than tribal jurisdictions, it handles less than ten percent of all the criminal cases. The highly touted 2018 Second Chance Act (SCA) reauthorization primarily addressed federal criminal legal reform. Congress could only address state criminal legal reform in the SCA through grants to state, local and tribal government agencies as well as non-profits. Momentum for criminal legal reform has increased due to such events as the shooting of Michael Brown on Ferguson, Missouri and the murders of George Floyd in Minneapolis, Minnesota and Breonna Taylor in Louisville, Kentucky. Those and other events particularly highlighted the need for police reform but also created momentum for other criminal legal reforms. But the question quickly became whether that momentum would reach the epicenter of criminal legal systems–the states–or whether it was too diffuse to have a local effect in jurisdictions untouched by Ferguson-, Floyd- or Taylor-type events. This article addresses the progress of criminal legal reform in one state–New Hampshire–over the last seven years of which University of New Hampshire faculty and students were a significant part. It looks closely at the anatomy of such reform: its sources, its nature of its sponsors, the whys of its successes and its failures. It includes an analysis of economic justice issues like debtors’ prisons, right to counsel for indigents, recoupment of cost of appointed counsel and bail reform. It analyzes post-conviction reforms in DNA testing, drug sentencing reform and fair chance hiring for the formerly incarcerated. It also analyzes systemic reforms in eyewitness identification procedures, the right to refuse to consent to a search and the recording of custodial interviews. Finally, it explains a new constitutional amendment on information privacy. This broad spectrum of criminal legal reform efforts in the last eight years presents a set of common themes. Municipalities very often misuse the criminal legal system to address the complex challenge of homelessness. Many in the system directly or indirectly resist efforts to gather enough data to understand the presence of racism in the criminal legal system. The criminal legal system over-punishes the economically disadvantaged simply because they are economically disadvantaged

Genetic Privacy & the Fourth Amendment: Unregulated Surreptitious DNA Harvesting

Genetic privacy and police practices have come to thefore in the criminal justice system. Case law and storiesin the media document that police are surreptitiouslyharvesting the out-of-body DNA of putative suspects.Some sources even indicate that surreptitious databanking may also be in its infancy. Surreptitiousharvesting of out-of-body DNA by the police is currentlyunregulated by the Fourth Amendment. The few courtsthat have addressed the issue find that the police are freeto harvest DNA abandoned by a putative suspect in apublic place. Little in the nascent surreptitious harvestingcase law suggests that surreptitious data banking wouldbe regulated either under current judicial conceptions ofthe Fourth Amendment.The surreptitious harvesting courts have misapplied theKatz reasonable-expectation-of-privacy test recentlyreaffirmed in United States v. Jones by the SupremeCourt. They have taken a mistakenly narrow property-based approach to their analyses. Given the potential forfuture abuse of the freedom to collect anyone\u27s out-of-bodyDNA without even a hunch, this Article proposes that the police do not need a search warrant or probable cause toseize an abandoned item in or on which cells and DNAexist. But they do need a search warrant supported byprobable cause to enter the cell and harvest the DNA.An interdisciplinary perspective on the physical,informational, and dignitary dimensions of geneticprivacy suggests that an expectation of privacy in thekaleidoscope of identity that is in out-of-body DNA. Usinglinguistic theory on the use of metaphors, the Article alsoexamines the use of DNA metaphors in popular culture asa reference point to explain a number of features of coreidentity in contrast to the superficiality of fingerprintmetaphors. Popular culture\u27s frequent uses of DNA as areference point reverberate in a way that suggests thatsociety does recognize as reasonable an expectation ofprivacy in DNA

Genetic Privacy and the Fourth Amendment: Unregulated Surreptitious DNA Harvesting

Genetic privacy and police practices have come to the fore in the criminal justice system. Case law and stories in the media document that police are surreptitiously harvesting the DNA of putative suspects. Some sources even indicate that surreptitious data banking may also be in its infancy. Surreptitious harvesting of out-of-body DNA by the police is currently unregulated by the Fourth Amendment. The few courts that have addressed the issue find that the police are free to harvest DNA abandoned by a putative suspect in a public place. Little in the nascent surreptitious harvesting case law suggests that surreptitious data banking would be regulated either under current judicial conceptions of the Fourth Amendment. The surreptitious harvesting courts have misapplied the Katz reasonable-expectation-of-privacy test recently reaffirmed in U.S. v. Jones by the Supreme Court. They have taken a mistakenly narrow property-based approach to their analyses. Given the potential for future abuse of the freedom to collect anyone’s out-of-body DNA without even a hunch, this article proposes that the police do not need a search warrant or probable cause to seize an abandoned item in or on which cells and DNA exist. But, they do need a search warrant supported by probable cause to enter the cell and harvest the DNA. An interdisciplinary perspective on the physical, informational and dignitary dimensions of genetic privacy suggests that an expectation of privacy expectation in the kaleidoscope of identity that is in out-of-body DNA. Using linguistic theory on the use of metaphors, the article also examines the use of DNA metaphors in popular culture as a reference point to explain a number of features of core identity in contrast to the superficiality of fingerprint metaphors. Popular culture’s frequent uses of DNA as a reference point reverberate in a way that suggests that society does recognize as reasonable an expectation of privacy in DNA

Chancengerechtigkeit und Diskriminierung beim Übertritt in die Berufsausbildung

Nicht zuletzt aufgrund der relativ spät einsetzenden Forschung zu Fragen sozialer Benachteiligungen in der beruflichen Bildung hat sich bisher keine intensive öffentliche Diskussion über die Benachteiligung und Diskriminierung von Jugendlichen mit Migrationshintergrund entwickelt, dies im Unterschied zum schulischen Bereich. Während an die öffentliche Schule seit den 1960er-Jahren wiederkehrend Forderungen nach Gewährleistung von Chancengleichheit und Bildungsgerechtigkeit adressiert wurden, wurde privatwirtschaftlichen Betrieben bisher zugestanden, dass sie bei der Einstellung und Förderung von Lernenden der Logik der betriebswirtschaftlichen Nutzenmaximierung folgten und nicht primär gesellschaftlichen Gerechtigkeitsnormen (Scherr, Janz & Müller, 2015a). Mit der nachfolgend zusammengefassten neueren Forschung ist die öffentliche und politische Aufmerksamkeit in jüngster Zeit gestiegen. So hat die Deutschschweizer Konsumentenzeitschrift «Der Beobachter» kürzlich in einem Beitrag zum Thema «Berufsbildung: Was taugt die Lehre?» neben dem wirtschaftlichen Strukturwandel, der Akademisierung und der Globalisierung die Diskriminierung als eines von vier aktuellen Problemen des Schweizer Ausbildungssystems hervorgehoben. Die Diskriminierung von ausländischen Jugendlichen wird dabei nicht nur als leidvoll für die Betroffenen problematisiert, sondern – im Kontext eines sich abzeichnenden Fachkräftemangels – als zunehmend schädlich für die Volkswirtschaft und den Schweizer Arbeitsmarkt, dem damit künftig dringend gesuchte, qualifizierte Arbeitskräfte verlorengehen

Soziale Arbeit und die nicht beliebige Konstruktion sozialer Probleme in der funktional differenzierten Gesellschaft

'Grundlage des Beitrags ist die Systemtheorie Luhmannscher Prägung, insbesondere die dort prominente Unterscheidung Inklusion/ Exklusion. Aufgezeigt wird, dass Exklusionen nicht geradlinig als soziale Probleme bzw. als Ursache sozialer Probleme verstanden werden können. Vor diesem Hintergrund werden solche Positionen innerhalb der Problemsoziologie kritisiert, die sich von objektivistisch gefassten Problembegriffen distanzieren und sich darauf beschränken, die kommunikative (mediale und politische) Konstruktion von Problemdefinitionen zu analysieren. Ausgehend von der Annahme, dass soziale Problemkonstruktion keine freischwebenden und beliebigen Setzungen, sondern Konstruktionen von etwas sind, zeigt der Beitrag weiter auf, dass der Möglichkeitsraum von Problemkonstruktionen gesellschaftsstrukturell begrenzt ist. Daran anschließend plädiert der Autor für eine Fundierung der Soziologie sozialer Probleme in einer 'Theorie der Lebensführung in der modernen Gesellschaft', die bestimmen kann, wie Gesellschaftsstrukturen auf Probleme der Lebensführung von Individuen, Familien und soziale Gruppen bezogen sind.' (Autorenreferat)'The article is based on the theory of social systems as developed by Niklas Luhmann. In particular it relates to his decisive distinction inclusion/ exclusion. It is shown, that exclusions cannot be understood in a straightforward manner as social problems or as the cause of social problems. Before this background it now comes to a criticism of those positions within the sociology of social problems, which distance themselves from the objectivistic understanding of problems and therefore limit themselves to analyse merely the communicative (media and political) construction of problems. The text assumes, that the constructions of social problems are not indifferent, variable settings in open space, but the construction of a concrete something. Based hereon the article further shows, that the space of opportunities for the construction of social problems is limited by the structure of society. As a consequence of this the author pledges for a foundation of the sociology of social problems in a 'theory of the way of living in modern society'. Such a theory has to analyse how structures of society are related to the problems of everyday live, and how these problems a communicated as social problems.' (author's abstract)

Bildungsprozesse von Flüchtlingen im Kontext struktureller, institutioneller und alltäglicher Diskriminierung

Im vorliegenden Beitrag werden Bildungsbiografien von Flüchtlingen betrachtet, die als unbegleitete Minderjährige nach Deutschland eingereist sind. Es wird aufgezeigt, dass es sich dabei um unwahrscheinliche Bildungsprozesse handelt, die unter prekären Voraussetzungen zustande kommen. Diesbezüglich wird akzentuiert, dass der Erwerb von Sprachkenntnissen und schulischen Abschlüssen sowie erfolgreiche Übergänge in die berufliche Bildung von einem eher zufälligen als institutionell abgesicherten Zusammenwirken von Unterstützungsleistungen sowie von den Anstrengungen Geflüchteter abhängig sind, durch die sie selbst zur Ermöglichung ihrer Bildungs- und Ausbildungsprozesse beitragen.&nbsp