Criminal Justice, Local Democracy, and Constitutional Rights

Universally admired, and viewed with great affection, even love, by all who knew him, Harvard law professor Bill Stuntz died in March 2011 at the age of fifty-two, after a long, courageous battle with debilitating back pain and then insurmountable cancer. In a career that deserved to be much longer, Stuntz produced dozens of major articles on criminal law and procedure. He was a leader in carrying forward the work of scholars who had analyzed criminal justice through the lens of economic analysis, and he added his own distinctive dimension by insisting on the importance of political incentives, with their often-perverse effects. Ever the contrarian, Stuntz excelled at challenging conventional wisdom, usually from a counterintuitive direction. He often succeeded in shaking an accepted consensus; even readers who remained skeptical were forced to reexamine their fundamental assumptions about how the criminal justice system works. The Collapse of American Criminal Justice ( The Collapse ) sums up much of Stuntz\u27s most important work. It brilliantly describes the deplorable injustices of contemporary criminal justice - most notably our massive levels of incarceration and shockingly disproportionate rates of imprisonment for minorities. And, in keeping with the style for which Stuntz became famous, it proposes startlingly original solutions

Confessions and the Court

A Review of Police Interrogation and Confessions: Essays in Law and Policy by Yale Kamisa

Access to National Security Information under the US Freedom of Information Act

[extract] A genuine democracy is incompatible with secrecy. Meaningful citizen participation in policy formation and oversight presupposes access to relevant information. Information is the fulcrum on which every form of accountability turns.In no domain is such access more important than in matters involving “national security” - the government’s responses to perceive external and internal threats to public safety and the territorial integrity of the State. Yet democratic societies typically give executive officials (who have multiple motives to opt for unjustified secrecy) the unilateral power to conceal any information to which they choose to attach the “national security” label. This common practice thus disconnects part of the essential machinery of democracy. In an era of transnational terrorism and ever expanding conceptions of what “national security” means, secrecy’s potential for eroding democratic values is growing, even at a time when societies seek more than ever to promote openness in government