The European Court of Justice and the U.S. Supreme Court: Parallels in Fundamental Rights Jurisprudence

The European Court of Justice has taken an activist approach to protecting human rights. Most scholars approve of this. However, one scholar, Hjalte Rasmussen, has been sharply critical of the ECJ\u27s activism. This Comment addresses Rasmussen\u27s criticisms and rebuts them. Because Rasmussen compares the ECI and the U.S. Supreme Court, the author discusses the similarities between the two courts and addresses the criticism of U.S. Supreme Court activism by Robert Bork in his book The Tempting of.America. The author ends with an argument in support of a purposive theory of constitutional interpretation

Engaging Capital Emotions

The Supreme Court, in Kennedy v. Louisiana, is about to decide whether the Eighth Amendment forbids capital punishment for child rape. Commentators are aghast, viewing this as a vengeful recrudescence of emotion clouding sober, rational criminal justice policy. To their minds, emotion is distracting. To ours, however, emotion is central to understand the death penalty. Descriptively, emotions help to explain many features of our death-penalty jurisprudence. Normatively, emotions are central to why we punish, and denying or squelching them risks prompting vigilantism and other unhealthy outlets for this normal human reaction. The emotional case for the death penalty for child rape may be even stronger than for adult murders, contrary to what newspaper editorials are suggesting. Finally, we suggest ways in which death-penalty abolitionists can stop pooh-poohing emotions\u27 role and instead fight the death penalty on emotional terrain, particularly by harnessing the language of mercy and human fallibility

Constitutionally Tailoring Punishment

Since the turn of the century, the Supreme Court has begun to regulate non-capital sentencing under the Sixth Amendment in the Apprendi line of cases (requiring jury findings of fact to justify sentence enhancements) as well as under the Eighth Amendment in the Miller and Graham line of cases (forbidding mandatory life imprisonment for juvenile defendants). Though both lines of authority sound in individual rights, in fact they are fundamentally about the structures of criminal justice. These two seemingly disparate lines of doctrine respond to structural imbalances in non-capital sentencing by promoting morally appropriate punishment judgments that are based on retail, individualized input and reflect the views and perspectives of multiple institutional actors. This new understanding illuminates how both doctrines relate to the Court’s earlier regulation of capital sentencing and how checks and balances can promote just punishment in a pluralistic system. It also underscores the need for other actors to complete the Court’s work outside the confines of rights-based judicial doctrines, by experimenting with a broader range of reforms that are not constitutionally required but rather are constitutionally inspired

Constitutionally Tailoring Punishment

Since the turn of the century, the Supreme Court has begun to regulate non-capital sentencing under the Sixth Amendment in the Apprendi line of cases (requiring jury findings of fact to justify sentence enhancements) as well as under the Eighth Amendment in the Miller and Graham line of cases (forbidding mandatory life imprisonment for juvenile defendants). Though both lines of authority sound in individual rights, in fact they are fundamentally about the structures of criminal justice. These two seemingly disparate lines of doctrine respond to structural imbalances in non-capital sentencing by promoting morally appropriate punishment judgments that are based on retail, individualized input and reflect the views and perspectives of multiple institutional actors. This new understanding illuminates how both doctrines relate to the Court’s earlier regulation of capital sentencing and how checks and balances can promote just punishment in a pluralistic system. It also underscores the need for other actors to complete the Court’s work outside the confines of rights-based judicial doctrines, by experimenting with a broader range of reforms that are not constitutionally required but rather are constitutionally inspired

What\u27s Wrong With Sentencing Equality?

Equality in criminal sentencing often translates into equalizing outcomes and stamping out variations, whether race-based, geographic, or random. This approach conflates the concept of equality with one contestable conception focused on outputs and numbers, not inputs and processes. Racial equality is crucial, but a concern with eliminating racism has hypertrophied well beyond race. Equalizing outcomes seems appealing as a neutral way to dodge contentious substantive policy debates about the purposes of punishment. But it actually privileges deterrence and incapacitation over rehabilitation, subjective elements of retribution, and procedural justice, and it provides little normative guidance for punishment. It also has unintended consequences for the structure of sentencing. Focusing on outcomes centralizes power and draws it up to higher levels of government, sacrificing the checks and balances, disaggregation, experimentation, and localism that are practically baked into sentencing’s constitutional framework. More flexible, process-oriented notions of equality might better give effect to a range of competing punishment considerations while still policing punishments for bias or arbitrariness. They also could bring useful nuance to equality debates that swirl around restorative justice, California’s Realignment experiment, federal use of fast-track plea agreements, and other contemporary sentencing practices