The Sociological Impact of U.S. Constitutional Rights on the Drug War
This legal position paper discusses relevant Supreme Court case law to the Drug War, such as 4th Amend. Search & Seizure and conflict with State law allowing medicinal marijuana. A change in current policy and law is strongly advocated.
Young Black Americans and the Criminal Justice System: Five Years Later
In 1990 The Sentencing Project released a report that documented that almost one in four (23 percent) African American males in the age group twenty to twenty-nine years old was under some form of criminal justice supervision—in prison or jail, on probation or parole. That report received extensive national attention and helped to generate much dialogue and activity on the part of policymakers, community organizations, and criminal justice professionals.
Law as Palimpsest: Conceptualizing Contingency in Judicial Opinions (forthcoming 2009)
Metaphors create conceptualizations, and for decades legal academics have employed metaphors to shape understandings of legal problems. But no metaphor in current use successfully conceptualizes the contingency of judicial opinions and the complexity of the relationship between opinions and precedent. This Article seeks to fill this void by introducing a new metaphor, the palimpsest, into the realm of legal analysis. A palimpsest is a writing surface that can be cleared away for reuse, like a personal blackboard. What distinguishes a palimpsest from other writing surfaces is that its removed contents do not disappear, but remain, obscured yet recoverable: A writing on a palimpsest never goes away. This Article argues that thinking of judicial opinions as being part of a shared, ever-evolving palimpsest underscores the fact that they are ultimately contingent and serves as a reminder of the multiple levels of interconnectedness between them and the cases they cite. Precedents—like the underlayers of a palimpsest—never go away, and they inform and shape the application of opinions in ways far more significant than simply serving as points of reference. A palimpsestic approach to understanding judicial decisionmaking also helps to explain why even the oldest, most reviled cases remain part of our national psyche—like underlayers of a palimpsest, they can never truly disappear, and their continued presence forces us to grapple with their existence. Finally, considering judicial opinions as part of a shared palimpsest reminds us that even the most troubling opinion is ultimately contingent, its application subject to reexamination and revision by future courts and future generations. Just as such an opinion replaces its precedents, it too will one day be replaced, like each of a palimpsest’s layers. 2 Law as Palimpsest [Vol. __:__ Law as Palimpsest: Conceptualizing Contingency in Judicial Opinions