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Stacey-Rae Simcox et al., Traumatic Brain Injury and Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, in Servicemember and Veterans Rights (Matthew Bender Elite Products, 2017)Clicking on the button will copy the full recommended citation.
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Ellen S. Podgor, “What Kind of a Mad Prosecutor” Brought Us This White Collar Case, 41 Vt. L. Rev. 523 (2017)Clicking on the button will copy the full recommended citation.
Prosecutors have enormous charging and plea discretion, although this discretion is not “unfettered.” This Essay examines this discretionary function when prosecutors in white collar cases stretch statutes beyond the statutory language, congressional intent, or policy. This Essay looks at three areas of white collar crime that have seen prosecutorial statute stretching: fraud, obstruction-of-justice, and bribery. Within each of these areas, there are examples of cases requiring judicial oversight to halt these prosecutorial practices. This Essay concludes by noting that prosecutors who stretch statutes do a disservice to our criminal justice process, as it is important to strictly construe white collar statutes to assure that criminal conduct is recognized and conformity with the law is promoted.
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Stacey-Rae Simcox and John Paul Cimino, Veterans Benefits, in Servicemember and Veterans Rights (Matthew Bender Elite Products, 2017)Clicking on the button will copy the full recommended citation.
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Ellen S. Podgor, Salman: The Court Takes a Left-Hand Turn, 49 Conn. L. Rev. 1 (2017)Clicking on the button will copy the full recommended citation.
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Jason Bent, Searching for Common Law Amid the Statutes: A Report on the Restatement of Employment Law, Chapter 4, 21 Em. Rts. & Emp. Pol'y J. 459 (2017)Clicking on the button will copy the full recommended citation.
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Lance Long and Ted Hamilton, Washington v. Brockway: One Small Step Closer to Climate Necessity, 13 McGill Journal of Sustainable Development Law & Pol'y 151 (2017)Clicking on the button will copy the full recommended citation.
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Stephanie Vaughan, Experiential Learning: Moving Forward in Teaching Oral Advocacy Skills by Looking Back at the Origins of Rhetoric, 59 S. Tex. L. Rev. 121 (2017)Clicking on the button will copy the full recommended citation.
What could make all the difference in a law student’s employment potential in today’s legal market? The answer is skills training. The American Bar Association (ABA) has required that law students be better prepared for practice by implementing experiential learning requirements for law students, which they must complete before graduation. One way to fulfill this experiential requirement is through oral advocacy.
This Article exemplifies how giving law students opportunities to orally advocate will help fulfill the experiential learning requirement and produce practice-ready graduates. It will explain the reasons that oral communication is so important and will give directives on how law schools, in compliance with the ABA standards, can help achieve the goals of graduating students who are ready to begin a legal practice from the minute they receive their bar results. This Article is among the first to explore the boundaries of experiential learning under the new ABA standards. It employs an historical analysis of the classical foundations of oral advocacy in order to develop best practices for law schools in “shifting the curriculum” to both comply with the ABA standards and to help students become successful practitioners in today’s global society.
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Elizabeth Berenguer, The Color of Fear: A Cognitive-Rhetorical Analysis of How Florida’s Subjective Fear Standard in Stand Your Ground Cases Ratifies Racism, 76 Md. L. Rev. 726 (2017)Clicking on the button will copy the full recommended citation.
Law often functions as a mirror of societal values at a given point in time, but it is also a tool of social construction operating to either reinforce generally acceptable norms or to redefine norms that are no longer generally accepted. Through its use of the subjective fear standard, Florida’s Stand Your Ground functions as a tool of social construction in that it reinforces deeply entrenched racial bias and perpetuates racism by condoning and ratifying behavior consistent with the suspicion heuristic. In this way, it not only declares as acceptable those behaviors that are influenced by racial bias, but it also perpetuates racial bias by further burying individual awareness that the bias even exists.
Study after study confirm that Black men, by virtue of their race, are the most feared individuals in society. The theory of embodied rationality confirms that Americans experience a fear response based on race, a germane, innate biological characteristic that cannot possibly accurately communicate whether the other person is a threat. The suspicion heuristic explains the negative decisions and behaviors that result from the irrational fear created by deep-seated, largely invisible, racial bias.
Viewed through the lens of embodied rationality and particularly the suspicion heuristic, Florida’s Stand Your Ground statutory scheme condones, ratifies, reinforces, and perpetuates both overt and implicit racial bias. American culture is long overdue for major shifts in how it views and perceives race. Until law forces individuals to face the realities of racial bias, however, deep-seated beliefs about the value of Black lives, and the lives of other minorities, will continue to breed in the dark recesses of our minds.
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Ann Piccard, US Legal Writing for International Lawyers and Law Students (West Academic Publishing, 2017)Clicking on the button will copy the full recommended citation.
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Sebastian Braun et al., American Indians: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives (Kendall/Hunt Publishing Company, 2017)Clicking on the button will copy the full recommended citation.