March 2, 2020
In 2018, Florida voters ratified Amendment 4, a state ballot initiative granting the right to vote to most formerly incarcerated people in the state “upon completion of all terms of sentence.” Initially, many thought the amendment would re-enfranchise more citizens than any law passed in at least the last 50 — and possibly the last…
April 23, 2019
The incident that gave rise to Mitchell v. City of Cedar Rapids, recently decided by the Iowa Supreme Court, should sound familiar by now. In November 2016, a Cedar Rapids white police officer, Lucas Jones, stopped a black motorist, Jerime Mitchell, for a minor traffic violation. When Mitchell attempted to drive away, Jones shot him,…
March 19, 2019
Six years after lawmakers first considered the issue of nonconsensual pornography, New York has criminalized the practice. We wholeheartedly support the effort in our role as legal scholars and as advocates for the Cyber Civil Rights Initiative (CCRI). One of us (Franks) drafted the first model statute criminalizing “revenge porn” and worked on New York’s…
October 26, 2018
This November, voters in four states – Michigan, Missouri, Colorado, and Utah – will vote on ballot measures that would create independent commissions or other non-partisan processes to draw congressional or state legislative districts, as Josh Douglas and Rick Hasen have noted in previous posts in this series. At the same time, litigation challenging partisan…
October 22, 2018
These are perilous times even for those who think that federal courts have no business messing with how state legislatures draw lines for legislative and congressional districts and that the issue is best left up to each state’s political system. Now that Justice Anthony Kennedy has left the stage, it is unlikely that the Court…
October 17, 2018
“After the 2016 election,” a recent video about the New York Senate primary begins, “New York State acted fast to pass these measures to resist Trump’s agenda: universal, single-payer healthcare; fully funded public schools; strong environmental safeguards; and sanctuary state legislation to protect all immigrants. Just kidding! That didn’t happen.” But, narrator Edie Falco continues,…
October 15, 2018
The way our democracy operates is on the ballot this November. Voters do not just elect people to public office; they can also dictate the rules for elections through ballot initiatives in many states. From creating independent redistricting commissions to adopting campaign finance measures to expanding voter eligibility and changing the way we vote, voters…
October 12, 2018
In November, voters will be asked to decide 6000 state legislative elections, with 87 of the nation’s 99 state legislative houses holding their regularly scheduled elections. But, on the day after Election Day, all of these elections will be understood by the mass media as having asked essentially only one question: Did voters support Donald…
October 11, 2018
In November 2018, Florida’s Amendment 4 could restore the right to vote to people who faced disenfranchisement for the rest of their lives because of a felony criminal conviction. Controlling and limiting who can vote has a long American tradition. But the tradition of slowly but surely expanding the universe of who is eligible to…
February 20, 2018
Adopting technology for the sake of having it is an unwise move. Last year, the California Judicial Council proposed that California’s criminal courts jump on a failing bandwagon to inhibit and effectively replace judicial discretion with computer-based algorithms. The present judicial system already assesses each defendant, their previous criminal history, and ties to the community….
January 19, 2018
In November 2016, the city of San Francisco enacted a ballot initiative that was somewhat overshadowed by other election results. It permitted noncitizens with children in the public school system to vote in school board elections. Though it is unclear whether the measure will have much practical impact on the city schools, the measure has…
January 11, 2018
Criminal justice reform has the attention of the country, but it is at the state and local level where reform will be implemented. Much of the conversation about criminal justice reform has revolved around high-profile incidents in major U.S. cities like Cleveland and New York City — and on what the federal Department of Justice…
December 11, 2017
Federal agencies overstepping their statutory and constitutional authorities, in order to aggregate power to the Executive Branch, has become an issue of especial concern in recent years in the legal academy. We saw this when President Barack Obama declared his intent to direct agencies to achieve through executive fiat what he had failed to secure…
November 21, 2017
We tend to think of states as the classic site of Brandeisian experimentalism, but cities, counties, towns and other local governments — by virtue of their number and variety, their sensitivity to local conditions and preferences, and their capacity to respond to the immediacy of emerging policy challenges — are equally, if not more, important…
October 17, 2017
Louisiana imprisons a larger share of its population than any other state in the U.S., and the U.S. locks up more people per capita than anywhere else on earth. With an incarceration rate almost five times that of Iran and 13 times that of China, Louisiana is the world’s incarceration capital. But soon, that will…
During the Obama administration, officials deported a record number of immigrants, immigrant detention ballooned, and immigration crimes became the majority of federal prosecutions. Since President Trump took office, these trends have only intensified. As outlined in his January 25, 2017 Executive Order, the administration intends to hire thousands of new immigration officers, deny federal funding…
More than 200,000 bail bonds are posted in California each year, generating $308 million in non-refundable premium fees from accused persons, their families, and friends who post bail for them. Being detained in custody pretrial, even for a short period of time, can threaten an individual’s employment, housing, financial stability, and family. With roughly 90%…
