Award plaque
I’m humbled and honored to receive the Dean Thomas Christopher Award for service to Alabama Law School. It’s an incredible privilege to get to work with amazing students and colleagues.
Yes!
Fiscally Restraining Criminal Lawmaking is under submission to law journals now. Please send it to your favorite journal editors. Or your least favorite😁. We examine how legislative process could make costs more salient in criminal law, hopefully prompting greater deliberation about benefits too.
Forcing defendants to tell a false tale about their own crime is troubling in its own right. More broadly, stifling counterstories about the role of systemic forces underlying crime and wildly divergent opportunities impedes potential public safety reform.
My article Look What You Made Me Do is now published in Washington & Lee Law Review: papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers..... I argue that criminal process flattens the narrative of crime into one of solely individual actors making bad choices, and it coerces defendants into telling that story.
Agree. It was a nice place to live.
Definitely wish our law school offered state con law.
Hot off the presses! In conjunction with @nacdl.org, I’ve written a report that examines criminal restitution in the federal system. The report debunks prevailing myths about restitution & presents recommendations for reform. www.nacdl.org/Document/Emp... 1/2
I’m not one of them. But don’t inchoate crimes already do that?
Even *if* you accept Stephen Miller’s (textually, historically, and morally indefensible) claim that undocumented immigrants are not entitled to due process, you’d *still* need due process to ensure that the individuals at issue are, in fact, undocumented.
His argument fails even on its own terms.
It ignores that systemic factors make it much harder for some people to comply
with the law than others. It entrenches the status quo of more cages to threaten punishment by suppressing counternarratives about root causes of crime. It prioritizes feeling safe over being safe.
I posted a draft of Look What You Made Me Do to SSRN: papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers..... I argue that criminal procedure coerces defendants into embracing the narrative that their crime was solely their bad choice. That narrative obscures important systemic factors like trauma, addiction, and poverty.
I’m excited to report that Look What You Made Me Do is now forthcoming in Washington & Lee Law Review.
Via @annabjournalist.bsky.social: The Alabama House of Representatives Thursday gave final approval to a bill extending paid parental leave to all state and education employees staring July 1, sending the bill to Gov. Kay Ivey.
A really interesting project that’s currently under submission, for the journal editors out there.
Usually they say it more metaphorically.
It felt like deep engagement with the work from folks who read and are trying to improve the piece. What more could a guest ask for?
What a great conversation with a thoughtful group! Thanks for reading and for your helpful comments, Corey.
BTW, feel free to highlight this submission for your favorite law review editors. Or even your least favorite. It has been 2.5 weeks and no offers yet. Is this cycle moving slowly for others too?
I’m not a business law person, but Andrew Verstein has a real knack for letting the rest of us in to complex topics in business law.
Interesting. Thanks!
It’s not, but I’m happy to share a draft. I’ll email you.
If I can get title help from my daughter or perhaps my students then it might be. At the moment I’m pondering a new paper about legislative exceptionalism for criminal law bills. Miss Americana? All Too Well? Not seeing it. If I were writing about habeas or accomplice liability that would be easier.
In this article I examine how criminal process flattens the complex narratives of crime into a simple story of defendants making bad choices. It sometimes coerces defendants into reciting this narrative too.
Look What You Made Me Do is currently under submission to law journals. Here’s the abstract.
Congratulations! Send them out by snail mail. That’s my vote.
This looks like a fantastic event, and I think it’s especially well-timed for folks getting early feedback on their summer projects that they haven’t written yet.
Building a large langauge model trained on the Alabama Code is a great resource, but we ought to be careful to understand that it still won’t tell us everything about Alabama law. news.ua.edu/2024/11/arti...
Alice Ristroph’s open-source book is fantastic and does cover property crimes. Happy to discuss that or anything else about teaching Crim if I can be helpful.