Race, Crime, and the Law

Race, Crime, and the Law
Author: Randall Kennedy
Publisher: Vintage
Total Pages: 559
Release: 2012-02-22
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0307814653

An "admirable, courageous, and meticulously fair and honest book” (New York Times Book Review) in which “one of our most important and perceptive writers on race" (The Washington Post) takes on a highly complex issue in a way that no one has before. "This book should be a standard for all law students."—Boston Globe In this groundbreaking, powerfully reasoned, lucid work that is certain to provoke controversy, Harvard law professor Randall Kennedy takes on a highly complex issue in a way that no one has before. Kennedy uncovers the long-standing failure of the justice system to protect blacks from criminals, probing allegations that blacks are victimized on a widespread basis by racially discriminatory prosecutions and punishments, but he also engages the debate over the wisdom and legality of using racial criteria in jury selection. He analyzes the responses of the legal system to accusations that appeals to racial prejudice have rendered trials unfair, and examines the idea that, under certain circumstances, members of one race are statistically more likely to be involved in crime than members of another.

Law and Crime

Law and Crime
Author: Gerry Johnstone
Publisher: SAGE
Total Pages: 233
Release: 2009-12-09
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1446206173

What is the definition of ′crime′? Law and Crime helps the criminologist to understand how the law constructs crime and how one might engage in critical analysis of such legal constructions. It uses a thematic approach to comprehensively explore the relationship between criminal conduct, criminal justice and the law. The book introduces key topics in criminal law scholarship for criminologists, including: criminalization fault and criminal responsibility corporate liability the production of criminal guilt the nature of judicial punishment. Aimed at students with no prior knowledge of law, the book includes many useful features to enhance understanding, from chapter overviews and key terms to study questions and suggestions for further reading. The Key Approaches to Criminology series celebrates the removal of traditional barriers between disciplines and, specifically, reflects criminology’s interdisciplinary nature and focus. It brings together some of the leading scholars working at the intersections of criminology and related subjects. Each book in the series helps readers to make intellectual connections between criminology and other discourses, and to understand the importance of studying crime and criminal justice within the context of broader debates. The series is intended to have appeal across the entire range of undergraduate and postgraduate studies and beyond, comprising books which offer introductions to the fields as well as advancing ideas and knowledge in their subject areas.

Computer Crime Law

Computer Crime Law
Author: Orin S. Kerr
Publisher: West Academic Publishing
Total Pages: 808
Release: 2006
Genre: Law
ISBN:

This book introduces the future of criminal law. It covers every aspect of crime in the digital age, assembled together for the first time. Topics range from Internet surveillance law and the Patriot Act to computer hacking laws and the Council of Europe cybercrime convention. More and more crimes involve digital evidence, and computer crime law will be an essential area for tomorrow's criminal law practitioners. Many U.S. Attorney's Offices have started computer crime units, as have many state Attorney General offices, and any student with a background in this emerging area of law will have a leg up on the competition. This is the first law school book dedicated entirely to computer crime law. The materials are authored entirely by Orin Kerr, a new star in the area of criminal law and Internet law who has recently published articles in the Harvard Law Review, Columbia Law Review, NYU Law Review, and Michigan Law Review. The book is filled with ideas for future scholarship, including hundreds of important questions that have never been addressed in the scholarly literature. The book reflects the author's practice experience, as well: Kerr was a computer crime prosecutor at the Justice Department for three years, and the book combines theoretical insights with practical tips for working with actual cases. Students will find it easy and fun to read, and professors will find it an angaging introduction to a new world of scholarly ideas. The book is ideally suited either for a 2-credit seminar or a 3-credit course, and should appeal both to criminal law professors and those interested in cyberlaw or law and technology. No advanced knowledge of computers and the Internet is required or assumed.

Crime and Law in Media Culture

Crime and Law in Media Culture
Author: Sheila Brown
Publisher:
Total Pages: 248
Release: 2003
Genre: Crime in mass media
ISBN:

This work explores the situating of law and crime within the vast range and scope of contemporary media forms. Sheila Brown shows how crime and the law, or our understanding of them, are produced, reproduced, disturbed, and challenged in and through media culture.

Crime and Culpability

Crime and Culpability
Author: Larry Alexander
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 375
Release: 2009-03-23
Genre: Law
ISBN: 0521518776

This book presents a comprehensive theory of a culpability-based criminal law.

Act and Crime

Act and Crime
Author: Michael S. Moore
Publisher:
Total Pages: 433
Release: 2010
Genre: Criminal act
ISBN: 0199599505

In print for the first time in over ten years, Act and Crime provides a unified account of the theory of action presupposed by both Anglo-American criminal law and the morality that underlies it. The book defends the view that human actions are always volitionally caused bodily movements andnothing else. The theory is used to illuminate three major problems in the drafting and the interpretation of criminal codes: 1) what the voluntary act requirement both does and should require; 2) what complex descriptions of actions prohitbited by criminal codes both do and should require (inaddition to the doing of a voluntary act); and 3) when two actions are 'the same' for purposes of assessing whether multiple prosecutions and multiple punishments are warranted. The book both contributes to the development of a coherent theory of action in philosophy, and it provides bothlegislators and judgees (and the lawyers who argue to both) a grounding in three of the most basic elelments of criminal liability.

Proceeds of Crime Law in New Zealand

Proceeds of Crime Law in New Zealand
Author: Heather McKenzie (Lawyer)
Publisher:
Total Pages: 455
Release: 2015
Genre: Forfeiture
ISBN: 9781927313053

"Practitioners will benefit from this text, which provides guidance on the Criminal Proceeds (Recovery) Act 2009's provisions and machinery, the growing body of case law, and the status of a conceptually criminal regime which engages the civil procedure and civil standard of proof"--Publisher information.

Crime & Politics

Crime & Politics
Author: Ted Gest
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 304
Release: 2003-08-07
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0190290137

Why has America experienced an explosion in crime rates since 1960? Why has the crime rate dropped in recent years? Though politicians are always ready both to take the credit for crime reduction and to exploit grisly headlines for short-term political gain, these questions remain among the most important-and most difficult to answer-in America today. In Crime & Politics, award-winning journalist Ted Gest gives readers the inside story of how crime policy is formulated inside the Washington beltway and state capitols, why we've had cycle after cycle of ineffective federal legislation, and where promising reforms might lead us in the future. Gest examines how politicians first made crime a national rather than a local issue, beginning with Lyndon Johnson's crime commission and the landmark anti-crime law of 1968 and continuing right up to such present-day measures as "three strikes" laws, mandatory sentencing, and community policing. Gest exposes a lack of consistent leadership, backroom partisan politics, and the rush to embrace simplistic solutions as the main causes for why Federal and state crime programs have failed to make our streets safe. But he also explores how the media aid and abet this trend by featuring lurid crimes that simultaneously frighten the public and encourage candidates to offer another round of quick-fix solutions. Drawing on extensive research and including interviews with Edwin Meese, Janet Reno, Joseph Biden, Ted Kennedy, and William Webster, Crime & Politics uncovers the real reasons why America continues to struggle with the crime problem and shows how we do a better job in the future.

Fatal Fictions

Fatal Fictions
Author: Alison L. LaCroix
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 345
Release: 2017
Genre: Law
ISBN: 0190610786

Writers of fiction have always confronted topics of crime and punishment. This age-old fascination with crime on the part of both authors and readers is not surprising, given that criminal justice touches on so many political and psychological themes essential to literature, and comes equipped with a trial process that contains its own dramatic structure. This volume explores this profound and enduring literary engagement with crime, investigation, and criminal justice. The collected essays explore three themes that connect the world of law with that of fiction. First, defining and punishing crime is one of the fundamental purposes of government, along with the protection of victims by the prevention of crime. And yet criminal punishment remains one of the most abused and terrifying forms of political power. Second, crime is intensely psychological and therefore an important subject by which a writer can develop and explore character. A third connection between criminal justice and fiction involves the inherently dramatic nature of the legal system itself, particularly the trial. Moreover, the ongoing public conversation about crime and punishment suggests that the time is ripe for collaboration between law and literature in this troubled domain. The essays in this collection span a wide array of genres, including tragic drama, science fiction, lyric poetry, autobiography, and mystery novels. The works discussed include works as old as fifth-century BCE Greek tragedy and as recent as contemporary novels, memoirs, and mystery novels. The cumulative result is arresting: there are "killer wives" and crimes against trees; a government bureaucrat who sends political adversaries to their death for treason before falling to the same fate himself; a convicted murderer who doesn't die when hanged; a psychopathogical collector whose quite sane kidnapping victim nevertheless also collects; Justice Thomas' reading and misreading of Bigger Thomas; a man who forgives his son's murderer and one who cannot forgive his wife's non-existent adultery; fictional detectives who draw on historical analysis to solve murders. These essays begin a conversation, and they illustrate the great depth and power of crime in literature.

Hate Crimes

Hate Crimes
Author: James B. Jacobs
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 224
Release: 2000-12-28
Genre: Law
ISBN: 0190286318

In the early 1980s, a new category of crime appeared in the criminal law lexicon. In response to concerted advocacy-group lobbying, Congress and many state legislatures passed a wave of "hate crime" laws requiring the collection of statistics on, and enhancing the punishment for, crimes motivated by certain prejudices. This book places the evolution of the hate crime concept in socio-legal perspective. James B. Jacobs and Kimberly Potter adopt a skeptical if not critical stance, maintaining that legal definitions of hate crime are riddled with ambiguity and subjectivity. No matter how hate crime is defined, and despite an apparent media consensus to the contrary, the authors find no evidence to support the claim that the United States is experiencing a hate crime epidemic--instead, they cast doubt on whether the number of hate crimes is even increasing. The authors further assert that, while the federal effort to establish a reliable hate crime accounting system has failed, data collected for this purpose have led to widespread misinterpretation of the state of intergroup relations in this country. The book contends that hate crime as a socio-legal category represents the elaboration of an identity politics now manifesting itself in many areas of the law. But the attempt to apply the anti-discrimination paradigm to criminal law generates problems and anomalies. For one thing, members of minority groups are frequently hate crime perpetrators. Moreover, the underlying conduct prohibited by hate crime law is already subject to criminal punishment. Jacobs and Potter question whether hate crimes are worse or more serious than similar crimes attributable to other anti-social motivations. They also argue that the effort to single out hate crime for greater punishment is, in effect, an effort to punish some offenders more seriously simply because of their beliefs, opinions, or values, thus implicating the First Amendment. Advancing a provocative argument in clear and persuasive terms, Jacobs and Potter show how the recriminalization of hate crime has little (if any) value with respect to law enforcement or criminal justice. Indeed, enforcement of such laws may exacerbate intergroup tensions rather than eradicate prejudice.