In 1987, the Supreme Court held that the Constitution requires federal and state courts to retroactively apply all new federal-constitutional rules of criminal procedure to direct appeals of convictions. Since then, the Court has not addressed whether the U.S. Constitution also requires state courts to retroactively apply new criminal procedure rules derived from state law on direct review. This issue is particularly significant because state jurisdictions...
No. 5
Lynn Walker Huntley was one of America’s great champions of civil rights. Her accomplishments will continue to make ours a better world for decades—assuredly outliving her short life, which ended on August 30, 2015. Her paper credentials must not be glossed over, even though Lynn was much more than the summation of her curriculum […]
There were no lawyers in my family. We had never sued or been sued. I barely knew any lawyers’ names. I enrolled at Columbia Law School sight unseen. When I entered in 1975, though, the name I heard fast and often was Lynn Walker, Class of 1970. She was the first black woman ever on […]
What a time it must have been to be alive in 1968. The United States was deep in the throes of the Vietnam War, with public support drastically waning after the Tet Offensive and the My Lai Massacre. One of the modern era’s founding fathers, Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., was assassinated, and […]
Judges and juries are frequently called upon to evaluate a party’s actions in retrospect—with the benefit of hindsight. Traditionally, courts and scholars have been understandably wary about how hindsight bias influences verdicts, focusing on how to keep outcome information away from jurors and how to minimize its influence on adjudication. But outcome information can be probative evidence: Bad outcomes can be indicative of bad decisionmaking....
Recent attention to police brutality has brought to the fore how law enforcement, when they become the subject of criminal investigations, receive special procedural protections not available to any other criminal suspect. Prosecutors’ special treatment of police suspects, particularly their perceived use of grand juries to exculpate accused officers, has received the lion’s share of scholarly and media attention. But police suspects also benefit...
Introduction In March of 2012, in Martinez v. Ryan, the Supreme Court announced a new type of cause under the cause-and-prejudice exception to procedural default in federal habeas cases. This new type of cause allowed federal courts to review a subset of claims that had been procedurally defaulted in state habeas proceedings due to the […]