For more than fifty years, the problems endemic to municipal policing in the United States—brutality, racial discrimination, corruption, and opacity—have remained remarkably constant. This has occurred notwithstanding the advent of modern constitutional criminal procedure and countless judicial opinions applying it to the police. The municipal police can evade criminal procedure’s legality-based paradigm through formal and informal means....
No. 6
In June 2018, the Supreme Court decided Animal Science Products, Inc. v. Hebei Welcome Pharmaceutical Co. and resolved a circuit split regarding the amount of deference courts must give to amicus briefs filed by foreign sovereign governments. The Court articulated a new standard of deference, “respectful consideration,” but did not take the opportunity to give weight or meaning to it. This Note argues that more must be done to develop the respectful...
The First Amendment is currently being pulled in opposite directions by a group of Hasidic schools in New York. Driven by deeply held religious beliefs, the leaders of these schools refuse to teach virtually any of the secular studies required for children by New York state law. Proponents of these schools point to the Free Exercise Clause and the “hybrid rights” of religion and parental control. However the state also has an interest in ensuring...
Civil forfeiture is controversial. Critics allege that law enforcement authorities use forfeiture to take property from often-innocent victims free of the constraints of criminal process. Yet despite recent statutory reforms, a significant obstacle to meaningful change remains: Under longstanding Supreme Court precedent, the Constitution imposes few limits on civil forfeiture. Relying on a perceived tradition of largely unfettered government power...