Author Archive | Paul Cassell

John Lott has an interesting analysis of recent corrections of “typos” in the vote totals in the Minnesota Senate race, found here. Its seems like the corrections have disproportionately favored Democrat Al Franken. Sounds like this is something that will bear watching.

My colleague Professor Amos Guiora has just written an interesting essay about what to do with the Guantanamo detainees. Here is an abstract: In the aftermath of 9/11, definitional uncertainty as to the status and rights of detainees has contributed to unending violations of civil and political rights for thousands of individuals held world-wide either […]

Tonight Eugene will be delivering the 2008 William H. Leary Lecture at the University of Utah S.J. Quinney College of Law at 6:00 p.m. In his talk, he will walk through the Heller opinions and explore how the justices (both the majority and the dissenters) turned originalist theory into practice and what important (but often […]

Over at Sentencing Law and Policy, Professor Doug Berman has this interesting post about a motion he has filed on behalf of Weldon Angelos attempting to set aside at least part of his 55-year prison sentence for carrying/possessing guns in connection with several low level marijuana deals. Berman’s post links to a motion he has […]

This is an update to an earlier post. I fell for a hoax e-mail from a senior faculty colleague of mine, listing purported examples of outrageous tort awards. I circulated that e-mail as a post of my own. I quickly caught the error and have since corrected that post. I apologize for my mistake in […]

There is an e-mail and webpostings making the rounds that appears to recount the “Stella Awards” for the year. These are awards named after 81-year-old Stella Liebeck, who spilled hot coffee on herself and successfully sued McDonald’s (in New Mexico). The purported winner this year is the following: This year’s runaway winner was Mrs. Merv […]

The Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure constitute the “playbook” for the federal criminal justice system. But crime victims have been largely absent from the rules, even though they have an expanding number of rights in the process. In this paper, which recently appeared in the Utah Law Review, I argue that it is time to […]

Amos Guiora and Martha Minow have this interesting post raising the provocative question of what is the proper exchange rate when a country like Israel negotiates with terrorists. They make this telling observation: What parent wouldn’t want the government to do anything—and everything–to recover a missing soldier-daughter or son? If a parent is in the […]

My colleague Amos Guiora has this interesting article on ways to improve international cooperation against terrorism. Here’s an abstract: Terrorism against the United States, post-9/11, reaches far beyond the U.S. borders. In order to effectively prevent and react to terrorism within the homeland, the U.S. must think of security internationally. International security efforts touch on […]

In his recent post, Orin wonders whether the exclusionary rule is consistent with orginalism. He sketches out the received wisdom on the subject, but then notes that the Supreme Court in decisions in 1914 (Weeks) and 1920 (Silverthorne) suppressed evidence. He then weaves an argument that originalism might support the exclusionary rule holdings in these […]

The recent mistake by the Supreme Court in the Kennedy case (missing a federal law authorizing the death penalty for child rape) has prompted this interesting idea from law professor Tom Smith over at The Right Coast. He suggests that the Supreme Court should post its decisions on the Web before they become final, to […]

John Lott has this very interesting article about the thesis that Roe v. Wade reduced crime. The thesis has been most prominently advanced by economists John Donohue and Steven Levitt. They argue that Roe lead to declining crime rates by reducing the number of “unwanted” children. These unwanted children would have entered their crime-prone years […]

This interesting list ranks the world’s happiest countries. Number 1? Denmark. Last? Zimbabwe. The U.S.? 16th overall. For me the biggest surprise was the clustering of many former Soviet republics at the bottom of the list. For example, Ukraine (5th from the bottom) is apparently far less happy than many other less wealthy countries such […]

I’ve discussed the recent controversy about the NBA game fixing in a couple of recent posts — a subject being batted around in the blogosphere. What has not been widely discussed is Donaghy’s additional allegations that the NBA is trying to silence him. Whatever one makes of the other allegations, this one rings true. Sentencing […]

As mentioned in my earlier post, disgraced NBA referree Timothy Donaghy has essentially accused the NBA of fixing games. In his sentencing letter (linked in my earlier post), he makes a thinly-veiled reference to game six of the Lakers-Sacramento series in 2002: Referees A, F, and G were officiating a playoff series between the Team […]