Blog

How do you get rid of a legendary coach who is beyond his or her prime? It seems you can’t. Pat Summitt, a living legend in women’s basketball, has early stages of dementia. But, Tennessee will continue to pay her a multi-million dollar salary.

“My first thought was, Pat Summitt is our coach and always will be,” said Tennessee’s athletic director, Joan Cronan, who has worked with Summitt for 28 years. “But I had three things to do. I had to protect Pat, who is the most loved person at the University of Tennessee. I had to protect her legacy. And I had to protect the program she built.”

What’s changed so far?

They were small things to everyone else: continually forgetting a meeting time, hesitation in calling a play, a personality shift stemming from her frustration with herself.

Those seem like important things for a coach to forget.

It would seem incumbent on the coach to know when to step away–this would seem to be the right time. Better now, then when the dementia develops, and she is even less able to make a rational decision. It is her choice, because the school won’t be able to fire her. I don’t see this ending well.

From WaPo:

Bringing some of those production jobs home while holding down the price of his products probably would require devising factories so automated that they wouldn’t employ all that many workers. Then again, Apple is sitting on $76 billion in cash, and Jobs is still Apple’s chairman. Devoting a few billion to reshape and restart American manufacturing, even if it employs fewer people than in Henry Ford’s time and narrows Apple’s profit margins, could work wonders for exports and, just possibly, lead to Jobs’s most amazing invention of all: a newly vibrant American working-class.

Not gonna happen.

In America, we celebrate our great industrialists. We’re not likely, some years hence, to celebrate our great offshorers or the guys who built the companies with the most unexpended cash.

Not gonna happen.

I think this new book answers my questions about original crime, quite well. Here is the description:

This book chronicles the development of criminal law in America, from the beginning of the constitutional era (1789) through the rise of the New Deal order (1939). Elizabeth Dale discusses the changes in criminal law during that period, tracing shifts in policing, law, the courts and punishment. She also analyzes the role that popular justice – lynch mobs, vigilance committees, law-and-order societies and community shunning – played in the development of America’s criminal justice system. This book explores the relation between changes in America’s criminal justice system and its constitutional order.

Update: OK, just bought the book on Kindle and read the sections that seemed relevant. This book does not answer the questions I sought to answer. In fact the commerce clause/due process analysis is pretty perfunctory. 186 pages with notes. Awfully short. Should provide a good resource to my ultimate paper on this topic.

Interesting article in JLEP (at George Mason!)

In discussing imperfections in the adversarial system, Professor Ribstein notes in his article entitled Agents Prosecuting Agents, that “prosecutors can avoid the need to test their theories at trial by using significant leverage to virtually force even innocent, or at least questionably guilty, defendants to plead guilty.” If this is true, then there is an enormous problem with plea bargaining, particularly given that over 95% of defendants in the federal criminal justice system succumb to the power of bargained justice. As such, this piece provides a detailed analysis of modern-day plea bargaining and its role in spurring the rise of overcriminalization. In fact, this article argues that a symbiotic relationship exists between plea bargaining and overcriminalization because these legal phenomena do not merely occupy the same space in our justice system, but also rely on each other for their very existence.

From the article:

As these hypothetical considerations demonstrate, plea bargaining and overcriminalization perpetuate each other, as plea bargaining shields over-criminalization from scrutiny and overcriminalization creates the incentives that make plea bargaining so pervasive.

Makes sense.

Interesting piece in La Raza (you know, where Sotomayor published the Wise Latina article) about the effects of felony disenfranchisement of recidivism.

Felony disenfranchisement – the exclusion of individuals convicted of felonies from the voting rolls – is a practice that is commonplace in the United States. In 2010, approximately 5.3 million Americans were ineligible to vote because of a prior felony conviction. Despite the fact that the justifications for disenfranchisement in a democratic society could be characterized as dubious, disenfranchisement has withstood various legal challenges and remains a widespread practice in almost every state. One argument which has never been examined empirically is the notion that disenfranchisement hampers efforts to rehabilitate offenders, which is what this article does. First, this article explores the history and philosophy that underlies disenfranchisement along with theoretical mechanisms by which disenfranchisement can be thought to have an impact on recidivism. Second, the legal challenges that have been made against disenfranchisement are discussed with a particular focus on challenges under the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment as well as the Voting Rights Act. A novel constitutional argument under principles of congruence and proportionality is also examined. Third, this article uses re-arrest data collected by the United States Department of Justice to examine the impact of felony disenfranchisement on recidivism. These results are discussed along with implications for future inquiries.

Arguments about disarming felons are closely tied (in a way) to disenfranchising felons. The argument for one may be stronger than the argument for the other. Not saying which is which. I’m not a fan of either.