Criminal Law

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Comment
Volume 89.5
Pretrial Detention by a Preponderance: The Constitutional and Interpretive Shortcomings of the Flight-Risk Standard
Jaden M. Lessnick
B.A. 2020, Emory University; J.D. Candidate 2023, The University of Chicago Law School.

I am immeasurably grateful for the input and mentorship of Professor Alison Siegler, whose tireless and groundbreaking pretrial detention advocacy inspired this Comment. I also benefitted greatly from the suggestions and patience of Alec Mouser and Simon Jacobs. Thanks as well to Professors Ryan Doerfler, Daniel Wilf-Townsend, Erica Zunkel, and Judith Miller, and to the editors of the University of Chicago Law Review. Finally, thanks to my parents, whose support has been unwavering.

This Comment contends that the preponderance standard for flight risk is unconstitutional and interpretively incorrect. In cases involving similar government restrictions on physical liberty, the Supreme Court has generally required at least a “clear and convincing evidence” standard to comport with due process.

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Article
Volume 89.4
Kids Are Not So Different: The Path from Juvenile Exceptionalism to Prison Abolition
Emily Buss
Mark and Barbara Fried Professor of Law at the University of Chicago Law School

Thanks to Herschella Conyers, Jessica Feierman, Martin Guggenheim, Esther Hong, Genevieve Lakier, Robert Schwartz, and Elizabeth Scott for their helpful comments and to Alexandra Bright Braverman, Eleanor Brock, Ryne Cannon, Robert Clark, Kyra Cooper, William Cope, Kim Johnson, Tori Keller, Crofton Kelly, Rachel Smith, and Anna Ziai for their excellent research assistance. Thanks to the Arnold and Frieda Shure Research Fund for its generous support of this research. 

Inspired by the Supreme Court’s embrace of developmental science in a series of Eighth Amendment cases, “kids are different” has become the rallying cry, leading to dramatic reforms in our response to juvenile crime designed to eliminate the incarceration of children and support their successful transition to adulthood. The success of these reforms represents a promising start, but the “kids are different” approach is built upon two flaws in the Court’s developmental analysis that constrain the reach of its decisions and hide the true implications of a developmental approach.

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Comment
Volume 89.3
Neither Here nor There: Wire Fraud and the False Binary of Territoriality Under Morrison
Jason Petty

This Comment argues that this broad domestic application of the wire fraud statute shields courts from asking whether the statute applies extraterritorially. Further, this Comment argues that courts’ domestic application of the wire fraud statute is sufficiently broad as to begin to resemble extraterritoriality because courts can almost always find sufficient domestic activity to apply the wire fraud statute.

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Essay
Volume 89.2
Symposium Introduction: This Violent City? Urban Violence in Chicago and Beyond
Aziz Z. Huq
Professor of Law, University of Chicago Law School.
John Rappaport
Professor of Law, University of Chicago Law School.

Bartosz Woda provided invaluable help in preparing the charts in this Introduction; we owe him great thanks for his remarkable work. Professor Huq thanks the Frank J. Cicero Fund; Professor Rappaport thanks the Darelyn A. and Richard C. Reed Memorial Fund.

Our modest goal in this Introduction is to assemble some baseline empirics concerning both private violence and state coercion to provide a context for the pieces that follow. In so doing, we aim to mitigate the need for “scene setting” by each paper in the Symposium. Readers of the Symposium will find here a synoptic guide to some basic facts about the distribution and extent of criminal violence, as well as socioeconomic conditions and police activity, in Chicago.

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Essay
Volume 89.2
The Enduring Neighborhood Effect, Everyday Urban Mobility, and Violence in Chicago
Robert J. Sampson
Robert J. Sampson is the Henry Ford II Professor of the Social Sciences at Harvard University and Affiliated Research Professor at the American Bar Foundation.
Brian L. Levy
Brian L. Levy is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at George Mason University.

The authors acknowledge financial support from National Science Foundation Grant SES #1735505. Direct correspondence to rsampson@wjh.harvard.edu.

A longstanding tradition of research linking neighborhood disadvantage to higher rates of violence is based on the characteristics of where people reside. This Essay argues that we need to look beyond residential neighborhoods to consider flows of movement throughout the wider metropolis.

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Essay
Volume 89.2
Neighborhood Inequality and Violence in Chicago, 1965–2020
Patrick Sharkey
William S. Tod Professor of Sociology and Public Affairs at the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs.
Alisabeth Marsteller
Researcher at Princeton University’s Office of Population Research.

The authors wish to thank the editors at the University of Chicago Law Review, participants at the Symposium “This Violent City? Rhetoric, Realities, and the Perils and Promise of Reform,”moderator Aziz Huq and panelist Allegra McLeod for their insights on violence in Chicago, and Robert Sampson and Michael Maesano for their comments and feedback on the Essay.

This Essay analyzes trends in violence from a spatial perspective, focusing on how changes in the murder rate are experienced by communities and groups of residents within the city of Chicago. The Essay argues that a spatial perspective is essential to understanding the causes and consequences of violence in the United States and begins by describing the social policies and theoretical mechanisms that explain the connection between concentrated disadvantage and violent crime.

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Essay
Volume 89.2
Prospects for Reform? The Collapse of Community Policing in Chicago
Wesley G. Skogan
Professor Emeritus, Department of Political Science and the Institute for Policy Research, Northwestern University.

The author thanks Mark Iris for his review of this manuscript. The author remains solely responsible for any errors.

Community policing’s accomplishments were numerous, but it fell victim to issues commonly facing reform: money—especially the impact of economic downturns; leadership turnover and policy preferences; changes in the social, political, and crime environments; and the emergence of new technologies for responding to community concerns.

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Essay
Volume 89.2
Capitalizing on Crisis: Chicago Policy Responses to Homicide Waves, 1920–2016
Robert Vargas
Associate Professor of Sociology, University of Chicago.

We would like to thank Andrew Papachristos, Aziz Huq, Jenny Trinitapoli, and Wesley Skogan for comments and feedback on earlier drafts as well as Cecilia Smith and Parmanand Sinha for technical support with the geographic analyses.

Chris Williams
Ph.D. Student, Sociology Department, University of Chicago.
Phillip O’Sullivan
Joint J.D./Ph.D. Student, Department of Statistics, Harvard University.
Christina Cano
Undergraduate Student, Sociology Department, University of Chicago.

This Essay investigates Chicago city-government policy responses to the four largest homicide waves in its history: 1920–1925, 1966–1970, 1987–1992, and 2016. Through spatial and historical methods, we discover that Chicago police and the mayor’s office misused data to advance agendas conceived prior to the start of the homicide waves.

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Essay
Volume 89.2
Identifying and Measuring Excessive and Discriminatory Policing
Alex Chohlas-Wood
Executive Director, Stanford Computational Policy Lab
Marissa Gerchick
Data Scientist, Stanford Computational Policy Lab.
Sharad Goel
Professor of Public Policy, Harvard Kennedy School.
Aziz Z. Huq
Frank and Bernice J. Greenberg Professor of Law, University of Chicago.
Amy Shoemaker
Data Scientist, Stanford Computational Policy Lab.
Ravi Shroff
Assistant Professor of Applied Statistics, New York University.
Keniel Yao
Data Scientist, Stanford Computational Policy Lab.

We describe and apply three empirical approaches to identify superfluous police activity, unjustified racially disparate impacts, and limits to regulatory interventions.

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Essay
Volume 89.2
Racially Territorial Policing in Black Neighborhoods
Elise C. Boddie
Henry Rutgers Professor, Professor of Law, and Judge Robert L. Carter Scholar, Rutgers Law School.

I thank Michelle Adams, Devon W. Carbado, Don Herzog, and R.A. Lenhardt for their very helpful comments and feedback. Any errors are my own.

This Essay explores police practices that marginalize Black people by limiting their freedom of movement across the spaces of Black neighborhoods.