Florence v. Board: With Proactive Policing at Issue, Supreme Court Backs Discretion

I’ve been working through my backlog of reading from the academic year, including the Supreme Court’s April decision in Florence v. Board of Chosen Freeholders of County of Burlington. This is the decision in which the Court upheld the use of routine, suspicionless strip searches of individuals arrested and jailed for minor offenses.

It strikes me that part of what was really at issue in the case went unmentioned by both the majority and the dissent. The case is framed on both sides as being about corrections administration, but it is perhaps just as much about policing – how much discretion are we going to give police to detain citizens and impose on them the humiliation, stigma, and danger of incarceration with a general jail population. This discretion seems a powerful tool in support of proactive, crime-preventive policing, but it is also prone to abuse and seems hard to reconcile with ideals like checks and balances and “innocent until proven guilty.”

Writing for the Florence majority, Justice Kennedy presented the case as a conventional prisoner rights case. 

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Former Packer Who Attended MULS Receives PhD Degree

Among those receiving degrees at the 2012 Marquette commencement was former Green Bay Packer linebacker George Koonce. Koonce, who took several classes at the law school while a graduate student at Marquette, received his PhD degree in Interdisciplinary Studies.

Koonce’s doctoral dissertation was entitled “Role Transition of National Football League Players: Using the Grounded Theory.” The dissertation was directed by Dr. John Cotton of the School of Business Administration.

Between 1992 and 2000, Koonce played nine seasons in the National Football League, all but the last with the Green Bay Packers. (His final season was with the Seattle Seahawks.) The graduate of East Carolina University ran back two interceptions for touchdowns and made over 500 tackles during his NFL career. He was also a member of the 1996 and 1997 Packer teams, which played in Super Bowls XXX and XXXI.

During his graduate school years, Koonce was advised at different times by Marquette law professors Matt Mitten and Gordon Hylton.

A recent story on George Koonce from Milwaukee Magazine can be found at this link.

George Koonce’s recent guest column for the ESPN NFL Blog, entitled “Surviving Life after the NFL,” can be found here.

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Wisconsin Recall Post-Mortem: Implications for Labor

Cross posted at Workplace Prof Blog.

As one of the few labor law professors here in the State of Wisconsin, and as a close election watcher, I think it is incumbent upon me to give my two cents on the meaning of the Walker recall election for the labor movement in Wisconsin and in the United States.

Although Governor Walker survived the recall with a 53%-46% margin, there are a number of points I wish to emphasize:

1) First and foremost, the Citizens United decision played a huge role.  Walker raised some $31 million for the recall (much from out-of-state billionaires like the Koch Brothers) while Barrett raised only $4 million. Given the 8-1 disparity in spending, perhaps it is surprising that there was a not a bigger win for Walker.  Also, these numbers belie the sometime allegation of conservatives that unions are raking in huge sums of cash through union dues.  Citizens United primarily favors large corporate donors, plain and simple.

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