Sex Crimes Issue of Federal Sentencing Reporter

I’ve worked for almost a year on the new issue of the Federal Sentencing Reporter, which covers recent developments in the punishment and management of sex offenders.  My copies arrived in the mail yesterday.  (I have a few extras, which I would be happy to distribute free of charge; just send me an email if interested.)  My introductory essay is available on SSRN.  Here is a summary of the other articles:

Sex Offender Treatment: Reconciling Criminal Justice Priorities and Therapeutic Goals

Professors Mary Ann Farkas and Gale Miller of the Marquette University Department of Social and Cultural Sciences identify important tensions in the therapist’s role when sex offenders are required to undergo treatment by the criminal justice system.  “Divided loyalties may arise,” they argue, “when treatment professionals feel a conflict between their professional responsibility to facilitate client change and their legal/criminal justice responsibilities.”  For instance, if an offender tells his therapist about a previously undisclosed offense, the therapist may be obliged to report the offense for possible prosecution.  Likewise, the therapist’s ability to sanction clients for noncompliance with the treatment program also puts therapists into a more punitive and less therapeutic role.  In light of such concerns, the authors call for treatment providers to modify their programs in various ways when they serve “involuntary” clients.

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Celebrating a Scholar’s Life

Walter Weyrauch, Stephen C. O’Connell Chair and Distinguished Professor of Law at the University of Florida, passed away last fall after more than a half century of faculty service at UF Law School.  A memorial service — quite a warm and joyous reminiscence and celebration of Walter’s life and work — was held last month in Gainesville. My admission ticket was courtesy of my wife, Professor Alison Barnes, for whom Walter was a mentor and co-author, as well as a dear friend.

What prompts me to write about the memorial service was one particular theme that almost every speaker emphasized. Walter was scholar to his core, an indefatigable reader, and a highly original thinker. Quite importantly in terms of his scholarship, Walter had a key insight.

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Judicial Campaign Talking Blues, Part 1

March law review madness has pretty much kept me from getting my blog on, so I have a whole slew of pontification on back order.

One of the things I am wondering about is campaign rhetoric in judicial elections. We all hate it, but why?

I have been thinking about it through the lens offered by one of my favorite law school professors, Duncan Kennedy. He said that there were two species of error in the way that non-lawyers think about the law. One is lay cynicism — the idea that judges do whatever they want to and that judging was just politics by another name. (There was, of course, a sense in which Duncan believed this — probably still does — but it was at a structural rather than decisional level.) 

One of the things that I think we hate about many judicial campaign ads is that they appeal to this lay cynicism.

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