Marquette University Law School Faculty Blog

Environmental Crime and “Real” Crime

Post author:Michael M. O'Hear
Post published:January 24, 2009
Post category:Criminal Law & Process Environmental Law Legal Scholarship

I just got back from a couple days at the University of Utah, where I was participating in a national conference on environmental crimes at the S.J. Quinney School of Law. It was a terrific conference, and I was honored to be included among the many distinguished speakers. But it was also among the more contentious academic conferences I have attended, with a marked divide among speakers and audience members as to whether the criminal liability provisions of the major federal environmental statutes have grown too expansive. The basic critique — roundly rejected by some in attendance — was that the statutes (and the federal environmental sentencing guidelines) do not recognize important distinctions among environmental violations, but, rather, lump together offenses of greatly varying culpability. The debate thus centered on the question of whether environmental criminal law respects the principle of proportionality in punishment.

In retrospect, it strikes me that the proportionality debate has a lot to do with how environmental criminal enforcement is framed: as an aspect of environmental law, or as an aspect of criminal law.

Religion in Public Places

Post author:Richard M. Esenberg
Post published:January 23, 2009
Post category:First Amendment Religion & Law

An unsettled question in the law of limited purpose public forums is whether forums that are made available for broad purposes can exclude religious worship. In a trio of cases culminating in Good News Club v. Milford Central School, the Supreme Court has made clear that religious uses that are within a forum’s purpose cannot be excluded because they are religious. Thus, the Milford school, having decided to make its facilities broadly available for after hours community use, could not exclude the Good News Club, an evangelical Christian group who wished to conduct bible study and related activities for children.

Some have read Good News Club (incorrectly in my view) to recognize a distinction between worship and other forms of religious uses. In this paper (forthcoming in the Mississippi Law Journal), I draw on the theology of Christian worship (which I think broadly applies to many other religious traditions) to argue that worship, while sometimes seen as noncommunicative and deliberative, is, in fact, both and ought not to be excluded from broadly defined forums.

Here’s a related question.

I Refer to the Woman with Whom You Have a Child But Who Is Not Your Wife (Hereafter “Baby Mama”)

Post author:Richard M. Esenberg
Post published:January 23, 2009
Post category:Criminal Law & Process Race & Law Wisconsin Court System Wisconsin Criminal Law & Process

Perhaps Professor O’Hear can straighten me out on this.

The decision of a divided Court of Appeals setting aside the sentence of Landray Harris has gotten a fair amount of play in the blogs and on talk radio. Put briefly, the court vacated the sentence because the sentencing judge, apparently frustrated by the defendant’s failure to get a job, referred to the defendant’s “baby mama” (who supports him) and wondered how “you guys” (referring to one out of four defendants who appeared before the court) find women who are willing to support them in idleness. One of the area’s most prominent African-American defense attorneys has come to the defense of the sentencing judge, suggesting that his comments grew out of conversations that they had over the years about the puzzling ability of ne’er-do-wells to find women who enable them.

MULS alum Tom Foley is derisive of the critics, suggesting that they have failed to understand the proper standard for evaluating such matters. He points out that the majority asked whether the sentencing remarks could suggest to a reasonable observer or a “reasonable person in the position of the defendant that the court was improperly considering Harris’s race?” Thus, Tom argues, the question to be answered is not what, say, Jeff Wagner would make of the judge’s remarks but how they would be perceived by an African-American defendant.