criminal justice

When I was a kid growing up in St. Louis, my friends and I used to take a grim sort of pride in the fact that, however far our hometown…

A series of recent scandals involving forensic evidence in North Carolina have placed hundreds of convictions in doubt and undermined public and judicial confidence in forensic science.

In a previous Legal Update, I complained about how President Obama’s opposition to mens rea reform led him to oppose, and ultimately scuttle, other important criminal justice reforms at…

Last week, the Harvard Law Review published an article by Barack Obama entitled, “The President’s Role in Advancing Criminal Justice Reform.” Despite its title, the article is not an…

In the past, standard employment application forms almost always included a question asking about the applicant’s criminal record. Recently, however, some employers have begun using forms that do not ask…

Model Resolution on Regulatory Overcriminalization

In the last two years, academics and scholars of public policy have identified North Carolina as a state with an overly complex criminal code that can ensnare small businesses, farmers, and individuals who unknowingly fail to comply with regulatory rules. In 2014, Professor Jeff Welty of the UNC-Chapel Hill School of Government published an article in the North Carolina Law Review, “Overcriminalization in North Carolina”; and James Copland and Isaac Gorodetski, directors respectively of the Center for Legal Policy and the Center for State and Local Leadership at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, published a primer, “Overcriminalizing the Old North State.”