Interested in criminal justice reform?

[Anjali Motgi]

Progressive friends,

First, it was wonderful to meet/chat/drink with so many of you at the ACS happy hour yesterday. For those of you who made it, thanks for coming! For those of you who missed it, keep your ears perked for word of future ACS social events. More info about those should be coming to an email inbox near you, soon. 

Second, I'm attaching the reading for week 3 of PSW. So far, the Progressive Scholarship Workshop has read papers on the perilous future of gender discrimination lawsuits in the employment context and the possibilities for inspiring Americans to participate in the democratic process. This week we'll be switching gears, moving away from civil litigation and political mobilization to criminal justice reform. 

We'll be reading Fiona Doherty's paper "The Return of Indeterminate Sentencing" (attached). The paper will be published in the NYU Law Review next summer, but Professor Doherty is planning to revise it significantly this month; to that end, she welcomes any suggestions and responses from students. The paper looks at the detrimental impact of supervised release on the "determinacy movement" in sentencing in the federal criminal justice system. Professor Doherty argues that the increasing use of supervised release in today's sentences has made the modern criminal justice sentence structurally indeterminate. She challenges federal supervised release as lacking a strong theoretical foundation to justify its widespread imposition, and offers an alternative vision for the role of this penalty in sentencing. This is a timely and important topic; federal supervised release controls the lives of more than 100,000 individuals and yet has received little attention in legal scholarship. If you are a 1L (or a 2/3L) and you know nothing about sentencing, this is the ideal forum in which to jump into one of criminal justice's most troubling  areas. If you're someone who's been involved in criminal justice work in any capacity, you likely already know how desperately the federal system is in need of sentencing reform--what you may not know is that Professor Doherty is one of the leading voices on the issue. 

We are especially excited about Professor Doherty's presentation this week as it is one of our few presentations by a clinical faculty member. Professor Doherty is a YLS alumna ('99), a former federal public defender, and a recipient of the Bernstein Fellowship. In addition to discussing her paper, she's agreed to share her insights on practicing as a public interest litigator and transitioning back to academia as a clinical professor. If you're interested in sentencing issues, criminal justice reform, public interest fellowships, or diverse experiences with legal scholarship, this is a PSW you won't want to miss. 

Finally, on a more mundane administrative note, everyone who told me that they'd like to receive credit for the reading group has had their name/email submitted to the registrar's office for that purpose. If anyone has any questions about that, or if anyone who missed today's deadline would still like to receive credit for the reading group, please don't hesitate to shoot me an email. 

I look forward to seeing everyone on Tuesday night, in our old/regular room (121) at 6:30 pm. 

Cheers,

Anjali

-- 
Anjali Motgi

Yale Law School, J.D. expected 2014

214.924.4731 | anjali...@gmail.com