Across societies labels rarely are met with the degree of contempt and hatred that has become inherent in the label of “sex offender,” applied to those who offend the morals, ethics, and values of citizens because of the actions (or sexual affinities) in which they are believed to have engaged. In the current article, we examine the diverse ways the sex offender is assembled, drawing on assemblage theory. We examine the signifiers attached to bodies suspected, accused, and convicted of sex offenses and the material connections that come together as part of the chimeric sex offender assemblage. We demonstrate that the arrangement of signifiers and materiality reflects the complex landscape that is expressed in the image of the monstrous sex offender. Our contribution to the literature on sex offenders lies in demonstrating the chimeric nature of the sex offender.

Our sexually violent predator (SVP) laws are a miserable failure. We suggest a turn to international human rights law (IHR) as a source of rights for this population, and consider this matter from the perspective of comparative law . Many nations have enacted laws that both mirror and contradict early developments in United States jurisprudence, but there, challenges to community containment and preventive detention laws have been more successful when based upon IHR law. Also, registry notification is generally far more limited, and details are usually confined solely to police agencies. We must consider laws and court decisions from other nations when implementing US law reform in this area. In Part I, we consider the implications of IHR law , and assess how realistic it is that such law be embraced by domestic jurisdictions in dealing with relevant cases. We also consider the human rights issues and violations that have resulted from domestic enactment of International Megan’s Law. In Part II, we apply comparative law in an effort to determine how other nations have struggled with some of the basic issues that have been focused on by domestic jurisdictions since the Supreme Court’s decision in Kansas v. Hendricks (1997). In Part III, we assess the application of therapeutic jurisprudence (TJ) to the legal and human rights issues discussed prior, in an effort to determine whether other nations have more successfully implemented TJ principles to combat some of the seemingly-intractable problems raised in SVP cases. We conclude by offering suggestions for US-based policymakers.

Across societies labels rarely are met with the degree of contempt and hatred that has become inherent in the label of “sex offender,” applied to those who offend the morals, ethics, and values of citizens because of the actions (or sexual affinities) in which they are believed to have engaged. In the current article, we examine the diverse ways the sex offender is assembled, drawing on assemblage theory. We examine the signifiers attached to bodies suspected, accused, and convicted of sex offenses and the material connections that come together as part of the chimeric sex offender assemblage. We demonstrate that the arrangement of signifiers and materiality reflects the complex landscape that is expressed in the image of the monstrous sex offender. Our contribution to the literature on sex offenders lies in demonstrating the chimeric nature of the sex offender.

Our sexually violent predator (SVP) laws are a miserable failure. We suggest a turn to international human rights law (IHR) as a source of rights for this population, and consider this matter from the perspective of comparative law . Many nations have enacted laws that both mirror and contradict early developments in United States jurisprudence, but there, challenges to community containment and preventive detention laws have been more successful when based upon IHR law. Also, registry notification is generally far more limited, and details are usually confined solely to police agencies. We must consider laws and court decisions from other nations when implementing US law reform in this area. In Part I, we consider the implications of IHR law , and assess how realistic it is that such law be embraced by domestic jurisdictions in dealing with relevant cases. We also consider the human rights issues and violations that have resulted from domestic enactment of International Megan’s Law. In Part II, we apply comparative law in an effort to determine how other nations have struggled with some of the basic issues that have been focused on by domestic jurisdictions since the Supreme Court’s decision in Kansas v. Hendricks (1997). In Part III, we assess the application of therapeutic jurisprudence (TJ) to the legal and human rights issues discussed prior, in an effort to determine whether other nations have more successfully implemented TJ principles to combat some of the seemingly-intractable problems raised in SVP cases. We conclude by offering suggestions for US-based policymakers.

Public policies requiring individuals convicted of sex offenses to register with law enforcement authorities, and in some cases granting public access to certain registry information, have been adopted by dozens of nations and provincial governments across the globe. Within the United States, sex offender registration and notification (SORN) policies are primarily established at the state level, but have come under increasing federal purview since the 1990s. Arising from a perceived need for improved interjurisdictional consistency and coordination, the 2006 Sex Offender Registration and Notification Act (SORNA) significantly broadened the scope and range of federal requirements for SORN systems operating within the states. Yet fourteen years following the law’s passage, a significant majority of states have yet to meet SORNA implementation thresholds, amidst an array of legal, political, fiscal, and practical challenges. Prior research has offered aggregate-level insights concerning the barriers to SORNA implementation, but has not captured the “back stories” of state policy experiences. Addressing this knowledge gap, the current study offers an in-depth examination of state experiences in aligning their policies with federal mandates. Drawing on data gathered from a diverse sample of ten states, the analysis reveals significant variation in the breadth and extent of required system changes and in the legal, political, and organizational dynamics surrounding state responses to federal oversight. Ultimately, the study offers insights and perspectives that can inform the continued refinement of federal and state policies, and improve the public safety effectiveness of the nation’s SORN systems.

In May 2018, the U.S. Supreme Court issued its opinion in the case of McCoy v. Louisiana , holding that defendants have a constitutional right to maintain their innocence at trial. Under McCoy , lawyers may not concede their clients’ guilt during trial when their clients insist on maintaining innocence, even if doing so would be a reasonable tactical decision. In this paper, we show how the case implicates an array of common problems concerning lawyer-client disagreement, and we argue that the Model Rules of Professional Conduct offer deficient guidance in this area. In particular, in relying on lawyer withdrawal as a remedy for lawyer-client disagreement, the Model Rules neglect to recognize that lawyers may have an obligation to stick with their clients despite serious disagreements over aspects of the representation. The Rules also gloss over the considerable administrative burden associated with withdrawal. After delineating some problems with the Model Rules’ approach to lawyer-client disagreement, we propose a set of revisions to the Model Rules that address the ethical and practical concerns we elaborate.

Public prosecutors are a key element within the legal complex, and crucial to the effective implementation of legal reforms. China’s procurators (public prosecutors) have previously colluded with local governments, police, and courts to “strike hard” against crime while overlooking systemic beating and torture of detained suspects to obtain confessions, shoddy investigative practices, and frequent miscarriages of justice. However, fifteen sets of Guiding Cases issued by the Supreme People’s Procuratorate since 2010 promote an unprecedented change in Chinese procurator culture away from “striking hard” to substantive protection of criminal suspects’ rights and exclusion of tainted evidence. They reinforce criminal procedure reforms since 2010 by demonstrating how procurators should protect innocent people against wrongful convictions and police brutality. They also stress the broader duty of China’s procurators to uphold the public interest against corrupt businesses and officials, especially in food safety, land-taking, and environmental protection cases. With other key actors in China’s “legal complex”—rights lawyers and civil society groups—still suppressed by the government, this effort to transform procurator culture is an essential, though still incomplete, step on China’s tortuous path toward a fair and just legal system.

This article examines how the perestroika gave rise to a new legal thinking that helped spark a broader transformation of international law and governance. Building on the sociology of Pierre Bourdieu, the article analyzes the emergence and short-lived influence of the professionals behind the new legal thinking of the perestroika. This elite operated at the crossroads between international and domestic law and politics. At this juncture, and in an attempt to safeguard and solidify their own position, they promoted the primacy of international law over politics by calling for, among other things, the establishment of an international criminal court. Building on the thinking of this elite that coexisted with concurrent streams of investments into international law from both East and West, a geopolitical window for new criminal law initiatives beyond the state was opened. It was in this brief window of opportunity that the field of international criminal justice was developed as a reflection of a wider universalist promise of establishing legal primacy in international governance.

This article sets out guidelines for law reform processes to account for the challenges that terrorism may pose to the rule of law and democracy. As a response to terrorism, an increase in reforms of laws and administrative measures has been seen across jurisdictions. The substantive offenses themselves have been criticized, but as of yet, the theoretical issues that may arise during processes of reform have not been considered. However, law reform as a direct and immediate response to such events may curtail the rule of law and democracy: there may be inadequate time for debate in the legislature regarding proposed measures, or the debate may be centered on arguments based on fear and hate toward perpetrators. This article argues that this may curtail individual autonomy of citizens and truncate democracy. It sets out guidelines for how processes of law reform may treat people as capable of self-moderation.

Problem-solving courts and restorative justice programs provide important new alternatives to cope with recurring problems in the criminal justice process. But they are much more. They are harbingers of a new theory of the criminal justice process that challenges traditional accounts in fundamental ways. Although practices akin to problem-solving courts and restorative justice have long operated outside or below the radar of the theory of criminal law and the adjudicative process, over the past few decades these practices have come to the fore and are now supported with full-blown theories, which threaten to displace traditional accounts of criminal responsibility, criminal liability, and indeed the core features of the criminal justice process. The new theories are based on theories of regulation, where the objective is not so much to enforce the law as it is to secure compliance to the law in order to facilitate harm reduction and restore social order. Nowhere is this new development so clearly seen as in the opening chapters of John Braithwaite’s important book, Restorative Justice and Responsive Regulation . In this book, Braithwaite offers a full-throated theory of the new criminal justice process that is based on recent developments in regulatory theory and, most particularly, responsive regulation, which Braithwaite helped to develop. This model is implicit to varying degrees in any number of recent developments in the criminal justice process, and in this paper, I argue it has the potential for displacing the classical theory of criminal law.

This article provides an empirical, comparative analysis of three criminal justice programs that reflect different social and ideological accounts: community courts, arraignment hearings, and restorative justice. The study draws on empirical findings that have been collected over three years in Israel, through observations and archival documentation of these mechanisms. Using the Criminal Law Taxonomy developed elsewhere by the authors as an analytical tool, the comparison is based on characteristics that relate to the structure, content, stakeholders, and outcomes of these justice mechanisms, emphasizing the plurality we have today in multi-door criminal justice systems. The comparative analysis highlights differences and similarities among various justice mechanisms, and offers policy makers and criminal justice practitioners important insights for referring different cases to various mechanisms.

As contemporary criminal justice practices have grown more varied, the equality concerns they raise have grown more nuanced and complex. This essay explores the interplay between equality in criminal justice and the mix of punitive and non-punitive mechanisms that have proliferated in parallel in the criminal justice systems of many post-industrial societies in the last thirty years. Multi-door criminal justice does not fare well under the dominant conception of equality in American criminal law, which seeks to stamp out disparities in punishment and ensure roughly equal outcomes for roughly similar offenders. But we need not view that as fatal to multi-door criminal justice. Tension between a multi-door system and our reigning approach to equality might suggest reasons to question the latter more than it does the former. Alternative, more flexible, more process-oriented conceptions of equality might exist that could better accommodate a multi-door world while still protecting and advancing egalitarian norms and ideals. At the same time, shifting our perspective on equality will not eliminate all equality concerns that flow from multi-door criminal justice, and it likely will reveal new ones. The question then becomes not whether multi-door criminal justice is unequal in some absolute sense. The question is whether it is less unequal—or unequal in more palatable ways—than what we have now.

“Western” democracies take an uneven view of the state’s role in reintegrating the incarcerated following punishment. Particularly in the United States, where retributivism remains punishment’s dominant justification, questions of punishment center on how wrongdoers ought to suffer for transgressions. Thus, reintegrative programs are viewed as a question of policy preference for various jurisdictions, and a question of grace for the state. A republican political theory, centered on our civic bonds, emphasizes different commitments. On this view, punishment is justified where a citizen attacks another in ways that deny their civic equality and undermine our ability to maintain a common civic life. But the same justification that requires protecting civic equality through punishment compels the state to reintegrate offenders after punishment; the right to punish and the obligation to reintegrate are complementary political duties. As such, reintegrative policies are not merely the state’s choice but rather a state duty and an offender’s right. This article explores the obligations the state owes ex-felons in reintegrating them into civic society across a range of political and civic rights. It also addresses reintegration’s important role in ameliorating the racial scars of American criminal punishment.

A growing trend in philosophical commentary about penal justice is what I loosely call “criminal law skepticism.” The scholarship I have in mind does not simply urge caution or a more judicious use of the criminal law to address social problems. Instead, its thrust is more sweeping and radical; it presents reasons to doubt that the criminal law as presently constituted should continue to exist at all. I make no concerted effort to categorize the several varieties or motivations for this trend; their forms and underlying rationales are diverse and frequently humane. No single argument can refute them all. Instead, I respond by describing the price that might be incurred if these skeptics were to achieve their objective. I list ten valuable functions served by the criminal law as it currently exists, several of which are too seldom appreciated in philosophical commentary. No case for criminal law skepticism is complete unless efforts are made to explain how alternatives to the criminal law can achieve these functions or afford to dispense with them.

Responsibilities to protect and prevent elite crimes are best energized by enforcement that walks through many doors. Effective deterrence is rarely delivered by the International Criminal Court. Yet deterrence is possible when it patiently cumulates through many doors. Likewise truth, justice, and reconciliation can achieve little through one door and much through many. Opening more doors to the complexly cross-cutting character of survivor guilt with mass atrocities can better open possibilities for future prevention and reconciliation than simply doors to courtrooms that find a criminal on one side of complex sequences of atrocity. The Nuremberg and Tokyo War Crimes Trials opened quickly after World War II. They did not prove to hold keys to truth and reconciliation for Germany until the Eichmann trial finished in Jerusalem in 1962. Why? Still today, non-confession by the U.S. to Hiroshima/Nagasaki as war crimes has meant truncated Japanese reconciliation. Different kinds of doors are needed with crimes like the Dresden and Tokyo fire bombing, the rape of Nanjing and the “comfort women” issue. These have included citizens tribunals, truth commissions, and indigenous justice in cases like Bougainville that rejected the truth commission model. When we reflect upon door diversity, transitional justice turns out not to be very focused on justice or international criminal law, and not to be at all transitional, but rather a maze of doors to justice of diverse kinds that open or close across the longue durée (as developed in the work of Susanne Karstedt). 1