This is an archived course. A more recent version may be available at ocw.mit.edu.

Readings

Required Texts

Buy at Amazon Bogira, Steve. Courtroom 302: A Year Behind the Scenes in an American Criminal Courthouse. Reprint ed. New York, NY: Vintage, 2006. ISBN: 9780679752066.

Buy at Amazon Cole, David. Enemy Aliens: Double Standards and Constitutional Freedoms in the War on Terrorism. New York, NY: New Press, 2005. ISBN: 9781565849389.

Readings by Session

SES # TOPICS READINGS
Part one: Introduction to American criminal law
1 The everyday world of American criminal justice Bogira, Steve. Courtroom 302, pp. 3-170.
2 Bogira, Steve. Courtroom 302, pp. 171-347.
3 Politics, procedure, and punishment in American criminal law

Stuntz, William J. "Political Constitution of Criminal Justice." Harvard Law Review 119 (2006): 780. (This resource may not render correctly in a screen reader.PDF)

Whitman, James Q. "A Plea Against Retributivism." Buffalo Criminal Law Review 7, no. 1 (2003): 85. (This resource may not render correctly in a screen reader.PDF)

Optional

Stuntz, William J. "Pathological Politics of Criminal Justice." Michigan Law Review 100 (2001): 505.
4 Perspectives on the race-crime nexus

Buy at Amazon Kennedy, Randall. Race, Crime, and the Law. Reprint ed. New York, NY: Vintage, 1998, chapter 4. ISBN: 9780375701849.

Buy at Amazon Sampson, Robert J., and William Julius Wilson. "Toward a Theory of Race, Crime, and Urban Inequality." In Crime and Inequality. Edited by John Hagan and Ruth D. Peterson. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995. ISBN: 9780804724777.

Steiker, Carol. "Why We're So Tough on Crime." Boston Review (October/November 2003).

Wacquant, Loïc. "Deadly Symbiosis." Boston Review (April/May 2002).
Part two: Case studies
5 Capital punishment

McKleskey v. Kemp, 481 U.S. 279 (1987).

Sunstein, Cass R., and Vermeule, Adrian. "Is Capital Punishment Morally Required? The Relevance of Life-Life Tradeoffs." University of Chicago Law & Economics, Olin Working Paper No. 239; AEI-Brookings Joint Center Working Paper No. 05-06; University of Chicago, Public Law Working Paper No. 85. March 2005.

Buy at Amazon Bright, Stephen B. "Death, Discrimination, and Denial: The Tolerance of Racial Discrimination in Infliction of the Death Penalty." In From Lynch Mobs to the Killing State: Race and the Death Penalty in America. Edited by Charles J. Ogletree, Jr. and Austin Sarat. New York, NY: New York University Press, 2006. ISBN: 9780814740224.

Optional

Buy at Amazon Banner, Stuart. "Traces of Slavery: Race and the Death Penalty in Historical Perspective." In From Lynch Mobs to the Killing State: Race and the Death Penalty in America. Edited by Charles J. Ogletree, Jr. and Austin Sarat. New York, NY: New York University Press, 2006. ISBN: 9780814740224.
6 Felon disenfranchisement

Buy at Amazon Manza, Jeff, and Christopher Uggen. Locked Out: Felon Disenfranchisement and American Democracy. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2006, pp. 3-94 and 221-23. ISBN: 9780195149326.

The Sentencing Project. "Felony Disenfranchisement Laws in the United States." April 2007. (PDF - 3.3MB)

Johnson v. Governor of Florida, 405 F.3d 1214 (11th Cir. 2005). Guide to the case from the Brennan School of Justice at New York University School of Law.
7 The war on drugs and the question of sentencing disparities

Stuntz, William J. "Race, Class, and Drugs." Columbia Law Review 98 (1998): 1795.

Selected testimony before the U.S. Sentencing Commission, November 14, 2006. (This resource may not render correctly in a screen reader.PDF)

Buy at Amazon Roberts, Dorothy. "Making Reproduction a Crime." Chapter 4 in Killing the Black Body. New York, NY: Vintage, 1998. ISBN: 9780679758693.

Meares, Tracey L. "Social Organization and Drug Law Enforcement." American Criminal Law Review 35 (1998): 191.
8 Illegal immigration

Chae Chan Ping v. United States, 130 U.S. 581 (1889).

Ngai, Mae M. "The Strange Career of the Illegal Alien: Immigration Restriction and Deportation Policy in the United States, 1921-1956." Law and History Review 21, no. 1 (2003).

Buy at Amazon ———. Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004, introduction. ISBN: 9780691124292.

Buy at Amazon Zolberg, Aristide. A Nation by Design: Immigration Policy in the Fashioning of America. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006, pp. 382-459. ISBN: 9780674022188.

Optional

Ngai, Mae M. "The Lost Immigration Debate." Boston Review (September/October 2006).
Part three: Race, citizenship, and national security
9 Japanese internment during world war two and its legacies

Korematsu v. United States, 323 U.S. 214 (1944).

Ex Parte Endo, 323 U.S. 283 (1944).

Ghachem, Malick W., and Daniel Gordon. "From Emergency Law to Legal Process: Herbert Wechsler and the Second World War." Suffolk University Law Review (forthcoming 2007).

Cole, David. Enemy Aliens, pp. 85-104.

Saito, Natsu Taylor. "Symbolism under Siege: Japanese American Redress and the 'Racing' of Arab Americans as Terrorists." Asian Law Journal 8, no. 1 (2001).
10 Race, religion, and profiling

Stuntz, William J. "Local Policing after the Terror." Yale Law Journal 111 (2002): 2137.

Gross, Samuel R., and Debra Livingston. "Racial Profiling under Attack." Columbia Law Review 102 (2002): 1413.

Cole, David. Enemy Aliens, pp. 47-56.

Sander, Libby. "6 Imams Removed from Flight for Behavior Deemed Suspicious." The New York Times, November 22, 2006.

"Flying while Muslim." WBUR Here and Now report, November 22, 2006.
11 Preemptive strategies in the war on terror

Cole, David. Enemy Aliens, pp. 1-46, 57-82, and 159-79.

Waldman, Amy. "Prophetic Justice." Atlantic Monthly (October 2006).

Remarks of Deputy Attorney General Paul J. McNulty at the American Enterprise Institute (May 24, 2006).

Neuman, Gerald. "Real Security Concerns." Boston Review (December 2002/January 2003).

Grinstein, Joseph. "Jihad and the Constitution: The First Amendment Implications of Combating Religiously Motivated Terrorism." Yale Law Journal 105 (1996): 1347.

Optional

The Center on Law on Security, New York University. "Terrorist Trial Report Card." 2006. (PDF)
12 Aliens and citizens at the bar of the Supreme Court

Cole, David. Enemy Aliens, pp. 211-233.

Hamdi v. Rumsfeld, 542 U.S. 507 (2004).

Rasul v. Bush, 542 U.S. 466 (2004).

Rumsfeld v. Padilla, 542 U.S. 246 (2004).

Indictment in United States v. Jose Padilla et al. (Southern District of Florida, No. 04-60001). (This resource may not render correctly in a screen reader.PDF)