Forum

Lawyers’ Monopoly and the Promises of AI

Access to justice in American civil courts won’t come through free or pro bono lawyers. To drive down costs, we need to loosen bar regulation and streamline procedures. And we should embrace technology and AI responsibly to give more people the legal help they need but can’t afford.

Forum

Victims Versus the State’s Monopoly on Punishment?

Gabriel Mendlow rightly argues that victims deserve larger roles in criminal justice, but mistakenly hints that they deserve exclusive control. Communities are also harmed by crimes and have standing to punish them. This Essay argues that criminal procedure should return to its roots as a communal m…

Forum

Taming Negotiated Justice

**This Essay is part of a Yale Law Journal Online series called "Summary Judgment," featuring short commentaries on recent Supreme Court cases.**

After four decades of neglecting laissez-faire plea bargaining, the Supreme Court got it right. In Missouri v. Frye¹ and Lafler v. Cooper,² the Court rec…

Essay

Integrating Remorse and Apology into Criminal Procedure

114 Yale L.J. 85 (2004)

Criminal procedure largely ignores remorse and apology or, at most, uses them as proxies for an individual defendant's badness. The field is preoccupied with procedural values such as efficiency, accuracy, and procedural fairness, to the exclusion of the criminal law's substan…

Article

Judicial Fact-Finding and Sentence Enhancements in a World of Guilty Pleas

110 Yale L.J. 1097 (2001)

Last June, in Apprendi v. New Jersey, the Supreme Court held that any fact that increases a defendant's statutory maximum sentence must be proved to a jury beyond a reasonable doubt. This rule, like most of criminal procedure law and scholarship, rests on the assumption that…