Law Review at Washington University in St. Louis

Compassionate Homicide

Michal Buchhandler-Raphael

Ample psychological studies demonstrate that emotions provide reasons for action and are powerful drivers of a host of behaviors, including criminal acts. Studies further establish that experiencing intense emotions might impair actors’ judgment and decision-making, sometimes culminating in committing homicide. Existing…

Constraining the Statutory President

Kathryn E. Kovacs

When agencies make decisions that are binding on the public, they must provide public notice, accept and consider public comments, and provide explanations for their final decisions. Their actions are then subject to judicial review to ensure that they acted…

Justice by Luck: How Unclear Records Force Some Unlucky Prisoners to Serve Unconstitutional Sentences in the Wake of Johnson v. United States

Nicholas C. Coyle

The Armed Career Criminal Act (ACCA) imposes mandatory minimum sentences on individuals convicted of being a felon in possession of a firearm who have at least three prior convictions for “violent felon[ies].” “Violent felon[ies]” include those crimes contemplated by the…

Lies Behind Bars: An Analysis of the Problematic Reliance on Jailhouse Informant Testimony in the Criminal Justice System and a Texas-Sized Attempt to Address the Issue

Luke G. Allen

The advent of DNA technology in the late 1980s led to a wave of exonerations in the United States, shedding light on major problems with the U.S. criminal justice system. Many of these wrongful convictions were traced back to criminal…

Payday

Yonathan A. Arbel

Legislation lags behind technology all too often. While trillions of dollars are exchanged in online transactions—safely, cheaply, and instantaneously—workers still must wait two weeks to a month to receive payments from their employers. In the modern economy, workers are effectively lending…

The Court and the Suspect: Human Frailty, the Calculating Criminal, and the Penitent in the Interrogation Room

Scott E. Sundby

Acknowledgments as a Window Into Legal Academia

Jonathan I. Tietz and W. Nicholson Price

Legal scholarship in the United States is an oddity—an institution built on student editorship, a lack of peer review, and a dramatically high proportion of solo authorship. It is often argued that this makes legal scholarship fundamentally different from scholarship…