Founded in 1927, Temple Law Review is a student-edited, quarterly journal dedicated to providing a forum for the expression of new legal thought and scholarly commentary on important developments, trends, and issues in the law.
Research has documented the role that implicit bias plays in the disproportionately high wrongful-conviction rate for people of color. This Article proposes a novel solution to the problem: empowering individual appellate judges, even over the dissent of two colleagues, to send cases back for a retrial when the trial record raises suspicions of a conviction […]
For centuries, the insanity defense has been one of the most hotly debated issues in criminal law. Nonetheless, scientific research shows the insanity defense is rarely used and rarely successful. Furthermore, few defendants who plead insanity have been charged with murder, and defendants found insane pose less of a danger to society than defendants found […]
“You’re in control of your child’s learning environment from the safety of your own home!” Andre’s mom repeats the Power 99 FM advertisement for Commonwealth Charter Academy to his grandmother as she maneuvers through lunch traffic, speeding to her son’s school. She has left work in the middle of the day, once again, to pick […]
This Note focuses on the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit’s decision in United States v. Safehouse, which effectively declared any such facility illegal under 21 U.S.C. § 856(a)(2) of the Controlled Substances Act. In doing so, the Safehouse majority chose an exceptionally broad interpretation of an ambiguous statute that is not […]
Nonetheless, in Mallory v. Norfolk Southern Railway Co.,15 the Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruled that the Pennsylvania business registration statute was unconstitutional. This Note argues that the Pennsylvania Supreme Court applied the wrong legal analysis by employing a Daimler due process analysis instead of a consent analysis. In doing so, the court ignored U.S. Supreme Court […]
Only days before the 2018 midterm election, President Donald Trump called immigrants, or asylum seekers, fleeing violence an “invasion.” It was not unusual for Trump to use this type of pejorative language—Trump had publicly used demeaning terms such as “predator” and “killer” to refer to immigrants at the southern border not once or twice, but […]
The Symposium was a deep dive into one pathway to assuring the conditions for optimal health and wellbeing by addressing the health-harming impact of the criminal legal system. Panelists described historical laws and policies that have resulted in inequitable outcomes for people of color and other economically and socially marginalized populations. Panelists also discussed re-envisioning […]
This punitive U.S. drug policy approach and its attendant symbolic moral crusade are commonly referred to as the “War on Drugs.” While frequently attributed to President Nixon, the inception of the War on Drugs can be traced back to the nation’s first opiate crisis in the late 1800s. Because the War on Drugs has been […]
Local governments heard their residents. In 2020, nearly half of the largest U.S. cities reoriented municipal spending priorities by directing money from their police budgets to social services;4 for many cities, these budgetary changes reversed decades of increases. Cities began implementing additional police reforms as well: New York City became the first municipality to end qualified […]
Scholars have recently cast doubt on the justifications for the criminalization of domestic violence, arguing that the criminal legal system proves inadequate in preventing future battering. Domestic violence, the argument continues, is largely a public health problem, which requires implementing noncarceral measures to effectively address it. Decriminalizing domestic violence aligns with broader reforms to defund […]