Print Issues

Volume 62, Issue 4


Article

Mapped Out of Local Democracy

by  Michelle Wilde Anderson

In the novel Sula, Toni Morrison describes a neighborhood known locally as the Bottom, where the black community lived. It was "the hilly land, where planting was backbreaking, where the soil slid down and washed away the seeds, and where the wind lingered all through the winter." We know such Bottoms. We have seen neighborhoods forsaken…

Article

Applying the Fourth Amendment to the Internet

A General Approach
by  Orin S. Kerr

This Article offers a general framework for applying the Fourth Amendment to the Internet. It assumes that courts will seek a technology-neutral translation of Fourth Amendment principles from physical space to cyberspace, and it considers what new distinctions in the online setting can reflect the function of Fourth Amendment protections designed for the physical world.…

Article

The Substance of False Confessions

by  Brandon L. Garrett

A puzzle is raised by cases of false confessions: How could an innocent person convincingly confess to a crime? Postconviction DNA testing has now exonerated over 250 convicts, more than forty of whom falsely confessed to rapes and murders. As a result, there is a new awareness that innocent people falsely confess, often due to…

Article

Through a Scanner Darkly

Functional Neuroimaging as Evidence of Criminal Defendant's Past Mental States
by  Teneille Brown & Emily Murphy

As with phrenology and the polygraph, society is again confronted with a device that the media claims is capable of reading our minds. Functional magnetic resonance imaging ("fMRI"), along with other types of functional brain imaging technologies, is currently being introduced at various stages of a criminal trial as evidence of a defendant's past mental…