Edmonds on Why We Should Stop Talking About Violent Offenders: Storytelling and Decarceration @UMichLaw @nulawreview

Mira Edmonds, University of Michigan Law School, is publishing Why We Should Stop Talking About Violent Offenders: Storytelling and Decarceration in the Northeastern University Law School. Here is the abstract.

The movement to decarcerate risks foundering because of its failure to grapple with so-called “violent offenders,” who make up nearly half of U.S. prisoners. The treatment of people serving sentences for offenses categorized as violent is a primary reason for the continued problem of mass incarceration, despite widespread awareness of the phenomenon and significant bipartisan interest in its reduction. People convicted of “violent offenses” are serving historically anomalous and excessively long sentences, are generally denied clemency and compassionate release, and are excluded from a wide array of legal reform and policy changes with decarceral aims. Keeping these people in prison for life or near life sentences is extraordinarily expensive for state budgets, largely unnecessary from a public safety perspective, and cruel and unusual punishment from the viewpoint of international and historical standards. While the moral imperative to release those serving draconian sentences for nonviolent drug offenses is widely if not universally accepted, such efforts will ultimately be a drop in the bucket if we fail to address the 58% of state prisoners who are serving sentences for offenses categorized as violent. Quantitative data about the low rates of recidivism for people released after serving long sentences for violent offenses will not alone shift the focus of our policies or politics. Rather, we need to develop a more nuanced understanding of violent offenses and violent offenders by hearing the voices of people who have been directly impacted by violence and by the system’s response to violence. These are, in many cases, the same people. Their stories are complex and human, defying simplistic narratives about innocent victims and bad offenders. Storytelling offers possibilities for reconceptualizing the stale terminology around violence and for shifting the discourse. This Article draws on insights from the literature on epistemic injustice and criminal law democratization, together with the legal storytelling literature. It explores the power of storytelling as an advocacy tool in the slow work of person-by-person decarceration during back-end processes like clemency, parole, and compassionate release, as well as part of the broader movement for systemic decarceration. Storytelling is an important tool for advocates working within the system, as well as for abolitionists seeking to end the system. In some contexts, advocates and activists are best situated to tell these stories, but ultimately people should be given the opportunity and tools to tell their own stories.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

Edmonds on Why We Should Stop Talking About Violent Offenders: Storytelling and Decarceration @UMichLaw @nulawreview

Mira Edmonds, University of Michigan Law School, is publishing Why We Should Stop Talking About Violent Offenders: Storytelling and Decarceration in the Northeastern University Law Review. Here is the abstract.

The movement to decarcerate risks foundering because of its failure to grapple with so-called “violent offenders,” who make up nearly half of U.S. prisoners. The treatment of people serving sentences for offenses categorized as violent is a primary reason for the continued problem of mass incarceration, despite widespread awareness of the phenomenon and significant bipartisan interest in its reduction. People convicted of “violent offenses” are serving historically anomalous and excessively long sentences, are generally denied clemency and compassionate release, and are excluded from a wide array of legal reform and policy changes with decarceral aims. Keeping these people in prison for life or near life sentences is extraordinarily expensive for state budgets, largely unnecessary from a public safety perspective, and cruel and unusual punishment from the viewpoint of international and historical standards. While the moral imperative to release those serving draconian sentences for nonviolent drug offenses is widely if not universally accepted, such efforts will ultimately be a drop in the bucket if we fail to address the 58% of state prisoners who are serving sentences for offenses categorized as violent. Quantitative data about the low rates of recidivism for people released after serving long sentences for violent offenses will not alone shift the focus of our policies or politics. Rather, we need to develop a more nuanced understanding of violent offenses and violent offenders by hearing the voices of people who have been directly impacted by violence and by the system’s response to violence. These are, in many cases, the same people. Their stories are complex and human, defying simplistic narratives about innocent victims and bad offenders. Storytelling offers possibilities for reconceptualizing the stale terminology around violence and for shifting the discourse. This Article draws on insights from the literature on epistemic injustice and criminal law democratization, together with the legal storytelling literature. It explores the power of storytelling as an advocacy tool in the slow work of person-by-person decarceration during back-end processes like clemency, parole, and compassionate release, as well as part of the broader movement for systemic decarceration. Storytelling is an important tool for advocates working within the system, as well as for abolitionists seeking to end the system. In some contexts, advocates and activists are best situated to tell these stories, but ultimately people should be given the opportunity and tools to tell their own stories.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

Johnson and Koenig on Aristotle and the Ethics of Narrative @LoriDelaneyJ

Lori D. Johnson, UNLV School of Law, and Melissa Love Koenig, Marquette Law School, have published Walk the Line: Aristotle &  The Ethics of Narrative as an UNLV Boyd School of Law Legal Studies Research Paper and a Marquette Law School Legal Studies Paper. Here is the abstract.

Lawyers are storytellers who face tremendous pressure to persuade judges and juries of the rightness of their stories. Zealous advocacy has long been a touchstone in lawyering, but lawyers need to balance zealousness with candor to the tribunal. As narrative and storytelling have evolved in scholarship and practice as powerful tools for persuasion, lawyers can find themselves walking a delicate ethical line. The applicable Model Rules of Professional Conduct do not provide a sufficient framework for ensuring sufficient candor in the use of narrative, particularly when considering the cultural and psychological power inherent in stories. Thus, lawyers can find themselves sliding on a slippery slope into ethically actionable misrepresentation. These are not new problems, and the classics have something to teach modern lawyers using narrative to persuade. Aristotle addressed the same types of concerns in his Nicomachean Ethics and On Rhetoric. Aristotle discussed the importance of keeping one’s conduct within the “mean”—to maintain a balanced approach to one’s life and practice. He also stressed the value of using good habits to develop a person’s character. Aristotle’s wisdom can guide a lawyer who seeks to be a candid, ethical, and still zealous advocate. Thus, this Article posits that incorporating Aristotle’s concepts of virtue ethics into the Preamble of the Model Rules will provide guidance to lawyers seeking to use legal storytelling in an ethical, balanced way. Providing lawyers with intrinsic motivation to behave ethically provides a more workable framework than adding additional proscriptive requirements to the Model Rules, particularly for lawyers walking the line between truth and falsity when retelling client facts through storytelling.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

Call For Proposals: The Utopia/Dystopia Project: A Writing Workshop, UNLV School of Law, Feb. 13-14, 2020 @UNLVLaw @elmacdowell @ljewel

CALL FOR PROPOSALS

The Utopia/Dystopia Project: A Writing Workshop 

February 13-14, 2020

William S. Boyd School of Law, University of Nevada Las Vegas

There is no end / To what a living world / Will demand of you.

Octavia Butler, Parable of the Sower 

In these days of hate politics and urgent need, there is a great need for countervailing narratives and envisioning. The Utopia/Dystopia Project seeks to engage the legal imagination with utopian and dystopian art forms to decolonize mental space, reframe critical consciousness, and engender deep resistance. Project organizers believe that this art has much to teach the legal academy about understanding contemporary politics and re-organizing and re-envisioning what comes next. Popular utopian and dystopian narratives may illuminate truth and sharpen our vision. Indeed, the most critical articulations of these genres struggle with basic questions while expressing alternative visions of what could be. Speculative texts urge us to think from a different perspective than the ones we normally occupy, to live differently than we are, and to dissent from the status quo. They teach us to resist against what scares or enrages us, and to build and engender what we hope for and love. They show us that alternative possibilities for empathy, recognition, and joy may be as near as the next frame or the turn of a page. 

This Workshop follows the powerful Utopia/Dystopia Project Conference held at Tulane University School of Law in April 2019, and panels at critical legal conferences in 2018-19. Guiding questions addressed at these events included: What is law? What is justice? What are our obligations to one another? What is sacred? What is profane? What is a person? What is gender? What is sex? What is race? Must our answers be linear, inevitable, binary? Participants also engaged questions about ethics, power, and the realm of the political: How should we treat one another? What does it mean to live a good or just life? How does power structure our interactions and inevitabilities in our lives? Could power structures be other than they appear to be? How? What institutions shape our life chances/choices? What does it mean to belong or to exclude? What is self,  community, nation, other? 

Please join us for an intimate workshop to support the development of a rich, interdisciplinary legal scholarship that engages these themes. This Workshop will continue this vital dialogue with a focus on developing the participants’ ideas and scholarship toward the goal of publication. Participants will share working drafts before the Workshop and receive intensive feedback at the Workshop, as well as participate in discussions of cross-cutting ideas and issues, in a supportive environment. 

We are seeking proposals for participation. 

Participation may include academic and artistic written materials that engage socio-legal themes, storytelling in the critical race theory tradition, and speculative, utopian and/or dystopian materials, themes, or ideas. Proposals of 250-500 words should be emailed to elizabeth.macdowell@unlv.edu by Dec. 19, 2019 and include the author’s resume. Selected participants will be notified by Dec. 27. 

Working drafts will be due Jan. 24, 2020. Inquiries may be sent to Elizabeth MacDowell or another organizing committee member: Cyra Akila Choudhury, FSU College of Law;  Atiba R. Ellis, Marquette University Law School; Anthony Farley, Albany Law School; Marc-Tizoc González, St. Thomas University School of Law; Lucy Jewel, University of Tennessee College of Law; Brant Lee, University of Akron School of Law; Saru Matambanadzo, Tulane University Law School; Christian B. Sundquist, Albany Law School; and Matthew Titolo, West Virginia University College of Law.