Links of Interest
What We Read, June 13-17, 2011
Criminal Justice Court Reform:
- SCotUS Blog analyzes the 5-4 decision in J.D.B. v. North Carolina (.pdf), in which the Court has ruled for the first time that police must take into account the age of a youth they intend to question when deciding whether or not they must inform the youth of his or her Constitutional rights.
- The ACLU takes the 40th Anniversary of President Richard Nixon’s declaration of a “war on drugs” to ask “What’s Wrong with the War on Drugs?”
Judicial Elections and Judiciary Reform:
- An editorial at the New York Times advocates an ordered approach to recusal rules and admonishes Illinois for having “nothing to keep campaign cash from tainting the courtroom.” The editorial to points to the Brennan Center recommendations (.pdf) on judicial recusal, which we at Chicago Appleseed are an excellent starting point.
- Justice At Stake looks at the broader implications of the federal court ruling that a gay judge did not have to remove himself from a high-profile same-sex marriage case in California.
- We ran across this older, but interesting, analysis of the dichotomy between judicial independence and accountability and how it creates problems in judicial evaluations in the Denver University Law Review (.pdf). We believe an objective process of judicial evaluation can promote accountability without sacrificing judicial independence.