Advocacy in Constitutional Choice: The Cramer Treason Case, 1942–1945

How did advocacy at each level of the federal judiciary help shape the leading decision in American law of treason? This article, adapted from a forthcoming biography of Judge Harold R. Medina, is a case study based on Justice Department archives and the personal papers of Medina, Charles Fahy, and seven Supreme Court Justices. It analyzes the whole case, from the lawyers’standpoint, to illuminate the role of counsel in transforming a minor wartime incident into the first treason case decided on the merits by the Supreme Court and the tribunal's only decision during World War II to limit constitutional war powers. Accenting litigation strategy and the use of history in constitutional interpretation, it is a story also of the struggle by counsel on both sides of the case to uphold high professional standards amid the passions of total war.     

When courts and experts disagree: Discordance between insanity recommendations and adjudications

Discordance between state examiner recommendations of culpability and subsequent insanity adjudications was investigated. The discordant group was compared with groups of defendants where concordance occurred between recommendation and adjudication. Data were collected from casefile materials (totalN=80) and comparisons were made on defendant's background, the offense, and the forensic evaluation. To determine how purposeful and goal directed the offense was, offenses were rated on a rationality scale. Results indicated that defendants in the discordance group committed emotionally charged or unusual offenses, were likely to have a psychiatric history (65%) and were more likely to have been found incompetent to stand trial than defendants recommended and adjudicated culpable. The discordant group was dissimilar to defendants recommended and adjudicated insane in frequency of prior felony arrest (65%), alcohol/drug use at time of offense (55%), paucity of psychosis (20%) and higher frequency of claimed amnesia (35%). On the rationality scale, discordant defendants were intermediate between those defendants recommended and adjudicated insane, who typically committed irrational offenses, and those defendants recommended and adjudicated culpable, who typically committed purposeful and goal directed offenses.     

State Courts, the U.S. Supreme Court, and the Protection of Civil Liberties

Advocates of federalism, both in the United States and elsewhere, often cite the potential for enhanced protection of individual civil liberties as an emerging rationale for a federal system dividing governmental responsibilities between central and regional governments and central and regional judiciaries. Echoing this, some judicial officials and scholars, confronting an increasingly conservative U.S. Supreme Court, have called for state supreme courts to use the state constitutional grounds to preserve and increase the protections of the Bill of Rights. Using event count analysis, we examine state search-and-seizure cases for 1981 to 1993 to ascertain under what circumstances state courts would use this opportunity to eliminate Supreme Court review. We find that the relative ideological position of the state supreme courts and the U.S. Supreme Court often prevents, or does away with the need for, liberal courts to use the adequate and independent state grounds doctrine to expand the rights of criminal defendants and that state supreme court justices react more predictably in the assertion of constitutional protection law than the general consensus suggests.     

Some Reflections on the Practice of Mediation

Negotiation Journal -     

Reviews

Vladimir Shlapentokh, Soviet Intellectuals and Political Power: The Post‐Stalin Era. London: I. B. Tauris & Co. Ltd., 1990, xiv + 321 pp., £19.95

Jadwiga Staniszkis, The Dynamics of the Breakthrough in Eastern Europe. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1991, xiii + 303 pp., £25.00, $35.00.

Richard Sakwa, Gorbachev and his Reforms, 1985–1990. London: Philip Allan, 1990, xiv + 459 pp., £35.00 h/b, £12.95 p/b.

Julian Cooper, The Soviet Defence Industry: Conversion and Reform. London: Pinter Publishers, 1991, ix + 111 pp., £22.50 h/b, £8.95 p/b.

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Marsha Siefert, ed., Mass Culture and Perestroika in the Soviet Union. New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991, 200 pp., $35.00.

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