Dalton Primeaux

Volume 27.1 (download PDF)

Abstract

Many public safety advocates have called for the use of police body cameras to document the interactions between officers and the public. In light of the documented incidents of police violence and misconduct, some advocates and policy experts have urged law enforcement to use body cameras to discourage future wrongdoing and create a record of when such incidents do happen. In some states, body camera footage is considered public record and can be obtained upon request. Most policies concerning requests for the release of body camera footage require the chief of police to grant permission for sharing the video with parties outside of the police department, but there is little guidance regarding if and when distribution should be allowed. As a result, victims are at risk of complete exposure during incredibly vulnerable moments in their lives. Protecting the privacy of victims and others captured in footage is one concern undergirding resistance to expanding such programs.

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Sayid R. Bnefsi

Volume 27.1 (download PDF)

Abstract

The access to justice movement broadly concerns people’s ability to resolve legally actionable problems. To the extent that individuals seek resolution through civil litigation, they can be disadvantaged by their unmet need for legal services, particularly in high-stakes cases and complicated areas of law. In part, this is because legal services and litigation are cost-prohibitive, especially for indigent plaintiffs. As a result, these individuals are priced out of litigation and, by extension, unable to use law to seek justice.

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Roni Amit

Volume 27.1 (download PDF)

Abstract

Marginalized individuals are largely excluded from making rights claims in the courts because their stories of rights violations fall outside of prescribed legal categories. Framing this exclusion as a lack of knowledge and access, proponents of the access to justice movement have sought to improve outcomes for unrepresented and marginalized litigants through measures that help them understand and navigate the system. The access to justice movement seeks to make the justice system more accessible to these litigants by focusing on procedural fairness. This Article draws on empirical data and observations from Tulsa’s eviction court to consider the limits of access to justice measures focused on process, including representation. It calls for an expanded understanding of access to justice that incorporates the rights claims of marginalized individuals. Asking how lawyers representing marginalized clients can best advocate for their clients’ rights and achieve social change, it draws on the law and social change literature around legal mobilization.

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Tolu Lawal and Al Brooks

Volume 27.1 (download PDF)

Abstract

The Character and Fitness process is the last major institutional hurdle that aspiring attorneys must overcome to gain licensure to the legal profession. A process held out to determine “moral” character, the Character and Fitness often goes uninterrogated, instead flattened into just a quotidian and inconvenient aspect of the profession’s admission procedures. However, the normalization of both the process and existence of the Character and Fitness obscures the reality that this unscientific process neither has particularized, inherent value to the profession nor is an accurate tool of determining the moral or ethical principles of potential attorneys. Instead, the advocacy of racial justice organizers and the scholarship of critical legal theorists in recent years have exposed the true nature of the Character and Fitness as a tool of exclusion, which molds the legal field and law in the White man’s image.

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