Should a Bully Serve 10 Years?
A fun thing about law school is that you get to debate, with your classmates and professors, hot button legal issues in real time as they arise in the media.
Earlier this week, senior editor at Slate Emily Bazelon (who also teaches fantastic op-ed writing workshops at Yale Law School, by the way) published an op-ed in the Times on how the application of civil rights laws has become too far-reaching. Young people who act meanly, but not violently, are being prosecuted under these broadly written laws and, in turn, receiving sentences that are disproportionate (she argues) to their offenses. (Here’s the full article).
What do you make of this?
No doubt, many of you engage in discussions about issues like this one outside of law school. Say, at your family dinner table:
Uncle Frank: Did you hear? Some kid got 10 years for using a web cam!
Aunt Lucille: What’s a web cam?
Aunt Gladys: He didn’t GET 10 years, Frank. He COULD get 10 years. Read.
Uncle Frank: Whatever! Just because he doesn’t like gays. He’s entitled to his own opinion.
Aunt Lucille: More potatoes, anyone?
You get the idea. These conversations can become real wild, real fast.
In law school, the perspective is a little different. You’re looking at a question like the one Bazelon presents from the perspective of someone whose future career is to interpret–and perhaps shape or challenge–the law. Here are a couple of ways in which this issue might arise in conversation at law school among students and/or professors.
1. Bazelon writes, “Because [a Massachusetts civil rights statute] was broadly written, like New Jersey’s, prosecutors could seize upon the law because it ‘sent a message’ about bullying.”
To what extent should prosecution of individuals be used to “send a message”? If the purpose of the criminal justice system is deterrence (arguable in itself), and “sending a message” deters, are we comfortable with singling out individuals to prosecute as symbols? Or is it better to appropriate punishment solely in reference to an individual’s crime, apart from whatever society, at large, may need to learn?
2. Bazelon ends with the recommendation, “States like New Jersey and Massachusetts should narrow their civil rights laws so that [the kid she talks about] is not the first of many stupid but nonviolent young people who pay a too-heavy price for our fears about how kids use technology to be cruel.”
What are the risks of more narrowly written civil rights laws? Are there ways in which confining such a law, for example, to include only violent crimes could fail to provide a grounds for prosecuting cases that should, in line with civil rights policy and theory, be prosecuted?
If these sound like fun questions to debate, you have a lot to look forward to in law school!
Mary Adkins is one of Manhattan LSAT’s 99th percentile rock star instructors based out of New York City. She’s also available for Private Tutoring, both in NYC and Live Online.