Law & Humanities Blog


The "Gatehouses and Mansions" After Fifty Years

Posted: 17 Jun 2011 11:33 AM PDT

Richard A. Leo, University of San Francisco School of Law, and Alexa Koenig, University of California, Berkeley, School of Law, and University of San Francisco, have published The Gatehouses and Mansions: Fifty Years Later at 6 Annual Review of Law and Social Science 323 (2010). Here is the abstract.




In 1965, Yale Kamisar authored "Equal Justice in the Gatehouses and Mansions of American Criminal Procedure," an article that came to have an enormous impact on the development of criminal procedure and American norms of criminal justice. Today, that article is a seminal work of scholarship, hailed for "playing a significant part in producing some of the [Warren] Court's most important criminal-procedure decisions" ( White 2003–2004 ), including Miranda v. Arizona. The most influential concept Kamisar promoted may have been his recognition of a gap that loomed between the Constitutional rights actualized in mansions (courts) versus gatehouses (police stations). Kamisar passionately detailed how the Constitution and its jurisprudential progeny failed to protect suspects when those rights mattered most: when facing questioning by police.
This article discusses where this thesis stands today in light of nearly 50years of legal developments and social science research.The full text is not available from SSRN.

Law, Gender, and Crime

Posted: 17 Jun 2011 11:30 AM PDT

Malcolm M. Feeley, University of California, Berkeley, School of Law, and Hadar Aviram, University of California, Hastings College of the Law, have published Social Historical Studies of Women, Crime, and Courts at 6 Annual Review of Law and Social Science 151 (2010). Here is the abstract.


While traditional criminology has ignored the historical dimension of female crime, social historical literature has examined the interplay between gender and the criminal process in a variety of historical settings. This review examines studies focusing on changes in crime, prosecution, conviction, and punishment patterns over time, as well as studies in particular settings. From these studies we conclude that crime has not always been a predominantly male phenomenon and that female crime rates have changed over time. We also conclude that, within the different categories, women defendants in particular were perceived through a gendered perspective, and their criminalization and punishment, as well as its representation in popular culture, reflected this special perspective.
The full text is not available from SSRN.

The Law of the Wild

Posted: 17 Jun 2011 07:53 AM PDT

New Mexico State University President Barbara Couture posted this video encounter between her felines Petey and Ricky and a beautiful (but of course wild and anonymous) bobcat, who visited her back yard recently. I dub him or her Robin. Dr. Couture narrates the visit, but even without the voiceover, I understand the indoor kitties's bemusement at the outdoor kitty's lack of comprehension of the law of trespass. When are their humans going to do something?

[Via the Chronicle of Higher Education's Tweed].
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