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4 Rutgers J.L. & Pub. Pol'y 504 (2007)
In October 2005,
Florida, a notoriously violent state, codified
its castle doctrine and doctrine of self-defense into a group of
statutes known as the “Stand Your Ground” law. This
new
statutory scheme abrogates the duty to retreat before using
deadly force and is built upon hard, bright-line rules and
presumptions that appear to do away with some of the
traditional considerations of necessity and proportionality.
Florida has “all the ingredients for . . .
disaster” with laws
involving deadly force: it is a “high-crime state with heavy
urbanization, a massively overcrowded prison system, and an
extremely diverse (and often tense) racial population.”1
Critics
of the law fear that it goes too far and will turn the state into a
modern Wild West, rather than simply secure a person’s right
to
protect himself, his family, and his fortress against wrongful
attack and intrusion. ... [ read more]
Imagine the
scene: you are sitting in your living room at
11:05 pm on a Wednesday night peacefully reading a magazine.
Suddenly, you hear police sirens blaze and a voice muffled
through a megaphone shout, “you two . . . stop right there,
don’t
move!” You toss down the magazine, run to the window, pull
back the shades, and intently look outside. You see two young
men being placed into a police car, but you do not see anything
to indicate what they have done. The next morning you tear the
local newspaper apart, eagerly searching to find out what these
boys had done. You find nothing.
Thinking that the story has not broken yet, you look again
the next morning. Still nothing. You think to yourself, “how
bizarre, the local paper prints everything that goes on in this
neighborhood.” You resign yourself to always wonder what
these boys had done, but are just thankful that your street is
safer from crime.190 However, this is a misconception. A crime
had been committed and acted upon by the police, but to the
detriment of society, not the betterment. These boys violated
your city’s non-emergency juvenile curfew by doing nothing
more than walking down your street an hour and five minutes
past the ten o’clock curfew. ... [ read more]
Imagine for a
moment that you are three years old again.
Your biological mother has been diagnosed with bipolar
disorder and your biological father left before you were born.As a
result of your mother’s inability to maintain a job, her
dramatic, often frightening mood swings, and lastly, a verbalized
threat of potential harm, the local child protective services
enters your home to remove you from the dangerous situation
and places you in the custody of the family court. Over the
course of the next year, the court makes “reasonable
efforts” to
reunite you with your biological mother. ... [ read more]
The Borgata
Hotel, Casino and Spa in Atlantic City, New
Jersey recently came under attack for the strict weight policy
that is imposed on its beverage servers. The weight requirement
provides sanctions for any employee whose weight increases by
more than seven percent from the time at which a baseline
weight was established. Critics of the policy argue that there is
no business reason to require cocktail servers to undergo
mandatory weigh-ins, and that a beverage server’s size has no
bearing on his or her ability to mix or serve a drink. According
to management, the policy was implemented as a means of
ensuring that the staff maintains an appearance that is
equivalent to their appearance as of the date on which they were
hired. ... [ read more]
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