By Ellen R Gutowski, Lisa A Goodman

Intimate partner violence (IPV) survivors seeking safety and justice for themselves and their children through family court and other legal systems may instead encounter their partners' misuse of court processes to further enact coercive control. To illuminate this harmful process, this study sought to create a measure of legal abuse. We developed a list of 27 potential items on the basis of consultation with 23 experts, qualitative interviews, and existing literature. After piloting these items, we administered them to a sample of 222 survivor-mothers who had been involved in family law proceedings. We then used both exploratory factor analysis (EFA) and Rasch analysis (RA) to create a final measure. Analyses yielded the 14-item Legal Abuse Scale (LAS). Factor analysis supported two subscales: Harm to Self/Motherhood (i.e., using the court to harm the survivor as a person and a mother) and Harm to Finances (i.e., using the court to harm the survivor financially). The LAS is a tool that will enable systematic assessment of legal abuse in family court and other legal proceedings, an expansion of research on this form of coercive control, and further development of policy and practice that recognizes and responds to it.

J Fam Violence. 2023;38(3):527-542

By The Center for Justice Innovation

In May 2024, the New York State Unified Court System, with the Center for Justice Innovation (the Center), and in partnership with the Office of the Governor of the State of New York, launched the Family Justice Initiative: Court and Community Collaboration (FJI or the Initiative). Building on the reports and analyses that have documented statewide challenges across all case types in Family Court to date, the Initiative seeks to forge a fair, equitable, and sustainable path forward for the Court and its system partners to better serve all New Yorkers. The Initiative is solutions-focused, prioritizes areas for improvement, identifies promising programs, and explores new ideas to strengthen families, reduce unnecessary system involvement, and break intergenerational cycles of trauma. The Center’s role is to support a strategic planning process to develop a broad vision for what makes an effective family-serving system, as well as a comprehensive plan to support that vision. The goal for the initial phase was to begin to develop a shared vision and objectives for the Initiative and identify concrete solutions ready for immediate implementation. This report lays out the values and goals articulated by Initiative partners to date, and the specific recommendations that emerged from extensive discussions facilitated across New York State in the first phase of the project. It also provides a preview of the next phase of work, which will include the development of working groups to pursue longer-term areas for improvement while continuing to identify concrete opportunities for investment along the way.   

New York: Center for Justice Innovation, 2025. 31p.

By Gabriele Paolini, Elena Kantorowicz-Reznichenko, Stefan Voigt

Over the last three decades, plea bargaining has been adopted by many jurisdictions worldwide. However, a comprehensive account of both its adoption as well as its use is still missing. We survey 174 jurisdictions, finding that 101 allow plea-bargaining. For 52 jurisdictions, we also compute plea-bargaining rates, as the percentage of convictions imposed through plea bargaining over all criminal convictions. Relying on this novel dataset, we find that Muslim-majority populations and the French and Scandinavian legal origins are associated with lower probabilities of formalizing plea bargaining, while democracies are associated with higher probabilities. The Spanish and Socialist legal origins, a looser regulation of the procedure, and jury trials are associated with higher plea-bargaining rates, while higher income levels correlate with higher plea-bargaining rates only up to a certain point.

Journal of Empirical Legal Studies, Volume22, Issue1, March 2025, Pages 27-75

By Allison P. Harris

How does racial diversity impact institutional outcomes and (in)equality? Discussions about diversity usually focus on how individuals’ identities shape their behavior, but diversity is a group-level characteristic. Scholars must, therefore, consider the relationship between group composition and the individual decisions that shape institutional outcomes. Using felony data from a large U.S. court system, I explore the relationship between racial diversity among the judges comprising a court and individual judges’ decisions. I find that as the percent of Black judges in a courthouse increases white judges are less likely to render incarceration sentences in cases with Black defendants. Increases in racial diversity decrease the Black–white gap in the probability of incarceration by up to 7 percentage points. However, I find no relationship between judge’s racial identities and disparities in their decisions. This study highlights the importance of conceptualizing diversity as a group characteristic and the relationship between institutional context and outcomes.

American Political Science Review, 2023, 16 pages

By R. Michael Cassidy

Disciplining individual prosecutors will never be enough to overcome the multifarious incentives prosecutors have to cut corners to secure convictions. Although bar discipline against prosecutors is increasing in frequency, professional regulators tend to focus on individual actors rather than paying attention to systemic failures.

No single instance of prosecutorial misconduct—revealed perhaps by the reversal of a criminal case or the exoneration of an innocent defendant—can ever be fully explained by the deeds of a lone actor without looking at who establishes enforcement priorities, who sets office policies, and who does the training. Leaders in the office are usually involved, either by omission (failing to catch an error) or commission (creating an office culture where ethical lapses are tolerated or even encouraged).

The predominance of collective action and shared responsibility in business organizations often makes it difficult to pinpoint criminal liability. That challenge is addressed through the “responsible corporate officer” doctrine in criminal law, which holds executive-level individuals accountable for the wrongdoing to which they contributed, whether through commission or omission. Prosecutor’s offices are organizations with structures and incentives not dissimilar to that of a corporation. Because existing frameworks for addressing prosecutorial misconduct in the criminal justice system are ineffective, bar regulators should borrow from the responsible corporate officer doctrine by more aggressively enforcing Rule 5.1 of the Rules of Professional Conduct.

The notion that supervisory attorneys must be more actively involved in their colleagues’ ethical decisions and conduct has been recognized by the bar since the adoption of ABA Model Rule 5.1 in 1983, but the rule remains undertheorized by scholars and underutilized by disciplinary authorities. This article draws on important parallels between the responsible corporate officer doctrine and Rule 5.1 to explain why enforcement of professional discipline against leaders in a prosecutor’s office is necessary to incentivize more rigorous supervision and training. The author scrutinizes two recent cases in Colorado and Massachusetts where bar regulators have successfully utilized Rule 5.1 to discipline leaders in a prosecutor’s office for failing adequately to supervise the conduct of junior associates. The author then advocates for an even more expansive use of Rule 5.1 to force head prosecutors to adopt written, transparent, and publicly available policies and procedures. Finally, the author discusses three recurring and highly intractable problems of prosecutorial discretion that could benefit from comprehensive office policy manuals: grand jury practice, disclosure of exculpatory evidence; and use of cooperating witnesses.

Oregon Law Review, Vol. 102, 2024, Boston College Law School Legal Studies Research Paper No. 614, 37 p