Tag: Corda

CCRC scholarship round-up – August 2019

Editor’s note:  This past year has seen a burgeoning of scholarship dealing with collateral consequences broadly defined, from lawyers, social scientists, and philosophers.  CCRC’s good friend Alessandro Corda has selected fifteen notable articles published in 2018-19, with information, links, and abstracts.  They are organized into five categories: (1) Legal collateral consequences (2) Collateral consequences and criminal procedure (3) Sex offender registration laws (4) Informal collateral consequences (5) Criminal records, expungement, sealing, and other relief mechanisms A complete and regularly updated collection of scholarship on issues relating to collateral consequences and criminal records can be found on our “Books & Articles” page. …

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Commercializing criminal records and the privatization of punishment

The deeply ingrained, indeed, constitutionally protected, U.S. tradition of the public trial and public records has led to a system where there are few restrictions on public access to criminal record information.  Europe, by contrast, is more willing to limit the press in service of important goals such as reintegration of people with convictions. Alessandro Corda and Sarah E. Lageson have published an important new study on how this works on the ground.  Disordered Punishment: Workaround Technologies of Criminal Records Disclosure and The Rise of A New Penal Entrepreneurialism, in the British Journal of Criminology, explains how these traditions play…

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Landmark criminal record disclosure case in the UK Supreme Court

Court litigation and policy debate revolving around the issue of criminal record disclosure are not unique to the United States. Especially in the United Kingdom, the past few years have witnessed important court decisions on the legal framework in place regulating access to criminal history information and the amount of information that can be obtained by third parties. For people with criminal records in the United Kingdom, last month was pretty significant.  This is why I am very happy to post on the CCRC blog a commentary on recent litigation before the UK Supreme Court authored by Christopher Stacey, co-director of…

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“More Justice and Less Harm: Reinventing Access to Criminal History Records”

This is the title of an important new article published by Alessandro Corda in the Howard Law Journal proposing a radical way of addressing the malign social impact of our current policies on public access to arrest and conviction records.  Corda traces the evolution of record dissemination policies and practices since the 1950s, contrasting the American and European experience where “informal collateral consequences” are concerned.  He critiques “partial remedial measures” like expungement and certificates of rehabilitation, and argues for making publication of a defendant’s record an “ancillary sanction” ordered (or not) by the court at sentencing. While this solution may…

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