L&C in the Media

When it comes to criminal cases, “Judges tend to sentence noncitizens to longer sentences than U.S. citizens,” notes L&C Professor Juliet Stumpf, an expert on the intersection of immigration and criminal justice. Now, Congress is considering a bill that would add extra prison time to all undocumented immigrants convicted of felonies in state and federal court. “That would be a serious departure from the principles of our nation’s criminal law system,” Stumpf says, “which focus on a person’s actions, not their status, when imposing punishment.”

Mount Fuji is a national and cultural icon of Japan. But that wasn’t always the case, explains L&C Professor Andrew Bernstein. His new book is a biography of the mountain, providing a geological, environmental, religious, and cultural history that stretches from the Paleolithic to the Anthropocene.

Founded and led by current and former Lewis & Clark undergraduates, the nonprofit Nutrition Inside is dedicated to improving the quality of food for adults in custody in Oregon prisons. Each week, Nutrition Inside volunteers deliver between 500 and 3,000 pounds of food to correctional facilities across the state.

Matthew Bergman, an alumnus and Trustee of Lewis & Clark Law School, has become a go-to lawyer for families who say their children have been harmed by social media. As founder of founder of the Social Media Victims Law Center (SMVLC), his clients include the parents of kids who have died by suicide and drug overdoses, kids who have allegedly been groomed and sexually abused by predators they met online, and kids who have developed debilitating anorexia. Last week, the SMVLC filed seven cases against OpenAI.

In Washington’s Yakima River Basic, as in many watersheds across the west, people own the rights to more water than actually exists, leading to what Lewis & Clark Professor Karen Russell calls the ‘hydroillogical cycle.’ The resulting adjudication is a legal process prioritizing those with competing claims to water rights, to determine whose water will get cut – potentially leaving Tribes, communities, or fish and other species without sufficient water.

Can an NBA team fire a coach who’s been indicted on federal charges? As Lewis & Clark Professor Keith Cunningham-Parmeter notes, the Portland Trail Blazers don’t necessarily need to wait for a conviction or plea deal  to fire head coach Chauncey Ray Billups. ‘‘’Innocent until proven guilty’ is a criminal law standard and the prosecutors will have to satisfy that to convict him.” But the standard for what employers can judge workplace misconduct on is entirely different, with a lot of discretion in determining what is and isn’t just cause for a dismissal.

The Oregon Health Authority has delayed an innovative program that would have provided health services to people being released from jail or prison – with potentially devastating consequences. “Almost every single person in Oregon’s prison system is going to get out at some point,” explains Lewis & Clark Professor Aliza Kaplan. “If they don’t have the services they need, the treatment they need, the housing they need, then they’re not going to be successful.” 

At age 60, Calvin Duncan earned his law degree from Lewis & Clark – after having spent decades in prison for a wrongful conviction. As Duncan explains, it was the effort to prove his innocence and assist his fellow prisoners that inspired his career as a lawyer.