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Interrogation Stories

The article poses questions about police interrogations that go beyond the furor over Miranda v. Arizona and even beyond the controversy over the a voluntariness standard for judging the admissibility of confessions in criminal cases. According to these debates, police interrogations have the potential to provide true answers to the historical questions of who-done-it, how, when, where, and why. The paper argues that the police confessional is a space where the truth is produced by the interrogator’s strategic use of narratives that exploit popular ways of thinking about the gap between legal liability and moral culpability for criminal misconduct. The project was motivated by the rhetorical strategies promoted by police interrogation experts for use in rape cases. 

The agenda is positive and normative. As for the positive, my plan is to describe what interrogation stories teach us about the character of police investigations as a device for recovering historical truth. Is the cop a species of archeologist, one who digs through layers of accumulated dirt to uncover a hidden crime? Interrogation stories suggest not. The interrogator is master author or improvisational playwright, one who is comfortable batting around potential plot lines with his leading actors before getting them to sign off on the final script. If author or playwright is the apt analogy, police interrogators do not merely find facts that are buried out there somewhere, just waiting for the alert detective to come along and excavate them. Rather, by using narrative scripts, cops actively shape the meaning of facts by helping suspects embed them in a coherent narrative that coincides with our ethical judgments about which acts are blameworthy and which are not. 

As for the normative, the essay will offer speculations about the value-laden connections between police investigatory practices and the substantive mandates they ostensibly serve. Rape interrogations are a poignant context in which to explore these connections, as we see the police persuading perpetrators to confess by using the very same victim-blaming stories that the rape reform movement has aimed to expunge from substantive prohibitions, courtrooms, popular culture, and, ultimately, from the heads and hearts of human beings.

Separate, But Equal? Virginia’s “Independent” Cities and the Purported Virtues of Voluntary Interlocal Agreements

Some public choice-influenced scholars claim that voluntary interlocal bargaining can effectively address city-suburb wealth disparities. On this view, economic interdependence encourages (comparatively) affluent suburbs to enter into “burden-sharing” agreements with cities, diminishing the need for so-called regional governments. This perspective holds that Virginia’s distinctive system of city-county separation is uniquely well-suited to the formation of such agreements. Interlocal burden sharing is rare in Virginia, however, and proponents’ example of such burden sharing—a tax base sharing scheme between Charlottesville and Albemarle County—is deficient in several respects.

This Note thus challenges the invocation of Virginia as a model to which other states might aspire. The paucity of burden sharing and the deficiencies of existing agreements stem from two weaknesses in the bargaining thesis. First, the conditions necessary to bargaining are frequently absent. For instance, Virginia’s annexation moratorium eviscerates cities’ bargaining power against counties. Second, and more fundamentally, the bargaining thesis neglects structural disincentives to bargaining resulting from Virginia’s system.

The weaknesses of the bargaining thesis have important repercussions for addressing interlocal inequities. Although some call for regional governments to cure disparities, such reforms are substantively undesirable and politically unfeasible. Similarly, Virginia’s now-dormant annexation system was problematic. Although annexation enhanced cities’ bargaining power, it also produced bitter conflicts. The annexation system also failed to promote significant burden sharing. Several reforms would realign suburban counties’ bargaining incentives, providing a means by which existing governmental entities can address metropolitan disparities. 

Originality

In this Essay we introduce a model of copyright law that calibrates authors’ rights and liabilities to the level of originality in their works. We advocate this model as a substitute for the extant regime that unjustly and inefficiently grants equal protection to all works satisfying the “modicum of creativity” standard. Under our model, highly original works will receive enhanced protection and their authors will also be sheltered from suits by owners of preexisting works. Conversely, authors of less original works will receive diminished protection and incur greater exposure to copyright liability. We operationalize this proposal by designing separate rules for highly original works, for works exhibiting average originality, and for works that are minimally original or unoriginal. We illustrate our rules’ application by showing how they could have altered court decisions in classic copyright cases in a socially beneficial way.

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