In its seminal case Robinson v. California, the Supreme Court struck down a state statute criminalizing narcotics addiction. The Court held this statute, in criminalizing the disease of drug addiction, constituted cruel and unusual punishment prohibited by the Eighth Amendment. Six years later in Powell v. Texas, the Court declined to extend this holding to encompass alcoholism, because alcoholism involves the act of drinking rather than the status of addiction. However, the Court’s modern Eighth Amendment jurisprudence has signaled a shift in its understanding of cruel and unusual punishment. The Court has begun to take into account brain development, and its relationship to culpability, for certain classes of offenders. Neurological findings regarding the brain development involved in chronic alcoholism necessitate a similar shift in the Court’s framework for analyzing the penalization of chronic alcoholism and, given the Court’s changing stance, call into question the constitutionality of Virginia’s habitual drunkard statute. Rather than viewing alcoholism under the act-versus-status dichotomy, the Court’s Eighth Amendment proportionality analysis signals a shift towards understanding addictions such as chronic alcoholism under a non-binary framework that takes into account recent scientific understandings of addiction. Much like the Court’s shift in the juvenile and intellectual disability contexts, a similar shift should occur, this Note posits, in the Court’s proportionality analysis as applied to statutes involving chronic alcoholism. This Note concludes by calling into question the continued constitutionality of Virginia’s habitual drunkard statute under the Court’s changing jurisprudence.
Note
Mining for Meaning: An Examination of the Legality of Property Rights in Space Resources
In November 2015, the Space Resource Exploration and Utilization Act of 2015 (“SREU Act”) became law. Private space companies hoping to mine asteroids for commercial gain rejoiced. For years, such private companies had struggled to obtain adequate funding and support for their revolutionary space missions due to a lack of legal certainty regarding property rights in space under the vague legal framework of the Outer Space Treaty (“OST”). The SREU Act purportedly eliminated this uncertainty by explicitly granting U.S. citizens property rights in any asteroid or space resource recovered for commercial purposes from space.
Nevertheless, much tension remains between this unilateral grant of property rights and the international obligations of the United States under the OST. This Note concludes that the SREU Act abrogates the United States’ international obligations and that the United States should have initiated discussions at the international level first to champion a more effective and long-lasting multilateral solution. Finally, this Note finds this abrogation to be all for naught, as the law itself fails to achieve its goal of providing the private space industry with the legal certainty it so desires and requires.
“Don’t Elect Me”: Sheriffs and the Need for Reform in County Law Enforcement
Most state constitutions require that counties have an elected sheriff who serves as the county’s chief law enforcement officer. The sheriff’s office is over a thousand years old and today has strong cultural associations with independence and populism. Ironically, however, the sheriff’s office has not been studied in the legal literature on policing as an entity separate and distinct from municipal police departments. This Note attempts to remedy that deficiency by identifying the unique pathologies of the American sheriff and proposing dramatic reforms to county law enforcement.
Although his elected status creates a perception that the sheriff is a local county officer, this Note argues that this perception is inaccurate because the sheriff is independent of the county and is actually, in many important ways, an agent of the state. The sheriff’s hybrid state-and-local status creates misalignments between different levels of government that obstruct efforts to hold the sheriff accountable.
County law enforcement is in need of reform. This Note argues that elections are not functioning as an effective accountability mechanism and that county government must be given power to act as a check on county law enforcement. This Note further argues that, although the sheriff in his current form is emphatically not the officer for the job, the county is actually the best level of government at which to provide policing. This Note discusses the merits of two models of achieving consolidation of policing to the county level, with insights gleaned from America’s experiences with sheriffs.