By: Jerry Yan (PO ’18) and Zachariah Oquenda (CMC ’16) FOREWORD It seems obvious that every citizen in the United States is entitled to an equally-weighted vote, regardless of age, race, sex, or socioeconomic status. But, as far as the courts are concerned, the concept of an equally-weighted vote did not emerge until relatively recently. In the early 1960s, the Supreme Court held in...
By Zachariah Oquenda (CMC ’16) While the framers of the U.S. Constitution did not create or mandate the single member plurality (SMP) system, in which voters cast a vote for one candidate only, it has remained central to the design of the U.S. electoral system for over 170 years. As David M. Farrell writes in his Electoral Systems: A Comparative Introduction, “Ultimately the main factor...
By: Zachariah J. Oquenda, CMC ’16 Beginning with Exodus and evolving into its much more complex modern form, civil forfeiture law has existed in a variety of shades of muddled legal gray area for millennia. Today, in U.S. jurisprudence, asset forfeiture comprises a two-track legal system.[i] In one track, a criminal forfeiture proceeding is brought in personam (“against the owner”).[ii] In...
