Home > Journals > Michigan Law Review > MLR FI > Vol. 114
Article Title
Abstract
Prisoners’ rights lawyers have long faced a dismal legal landscape. Yet, 2015 was a remarkable year for prison litigation that could signal a new period for this area of law—the Supreme Court handed down decisions that will reverberate in prison jurisprudence for decades to come. New questions have been asked, new avenues opened. This piece is about what the Court has done recently, and what possibilities it has opened for the future. More broadly, I suggest that the Court may be subjecting prison officials to greater scrutiny and that this shifting judicial landscape reflects an evolving social discourse about prison conditions and mass incarceration. With the United States leading the world in incarcerating its own people, the federal courts’ attention to prison conditions is long overdue.
Recommended Citation
David M. Shapiro,
To Seek a Newer World: Prisoners’ Rights at the Frontier,
114
Mich. L. Rev. First Impressions
124
(2016).
Available at:
https://repository.law.umich.edu/mlr_fi/vol114/iss1/1
Included in
Constitutional Law Commons, Law Enforcement and Corrections Commons, Supreme Court of the United States Commons