Welcome to the   Yale Law School Legal Scholarship Repository. This repository provides open, global access to the scholarship of Yale Law School faculty and jornals, as well as a selection of unique collections. 

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  • Breaking the most vulnerable branch: do rising threats to judicial independence preclude due process in capital cases?
    Bright, Stephen B. (Columbia Human Rights Law Review, 1999)
    We have been asked this morning to address whether the attacks on the judiciary and the efforts of politicians to change the judiciary so it will do things the politicians want it to do are affecting due process in capital cases. The answer to that question is yes.

  • The need for timeliness and independence to ensure fairness and the appearance of justice
    Bright, Stephen B. (South Texas Law Review, 2001)

  • Turning Celebrated Principles into Reality
    Bright, Stephen B. (National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, 2003)
    No constitutional right is celebrated so much in the abstract and observed so little in reality as the right to counsel. While leaders of the judiciary, legal profession and government give speeches every Day about the essential role of lawyers in protecting the individual rights of people accused of crimes, many states have yet to create and fund adequately independent programs for providing legal representation. As a result, some people — even people accused of felonies — enter guilty pleas and are sentenced to imprisonment without any representation. Others languish in jail for weeks or months — often for longer than any sentence they would receive — before being assigned a lawyer. Many receive only perfunctory representation — sometimes nothing more than hurried conversations with a court-appointed lawyer outside the courtroom or even in open court — before entering a guilty plea or going to trial. The poor person who is wrongfully convicted may face years in prison, or even execution, without any legal assistance to pursue avenues of post-conviction review.

  • THE RICHARD J. CHILDRESS MEMORIAL LECTURE 2016 KEYNOTE: THE CONTINUING DENIAL OF COUNSEL AND ASSEMBLY-LINE PROCESSING OF POOR PEOPLE ACCUSED OF CRIMES.
    Bright, Stephen B. (St. Louis University Law Journal, 2016)
    A speech is presented by Stephen B. Bright The Richard J. Childress Memorial Lecture 2016 . Topics discussed include problem of poverty in our court system; issues of poor people with urgent, unmet legal needs who lack access to the courts and have no ability to even confer with a lawyer about their legal problems; and the issues of poor people accused of crime.

  • Rigged: When Race and Poverty Determine Outcomes in the Criminal Courts
    Bright, Stephen B. (OHIO St. J. CRIM. L., 2016)
    A Pennsylvania newspaper recently reported that many people sentenced to death in that state since 2005 were represented by lawyers who were drug and alcohol addicts, had histories of mishandling cases or were convicted felons.1 Eighteen percent of those sentenced to death had been represented by lawyers who had been disciplined for professional misconduct. A majority of those lawyers had received the most serious discipline: suspension or disbarment. A reporter from the paper asked how was it possible that the most important cases-involving life and death-were being handled by the least capable lawyers. The answer is that the system is rigged against the poor and against people of color.

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