West Virginia Law Review

Foreword to the 2018 West Virginia Appalachian Justice Symposium.

Includes a directory of members

The West Virginia State Constitution provides a review of the history and development of West Virginia's Constitution and an updated section-by-section analysis of its meaning. The State has had two constitutions, the original that was ratified in 1863 and the current one that was initially adopted in 1872. Both were rooted in the several Virginia Constitutions that preceded them but also included major reforms that emerged out of ongoing disputes between the western and eastern regions of antebellum Virginia. Amendments in the thirties and between 1968 and 1982 modernized the Constitution. This history is recounted in Part I of the book. This second edition provides section-by-section analysis that describes the origins and evolutions of the provisions and, more importantly, summarizes the interpretations given to them by the West Virginia Supreme Court of Appeals over more than 150 years of the State's existence. The text reduces the case law to readily grasped concepts and cites the leading cases. A useful and convenient table of cases is provided, and a bibliography to facilitate more extensive or specific research is included. The Oxford Commentaries on the State Constitutions of the United States is an important series that reflects a renewed international interest in constitutional history and provides expert insight into each of the 50 state constitutions. Each volume in this innovative series contains a historical overview of the state's constitutional development, a section-by-section analysis of its current constitution, and a comprehensive guide to further research. Under the expert editorship of Professor G. Alan Tarr, Director of the Center on State Constitutional Studies at Rutgers University, this series provides essential reference tools for understanding state constitutional law. Books in the series can be purchased individually or as part of a complete set, giving readers unmatched access to these important political documents.

Fueled by more than 2,000 exonerations of wrongfully convicted men and women, the "innocence revolution" has shaken the criminal justice system to its core. By gathering the leading research, law, and policy analysis into one volume, The Wrongful Convictions Reader explores the core contributing factors to wrongful convictions: false confessions, witness misidentifications, cognitive bias, junk science, police and prosecutorial misconduct, racial bias, and ineffective assistance of counsel. The second edition provides an expanded treatment of certain critical topics. The reader now includes an entire chapter devoted to race and wrongful convictions and provides expanded treatment of the intersections between gender, sexual orientation, and disability and wrongful conviction. The addition of these topics in expanded form creates new options for instructors to explore timely topics in the field of compelling concern to many contemporary students. As before, the book remains more than a mere 'reader' of literature in the field, but rather a book that can serve as the principal text in doctrinal as well as experiential courses. Each chapter is divided into three sections that include: readings, current law overview--which summarizes the key cases in the area; and legal materials, exercises, and media--which provides relevant experiential activities. Examples from the legal materials, exercises, and media sections includes: Recommended listening and viewing: timed excerpts from podcast episodes, films, and television clips; Oral advocacy exercises: mock bail arguments, parole hearings, testimony before the state legislature, presentations to the state rules committee, appellate oral arguments; Written advocacy exercises: practice motions and comparing state statutes; Issue spotting exercises: transcripts from interrogations and in-court testimony; Review: reflective essays, short answer questions, and true/false questions; Team exercises: plea negotiations; Discussion prompts; and Actual wrongful conviction case documents.