Search results

Although substantive due process theory has lost much of its force as a local policymaking tool in the federal courts, the doctrine has played a significant role in the land use policies of Washington State. Relying on an ancient U.S. Supreme Court case, Lawton v. Steele, the Supreme Court of Washington has declared that legislation permitting government to pass the social costs of low-income housing demolition on to individual developers through development impact fees is "unduly oppressive" on those individuals and thus violates substantive due process. This Comment argues that the substantive due process doctrine the Supreme Court of Washington has applied is irrelevant under the Federal Constitution and inconsistent with Washington constitutional jurisprudence. Moreover, the Comment asserts that the substantive due process theory of Lawton v. Steele inappropriately permits courts to delve into the policymaking role of legislators.

Since the late 1990s, marijuana grow operations have been identified by media and others as a new and dangerous criminal activity of "epidemic" proportions. With Killer Weed, Susan C. Boyd and Connie Carter use their analysis of fifteen years of newspaper coverage to show how consensus about the dangerous people and practices associated with marijuana cultivation was created and disseminated by numerous spokespeople including police, RCMP, and the media in Canada. The authors focus on the context of media reports in British Columbia to show how claims about marijuana cultivation have intensified the perception that this activity poses "significant" dangers to public safety and thus is an appropriate target for Canada's war on drugs. Boyd and Carter carefully show how the media draw on the same spokespeople to tell the same story again and again, and how a limited number of messages has led to an expanding anti-drug campaign that uses not only police, but BC Hydro and local municipalities to crack down on drug production. Going beyond the newspapers, Killer Weed examines how legal, political, and civil initiatives that have emerged from the media narrative have troubling consequences for a shrinking Canadian civil society