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Law working papers series.

Welcome to the Bristol Law Working Papers Series. The series publishes a broad range of legal scholarship in all subject areas from members of the University of Bristol Law School. All papers are published electronically and available to download as pdf files.

Working papers

Exceptions and Regulatory Autonomy (PDF, 1,504kB) Author: Joshua Paine

Default Norms in Labour Law- From Private Right to Public Law (PDF, 1,525kB) Author: Alan Bogg

An Analysis of the UK–Australia FTA’s Investment Chapter (PDF, 630kB) Author: Joshua Paine

A Kantian moral cosmopolitan approach to teaching professional legal ethics (PDF, 693kB) Author: Omar Madhloom

COVID-19 at Work: How risk is assessed & its consequences in England & Sweden (PDF, 837kB) A‌uthors: Peter Andersson and Tonia Novitz

Capturing the value of community fuel poverty alleviation (PDF, 1,891kB) Authors: Colin Nolden, Daniela Rossade and Peter Thomas

Bridging the Spaces in-between? The IWGB and Strategic Litigation (PDF, 522kB)   Author: Manoj Dias-Abey

View past papers

5 Key Steps to Writing an Effective Law Research Paper

Written by admin

Updated on: April 7, 2024

Table of Contents

5 Key Steps to Writing an Effective Law Research Paper: Our Legal World

Writing a law research paper is much different and complex than crafting a research paper for other fields. That’s because it involves methodological research, which further requires familiarizing yourself with the current legal precedents, principles, and regulations. So, due to such complexities, students often get overwhelmed when asked to write a law research paper. And if you happen to know any such students, this blog post is for them.

Here, we’ll simplify the art of writing a persuasive research paper for law students with the help of 5 key steps. So, without prolonging this intro, let’s get to those steps.

1.    Select a Relevant and Narrow Topic

Whether you want to write a research paper for law or any other field, the first step you need to perform is to select a relevant topic. This step is paramount to writing an effective research paper because it will help you form the foundation for a compelling and well-researched paper. Therefore, the earlier you complete it, the better it will be for the overall quality of your law research paper.

But choosing a topic for a law research paper is different from selecting a topic for any other writing form. That’s because broader topics are challenging to cover. Therefore, your chosen topic should be specific and relevant to your interest. For instance, you can narrow your research for a topic to a particular point that aligns with your interest or has significance in law.

Sometimes, colleges or universities assign the research paper’s topic to students. So, if this situation represents your use case, all you need to do is pick a topic according to your interest from the assigned ones.

2.    Perform a Thorough but Methodological Research

Like other writing forms and research papers, thorough research is essential to write an effective law research paper. In fact, it’s the backbone of a research paper. Therefore, you should perform it, which is the second step in this guide.

But unlike other writing forms, the research for writing a law paper must be methodological. So, how can you conduct such research?

Well, existing literature can be a great starting point for the research phase of a law research paper. But other than that, you can use a plethora of sources, such as

• Legal databases.
• Scholarly articles.

Thus, looking for relevant data should be your priority while exploring the above-mentioned resources. But other than that, you should also familiarize yourself with the current legal precedents, principles, and regulations. Doing so will help you collect compelling evidence, arguments, and counterarguments, ultimately supporting your research paper and providing an overall comprehensive analysis.

3.    Create a Well-Thought-Out Outline

Suppose you have collected a lot of information and read all the existing written material regarding your research topic. In that case, you might crown your research paper with a lot of information and get carried away. Therefore, to cope with such a situation, we recommend creating a detailed outline, which is the third step of this guide.

Creating an outline and dividing your research paper into logical sections and subsections will help you formulate a coherent and organized structure. So, do that because this way, you can convey your ideas effectively. But remember that each section and subsection you create should relate to your research question and support your thesis.

Thus, once you’ve maintained a clear flow of ideas through the logical sections and subsections, it will ultimately improve your paper’s readability, which means readers can follow your point quickly.

4. Write in a Clear and Precise Legal Language

Documents related to law are famous for their complex and intricate language. But since a law research paper doesn’t intend to educate people having a legal background only, understanding convoluted language can be challenging for readers. And this situation is especially valid when you have to discuss arguments or concepts that are intricate and nuanced. To cater to this, we recommend writing the law research paper in clear and precise language.

Whether you are developing a solid thesis statement or writing your research paper’s introduction, body, and conclusion sections, it is essential to communicate the ideas clearly. And to do that, first of all, you must avoid using complex sentences and wording. Doing so will make your law research paper accessible to the experts and novices in the field.

But if writing content in a simple and easy-to-read manner is challenging for you, you can reword your complex content with any AI-based rephrase tool . Such tools use advanced NLP and AI technologies to paraphrase sentences and simplify their complexities in no time. This will ultimately save you time in simplifying the research paper manually and improves the overall quality of the paper as well.

5.    Don’t Forget to Revise, Edit and Polish Your Work

You’ve got the research and outline, which means, by now, you will have crafted a first draft of your research paper. And if you have, then it’s time to polish that draft by revising and editing it. But how can you do that?

Well, you can perform the following checks:

• Carefully proofread your paper and look for formatting mistakes.
• Besides formatting, don’t forget to check for grammar, punctuation, or spelling errors. But if you need any assistance, we recommend using an AI writing assistant.
• Your research paper will have a plethora of arguments. So, make sure that every one of them flows logically and cohesively throughout your research paper. And also, analyze whether you’ve supported every idea with relevant details.
• The first draft often contains repetitions of ideas. Therefore, you must trim them to polish your work.
• Perform a check for plagiarism on the content of your research paper.
• Remember to cite every source you’ve assisted in formulating your research paper’s data.
• Remember to use the same citation style throughout the research paper.

Thus, by implementing these tips, you can easily polish your research paper and prepare it for the final submission.

Writing a law research paper requires dedication, meticulous research, and thoughtful organization. However, with the proper guideline, you can enhance your chances of producing a compelling and impactful paper.

So, remember to choose a relevant and focused topic, conduct thorough research, structure your paper effectively, and meticulously revise and edit your work. Thus, with practice and persistence, you can master the art of writing an outstanding law research paper that engages readers and contributes to the legal discourse.

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Writing a law school research paper or law review note

• Books and articles

Examples of student papers

The three documents listed below were written by 2Ls for the Indiana International & Comparative Law Review. If you are writing for a seminar or an independent study, your parameters might be a little different, but these serve as good examples of general expectations for what can satisfy the advanced writing requirement.  

• Ancient Water Law in a Modern Crisis: An Analysis of Australian Water Law Reform in the United States Context
• Seizing the Initiative on Sexual Assault in the United States Military: The Way Forward
• Striking a Balance: Extending Minimum Rights to U.S. Gig Economy Workers Based on E.U. Directive 2019/1153 on Transparent and Predictable Working Conditions
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• Last Updated: Jul 29, 2022 11:08 AM
• URL: https://law.indiana.libguides.com/c.php?g=1071346

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Researching Law School Papers

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Resources on academic legal writing

Make a research appointment.

Reference librarians are available to help you get started and research your topic. 

• Stop by the Reference Desk in the library lobby
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Articles (UC Davis law students may access from offsite using Kerberos password)

• Stalking the Golden Topic: A Guide to Locating and Selecting Topics for Legal Research Papers by Heather Meeker
• Writing a Student Article by Eugene Volokh
• How to Write a Law Review Article by Richard Delgado
• How to Write a Law Review Article by Sean Burke

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• Last Updated: Sep 14, 2023 10:00 AM
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Directed Research Projects

• Getting Started
• Preparing to Research
• The Research Process

Structuring Your Paper

Writing tips, writing resources.

• Checking your Sources
• Getting it Published

There is no strict structure to writing a legal research paper.  Unlike legal memos written for class or documents prepared for court proceedings that require formatted headings such as "Question Presented," "Statement of Facts," etc., legal research papers are not required to contain prescribed content or abide by a particular structure.

That said, below is a typical approach to organizing the content of your research project.

• Introduction (clear statement of your thesis)
• Background information (what is the existing law, if any)
• The problem (explain why the status quo does't work)
• Recommendation for change (what can be done to improve the field and how)
• Conclusion (tie back to your thesis)

If you have any questions about formatting your research project, you should seek advice from your faculty advisor.  Below are some basic guidelines, but keep in mind formatting requirements set forth by your faculty advisor will always supersede instructions provided here.

Generally, directed research papers are formatted as follows:

• 12-point font (Times New Roman or similar)
• Double-spaced lines
• One-inch margins on both sides, top, and bottom
• 10-point font for footnotes (same font as text)
• Bluebook style and rules for all footnotes citations
• Roman numerals and/or letter headings and subheadings (same font as text but bolded and/or underlined)
• Numbered pages in the footer (same font as text)

Table of Contents

Although not required (unless your faculty advisor states otherwise), a table of contents can be helpful to provide your reader with an overview of your research paper and direct them to certain sections.  Your table of contents should mirror your headings and subheadings.  Below is an example of a table of contents.

When to Cite

You must include a citation every time you refer to, paraphrase, or quote a law, case, or another's work.  Most of your sentences will include a citation.  Additionally, when you cite to a law, always cite to the primary source.

How to Cite

The Bluebook, formally titled  The Bluebook: A Uniform System of Citation , is the style manual for citing to legal documents within the United States.  You should use the Bluebook for all your citations in your legal paper.  The white page section contain the citation rules for legal academic publications.

Writing a Strong Introduction

Your introduction is arguably the most important section of your paper because many people will decide to continue reading based on the introduction.  It must grab the reader's attention and explain why what you are writing about is important.

Essentially, the reader should be able to skim the rest of your paper after reading your introduction and have a good understanding of its layout and arguments.  A good introduction should present the theme of the paper in a succinct manner while providing an overview of your paper.

Generally, a strong introduction will

• State the legal problem/issue;
• Describe why it is important and how your paper contributes to the discussion;
• Provide a road map of your paper; and
• State your conclusion.

Being Objective & Subjective

After your introduction, you should discuss background information on the issue you chose to write about.  This should be an objective overview of the relevant facts and existing law.  Your objective background information section should not be an all encompassing.  Keep this portion of your paper focused on the essential law and relevant facts that support your recommendation for change. 

The bulk of your paper lays in your discussion of the problem and recommendation for change.  This is the subjective portion of your paper.  In this section you should extract the relevant objective material to support your subjective analysis.

Writing a Strong Conclusion

Your conclusion should restate your thesis, summarize your major points, and remind the reader why the issue you've chosen is important.  The conclusion should essentially reword your introduction in a condensed fashion. 

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HLS Dissertations, Theses, and JD Papers

S.j.d. dissertations, ll.m. papers, ll.m. theses, j.d. papers, submitting your paper to an online collection, other sources for student papers beyond harvard, getting help, introduction.

This is a guide to finding Harvard Law School (“HLS”) student-authored works held by the Library and in online collections. This guide covers HLS S.J.D Dissertations, LL.M. papers, J.D. third-year papers, seminar papers, and prize papers.

There have been changes in the HLS degree requirements for written work. The library’s collection practices and catalog descriptions for these works has varied. Please note that there are gaps in the library’s collection and for J.D. papers, few of these works are being collected any longer.

If we have an S.J.D. dissertation or LL.M. thesis, we have two copies. One is kept in the general collection and one in the Red Set, an archival collection of works authored by HLS affiliates. If we have a J.D. paper, we have only one copy, kept in the Red Set. Red Set copies are last resort copies available only by advance appointment in Historical and Special Collections .

Some papers have not been processed by library staff. If HOLLIS indicates a paper is “ordered-received” please use this form to have library processing completed.

The HLS Doctor of Juridical Science (“S.J.D.”) program began in 1910.  The library collection of these works is not comprehensive. Exceptions are usually due to scholars’ requests to withhold Library deposit. 

• HLS S.J.D. Dissertations in HOLLIS To refine these search results by topic or faculty advisor, or limit by date, click Add a New Line.
• Hein’s Legal Theses and Dissertations Microfiche Mic K556.H45x Drawers 947-949 This microfiche set includes legal theses and dissertations from HLS and other premier law schools. It currently includes about 300 HLS dissertations and theses.
• Hein's Legal Theses and Dissertations Contents List This content list is in order by school only, not by date, subject or author. It references microfiche numbers within the set housed in the Microforms room on the entry level of the library, drawers 947-949. The fiche are a different color for each institution.
• ProQuest Dissertations and Theses @ Harvard University (Harvard login) Copy this search syntax: dg(S.J.D.) You will find about 130 SJD Dissertations dated from 1972 to 2004. They are not available in full text.
• DASH Digital Access to Scholarship at Harvard Sponsored by Harvard University’s Office for Scholarly Communication, DASH is an open repository for research papers by members of the Harvard community. There are currently about 600 HLS student papers included. Unfortunately it is not possible to search by type of paper or degree awarded.

The Master of Laws (“LL.M.”) degree has been awarded since 1923. Originally, the degree required completion of a major research paper, akin to a thesis. Since 1993, most students have the option of writing the LL.M. "short paper."  This is a 25-page (or longer) paper advised by a faculty supervisor or completed in conjunction with a seminar.  Fewer LL.M. candidates continue to write the more extensive "long-paper." LL.M. candidates holding J.D.s from the U.S. must write the long paper.

• HLS Written Work Requirements for LL.M. Degree The current explanation of the LL.M. written work requirement for the master of laws.

The library generally holds HLS LL.M. long papers and short papers. In recent years, we require author release in order to do so. In HOLLIS, no distinction is made between types of written work created in satisfaction of the LL.M. degree; all are described as LL.M. thesis. Though we describe them as thesis, the law school refers to them solely as papers or in earlier years, essays. HOLLIS records indicate the number of pages, so at the record level, it is possible to distinguish long papers.

• HLS LL.M. Papers in HOLLIS To refine these search results by topic, faculty advisor, seminar or date, click Add a New Line.

HLS LL.M. Papers are sometimes available in DASH and Hein's Legal Dissertations and Theses. See descriptions above .

The HLS J.D. written work requirement has changed over time. The degree formerly required a substantial research paper comparable in scope to a law review article written under faculty supervision, the "third year paper." Since 2008, J.D. students have the option of using two shorter works instead.

Of all those written, the library holds relatively few third-year papers. They were not actively collected but accepted by submission from faculty advisors who deemed a paper worthy of institutional retention. The papers are described in HOLLIS as third year papers, seminar papers, and student papers. Sometimes this distinction was valid, but not always. The faculty deposit tradition more or less ended in 2006, though the possibility of deposit still exists. 

• J.D. Written Work Requirement
• Faculty Deposit of Student Papers with the Library

HLS Third Year Papers in HOLLIS

To refine these search results by topic, faculty advisor, seminar or date, click Add a New Line.

• HLS Student Papers Some third-year papers and LL.M. papers were described in HOLLIS simply as student papers. To refine these search results, click "Add a New Line" and add topic, faculty advisor, or course title.
• HLS Seminar Papers Note that these include legal research pathfinders produced for the Advanced Legal Research course when taught by Virginia Wise.

Prize Papers

HLS has many endowed prizes for student papers and essays. There are currently 16 different writing prizes. See this complete descriptive list with links to lists of winners from 2009 to present. Note that there is not always a winner each year for each award. Prize winners are announced each year in the commencement pamphlet.

The Library has not specifically collected prize papers over the years but has added copies when possible. The HOLLIS record for the paper will usually indicate its status as a prize paper. The most recent prize paper was added to the collection in 2006.

Addison Brown Prize Animal Law & Policy Program Writing Prize Victor Brudney Prize Davis Polk Legal Profession Paper Prize Roger Fisher and Frank E.A. Sander Prize Yong K. Kim ’95 Memorial Prize Islamic Legal Studies Program Prize on Islamic Law Laylin Prize LGBTQ Writing Prize Mancini Prize Irving Oberman Memorial Awards John M. Olin Prize in Law and Economics Project on the Foundations of Private Law Prize Sidney I. Roberts Prize Fund Klemens von Klemperer Prize Stephen L. Werner Prize

• Harvard Law School Prize Essays (1850-1868) A historical collection of handwritten prize essays covering the range of topics covered at that time. See this finding aid for a collection description.

The following information about online repositories is not a recommendation or endorsement to participate.

• ProQuest Dissertations and Theses HLS is not an institutional participant to this collection. If you are interested in submitting your work, refer to these instructions and note that there is a fee required, which varies depending on the format of submission.
• EBSCO Open Dissertations Relatively new, this is an open repository of metadata for dissertations. It is an outgrowth of the index American Doctoral Dissertations. The aim is to cover 1933 to present and, for modern works, to link to full text available in institutional repositories. Harvard is not one of the institutional participants.
• DASH Digital Access to Scholarship at Harvard

Sponsored by Harvard University’s Office for Scholarly Communication, this is an open repository for research papers by members of the Harvard community. See more information about the project. 

Some HLS students have submitted their degree paper to DASH.  If you would like to submit your paper, you may use this authorization form  or contact June Casey , Librarian for Open Access Initiatives and Scholarly Communication at Harvard Law School.

• ProQuest Dissertations and Theses (Harvard Login) Covers dissertations and masters' theses from North American graduate schools and many worldwide. Provides full text for many since the 1990s and has descriptive data for older works.
• NDLTD Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations Union Catalog Worldwide in scope, NDLTD contains millions of records of electronic theses and dissertations from the early 1900s to the present.
• Law Commons of the Digital Commons Network The Law Commons has dissertations and theses, as well as many other types of scholarly research such as book chapters and conference proceedings. They aim to collect free, full-text scholarly work from hundreds of academic institutions worldwide.
• EBSCO Open Dissertations Doctoral dissertations from many institutions. Free, open repository.
• Dissertations from Center for Research Libraries Dissertations found in this resource are available to the Harvard University Community through Interlibrary Loan.
• British Library EThOS Dissertation source from the British Library listing doctoral theses awarded in the UK. Some available for immediate download and some others may be requested for scanning.
• BASE from Bielefeld University Library Index of the open repositoris of most academic institutions. Includes many types of documents including doctoral and masters theses.

Contact Us!

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• Last Updated: Sep 12, 2023 10:46 AM
• URL: https://guides.library.harvard.edu/studentpapers

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Supreme Court Seminar (Dawson)

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Helpful Books from the Law Library

Getting ready to write, help crafting your seminar paper, using working papers to select a topic, using legal news and blogs to select a topic, avoiding plagiarism.

• Supreme Court Nominations

More Ways to Contact Us

Students submit help requests here .

Faculty and staff submit help requests here .

The following treatises are just a few of the many available treatises that can assist with drafting a seminar paper or understanding the scholarly legal writing process.

• Understand your objective.   Know what type of paper you want to write and how it falls in line with the goals of the class.
• Make sure you are interested in your topic.   You will be spending a lot of time with your seminar paper topic, so having a genuine interest in it can make the process more satisfying and less frustrating.
• Plan ahead.   Thorough scholarly research cannot be done in one day or even a weekend.  One resource that may assist you with developing a writing timeline is an  Assignment Calculator .
• Keep track of your research.   Know what resources you have looked in, what search terms you have used, and when you used these resources.  This will make completing and updating your research easier.  Tools like  Zotero  can help you with this.
• Writing a Student Article This law review article provides fantastic insights into the ins and outs of writing a law school seminar paper.
• Georgetown Law Writing Center - Guides and Handouts A collection of Guides and Handout about Scholarly and Legal Writing covering various topics. Selected guides are linked below.
• Georgetown Law Writing Center- Checklist for Scholarly Writing
• Georgetown Law Writing Center - Checklist for the Writing Process
• Georgetown Law Writing Center- Creating a Good Scholarly Paper
• Georgetown Law Writing Center- Strategies for Outlining Your Scholarly Paper

Looking at working papers from other scholars can assist you by allowing you to see what types of topics are being actively discussed in legal academia.  Two resources for reviewing working papers are detailed below

• Bepress Legal Repository The bepress Legal Repository offers working papers and pre-prints from scholars and professionals at top law schools around the world.
• Social Science Research Network (SSRN) The Social Science Research Network is devoted to the rapid worldwide dissemination of social science research and is composed of a number of specialized research networks in each of the social sciences.

Various legal news resources and blogs (or blawgs) can assist with selecting a seminar paper topic.  The resources below are just of few of the many resources available on the Internet and through subscription services authors can use to locate current events and novel legal issues.

• SupremeCourt.gov
• SCOTUS Blog
• ABA Blawg Directory
• Seton Hall Circuit Review  (Law Review) available via  HeinOnline
• NCCU Library Plagiarism Tutorial   NCCU's main library put together a step-by-step guide to avoid I plagiarism. It is not a law school specific guide; however, it offers a great breakdown of what plagiarism is and how to avoid it.
• Purdue Online Writing Lab: Avoiding Plagiarism   This guide provided by Cornell offers an overview of what constitutes plagiarism, safe practices and exercises.
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Seminar Paper Research

• Topic Selection
• Preemption Checking
• Guides to Academic Legal Writing
• Interdisciplinary Research
• Evaluating Authority
• Writing the Abstract
• Problems in Constitutional Law Seminar Resources
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• Gender and Criminal Justice Resources
• Equality and Sports

Tips for Writing an Abstract

The abstract is a succinct description of your paper, and the first thing after your title that people read when they see your paper. Try to make it capture the reader's interest.

Outline of Abstract:

Paragraph 1

• Sentence 1: One short sentence, that uses active verbs and states the current state of things on your topic.
• Sentence 2: Describe the problem with the situation described in sentence one, possibly including a worst-case-scenario for what will happen if things continue in their current state.
• Sentence 3: In one sentence, describe your entire paper--what needs to be done to correct the problem from Sentence 1 and avoid the disaster from Sentence 2?
• Sentence 4: What has been written about this? If there is a common consensus among legal scholars, what is it? (Note any major scholars who espouse this vision).
• Sentence 5: What are those arguments missing?

Paragraph 2 :

• Sentence 1-3: How would you do it differently? Do you have a theoretical lens that you are applying in a new way? 
• Sentence 4: In one sentence, state the intellectual contribution that your paper makes, identifying the importance of your paper.

(from " How to Write a Good Abstract for a Law Review Article ," The Faculty Lounge, 2012).

Sample Student Abstracts

The following abstracts are from student-written articles published in Law Reviews and Journals. These abstracts are from articles that were awarded a Law-Review Award by Scribes: The American Society of Legal Writers . You can find more examples of student-written articles by searching the Law Journal Library in HeinOnline for the phrase "J.D. Candidate."

Mary E. Marshall, Miller v. Alabama and the Problem of Prediction, 119 Colum. L. Rev. 1633 (2019) .

Joseph DeMott, Rethinking Ashe v. Swenson from an Originalist Perspective, 71 Stan. L. Rev. 411 (2019)

Julie Lynn Rooney, Going Postal: Analyzing the Abuse of Mail Covers Under the Fourth Amendment, 70 Vand. L. Rev. 1627 (2017).

Michael Vincent, Computer-Managed Perpetual Trusts, 51 Jurimetrics J. 399 (2011).

Other research guides.

NYU Researching & Writing a Law Review Note or Seminar Paper: Writing

The Writing Process

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• Last Updated: Jan 25, 2024 3:32 PM
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How to write a legal research paper: All you need to know

This article on “How to write a legal research paper: All you need to know” was written by Vridhi Rai, an intern at Legal Upanishad.

Introduction:

Law is all about analysis, critical thinking, and interpretation. Your capability to put together the analysis of the study of the issues in written form is essential in the practice of law. The research paper is one such way to express your creative and analytic thought process, your vision of the theme, and the originality of your content. The word ‘research’ means a systematic examination of material facts. It can be complex and daunting for law students. But research helps in enhancing your knowledge and cultivating your writing skills. This article will help you understand what is research paper all about and how to write a research paper.

What is a research paper?

A research paper is a piece of academic writing which is based on an author’s original composition in the research and the findings on a given theme or topic. The writing should be owned by the author himself or herself. A good research paper strives to convey the information traced by the author crisply and concisely. The paper is written to examine the theme or the provisions, present your stand on it, and showcase evidence in support in a systematic manner. The true nature of the paper shows you the purpose of the theme or topic. 

What is the aim of the legal research paper?

The aim of the legal research paper can be a subjective question since the writing will indicate what the intended outcome is. There are kinds of writings that would pave a way for courts because it geared toward a certain kind of doctrinal analysis of the court’s interaction with theory and practice. The writings are done for better interpretation of the law. It could also be used to influence policy-making and generate debates. The author has a specific objective and intended audience in mind to serve.

How to write a legal research paper?

Step-1 choose a theme or topic:.

The foremost step in writing a  legal research paper is to select a theme or topic for the research. Select topics that catch your attention or interest. You can pick topics addressing contemporary issues or topics for the intended audience you wish to cater to. It should be novel, innovative, and interesting. While choosing a topic, read pertinent issues from different sources.  You can follow legal news to search for pertinent topics.

In case, you find difficulty selecting a topic, it will be wonderful for you to approach your professors, colleagues, and friends for consultation. Also, never feel hesitant to change the theme or topic of the research, if you feel it is not the right topic or you will not able to research the topic effectively.

Step-2 Research on your topic:

Now, your next task is to research the topic extensively on your selected topic from credible sources. You can refer to different sources by reading legal research pieces from books to online sites like SCC online, Manupatra, and Kluwer Arbitration. Always remember don’t just goggle. Use conventional sources like books and articles, these will give you a broader perspective. Read as much as you can. Reading helps you understand the nitty-gritty of the law provisions. Please beware of the research as this task can be very monotonous. You might lose motivation to perform this task. But hang in there and stay motivated to find interesting facts.

Step-3 Examine and Make a plan:

After researching, your very next step is to examine and make a plan to execute writing a legal research paper. Your research will be comprehensive with ideas. Please develop a detailed outline. Try adding notes to your research work. It can be possible that you might end up adding too much information to your paper. Highlight the key findings from your study. At this stage you are required to identify the goal of your research work, it can be either argumentative or analytic. You have to determine the masses you are wishing to address. The focus and the tone of the paper should b according to the audience you are intending to reach.

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Step-4 writing the paper:.

The next step is to draft the research paper. Make a final outline of the research work. The outline must have the points to describe the overview of the paper. The basic mantra of legal research is the structure of the paper. The research paper writing should be creative, clear, concise, and comprehensive. The language of your research paper should be easy to interpret. The legal terminologies and material facts are generally very sophisticated and complex. The facts, you are mentioning must be backed by shreds of evidence.

The format of the legal research paper:

The paper should have a proper format that consists of writing styles, referencing styles, page numbering, spacing, and margins. It should also include the headlines, sub-headlines, citations, or credits to the authors and the scholars.

The content of the legal research paper:

The content consists of the following:

Acknowledgment : the content of the paper should include an acknowledgment section that appreciates all the contributors to the research paper for their efforts and encouragement.

Table of contents: it includes the list of the things that you have written in your research paper.

Scope of the research: the scope or object of the research includes the reason for your study. It shows you the skeleton of your research paper. You have stated the problem or issue of the paper.

A literature survey or the sources used in the study: it includes the sources you have referred to in your study. It can be primary or secondary resources. The primary resources include books, statutes, and case laws. The secondary sources include the material you have collected from law articles, journals, and compendiums online or offline.

The hypothesis of the research: the hypothesis is the idea that is suggested to explain the objective of the research conducted by the researcher. It conveys the expectations of the researcher on what basis he started studying the issues, he raised in his paper.

Abstract : abstract shows the gist of the theme you have mentioned in your study. It is like the summary of the findings in your research regarding the theme. It should be written clearly and concisely.

Introduction: the introduction should be well-written to attract the attention of the audience toward the theme you mentioned in your thesis. A glance over the initial paragraphs gives an insight to the readers of your work. The introduction determines whether the research paper is worth reading or not. It should express the research problem, the purpose of your thesis, and background details about the issue you are referring to. It should be short, crisp, and comprehensive.

The main body of the study: the main focus of the paper is the main body of the thesis. The body should be divided into paragraphs along with sub-headings for a better understanding of the facts. Each paragraph should draw the main points of your study. It should begin with the topic’s sentences and should conclude extensively. In the main body, you can add the case laws and judgments.  

The conclusion of the study: the finale of the study should include a summary of the main pointers discussed in the study, it should express your stand or viewpoint towards the research problem. The concluding para of your research can be affirmative or negative in tone. In the end, you can add some suggestive measures to your study.

References or bibliography: at the end of the paper mention the references or the sources links or sites from which you have researched the material facts.

Step – 5 edit and proofread the final draft of the research paper:

Use proper grammar, punctuation, and spelling. Proofreading will help you to find errors in your content. If you need, to make changes to the paper, check and find the logic and legality of the statement. At this stage, you check the plagiarism of your content.

The things that should be considered carefully before drafting the paper:

you need to check the validity of the judgments before mentioning them in the research paper. The validity of the bills mentioned in your study should be carefully considered. The errors related to applicability or jurisdictions should be carefully verified.

Conclusion:

Legal research is not an easy task to perform. It takes a lot of time to conduct it. Constant hard work, attention, motivation, and patience are the factors required to examine and analyze the details. It can be boring. But it will help you in brushing your skills. Your efforts and dedication toward finding more and more material facts will help in shaping you into a good researcher.

It is beneficial for law students for interpreting law provisions, policies, and judgments. It can be used as a medium to influence policy-making procedures and as a tool to aware the masses. Publication of your research papers will act as a stimulating force to your law career. It will help you build your confidence and help them transform into law professionals.

References:

• How to write a legal research paper: guide: how to write a winning research paper?- Legal Desire. Retrieved: https://legaldesire.com/guide-how-to-write-a-winning-research-paper/
• A helpful guide on writing a law research paper- Writing help. Retrieved: https://howtowrite.customwritings.com/post/law-research-paper-guide/
• How to begin with writing a legal research paper- Manupatra- youtube channel-(video file)
• How to write a legal research paper law?|research paper- Eminent law classes-(Video file)
• The aim of writing a legal research paper- the art of writing a legal research paper-Rohini Sen-letter of the law-(video file)

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Criminal Law Research Paper

This sample criminal law research paper features: 10200 words (approx. 34 pages), an outline, and a bibliography with 32 sources. Browse other research paper examples for more inspiration. If you need a thorough research paper written according to all the academic standards, you can always turn to our experienced writers for help. This is how your paper can get an A! Feel free to contact our writing service for professional assistance. We offer high-quality assignments for reasonable rates.

Introduction

Criminal law in the new england colonies, the pennsylvania experiment in criminal law, jefferson’s proposed reform of the penal law of virginia, pennsylvania and the degrees of murder, edward livingston and criminal law, the movement to abolish the death penalty, field’s reforms in new york state, the juvenile court, the cleveland survey, the wickersham commission, the model penal code.

• Bibliography

It is an undeniable fact that the law of crimes in the United States has historically suffered from a malevolent neglect. In other fields of the law, there has always been a tradition of judges, legislators, and legal commentators being willing, if not eager, to scrutinize fundamental premises and push doctrinal reform if they believed society demanded it. The predominant view of the American legal profession regarding the penal law, however, appears to have been that if it needed change, it would improve itself. Therefore, it is not unexpected that criminal law has long been one of the least developed, most convoluted, and, in a way, most primitive branches of American law.

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Certainly, there are a number of notable exceptions to this general rule of neglect. Throughout American history, there have been periodic surges of interest in criminal jurisprudence, accompanied by the emergence of reformers who, in one way or another, have sought to humanize the criminal law, modernize it, or even just add a degree of clarity to it. These endeavors have had differing effects on the course of legal advancements due to their vastly different motivations, scopes, and quality. However, they have all signified an awareness of the significance of criminal law and a willingness to confront at least some of its fundamental flaws. Consequently, they stand out as brilliant landmarks in an otherwise drab terrain.

This research paper examines the tumultuous history of criminal law reform in the United States. Emphasis is placed primarily on substantive penal law, which includes the law guiding the treatment of criminal offenders. Nonetheless, there are a few remarks regarding efforts to alter criminal procedure and the administration of justice.

Criminal Law during The Colonial Period

It is logical to begin a study of the history of criminal law reform with the colonial period, as it was at this time that the first improvements were made. All of the American colonies based their criminal law primarily on the jurisprudence and statutes of the home nation. Obviously, small groups of colonial settlers, few of whom have legal expertise, do not create criminal codes out of thin air. However, from the first, the colonists shown a willingness to experiment with revisions to the English legacy if their own ideals demanded it. In the very first set of rules established in British North America, the Plymouth Code of 1636, the punishment for serious offenses diverged significantly from the English model. The death sentence in Plymouth was restricted to treason, murder, arson, and a number other morals offenses, but the list of capital offenses in England was extensive and encompassed nearly all significant sins. This document should not be accorded excessive weight, as it was, in many ways, a basic set of regulations and Plymouth was a little community that would soon fall into obscurity. However, its amendments to the criminal law foreshadowed a pattern that was eventually adopted by other colonies.

The Laws and Liberties of Massachusetts (1648), a much more sophisticated document than the Plymouth Code, incorporated significant improvements to the common and statutory criminal law of the home country. It, like English law, limited the amount of capital offenses and generally imposed more mild punishments for noncapital offenses. The universal prohibition on “cruel and barbaric” penalties was an innovation in and of itself. The entire code was equally influenced by the Old Testament and the English common law. Deuteronomy and other portions of the Pentateuch were frequently referenced to justify punitive clauses, and this reliance on the Bible had the net effect of making the law less harsh than it otherwise would have been. Only those crimes for which the Bible plainly dictated the death penalty were designated capital crimes. The code also incorporated several substantial enhancements to criminal procedure. A conviction for a capital offense required the evidence of two witnesses (this criterion was also founded in the Bible), and all capital cases were entitled to an appeal.

In addition to being inspired by the Bible, The Laws and Liberties of Massachusetts were imbued with a spirit of logic and a healthy dislike for the numerous incidental elements of English criminal law. The device of clerical benefit, for instance, was viewed as a consequence of historical accident, with no basis in Scripture or reason, and was therefore removed from the law.

The significance of these New England criminal codes, particularly those of Massachusetts Bay, lay as much in their status as codes as in the revisions they made to specific elements of English criminal law. Underlying the codes was the conviction that a community’s criminal law was too vital to be allowed to develop piecemeal, as many Puritan settlers believed had happened with the English common law.

Rather, it was something that needed to be built methodically and with consideration to reflect the community’s deepest moral sense and to advance the social reasons for which the society existed. Later years tragically lost sight of this lesson.

Despite the fact that the criminal code of the American colonies was generally less retributive than that of the mother country, it was by no means less punitive and was quite harsh by contemporary standards. In the colonial imagination, crime and sin were nearly synonymous. The criminal was viewed as a moral actor with free will, and punishment was justified as a form of communal vengeance or divinely ordered, albeit humanly administered, retribution. The punishment schedules were little more than clumsy attempts to correlate the severity of the punishment to the wickedness of the conduct, and the unique circumstances of the offender received almost no consideration. However, the penal regulations created by Pennsylvania colony in the final decades of the seventeenth century exhibited a quite different mentality. There, between 1682 and 1718, William Penn and other prominent Quaker figures conducted a remarkable experiment in criminal law reform. Despite its unfortunate conclusion, it planted seeds that would later bear fruit.

A year after it was founded by William Penn under a royal charter, Pennsylvania passed a comprehensive code of criminal laws, part of a larger codification known as the Great Law of 1682, that was radically different from anything that had come before. The colony’s Quaker founders rejected in principle brutality, senseless slaughter, and, excepting the most exceptional circumstances, the taking of human life. They were repulsed by the English criminal system and felt obligated to seek alternatives. The alternative they discovered was imprisonment. The period of imprisonment varied according to the nature of the offense and the conditions under which it was committed. In general, the conditions of incarceration were not terrible. Therefore, the penalty for burglary was three months in prison and quadruple reparation to the victim. In the judgment of the court, arson was punishable by one year of hard labor and physical punishment (often lashing). One month in prison was the penalty for assaulting a magistrate. Assault and battery, along with manslaughter, were to be penalized based on the nature and circumstances of the offenses. In contrast to the relatively light penalties associated with these offences, the Quaker law dealt harshly with sexual offenses. Bigamy, for instance, was punishable by life imprisonment for the first offense and rape for the second.

Another unique aspect of the Pennsylvania code was its treatment of religious offenses, a common category of crime in most jurisdictions. These types of crimes were fully eradicated, and all citizens were guaranteed complete freedom of conscience.

The Pennsylvania code of 1682 constituted the purest form of Quaker criminal law. The colony’s criminal legislation was changed throughout the next three decades by a succession of legislative acts and became somewhat stricter. More crimes were made punishable by incarceration, jail periods were lengthened, and harsh physical punishments such as branding were established for some transgressions. In spite of these modifications, Pennsylvania’s criminal code remained a model of enlightenment and humanity compared to that of its neighbors. However, the Quaker experiment abruptly ended in 1718. The colony had been lobbying the Crown for some time to permit Quakers to testify on affirmation rather than under oath, and the Crown had been attempting to bring the colony’s criminal code closer to that of the mother country. In exchange for the colony’s decision to adopt the English criminal code in place of its own, the Quakers were granted recognition for affirmation.

The Revolution and Its Aftermath

The American Revolution prompted a number of attempts at criminal law reform, all of which were noteworthy for the new ideas toward punishment they revealed, but only one had lasting benefits. Following their separation from the United Kingdom, the newly independent colonies were faced with the dilemma of how much of the home country’s legal system they desired to keep. Some patriots argued that the United States’ criminal law was especially in need of reform. They maintained that its punitive requirements reflected a British rather than an American mindset. These points resonated well in a number of state capitals. The original state constitution of New Hampshire (adopted in 1784) urged the government to address the state’s draconian criminal statutes. It ruled that it was not prudent to apply the same punishment to offenses as different as forgery and murder since “the true purpose of all punishments is to reform, not exterminate, mankind” (article 1, section 18). Regrettably, the legislature declined the invitation, and the state’s penal code did not change significantly. Virginia witnessed similar developments.

A few weeks after the signing of the Declaration of Independence, the General Assembly of Virginia passed an act for the revision of the Laws (ch. 9 (1776), Hening’s Virginia Statutes at Large 175 (Richmond, Va., 1821)) with the intention of bringing the state’s laws more in line with the spirit of republicanism. George Mason and Thomas Jefferson served on the committee charged with revising the document. As part of the remodeling process, Jefferson drafted a bill proposing a new system of criminal penalties. This draft is the result of a comprehensive review of ancient to contemporary theoretical texts on punishment and the treatment of criminal offenders. The footnoted form of the bill found in Jefferson’s archives includes references to Anglo-Saxon laws in their original language. It is widely considered as a literary drafting model (Boyd, p. 594).

None of the thinkers Jefferson studied had a greater influence on him than the great Italian criminologist Cesare Beccaria, whose essay On Crimes and Punishments (1764) was generating vigorous debate in educated colonial circles. Beccaria advocated a strictly utilitarian approach to the criminal law, and Jefferson’s penology was infused by his beliefs. Jefferson’s guiding principles were: (1) that the only purpose of the penal law was the deterrence of crime; (2) that sanguinary laws were self-defeating because men shied away from enforcing them to the full and thus left many crimes unpunished; (3) that if punishments were proportionate to the crime, men would be more likely to ensure the laws were observed; and (4) that the reform of criminals was a worthy goal worthy of the law’s promotion. Finally, Jefferson’s criminal law reflected a preoccupation with the theory of analogical punishments, which held that punishments should be symbolic reflections of the actions to which they are fastened, so that crimes and their consequences are inextricably linked in the minds of citizens. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, this peculiar hypothesis had a profound effect on the evolution of penological thought.

These concepts produced a suggested system of punishments that was generally lenient and enlightened, but was tarnished by certain fairly peculiar characteristics. Jefferson limited the broad list of crimes punishable by death under the prevailing law to treason and murder, and imposed far lighter punishments for the vast majority of these typically lethal acts. As a result of a near-obsession with similarity and balance, however, the punishments imposed for certain infractions took on a very macabre tint. Thus, the penalty for treason was being buried alive. Murder by poison was punished with poison, rape with castration, and mayhem with mutilation. The Virginia legislature vigorously debated Jefferson’s proposals but ultimately rejected them.

Pennsylvania, which had previously experimented with large-scale modifications to its prison regime, was the first state where the new champions of penal law reform were able to transfer theory into practice. During the American Revolution, numerous Pennsylvania political offices fell into the hands of a mix of populist farmers and Philadelphia radicals, which may have made the soil even more fertile. In any case, the state adopted a constitution in 1776 that had measures about the reform of the criminal code that were remarkably similar to those included in the New Hampshire Constitution of 1784. (It’s possible that New Hampshire borrowed part of its language from the Pennsylvania document.) The difference was that Pennsylvania mandated, as opposed to urged, its lawmakers to modify the state’s penal laws and make punishments more commensurate to the offenses. The constitution echoed a popular idea of the new generation of reformers by stating that conspicuous punishments of extended duration, such as incarceration, prevented crime more effectively than harsh, brutal, but fleeting sanctions (Pa. Const. of 1776, 38–39).

Ten years later, the Pennsylvania Assembly took the first move toward penal law reform by eliminating the death penalty for robbery, burglary, and sodomy (Act of Sept. 15, 1786). Act of September 23, 1791, sections 5 and 8 abolished the death penalty for witchcraft and ended the barbaric practice of branding for adultery and fornication.

Despite these advancements, there were indications in the early 1790s that the momentum produced during the Revolution in favor of fundamental and extensive criminal law reform was beginning to wane. In 1790, for instance, Pennsylvania’s new constitution did not even mention the matter. Possibly with this in mind, a number of renowned Pennsylvanians began to strongly and publicly advocate for the reformer cause.

James Wilson, the first law professor at the University of Pennsylvania, a signer of the Declaration of Independence, and a co-author of the United States Constitution, gave a series of lectures on crime and punishment in Philadelphia in 1790. Citing with approval the views of Beccaria and that other great eighteenth-century legal theorist, Montesquieu, Wilson argued vehemently that prevention was the only purpose of punishment and that anything more severe than the minimum punishment required to deter crime was incompatible with a civilized society. In 1792, Benjamin Rush, a professor of medicine at the same university, wrote an essay titled “Considerations on the Injustice and Impolicy of Punishing Murder by Death” in which he claimed that death punishment was “contrary to reason and to the order and happiness of society.” In the same year, Pennsylvania Supreme Court Justice William Bradford entered the fray. In a report on the effectiveness of the death penalty as a deterrent against crime, prepared at the request of Governor Thomas Mufflin, Bradford argued that the death penalty was completely unnecessary and cited statistics showing that the imprisonment penalty provided by the act of 1786 was just as effective in deterring burglary, robbery, and sodomy as the earlier death penalty.

Taking a lead from Bradford’s memorandum, Governor Mufflin advocated to the Pennsylvania assembly that further reforms to the criminal system were necessary and urged it to explore making other reforms. The response of the legislature was equivocal. It was extremely loath to travel the full distance down the path that Bradford, Wilson, and others were encouraging it to go, but it did agree that the punishment of death ought to be administered only when it was absolutely necessary to safeguard the public safety. In light of this theory, it drafted legislation that, for the first time in Anglo-American legal history, differentiated between two degrees of murder. The first degree, punishable by death, related to homicides performed by lying in wait or by poison, or to any other kind of willful, deliberate, and premeditated killing. (There were echoes here of the statute of 1682.) All other sorts of murder were categorized as murder in the second degree, punished by imprisonment at hard labor or in solitary confinement or both for a duration not to exceed twenty-one years. This law was duly enacted by the legislature in 1794 with the inclusion of criminal murder to the category of the first degree (Act of April 22, 1794, § 2).

The classification of murder into two degrees proved to be Pennsylvania’s greatest lasting contribution to the general criminal law of the United States. Virginia approved a similar statute in 1796, which was followed by Ohio in 1824, Missouri in 1835, Michigan in 1846, and the great majority of American jurisdictions ultimately.

Criminal Law during The Antebellum Period

The passing of the law on the degrees of murder significantly weakened the Pennsylvania campaign for the complete abolition of the death penalty. The movement stayed dormant for several decades before reviving in the 1820s as part of a larger anti-death-penalty campaign that flourished on the national arena between roughly 1820 and 1850. This debate will be resumed below, but the focus must now shift to the state of Louisiana and the work of Edward Livingston, the most creative and productive of all nineteenth-century penal code reformers.

Born in New York State, Edward Livingston (1764–1836) had a notable political career before focusing on criminal law reform. He served in the House of Representatives, as U.S. attorney, and as mayor of New York City. Livingston departed New York in 1804 and settled in New Orleans, where he began a law business and became involved in Louisiana politics almost immediately. Simultaneously, he maintained a longstanding interest in jurisprudence and the reform of the law.

Livingston was elected to the Louisiana assembly in 1820 and was crucial in the passage of an act authorizing the construction of a code of criminal law “based on one principle, namely the prevention of crime” (Livingston, vol. 1, pp. 1–2). The next year, he was named as the effort’s leader.

Livingston combed through all available resources on criminal law and engaged in extensive correspondence with jurists and legal practitioners from other states and abroad in order to draw on their thoughts and expertise. In 1826, he presented the state of Louisiana’s General Assembly with a finished work.

The Livingston Code had four distinct sections: a code of crimes and punishments, a code of process, a code of evidence, and a code of reform and prison discipline. Each code was accompanied by a report detailing its history and underlying philosophy. In addition, there were two extensive reports in which Livingston expressed his overall opinions on criminal law. In one of them, he made clear that he believed his code to be the first serious attempt, at least in the Anglo-American world, to set criminal law on a strong, scientific foundation. He compared the former criminal law to pieces of fretwork, the result of caprice, fear, and negligence, which jeopardized the lives and liberties of the people due to cruel or disproportionate punishment and conflicting laws (Livingston, vol. 1, p. 11).

Livingston freely recognized that he owed his largest intellectual debt to the English utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham, and the entire structure of the code is based on Benthamite ideas. First, there is a dedication to the notion that all educated citizens should have complete access to the content of the laws. Livingston wrote: “Penal laws should be written in plain language, clearly and unequivocally expressed, so that they cannot be misunderstood or perverted” (vol. 1, p. 5). The code contains surprisingly little of the technical verbiage that attorneys love so much. It is one of the few pieces of legislation that can be described as actually enjoyable to read.

Consistent with Benthamite ideology, the code is imbued with a profound mistrust of judges and a hostility to any form of judicial lawmaking. The code of crimes and punishments prevented the punishment of conduct not specifically rendered illegal by statute, and judges were prohibited from punishing anything not made criminal by the letter of the law under the pretext that the act in issue was within the spirit of the law (vol. 2, p. 15). Livingston intended to prohibit judges from injecting their own moral convictions into the criminal code.

Lastly, in an effort to involve the average person in the lawmaking process, the code aimed to make clear the rationale behind its various provisions. Thus, explicit prohibitions on types of action were frequently supported with examples and justifications for their inclusion. Livingston believed that people would be more inclined to respect the law if they perceived that it was rational and based on the fundamental concept of utility.

In general, Livingston’s code represented a significant consolidation and clarification of the existing penal laws, as well as the removal of much of its weedlike overgrowth; he was adamant that there were too many crimes and that the criminal sanction was overused when the civil sanction would suffice. In addition, a large number of the code’s substantive sections were relatively novel. This was particularly true regarding civil freedoms and privacy. It was deemed a crime to open a letter addressed to another (vol. 2, p. 166), and it was a misdemeanor to interfere with someone’s right to free expression or free assembly (vol. 2, p. 69). Homosexuality was removed from the list of criminal offenses on the grounds that describing such transgressions in a code could corrupt young readers and criminalizing sexual deviance was an invitation to blackmail (vol. 1, p. 27).

The most notable innovation in Livingston’s law was the removal of the death punishment (volume 1, pages 185–224). This proposition was extensively defended by Livingston in his “Introductory Report to the Code of Crimes and Punishments” His primary point was that the state could only justify taking a life if it could prove that it was extremely essential. But, he argued, it could be demonstrated through logic and experience that lighter punishments would enough to deter major offenses. He also pointed out that public executions had a corrupting influence on society morality, that courts frequently erroneously convicted criminals, and that it was impossible to fix these mistakes under a system that permitted capital punishment. Livingston also maintained, in a relatively ignored portion of his discourse, that capital penalty was insufficient to deter the commission of significant crimes. The dread of death was just insufficient to deter potential criminals from acting on their intense desires to commit crimes. The voracious spendthrift, he claimed, would risk the temporary, but acute, pain of death to advance his interest in a life of idleness and dissipation, whereas the threat of a life lived under a harsh jail regime might be enough to quell his thieving tendencies (vol. 1, pp. 37–40).

Livingston’s proposed system for the treatment of social deviance had never been proposed previously. He understood that poverty and idleness led to crime, therefore his code of reform and prison discipline called for a house of refuge, which would employ people who were unemployed, and a home of industry for those who refused to work in the house of refuge. This institution would also provide work to recently released inmates. For the treatment of genuinely criminal offenses, he proposed a fines-to-incarceration scale that was delicately graduated. The conditions of confinement were graded according to the severity of the crime. The objective of incarceration was to both rehabilitate the offender and serve as an example to dissuade crime.

In most ways, Livingston’s code of reform and jail discipline was decades ahead of its time. It prohibited abuse of prisoners and required that they be appropriately dressed and fed. It also stipulated training and conduct requirements for jail officials. Incorporating relatively basic psychological manipulation techniques on both the offender and the rest of the public who were to be deterred by his example, it also had a less palatable aspect. For the remainder of their lives, murderers, for instance, were to have no contact with people from the outside world other than official visitation and little contact with their fellow prisoners. Their cell walls were to be painted black, and an inscription was to be hung on the outside of the cells stating that the inhabitants were dead in all but body; their bodily existence was being prolonged solely so that they might remember their crimes and repent of them, and so that their trials could serve as an example to others (vol. 2, p. 573).

Livingston campaigned vehemently for the approval of his penal law in the assembly, but it was not approved and was never adopted. It was an odd development in the backward, slave-holding society of pre-Civil War Louisiana.

As previously mentioned, a movement to abolish the death penalty arose and prospered on the national stage throughout the second part of the antebellum period. Beginning in New England and Pennsylvania, the movement swiftly expanded to other states and soon had a nationwide following. Eleven states had well-organized anti-capital-punishment societies by the 1840s, and in 1845, George Dallas, the vice president of the United States, became the first president of a nationwide society. In the vanguard of the movement were Quakers and others who opposed the death sentence on the basis of Christian humanitarianism, but also prominent were those who drew inspiration from the tradition of enlightened rationalism and utilitarianism. These opponents, many of whom were attorneys, frequently leaned on Edward Livingston’s penological beliefs in their arguments.

There was substantial overlap between the antislavery crusade and the death-penalty campaign, thus the term abolitionists was aptly used to the supporters. Wendell Phillips, for instance, was one of the Massachusetts society’s founders. The abolitionists were notably active in state legislative chambers. Typically, their tactic consisted of influencing legislative or outside consulting groups to investigate the efficacy and necessity of capital punishment. These investigations yielded various outcomes.

In 1836, Massachusetts Governor Edward Everett convened a committee led by Robert Rantoul, the prominent Jacksonian lawyer and promoter of codification, to examine if the death penalty might be repealed for all offenses save murder. The committee delivered a report that rapidly became a movement classic, combining utilitarian and biblical reasons in its call for abolition. The legislature did not accept Rantoul’s views, but in 1839 it did eliminate the death penalty for burglary and highway robbery (Act of April 8, 1839). Also in New York, there was legislative pressure for reform.

During the 1830s, the abolition of the death sentence was frequently debated on the floor of the New York Assembly and the subject of numerous committee investigations. On occasion, these deliberations resulted in dismal outcomes for opponents of the death penalty. Thus, in 1838, an assembly committee rejected the Livingstonian argument that jail was a more effective deterrent than the death penalty, arguing that since the majority of criminals were destitute, the promise of free shelter and food in prison would be favorably appealing to them.

In 1846, the Michigan legislature voted to abolish the death penalty for all offenses except treason (Mich. Rev. Stat. tit. 30, chs. 152–153, 658 (1846)). This was the movement’s most notable victory. Rhode Island and Wisconsin followed suit in 1852 and 1853, respectively. However, after these occurrences, the movement began to lose its momentum. By the eve of the Civil War, its influence on the public psyche had diminished significantly.

During the Progressive Era, the anti-death penalty movement saw a brief revival, and six states were persuaded to abolish the death sentence. However, the majority of these states reintroduced the death penalty within a few years of the repeal of the death penalty due to public pressure.

Criminal Law during The Postbellum Period

The second part of the nineteenth century was not characterized by significant substantive criminal law reform. During this period of industrialization and economic prosperity, American lawyers and legislators were generally busy with other problems. New York’s endeavor, led by David Dudley Field, to entirely restructure the state’s criminal code was, however, a significant exception to the pattern.

David Dudley Field (1805–1894) was one of the towering characters of the nineteenth-century American bar, and by the time of the American Civil War, he had become the country’s foremost advocate for codification. His attempts for penal-law reform were a component of his greater codification endeavor. In 1846, a New York constitutional convention, convened in large part due to the effective lobbying of Field and other Jacksonian Democrats, passed a resolution requiring the New York assembly to codify all of the state’s laws in a written and systematic code. A groundbreaking code of civil process was drafted by Field and other members of a specially formed panel and adopted by the New York assembly prior to the Civil War (1849 N.Y. Laws, ch. 438), but the other codes were not to be finished until after the war.

In 1857, a new commission, of which Field was once again a member, was tasked with drafting a civil code, a political code, and a penal code. The bulk of the work on the last code, which was given to the New York legislature in 1865, was completed by Field’s two cocommissioners, Curtis Noyes and B. V. Abbot, who lacked professional or scholarly knowledge in criminal law. Nevertheless, Field played a limited role in the drafting, and as he was the driving force behind the entire New York codification endeavor, it is fitting that the penal code, along with all the other New York codes, has always carried his name.

First among the declared goals of the Field Penal Code’s authors was to consolidate the entirety of the state’s criminal law into a single document. The drafters observed that the state’s penal provisions were dispersed throughout the collected statutes and that many acts were criminal only by virtue of court decision; if deemed criminal by statute, they may be defined purely by reference to common law rulings. All of this, they claimed, infused New York’s criminal law with doubt. Second, the intent of the drafters was to correct flaws and mistakes in the current definitions of offenses. Finally, they desired to penalize actions that should have been criminal but were not (New York State Commissioners of the Code, pp. iii-vi).

It was a vast and audacious goal, and there appeared to be at least the potential for a thorough, critical reexamination of the fundamental concepts of American criminal law, a work that had not been addressed by anyone other than Livingston. In this regard, however, the commissioners’ final output was a deeply unsatisfactory paper. Field and his colleagues may have believed that their reform mission was accomplished when the disparate elements of the state’s penal code were brought together and a semblance of order was introduced to this assortment of statutes. There is no indication in the document of a desire to clarify or reformulate any of the confused or archaic common law concepts that formed the foundation of Anglo-American criminal law, or to simplify or consolidate the vast corpus of statutory crimes and regulatory offenses that had been added to the state’s criminal law since the Revolution. This “reformist” code did not significantly alter the existing quo.

The Field Code was successful in achieving its goal of incorporating all of the criminal law into a single volume. The provisions of the code included every occasion in which a criminal penalty was imposed for any action. No items were left outside, nor was any effort made to combine. Thus, there are separate, specific laws regarding “the refilling of mineral bottles” (section 417), “the failure to mark packages of hay” (section 449), and “the discharge of gas tar into public waters” (section 434). Each type of arson is regulated by a different provision ( 531–539), ranging from maliciously torching an inhabited building at night to torching an uninhabited building during the day. Separate clauses address willful mischief to railroads, public highways or bridges, toll houses or turnpikes, mile markers and guideposts, and telegraph wires ( 690–695). This is possibly the most absurd example of overspecification.

Despite these limitations, the Field Code proved to be immensely popular. It was ultimately established by the New York assembly in 1881 (1881 N.Y. Laws, ch. 676), adopted virtually in its whole by California and the Dakotas, and had a considerable impact on the criminal code of numerous other western states, including Arizona, Idaho, Montana, Oregon, Utah, and Wyoming.

Progressivism and Criminal Law

In the last decade of the nineteenth century and the first decades of the twentieth century, the middle and upper classes of American society were swept by a sophisticated, dynamic social reform movement known as Progressivism. Progressives were a diverse group with a diverse political and social agenda. But among their primary goals were the eradication of corruption in politics, the introduction of efficiency and scientific technique into the governmental process, the uplift of the disadvantaged, and the assimilation into the mainstream of American society of the record-breaking immigrant masses who were flooding into the country at the time. The entire Progressive program hinged on two essential tenets: belief in the perfectibility of man and implicit faith in the capacity of the state to foster individual happiness. The primary innovations in the treatment of criminal offenders—probation, parole, and the juvenile court—introduced or popularized during the Progressive Era may be viewed as embodiments of the Progressive spirit.

Probation, whose philosophy holds that at least some criminal offenders are more likely to be rehabilitated by being placed in the community under the supervision of a trained official than by being incarcerated, is an American invention that has its origins in the work of Boston shoemaker John Augustus in the 1840s and 1850s. With the approval of the courts, Augustus had for over two decades accepted into his care those convicted of (often minor) criminal acts with the intention of rehabilitating them. Augustus amassed an excellent record, but his arrangement with the Boston courts remained totally informal, and his example did not inspire imitation anywhere else. In 1878, Massachusetts passed a law permitting the mayor of Boston to appoint a paid probation officer, and in 1880, this authority was extended to all cities and towns in the state (Mass. Probation Act of 1880, 1880 Mass. Acts, ch. 129). Other states experimented with the concept of enacting similar reforms but refrained due to constitutional concerns with the program. In 1894, the New York Supreme Court ruled that a state law authorizing judges to suspend sentence, a necessary prerequisite to any system of probation, was not an unconstitutional infringement on the executive power of pardon (People ex rel. Forsyth v. Court of Sessions, 141 N.Y. 288, 36 N.E. 368 (1894)). Twelve states established probation for juvenile offenders between 1900 and 1905; the number increased to twenty-three by 1911. By 1925, all 48 states had legalized the use of juvenile probation. During the Progressive Era, adult probation progressed at a considerably slower rate, but yet made continuous progress.

Probation stressed the specialized treatment of the offender by professionals: offenders were no longer viewed as bad and deserving of punishment, but as ill and in need of therapy. As such, it was consistent with the Progressives’ deeply held confidence in the scientific method’s capacity to educate everyone. The same applied to parole. In New York’s Elmira Reformatory, which began admitting juvenile offenders in 1877, parole and the other reform that typically accompanied it, the indeterminate sentence, were initially established. The reformatory was to hold its inmates for as long as was necessary to rehabilitate them, after which they were to be turned over to trained professionals for further noncustodial supervision or treatment in the community. In 1889, New York established a broad indeterminate sentencing statute (1889 N.Y. Laws, ch. 382, 74), and by 1891, eight additional states had enacted some sort of indeterminate-sentence or parole legislation.

Of all the criminal justice reforms advocated by progressives, the juvenile court was the most symbolic. Child welfare was a primary emphasis of Progressive action, as Progressivism was a child-centric movement. Before the advent of juvenile court, jurisdictions frequently devised means of sparing juvenile offenders the full rigors of the legal system. However, as has been pointed out, what was lacking was the notion that a young person who violated the law should be treated from the outset “not as a criminal, but as a person in need of care, education, and protection” (Warner and Cabot, p. 600). During the 1890s, a broad range of enlightened professionals, including members of the bar and representatives of the burgeoning behavioral sciences, advocated for the separation of juvenile offenders from the adult criminal procedure and the implementation of a separate treatment system. Illinois was the first state to respond positively to these requests, establishing a juvenile court for Chicago in 1899. (1899 Ill. Laws, ch. 131). The act, which was prepared by a committee of the Chicago Bar Association, essentially constituted the court as an equity court with administrative powers. The aim was for the court to assume guardianship of wayward or neglected children when the circumstances warranted it in order to provide them with the same care, custody, and discipline that a good parent would provide for his or her own children. In conclusion, the court was to assume the role of parens patriae, which is not foreign to equity courts. The juvenile court was to work under relatively flexible, non-adversarial processes, with counsel’s role diminished, and its function was to be viewed as rehabilitative rather than punitive. The issue before the court would not be whether the juvenile defendant was guilty of a crime, but rather whether he was “delinquent” and hence in need of care and education from the state.

As a result of the passing of the Illinois Act, the juvenile court movement took on certain characteristics of a crusade. In other states, the reform’s proponents strongly advocated for its passage. In addition to theoretical considerations, they now had an actual experience to support their demands, and they found enthusiastic and willing friends among the professionals of the Chicago juvenile court. For instance, the court’s chief administrator, Timothy Hurley, published the monthly Juvenile Court Record, which documented the effectiveness of his institution and the advancement of the movement. The advocates found little to no pushback, and state after state hurried to adopt the Chicago model. Certain individuals did raise the question of whether the juvenile court’s loose, informal procedure and the enormous discretion of the juvenile magistrate effectively protected juveniles against arbitrary deprivation of liberty. These voices, however, were drowned out by the growing chorus of applause. By 1920, all states but three had established juvenile courts.

Twentieth-Century Developments in Criminal Law

In the 1920s, the focus changed from the improvement of strategies for individual offender rehabilitation to the management of criminal conduct as a whole. This was the time of the great national experiment of Prohibition, which led to an increase in all criminal activities. Citizens around the nation, but especially in large cities, grew increasingly angry at what they saw to be an alarming rise in crime and the criminal justice system’s apparent failure to combat it. Some alleged that the criminal element’s corruption of government officials was the main cause of the problem, and there were several examples of political corruption during the time period. Others felt that the criminal justice system was fundamentally flawed and in dire need of reform. Widespread calls for action were heard.

The city of Cleveland was the first to try a systematic solution to the problem. It had suffered from a rising crime rate for some years, and mistrust loomed over the municipal criminal justice system. In the spring of 1920, the top judge of the city’s municipal court was compelled to resign as a result of his cooperation in a heinous crime. A number of civic organizations, led by the Cleveland bar, convinced the Cleveland Foundation, a private philanthropic organization, to support a criminal justice survey in the city. A team of investigators led by Roscoe Pound, dean of the Harvard Law School at the time, and Felix Frankfurter, a professor of law at Harvard, was assembled. They delivered a lengthy report on Cleveland’s criminal justice system after two years of empirical observation and the collection of vast quantities of statistics. It was the most thorough, detailed, and accurate depiction ever generated of the issues of metropolitan law enforcement. From the police administration to the criminal courts and the city’s correctional facilities, every nook and crevice of the criminal justice system was examined. Even a section on law education in Cleveland and its influence on the criminal justice system was included.

The research identified numerous faults in the present criminal justice system and made recommendations for reform. However, these recommendations were not revolutionary but rather ameliorative. Instead of a drastic redesign of the existing system, the research suggested streamlining and modernizing its operation. The focus was on incorporating more efficiency into all parts of the criminal justice system. For instance, a great deal of space was devoted to describing how prosecution staffs and courts could handle the overwhelming number of criminal cases more efficiently and effectively. The report also highlighted the necessity for the complete professionalization of criminal justice personnel and the elevation of the criminal law practitioner’s status.

The Cleveland crime study inspired the development of crime commissions with comparable responsibilities in other municipalities. Georgia in 1924, Minnesota and Missouri in 1926, Memphis in 1928, and Illinois and New York State in 1929 all initiated their own investigations of the local police enforcement environment. In general, though, they were pale imitations of the original.

At this moment, the national government made the decision to intervene. In 1929, President Herbert Hoover selected United States Attorney General George Wickersham to lead the National Commission of Law Observance and Enforcement. The Wickersham Commission, as it came to be known, was initially tasked with examining issues of law enforcement under the Eighteenth Amendment, but it quickly enlarged its mandate to embrace the entire field of criminal justice. In the subsequent two years, it conducted a comprehensive examination into crime and law enforcement in the United States and issued fourteen volumes of reports covering all aspects of the process. In many ways, its results and suggestions matched those of the Cleveland survey, but it also broke significant new territory. Its report on police procedures, for instance, uncovered patterns of police mistreatment of suspects and emphasized the need to eradicate these practices. According to the committee, one full volume, The Causes of Crime, provided a sociological picture of criminal conduct and suggested techniques for combating the environment that nurtured crime.

The focus of the great crime surveys of the 1920s was almost entirely procedural, but Pound, the guiding spirit of the Cleveland survey, had repeatedly highlighted the enormous inconsistencies and anachronisms embedded in the American substantive law of crimes and emphasized how these stood in the way of constructing a truly modern and effective system of criminal justice. Additionally, the Wickersham Commission drew attention to the dismal and disorganized status of the federal substantive criminal law. In addition, researchers in criminal law, the behavioral sciences, and the embryonic subject of criminology have been attacking the theoretical foundations of the criminal law since the turn of the century and continuing throughout the 1920s. They questioned the scientific validity of such fundamental concepts as “criminal intent,” “deliberation,” and “premeditation,” as well as the utility of the nuanced and even odd definitional distinctions that had developed over the ages in the common law of crimes.

Certainly, a number of these critiques were tainted by a naive determinism; a few even went so far as to claim that science had completely undermined the concept of free will or was on the cusp of finding the biological and psychological kinds that invariably lead to criminal action. The majority, on the other hand, were significantly more nuanced and circumspect, and there is no denying that there were several flaws in the current criminal law, which was the argument made by everyone.

The American Law Institute, a group of attorneys, judges, and legal experts, was established in 1923 to clarify and improve the law. Unhappiness with the condition of the criminal law was one of the key factors that led to its foundation, therefore it is not surprising that criminal law reform was a top priority from the beginning. Nonetheless, it was challenging to put this concern into action. The institute swiftly determined that the process of restatement that looked relevant in other areas of law was inapplicable to the law of crime. As the main theorist of criminal law, Herbert Wechsler, subsequently noted, “the need was less for a description and reaffirmation of existing law than for a guide to long-delayed reform” (1974, p. 421). In 1931, a proposal was made for a model penal code, but the scale of the project was so broad that it could not be funded during the Great Depression.

In 1950, a substantial donation from the Rockefeller Foundation brought the model penal code project back to life. The American Law Institute has created a committee of eminent experts in the subject of criminal law to serve in an advisory capacity. Wechsler was chosen the enterprise’s lead reporter, and Louis Schwartz, another famous specialist in the subject, was made the enterprise’s coreporter.

Wechsler made it plain early on in the project’s development that he and his colleagues were facing a monumental undertaking. According to Wechsler, American society began the twentieth century without ever having properly established “the law on which men placed their ultimate reliance for protection against the gravest harms that human conduct can inflict on individuals and institutions” (1974, p. 420). Instead, the penal law of the various states was a hopelessly disorganized and internally inconsistent mass of common and statute law, with the statutes often being more important in their gloss than in their text. This was less the result of deliberate, informed selection than of accident, chance, and unreflective imitation. According to Wechsler, American criminal law was a mixture of the old and the new that only history can explain (1955, p. 526).

Wechsler was the project’s guiding spirit from beginning to end, and he deserved the most of the credit for its successful completion. However, Wechsler did not act alone in the creation of the Model Penal Code. It was a collaborative endeavor that utilized the expertise of almost the whole academic criminal law establishment, a substantial number of judges, and a few practitioners. It was also a methodically and deliberately conducted endeavor. The drafting of the Code took ten years, from 1952 to 1962, and thirteen drafts were circulated for pubic discussion and criticism after debate in the project’s advisory committee and on the floor of the American Law Institute.

In 1962, the institute released its Proposed Official Draft of the Model Penal Code, the most significant effort since Livingston’s time to put the house of penal law in some sort of reasonable order. In reality, the Proposed Official Draft was, in many ways, an extremely Livingstonian text. This was most evident in its devotion to the assumption that the main objective of criminal law is the control of harmful behavior and to the view that clarity of concept and expression are vital to the accomplishment of this purpose. However, the draft was devoid of the intellectual arrogance and imperiousness that occasionally marred the work of Livingston and his mentor, Bentham. As befitting a product of the American intellect of the middle of the twentieth century, the draft was imbued with a spirit of pragmatism, albeit tempered by principles.

The Code consisted of four sections: general laws, definitions of individual offences, treatment and correction, and correctional organization. Each contained substantial advances relative to existing law. New standards of criminal responsibility were established in the Code’s general provisions in accordance with the premise that the sole goal of the criminal law is to prohibit culpable and destructive behavior, and the principle that flawless behavior should be exempt from punishment. In the domain of inchoate crimes, for instance, the law of attempt was amended to eliminate all doubts regarding factual impossibility and to place emphasis on the actor’s view of the circumstances surrounding the conduct of his act ( 5.01). In conspiracy, on the other hand, the conventional common law rule that held every conspirator accountable for every act that was reasonably foreseeable to be committed by another conspirator was rejected. Instead, the culpability of a co-conspirator was restricted to those crimes of the principal that the co-conspirator sought to aid or encourage ( 5.03). Similarly, the use of defensive force was deemed justified in circumstances of perceived, as opposed to actual, necessity ( 3.04) in the purpose of protecting flawless conduct. The defense of reasonable mistake of fact was upheld for offences such as bigamy ( 230.1). In addition, a limited ignorantia legis defense was made accessible to defendants who held good faith beliefs regarding the innocence of their behavior due to reliance on official opinion or the unavailability of the statute they were accused of breaching ( 2.02, 2.04).

Those provisions in the Code’s general portion that aimed to articulate a new definition of the mental element of crime were the most notable. The common law employed a bewildering array of phrases to describe the mental culpability (mens rea) that was required for a person to be guilty of a crime. In lieu of this plethora of phrases, the drafters of the Code substituted four modes of conduct with respect to the material ingredients of offenses: intentionally, knowingly, recklessly, and negligently. One of these modes must be present for criminal culpability to attach ( 2.02). The Code established a creative solution in the area of strict liability by defining such actions as violations punished solely by penalties, thereby enabling their possibility.

In addition to seeking to organize and rationalize the broad, underlying concepts of criminal culpability, the Model Penal Code introduced various modifications to the definitions of particular offenses. Perhaps the most significant accomplishment in this regard was the adoption of a uniform law of theft in place of the variety of common law offenses known as larceny, larceny by trick, false pretenses, and embezzlement. It also tried to increase the rationale and fairness of sentence for convicted criminals. It advocated a system of determinate sentencing that categorized all felonies into three penalty categories and all misdemeanors into two. Upper and lower limitations of sentences were established for each category, with the judge’s discretion permitted to determine the exact length ( 6.06, 6.08). Extended sentences were permitted for repeat offenders and career criminals ( 7.03, 7.04).

The American Law Institute never anticipated nor intended that its Model Penal Code would be accepted in its entirety anywhere nor would it result in the development of a uniform national penal code. The diverse political histories and demographics of the many states rendered this hope impossible. Rather, the institution hoped that the Code would inspire a comprehensive reevaluation of the criminal code in numerous jurisdictions and that its principles would be broadly applied. This expectation was not to be dashed for the institute. By 1980, thirty states had adopted new criminal codes, mostly as a result of the Model Penal Code, and another nine had either begun or finished code reforms pending approval. It is hardly an exaggeration to assert, as did Sanford Kadish, that the Model Penal Code had “permeated and transformed” American substantive law within three decades of the first circulation of Code drafts (p. 1144).

A last positive effect of the Model Penal Code is the impetus it gave to the effort to codify the federal criminal law for the first time in the truest sense of the word. In 1962, when the Proposed Official Draft of the Code was issued, federal criminal law was in a worse situation than that of the majority of states. Since the inception of the republic, it had developed in an unsystematic, fragmentary manner, and the earlier attempts to establish it on a more reasonable basis had not been very successful. In 1866, the U.S. Congress, disturbed by the unchecked growth of federal criminal law since 1800, appointed a commission to bring order to the chaos. The work of this panel resulted in the enactment of a set of updated statutes that, at the very least, reorganized federal penal provisions into some semblance of coherence (U.S. Congress). In 1897 and 1909, federal penal legislation underwent amendments and rearrangements (Appropriations Act of June 4, 1897, ch. 2, 30 Stat. 11; Act of March 4, 1909, ch. 321, 35 Stat. 1088 (codified in scattered portions of 18 U.S.C.)). After eight years of study by another panel, Congress enacted Title 18 of the United States Code in 1948, claiming it to be the first codification of federal criminal law. If it was a codification, it was of the Fieldian variety as opposed to the Benthamite-Livingstonian variety, and even that may be an exaggeration.

The National Commission on Reform of Federal Criminal Laws was established by Congress in 1966 to study the current state of federal criminal law and propose reforms. The measure was conducted in part to please an anxious public that demanded Congress do something about rapidly rising crime rates, but it was also driven by a genuine desire to reform and enhance the legislation. Congress made it abundantly clear that it desired a comprehensive reevaluation of federal criminal law, and its directive was followed. Eventually, the commission presented a comprehensive rewrite of the federal substantive law of crimes, and numerous legislation were immediately introduced for its enactment in some form.

Due in part to the efforts of Wechsler and his colleagues, the middle decades of the 20th century witnessed a general resurgence of interest in the field of criminal justice, as well as significant efforts to change the criminal code. The future will determine whether this marked the reversal of previous patterns of inattention and the beginning of a new, long-term trend, or whether it was only a brief infatuation with the topic.

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• American Law Institute. Model Penal Code: Proposed Official Draft. Philadelphia: ALI, 1962.
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How Big Tech and Silicon Valley are Transforming the Military-Industrial Complex

America’s military-industrial complex has been rapidly expanding from the Capital Beltway to Silicon Valley. Although much of the Pentagon’s budget is spent on conventional weapons systems, the Defense Department has increasingly sought to adopt AI-enabled systems. Big tech companies, venture capital, and private equity firms benefit from multi-billion dollar Defense contracts, and smaller defense tech startups that “move fast and break things” also receive increased Defense funding.  This report illustrates how a growing portion of the Defense Department’s spending is going to large, well-known tech firms, including some of the most highly valued corporations in the world.

Given the often-classified nature of large defense and intelligence contracts, a lack of transparency makes it difficult to discern the true amount of U.S. spending diverted to Big Tech. Yet, research reveals that the amount is substantial, and growing. According to the nonprofit research organization  Tech Inquiry , three of the world’s biggest tech corporations were awarded approximately $28 billion from 2018 to 2022, including Microsoft ($13.5 billion), Amazon ($10.2 billion), and Alphabet, which is Google’s parent company ($4.3 billion). This paper found that the top five contracts to major tech firms between 2019 and 2022 had contract ceilings totaling at least $53 billion combined.

From 2021 through 2023, venture capital firms  reportedly  pumped nearly $100 billion into defense tech startup companies — an amount 40 percent higher than the previous seven years combined. This report examines how Silicon Valley startups, big tech, and venture capital who benefit from classified Defense contracts will create costly, high-tech defense products that are ineffective, unpredictable, and unsafe – all on the American taxpayer’s dime.

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• Nwamaka Alexandra Ezeonu 1 , MBBS, MSc, MBA   ; 
• Attila J Hertelendy 2, 3 , BSc, MHS, MSc, PhD   ; 
• Medard Kofi Adu 4 , BSc, MSc   ; 
• Janice Y Kung 5 , BCom, LMIS   ; 
• Ijeoma Uchenna Itanyi 1, 6, 7 , MBBS, MPH   ; 
• Raquel da Luz Dias 4 , BSc, MSc, PhD   ; 
• Belinda Agyapong 8 , HDip, BSc, MEd   ; 
• Petra Hertelendy 9 , BS   ; 
• Francis Ohanyido 10 , MBBS, MBA, MPH   ; 
• Vincent Israel Opoku Agyapong 4 , BSc, PGD, MBChB, MSc, MD, PhD   ; 
• Ejemai Eboreime 4 , MBBS, MSc, PhD  

1 Center for Translation and Implementation Research, College of Medicine, University of Nigeria, Nsukka, Nigeria

2 Department of Information Systems and Business Analytics, College of Business, Florida International University, Miami, FL, United States

3 Department of Emergency Medicine, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, United States

4 Department of Psychiatry, Faculty of Medicine, Dalhousie University, Halifax, NS, Canada

5 Geoffrey and Robyn Sperber Health Sciences Library, University of Alberta, Edmonton, AB, Canada

6 Department of Community Medicine, University of Nigeria, Enugu, Nigeria

7 Department of Public Health Sciences, Dalla Lana School of Public Health, University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada

8 Department of Psychiatry, Faculty of Medicine and Dentistry, University of Alberta, Edmonton, AB, Canada

9 Department of Psychology, Florida State University, Tallahassee, FL, United States

10 West African Institute of Public Health, Abuja, Nigeria

Corresponding Author:

Ejemai Eboreime, MBBS, MSc, PhD

Department of Psychiatry

Faculty of Medicine

Dalhousie University

5909 Veterans' Memorial Lane

8th Floor Abbie J Lane Memorial Building, QEII Health Sciences Centre

Halifax, NS, B3H 2E2

Phone: 1 9024732479

Email: [email protected]

Background: Disasters are becoming more frequent due to the impact of extreme weather events attributed to climate change, causing loss of lives, property, and psychological trauma. Mental health response to disasters emphasizes prevention and mitigation, and mobile health (mHealth) apps have been used for mental health promotion and treatment. However, little is known about their use in the mental health components of disaster management.

Objective: This scoping review was conducted to explore the use of mobile phone apps for mental health responses to natural disasters and to identify gaps in the literature.

Methods: We identified relevant keywords and subject headings and conducted comprehensive searches in 6 electronic databases. Studies in which participants were exposed to a man-made disaster were included if the sample also included some participants exposed to a natural hazard. Only full-text studies published in English were included. The initial titles and abstracts of the unique papers were screened by 2 independent review authors. Full texts of the selected papers that met the inclusion criteria were reviewed by the 2 independent reviewers. Data were extracted from each selected full-text paper and synthesized using a narrative approach based on the outcome measures, duration, frequency of use of the mobile phone apps, and the outcomes. This scoping review was reported according to the PRISMA-ScR (Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses extension for Scoping Reviews).

Results: Of the 1398 papers retrieved, 5 were included in this review. A total of 3 studies were conducted on participants exposed to psychological stress following a disaster while 2 were for disaster relief workers. The mobile phone apps for the interventions included Training for Life Skills, Sonoma Rises, Headspace, Psychological First Aid, and Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) Behavioural Health Disaster Response Apps. The different studies assessed the effectiveness or efficacy of the mobile app, feasibility, acceptability, and characteristics of app use or predictors of use. Different measures were used to assess the effectiveness of the apps’ use as either the primary or secondary outcome.

Conclusions: A limited number of studies are exploring the use of mobile phone apps for mental health responses to disasters. The 5 studies included in this review showed promising results. Mobile apps have the potential to provide effective mental health support before, during, and after disasters. However, further research is needed to explore the potential of mobile phone apps in mental health responses to all hazards.

Introduction

Rising global average temperatures and associated changes in weather patterns result in extreme weather events that include hazards such as heatwaves, wildfires, hurricanes, floods, and droughts [ 1 ]. These extreme events linked to climate change are resulting in overlapping and so-called cascading disasters leading to record numbers of “billion dollar” disasters with significant losses of lives and property [ 2 , 3 ]. In 2021 alone, approximately 10,000 fatalities caused by disasters were reported globally, while the economic loss was estimated at approximately US $343 billion [ 4 ]. Disasters are predicted to become more recurring as a result of the impact of human activities such as burning fossil fuels and deforestation, which release greenhouse gases into the atmosphere that trap heat and cause global temperatures to rise [ 5 ].

These catastrophes can adversely affect physical health, mental health, and well-being in both the short and long term as a result of changes due to the political and socioeconomic content, evacuations, social disruption, damage to health care facilities, and financial losses [ 6 - 10 ]. It is estimated that about 33% of people directly exposed to natural disasters will experience mental health sequelae such as posttraumatic stress disorders (PTSDs), anxiety, and depression, among others [ 11 , 12 ].

There is growing recognition of the importance of incorporating mental health into medical and emergency aspects of disaster response [ 12 , 13 ]. However, in contrast to most medical response strategies that are largely curative, mental health response to disasters is predicated on the principles of preventive medicine, thus, emphasizing health promotion, disaster prevention, preparedness, and mitigation [ 14 ]. The strategies of mental health response span across primary prevention (mitigating the risk of ill health before it develops), secondary prevention (early detection and intervention), and tertiary prevention (managing established ailment and averting further complications) [ 15 ].

Mobile health (mHealth) technology has shown great promise in mental health and has been applied across the 3 levels of prevention [ 16 - 20 ]. For example, SMS text messaging and mobile apps have been developed to promote mental health awareness among young people and older adults (primary prevention) [ 21 ]. Additionally, during the COVID-19 pandemic, mHealth was deployed at the population level in Canada to screen for symptoms of anxiety and depression (secondary prevention) [ 22 ]. In addition, mHealth interventions were deployed to support first responders and essential workers during the pandemic [ 23 , 24 ]. Further, the technology has been deployed for therapeutic purposes in patients diagnosed with mental health conditions while simultaneously providing support against complications such as suicidal ideation (tertiary prevention) [ 25 ].

Although videoconferencing and phone calls can be used for mental health conditions, mobile apps provide more mobility and accessibility, are interactive, more adaptable to users’ routines, and can be used repeatedly [ 26 , 27 ]. While numerous academic studies have been conducted on the app of mHealth in the preventive and curative management of mental health conditions in clinical, community, and public health settings, including epidemic response and control, little is known about the use of mobile apps in the mental health components of natural disaster management. This scoping review aims to fill this gap in the literature by mapping where and how mobile apps have been used as part of natural disaster mental health response strategies.

This scoping review was reported according to the PRISMA-ScR (Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses extension for Scoping Reviews) [ 28 ]. The PRISMA-ScR checklist is available in Multimedia Appendix 1 . The protocol was not registered.

Search Strategy

A medical librarian (JYK) collaborated with the research team to identify relevant keywords and subject headings for the review, such as mHealth or m-health; mobile health or mobile applications; public health emergency, disaster, or catastrophe; and flood, earthquake, or hurricane. Equipped with this knowledge, the librarian developed and executed comprehensive searches in 6 electronic databases, including Ovid MEDLINE, Ovid Embase, APA PsycInfo, CINAHL, Scopus, and Web of Science Core Collection. The search was conducted on June 30, 2022, and was limited to the English language. The full search strategies are available in Multimedia Appendix 2 .

Inclusion and Exclusion Criteria

We included papers that applied mobile apps for mental health responses to disasters. Papers were included if the study participants were persons affected by a natural disaster (setting), the intervention included using a mobile phone app, and the outcome included the assessment of a mental health problem. Studies in which participants were exposed to a man-made disaster were included if the sample also included some participants exposed to a natural disaster. The mental health conditions included were stress, anxiety, depression, and PTSD. Only full-text studies published in English were included. Studies that did not include any intervention with a mobile app for mental health, those focused on videoconferencing or phone calls, and papers on protocols, trial registration, or review were excluded.

Selection of Studies

The search identified papers that were retrieved from the databases. After removing duplicates, the initial titles and abstracts of the unique papers were screened by 2 independent review authors based on the inclusion criteria in a web-based tool called Covidence (Veritas Health Innovation Ltd) [ 29 ]. Full texts of the selected papers that met the inclusion criteria were reviewed by the 2 independent reviewers. The research team resolved disagreements through discussion. The bibliographies from the included studies were also reviewed to identify additional studies for inclusion.

Data Extraction and Synthesis

Data from each selected full-text paper were extracted into a data extraction form developed by the research team. The data included the author and year of publication, country of study, study design, number of participants, type of natural disaster, name of the mobile app, duration of use of the app, outcome measures, and the study’s findings. These data were synthesized using a narrative approach based on the outcome measures, the duration, frequency of use of the mobile apps, and the outcomes.

Search Results

Of the 1532 papers retrieved from the searches, 976 unique papers had their titles and abstracts screened after deduplication. A total of 38 papers were moved to full-text screening, and data were extracted from 5 papers [ 30 - 34 ] ( Figure 1 ). Table 1 shows the summary of the details of the papers.

a TLS: Training for Life Skills.

b PTSD: posttraumatic stress disorder.

c MBSR: Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction.

d PFA: Psychological First Aid.

e SAMHSA: Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration.

Characteristics of Included Studies

Of the 5 studies included in this review, 3 (60%) were conducted in the United States [ 30 , 31 , 34 ], while 2 (40%) were conducted in South Korea [ 32 , 33 ]. All studies used different study designs. A total of 3 studies used a quasi-experimental design—the first, a single group postexperiment with 22 participants [ 32 ]; the second, a multiple-baseline single case experimental design with 7 participants [ 30 ], while the third study used a 1-group pre- and posttest design with 318 participants [ 31 ]. The Training for Life Skills (TLS) app study had only a posttest following the use of the app [ 32 ]; the other 2 had baseline and follow-up measurements with the Sonoma Rises app study having, in addition, preintervention and postintervention measurements. The Psychological First Aid (PFA) study was designed as a qualitative study, while the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) study used a mixed methods descriptive design.

Characteristics of the Population

The TLS, Sonoma, and Headspace apps were designed for disaster survivors, while the PFA and SAMHA apps were designed to support disaster relief workers. The TLS app study was administered to adults with a median age of 32 years. Participants of the Sonoma Rises app study had a mean age of 16 (SD 0.98) years, while participants of the Headspace app study had a mean age of 46.1 (SD 10) years. The TLS app study focused on all types of disasters; the Sonoma Rises study focused on adolescents exposed to wildfires, while the Headspace app focused on women who experienced hurricanes and deep-water oil spillage. The PFA study involved 19 disaster health care workers who first underwent disaster simulation training using the mobile app.

Characteristics of the Mobile App Interventions

The included studies revealed several mobile phone apps used as interventions. The first, the TLS app, was used as a psychological first aid program for disaster survivors with content on information, psychological healing, and mood change [ 32 ]. The second was the Sonoma Rises app, a Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA)–compliant, cloud-based mobile app with daily push notifications as reminders designed to help survivors of wildfires or other disasters to find their new routines, build resilience, and increase well-being. The app included 6 self-paced content sections, psychoeducation, and direct connections to free and local mental health care services. The third was the Headspace app for a mindfulness-based stress reduction program that included a series consisting of 10 sessions designed to be used for about 10 minutes per day. The SAMHSA Disaster App equips behavioral health providers to respond to all kinds of traumatic incidents by enabling them to readily access disaster-specific information and other important materials directly on their mobile devices [ 34 ]. The PFA mobile app provided evidence-based information and tools for disaster workers to prepare for, execute, and recover from providing psychological first aid during disasters. Accessibility via smartphones and the inclusion of multimedia interventions and assessments tailored for disaster contexts were key features enabling its use integrated with the simulation training [ 33 ].

Frequency and Duration of App Use

The 3 survivor-based apps had variations in the duration of the intervention (app use), which were 8 weeks, at least 5 times a week, frequency of use per day not specified [ 32 ]; 4 weeks for 10 minutes per day [ 30 ]; and 6 weeks for 5-10 minutes per day [ 31 ]. Both the TLS app and the Sonoma Rises app studies had weekly follow-up assessments. The different interventions were applied at least a year following the disasters. Participants in the Sonoma Rises app study used the app on an average of 17 (SD 8.92) days and visited the app an average of 43.50 (SD 30.56) times, with an average session lasting 56.85 (SD 27.87) seconds. The mean time spent on the app was 35.77 (SD 30.03) minutes, while for the TLS app study, the median time spent on the app over the 8 weeks of use was 200-399 minutes. Participants used the Headspace app an average of 24 (SD 36) days and logged in an average of 36 (SD 80) times. There was no description of the frequency and duration of use for the relief worker apps.

Effectiveness Outcomes

Effectiveness outcomes refer to the effects or impact of an intervention or program on the intended outcomes or goals. Different measures were used to assess the effectiveness of the apps’ use as either the primary or secondary outcome. Emotional quotients (emotional stability), basic rhythm quotients (brain stability), alpha-blocking rates (increased positive mood), and brain quotients assessed using electroencephalogram (EEG)–measured brainwave activities adjusted for self-reported app use time were used in the TLS app study [ 32 ]. The Headspace app study assessed effectiveness using a combination of measures such as trait mindfulness using a 15-item Mindful Attention Awareness Scale (MAAS)—trait version; depressive symptoms using the Center for Epidemiologic Studies Depression Scale-10 (CESD-10); perceived stress with the Perceived Stress Scale, 4-item version (PSS-4); and sleep quality using the Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index (PSQI) [ 31 ]. The Sonoma Rises app study measured efficacy using daily ratings of anxiety and fear, weekly measures of post-traumatic stress symptoms using the Child PTSD Symptom Scale (CPSS-5) for Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition ( DSM-5 ), internalizing and externalizing symptoms using the Behaviour and Feelings Survey (BFS), psychosocial functioning using the Ohio Scale for Youth—Functioning subscale (OSY), and measures of anxiety (Generalized Anxiety Disorder-7 [GAD-7]), depression (Patient Health Questionnaire-9 [PHQ-9]), well-being—Warwick-Edinburgh Mental Well-being Scale (WEMWBS), sleep (Insomnia—Severity Index [ISI]), academic engagement (Student Engagement Instrument [SEI]), and perceived social support (Wills’ Social Support Scale [WSSS]) [ 30 ].

All 3 survivor-based apps were found to have positive benefits in addressing mental health issues among persons exposed to natural disasters. The TLS mobile app was shown to be effective in increasing positive and decreasing negative psychological factors according to app use time. The TLS mobile apps’ use had a significant effect on the emotional quotients (β=.550; P <.008), explanatory power (EP) was 30%, had a significant positive effect on the basic rhythm quotient (left brain: β=.598; P <.003; EP 35; right brain: β=.451; P <.035; EP 20%). Additionally, it had a significant positive effect on the alpha-blocking rate (left brain: β=.510; P <.015; EP 26%; right brain: β=.463; P <.035, EP 21%); and a significant positive effect on the brain quotient (β=.451; P <.035; EP 20%) [ 16 ]. The Headspace app had a positive effect on depression (odds ratio [OR] 0.3, 95% CI 0.11-0.81), physical activity (OR 2.8, 95% CI 1.0-7.8), sleep latency (OR 0.3, 95% CI 0.11-0.81), sleep duration (OR 0.3, 95% CI 0.07-0.86), and sleep quality (OR 0.1, 95% CI 0.02-0.96); however, there was no change in mindfulness scores from baseline to follow-up. For the Sonoma Rises app, no significant effects were observed for the clinical and functional outcomes because the longitudinal part of the study was affected by limited statistical power as a result of small sample size and historical confounds that made the participants miss data submission. However, visual inspection of individual data following the intervention showed downward trends across the study phases for daily levels of anxiety, fearfulness, and individual posttraumatic stress symptom severity.

For the PFA app, the qualitative study explored disaster health workers’ experiences with simulation training using focus group discussions. A total of 19 participants engaged in disaster scenarios with standardized patients, using a PFA app for guidance. Workers valued the practical educational approach, felt increased self-efficacy to support survivors, and identified areas for enhancing simulations and app tools to optimize effectiveness.

Implementation Outcomes

Implementation outcomes refer to the effects of an intervention or program implementation on various aspects of the implementation process, such as the fidelity of implementation, acceptability, adoption, feasibility, and maintainability. In the papers reviewed, feasibility was assessed using enrollment, program participation, and retention. Acceptability was measured using how well participants liked the app using a rating scale, how much of the app program was completed, the biggest barriers, and whether the app would be recommended to others. Data on characteristics of app use (engagement) were measured using the total number of log ins, average log ins per program completer, platform used (iOS, Android, or web-based), day of week of use (weekday vs weekend), and time of day of use (in 4-hour blocks) [ 30 , 31 ].

The Headspace app was reported to be cost-effective to implement and easy to use [ 31 ]. For engagement, only 14% (43/318) of the enrolled women used the app. The level of engagement with the app was high, with 72% (31/43) of participants completing some or all the sessions. Retention was also high with 74% (32/43) of the participants completing the follow-up survey. Lack of time was cited as the main barrier to using the app for 37% (16/43) of users and 49% (94/193) of nonusers. The majority of the users (32/43, 74%) reported high levels of satisfaction with the app. Acceptability was also high, with most participants (32/43, 74%) reporting that they liked the app and 86% (37/43) reporting that they would recommend it to others. Characteristics of app use showed that of the 1530 log ins, most participants (n=1191, 78%) used the iOS platform, mainly on weekdays (n=1147, 75%) and at different times of day mostly from noon to 4 PM (n=375, 25%).

Sonoma Rises was found to be feasible in terms of engagement and satisfaction among teens with high levels of disaster-related posttraumatic stress symptoms [ 30 ]. The self-assessment and data visualization features of the Sonoma Rises app strongly appealed to all the participants, and they were willing to recommend the app to their friends. Self-satisfaction with the mobile app was rated as extremely high (mean 8.50, SD 0.58, on a scale of 0 to 10, with 10 as totally satisfied). The participants agreed or strongly agreed to recommend this intervention to a friend. The participants found the intervention helpful (mean 2, SD 0.82); had the content, functions, and capabilities they needed (mean 3, SD 1.12); and were satisfied with how easy it was to use the app (mean 2, SD 0), on a scale of 1 to 5 with 1 as strongly agree and 5 as strongly disagree. In the qualitative feedback, to make the use of the app better, the participants suggested more notifications to return to the app and the use of the app immediately after a disaster. Implementation outcome was not an objective of the TLS app, hence, none was reported.

Other Mobile Apps With Potential Use in Disasters

Some mobile apps not meeting the inclusion criteria showed promise for supporting mental health in disasters. PTSD Coach provides tools for managing PTSD symptoms [ 35 ]. Though not disaster-specific, its psychoeducation, symptom tracking, and coping strategies could aid survivors. Similarly, COVID Coach was designed to help manage pandemic-related stress and anxiety [ 36 ]. These apps are summarized in Table 2 .

a PTSD: posttraumatic stress disorder.

Principal Findings

This review sought to identify and map the use of mobile apps for the mental health component of natural disaster management. We found only 5 studies meeting the inclusion criteria. The scarcity of published literature in this area suggests that mobile apps have not been extensively used in mental health responses to natural disasters. Academic studies on the public’s use of mobile technologies in disaster management are still nascent [ 37 ], but there has been increased interest in developing and deploying digital technology and mobile apps by governments and nonstate actors as part of disaster preparedness and response [ 38 , 39 ]. A recent systematic review found that there is a lack of mental health preparedness in most countries when it comes to disasters [ 40 ]. The 5 studies included in our scoping review confirmed this gap and further demonstrated that mobile apps can provide mental health support to disaster-affected individuals and communities. The studies found that the use of mobile apps was associated with improvements in mental health outcomes, such as decreased anxiety and depression symptoms and increased resilience. The reviewed studies also suggest that mobile apps can be effective in delivering psychoeducation and coping skills training to disaster-affected individuals. A 2017 scoping review found that mobile apps have been largely used for communication purposes in disaster management [ 37 ]. The scope of use was classified into 5 categories which are not mutually exclusive. These categories are (1) crowdsourcing (organize and collect disaster-related data from the crowd), (2) collaborating platforms (serve as a platform for collaboration during disasters), (3) alerting and information (disseminate authorized information before and during disasters), (4) collating (gather, filter, and analyze data to build situation awareness), and (5) notifying (for users to notify others during disasters) [ 37 ].

Some authors classify disaster response into 3 phases: preparedness, response, and mitigation [ 41 ]. The studies included in this review exclusively examined the use of mobile apps during the recovery phase of disaster management. However, none of the studies explored the potential of mobile apps during the preparedness or response phases of disaster management. By addressing this gap, future research could help to provide more comprehensive and effective strategies for the use of mobile apps throughout all phases of disaster management. Examples of potential opportunities are demonstrated in Figure 2 .

Preparedness Phase

Mobile apps can play a critical role as primary prevention interventions by raising awareness and promoting mental health literacy in the community in preparation for natural disasters. These apps can provide information on common mental health problems that may arise during and after disasters and offer tips on staying mentally healthy. For example, apps can include psychoeducation modules on coping skills, stress reduction, and self-care techniques, as well as information on how to prepare for a disaster and what steps to take to protect one’s mental health during and after a disaster. The use and effectiveness of mobile apps in health literacy have been demonstrated in the literature [ 19 ], thus providing a foundation for adaptation in disaster management.

Response Phase

Mobile apps can be used to connect people in need of mental health support with mental health professionals or other resources. For example, apps can provide information on emergency hotlines, crisis intervention services, and support groups. This was demonstrated as effective during the COVID-19 pandemic [ 42 ]. Mobile apps can also provide coping strategies and techniques to manage stress and anxiety in response to other natural disasters [ 34 ]. In this scoping review, we found that 3 apps had positive benefits in addressing mental health issues among persons exposed to natural disasters.

Recovery Phase

As part of secondary and tertiary prevention strategies, mobile apps can provide valuable ongoing support to those affected by disasters. For secondary prevention, mobile apps can be designed to support early detection and intervention for mental health problems after a natural disaster. These apps can include screening tools to identify common mental health issues such as anxiety, depression, and PTSD and offer appropriate referral pathways [ 43 ]. Additionally, apps can provide symptom-tracking tools to help individuals monitor their mental health over time [ 43 ]. For tertiary prevention, mobile apps can support the ongoing management of established mental health problems after a natural disaster. For example, apps can provide evidence-based psychotherapy interventions, such as cognitive-behavioral therapy, to help individuals manage their symptoms [ 44 ]. They can also connect individuals with support groups and peer-to-peer networks to provide additional emotional support and help individuals connect with others who have experienced similar challenges. Furthermore, mobile apps can offer self-help tools, such as meditation exercises and mood tracking, to help people cope with the ongoing mental health effects of the disaster. They can also provide information on local mental health services and support groups, helping individuals access the resources they need to manage their mental health.

General Mental Health Apps Show Promise for Disaster Response

While not specifically designed for disaster contexts, some mobile apps demonstrate strategies to support mental health that could aid disaster survivors. PTSD Coach delivers PTSD psychoeducation, symptom tracking tools, coping skills training, and crisis resource access—elements that could help survivors experiencing common postdisaster issues like trauma or loss [ 35 ]. Though it was tailored for veterans and civilians with PTSD, 1 study found it improved users’ depression and functioning. Similarly, COVID Coach offered pandemic-related stress management through symptom tracking, healthy coping recommendations, and crisis line referrals [ 36 ]. By leveraging the scalability of mobile apps, COVID Coach reached many struggling during a global crisis. These examples illustrate that apps may provide accessible, far-reaching mediums for disseminating disaster mental health resources—even without disaster-specific tailoring. Research should further explore adapting evidence-based, general mental health apps for disaster contexts or incorporate elements of them into future disaster response tools. With mental health needs magnified during disasters, mobile apps with thoughtful design show promise in expanding access to psychosocial support.

There are several potential limitations when using mobile apps for mental health responses to disasters. One of the main concerns is the accessibility of these apps, as not all members of the affected communities may have access to smartphones or internet connectivity. Furthermore, language and cultural barriers may prevent effective use. Another potential limitation is the quality and accuracy of the information provided. Without proper oversight, some apps may provide misinformation or inaccurate advice, which could exacerbate mental health issues. In addition, privacy concerns around collecting and storing sensitive data must be addressed.

Barriers like lack of mobile devices and internet access can impede adoption, especially in marginalized areas. Apps not designed for low literacy users or that are only available in certain languages could also limit accessibility. Concerns around privacy and security may deter some individuals. However, smartphone ubiquity globally enables use by vulnerable groups. Government agencies and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) can promote adoption by integrating vetted apps into disaster protocols and funding dissemination. Developing apps with stakeholders and prelaunch user testing also facilitate uptake. Monitoring user feedback allows for ongoing optimization and troubleshooting of barriers. Cultural tailoring to address stigma and use local beliefs further enables implementation success. Finally, limited evidence-based research into app effectiveness highlights the need for more rigorous evaluation and testing of mobile apps for disaster mental health response.

This scoping review has certain methodological limitations that should be considered while interpreting its results. First, the search was restricted to 6 electronic databases and only English-language papers were considered. We also searched MEDLINE and not PubMed, and these may have led to the omission of some relevant studies. Second, the study focused on mobile phone apps for mental health response to disasters, disregarding other types of technology that could also be used in disaster management such as telehealth, SMS text messaging, and emails. Moreover, since the study included only 5 papers, it may not offer a comprehensive overview of the use of mobile phone apps in disaster response strategies. There is the possibility of the existence of apps not yet published in academic literature. Fourth, the nonuse of a control group in the design of the studies makes it difficult to determine whether the observed effects were entirely due to the use of the apps or other characteristics of the participants that predisposed them to use the apps. Fifth, the small sample sizes for the studies mean they require caution with generalization. Despite these limitations, the review provides valuable insights into the use of mobile apps in disaster response and serves as a useful resource for developing contextually appropriate mobile apps for disaster management. Last, our study focused on natural disasters, further research should examine the role of apps in supporting mental health in conflict and complex emergencies such as wars, outbreaks of violence, and complex political conflict situations [ 45 ].

Conclusions

This scoping review found that mobile apps have not been extensively used in mental health responses to natural disasters, with only 5 studies meeting the inclusion criteria. However, the studies included in this review demonstrate that mobile apps can be useful in providing mental health support to disaster-affected individuals, as well as equip disaster responders. There is a critical gap identified in this study, as none of the studies investigated the use of mobile apps for potential victims in the preparedness or response phases of disaster management. We, therefore, recommend that mobile apps be integrated into the various phases of disaster management as part of mental health response. Additionally, it is important to ensure that these apps are accessible to all members of the community, taking into account cultural, linguistic, and other factors that may impact their effectiveness. Mobile apps have great potential to provide valuable ongoing support to those affected by disasters, and they can be a valuable resource in disaster management, helping people cope with the mental health effects of disasters and connecting with the necessary support services.

The findings from this scoping review have important implications for policy makers, disaster management professionals, and mental health practitioners. There is a clear need for policies and protocols that integrate evidence-based mobile apps into mental health disaster planning and response. Disaster agencies should invest in developing, evaluating, and widely disseminating mobile apps specifically designed to mitigate psychological trauma before, during, and after catastrophic events. Mental health professionals can incorporate vetted mobile apps into their standard of care for at-risk disaster survivors. Going forward, a collaborative approach across these groups will be essential to leverage mobile technology in building community resilience and addressing the rising mental health burdens in an era defined by climate change–fueled natural disasters.

Acknowledgments

This work was funded by the Department of Psychiatry, Dalhousie University, Halifax, Canada. The funder was not involved in the conceptualization or implementation of the study, nor the decision to publish the findings.

Conflicts of Interest

None declared.

The PRISMA-SCR checklist. PRISMA-SCR: Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses extension for Scoping Reviews.

Detailed search strategy.

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Abbreviations

Edited by G Eysenbach; submitted 13.06.23; peer-reviewed by T Benham, K Goniewicz, R Konu, J Ranse, P Moreno-Peral; comments to author 10.01.24; revised version received 25.02.24; accepted 23.03.24; published 17.04.24.

©Nwamaka Alexandra Ezeonu, Attila J Hertelendy, Medard Kofi Adu, Janice Y Kung, Ijeoma Uchenna Itanyi, Raquel da Luz Dias, Belinda Agyapong, Petra Hertelendy, Francis Ohanyido, Vincent Israel Opoku Agyapong, Ejemai Eboreime. Originally published in the Journal of Medical Internet Research (https://www.jmir.org), 17.04.2024.

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