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Professor C. Eric Hintz presented his forthcoming paper, “The Plain Solution to Federal Habeas,” at the American Association of Law Schools (AALS) Criminal Procedure Section Junior Scholars Conference.
Professor Hintz’s paper has been accepted for publication in the Utah Law Review some time in early 2026. The article argues that the current federal habeas system is broken and fails to serve any of its core purposes due to a myopic focus on limiting review through excessive procedure. To fix the problem, the paper proposes that much of the existing habeas structure be scrappped and replaced with a more flexible and holistic approach premised on “plain error” review.
The article maintains that this would improve habeas by opening the door to relief in strong cases while still giving courts tools to deny weak ones and enforce procedural regularity–all without forcing everyone to slog through an impassible procedural thicket, as they currently must in most cases.