Law Commons^™

Comparing Supreme Court Jurisprudence In Obergefell V. Hodges And Town Of Castle Rock V. Gonzales: A Watershed Moment For Due Process Liberty, Jill C. Engle

Jill Engle

“The nature of injustice is that we may not always see it in our own times. The generations that wrote and ratified the Bill of Rights and the Fourteenth Amendment did not presume to know the extent of freedom in all of its dimensions, and so they entrusted to future generations a charter protecting the right of all persons to enjoy liberty as we learn its meaning. When new insight reveals discord between the Constitution’s central protections and a received legal stricture, a claim to liberty must be addressed.” -- Obergefell v. Hodges, 135 S. Ct. 2584, …

Evicted: The Socio-Legal Case For The Right To Housing, Lisa T. Alexander

Lisa T. Alexander

Matthew Desmond's Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City is a triumphant work that provides the missing socio-legal data needed to prove why America should recognize housing as a human right. Desmond's masterful study of the effect of evictions on Milwaukee's urban poor in the wake of the 2008 U.S. housing crisis humanizes the evicted, and their landlords, through rich and detailed ethnographies. His intimate portrayals teach Evicted's readers about the agonizingly difficult choices that low-income, unsubsidized tenants must make in the private rental market. Evicted also reveals the contradictions between "law on the books" and "law-in-action." Its most …

Domestic Violence And The Politics Of Privacy, By Kristin A. Kelly [Book Review], Cynthia Grant Bowman

Cynthia Grant Bowman

No abstract provided.

Denying Freedom Rather Than Securing The Country: National Security Is Undermined By Laws Governing Battered Immigrants, Eve Tilley-Coulson

Eve Tilley-Coulson

Relief for battered immigrants is not an obvious national security matter per se, yet remedies are enacted in conjunction with stringent interpretations of immigration law, as though victims pose a security threat. Discrepancies exist between the immigration laws themselves—which attempt to secure the United States from disease, violence, and illegal activity—and the loopholes found within remedies under these laws, unnecessarily removing victims and perpetuating a cycle of fear and abuse. This paper addresses how relief for battered immigrants, when implemented with the priority of protecting national security and immigration legislation, creates and perpetuates negative societal consequences. The economic and societal …

Battering The Poor: How Georgia’S Mandatory Family Violence Classes Deny Indigent Defendants Equal Protection Of The Law, Whitney Scherck

Whitney Scherck

Thirty years ago, the U.S. Supreme Court in Bearden v. Georgia held that the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment prevents a court from incarcerating an individual for failure to pay a fine unless it first inquires into their reasons for failing to do so and determines that the defendant willfully failed to make bona fide efforts to pay. However, recently, a new kind of legal debt has emerged. As states’ budgets tighten, so-called user fees are becoming an increasingly common way for legislatures to toughen the criminal justice system without having to come up with funding for it. …

Penny Wise But Pound Foolish In The Heartland: A Case Study Of Decriminalizing Domestic Violence In Topeka, Kansas, Shelley Santry

Shelley M. Santry

The Personal Is Political--And Economic: Rethinking Domestic Violence, Deborah M. Weissman

Deborah M. Weissman

This Article seeks to expand the scope of the domestic violence discourse within the context of the theory and practice of legal strategies. The intent is to shift the analytical parameters beyond the criminal justice system to include the political economy of everyday experiences of households. Such a paradigm shift examines the conditions of the private sphere as a function of the circumstances of public realms. It considers domestic violence by linking it to the structural transformations of the U.S. economy during recent years. It assesses domestic violence from the perspective of the daily life of men and women who …