Law Commons^™

The California Supreme Court And State Constitutional Rights: The Early Years, Joseph R. Grodin

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Neighborhood, Crime, And Incarceration In New York City, Jeffery Fagan, Valerie West, Jan Holland

Faculty Scholarship

Several new studies suggest that social and spatial incarceration of young males has become part of the developmental ecology of adolescence in the nation's poorest neighborhoods. This concentration began in the 1970s, and has grown steadily through the last quarter century.The story of young men such as Cesar in Random Family illustrates the pervasive effects of both direct and vicarious prison experiences for young men and women in poor neighborhoods. Studies of street life such as Random Family, Code of the Streets, and American Project show how these experiences are now internalized in the social and psychological fabric of neighborhood …

Legislating Accountability: Standards, Sanctions, And School District Reform , Aaron J. Saiger

Faculty Scholarship

The “New Accountability” movement in American education purports to catalyze improvement in American education by setting clear state standards for academic performance, measuring performance against those standards, and disseminating information about results. This Article argues that the potential of state accountability programs lies not in their imposition of standards but in their imposition of a sanction - the disestablishment of school districts, which entails unseating the local superintendent and school board and replacing them with state officials or their designees - that is extremely painful for the targeted district but is also painful for states to impose. The first Part …

Home Rule For The Twenty-First Century, Richard Briffault

Faculty Scholarship

At this point, four years into the new century, most readers must be tired of the invocation of the "twenty-first century" in law review articles. Yet, "the twenty-first century" in the title of this article is significant. The home rule idea first entered American law in the nineteenth century, an era with different forms of urban political, social, and economic organization, and a different role for local government. As the nature of urban development and the role of local government changes, home rule must change with it.

Home rule is a complex topic. Home rule takes many legal forms and …

With Strings Attached: The Limits On Local Control, Richard Briffault

Faculty Scholarship

In a December 2003 decision, a Colorado trial court judge invalidated the state's new school voucher program. The decision was unusual in that the court relied not on traditional separation-of-church-and-state concerns, but instead on a provision of the Colorado state constitution that vests control over public education in local school boards. The court held that by failing to give local school boards any" input whatsoever into the instruction to be offered by the private schools" that accepted voucher students, the state had violated the constitutional provision that grants local boards "control of instruction in the public schools of their respective …