Law Commons^™

What You Should Know About Michigan’S Revised Kindergarten Oral Health Assessment Law, Michele Kawabe Mph, Rd, Cdces

The Journal of the Michigan Dental Association

Starting from the 2024-25 academic year, Michigan mandates a pre-school oral health assessment for all incoming kindergarten students. Michele Kawabe, MPH, RD, CDCES, explains the legislative change, its implementation through the Kindergarten Oral Health Assessment (KOHA) program, and its potential impact on dental offices. This feature provides insights into frequently asked questions, covering assessment protocols, forms, patient records, reimbursement, and data tracking by the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services (MDHHS).

Armed And Under The Influence: The Second Amendment And The Intoxicant Rule After Bruen, F. Lee Francis

Marquette Law Review

In 2001, the Michigan Legislature passed a law prohibiting the possession or use of a firearm by a person under the influence of alcoholic liquor or a controlled substance. Presumably the legislature thought it necessary to prevent individuals from possessing a firearm while under the influence of drugs or alcohol. One study has indicated that alcohol misuse is keenly associated with firearm ownership, risk behaviors involving firearms as well as risk for perpetrating harm to one’s self or others. Researchers also found that an estimated 8.9 to 11.7 million firearm owners binge drink in an average month. In an attempt …

Affirming And Supporting Black Women’S Lactation Agency As Redress, Dorothy Couchman

San Diego Law Review

This Article opens with Truth baring her breasts for four reasons. First, for many women like Truth who survived enslavement, lactation was a specifically gendered and racialized site of atrocity. Under chattel slavery in the United States, enslaved women were prevented from breastfeeding their infants as needed, compelled to wean their children far too early at the demands of their enslavers, or made to wet-nurse their enslavers’ White children in place of their own. This lactational coercion was part of a larger atrocity of reproductive abuse perpetuated against enslaved women.

Second, as Truth notes, enslaved women’s children were harmed when …

Breathing Room For The Right Of Assembly, Tabatha Abu El-Haj

William & Mary Journal of Race, Gender, and Social Justice

This Article explores the legal and political fault lines that the wave of protests highlighting police violence and systemic racism in the summer of 2020 reveal. It focuses in depth on Detroit, Michigan, as a window into the ways that the First Amendment, as currently construed, under-protects those seeking political change and racial reckoning by demonstrating in the streets.

Can A Person's "Slate" Ever Really Be "Cleaned"? The Modern-Day Implications Of Pennsylvania's Clean Slate Act, Kimberly E. Capuder

St. John's Law Review

(Exceprt)

In 2006, Khalia was arrested for a “low-level counterfeiting charge.” While Khalia was innocent and never convicted for the charged offense, she still had a criminal record. Because she was concerned that future employers would “view her as a thief,” she never applied to any of her dream jobs. But once Khalia’s arrest record was automatically sealed, she finally had enough confidence to send in a job application to a prestigious consulting firm, and was offered the position. Khalia believes that her newly sealed criminal record “means a future without judgment.” And this future without judgment was made possible …

Michigan’S Driver’S Licensing Legislation: The Road To Unlicensed Drivers, Alexa Tipton

Journal of Legislation

No abstract provided.

A New Urban Front For Shareholder Primacy, Anne Choike

Michigan Business & Entrepreneurial Law Review

The hundredth anniversary of Dodge v. Ford marks an occasion to reflect upon what, if anything, has changed about shareholder primacy in a century. Seizing this opportunity, in this Article I analyze new local laws and ordinances that promote stakeholder governance and engagement, which seek to protect the interests of non-shareholder constituencies such as workers, the environment, and the communities in which corporations operate, among others. In doing so, I argue that such local laws meaningfully differ from traditional stakeholder protections, most significantly in the way that they weaken managerial accountability to shareholders. The emergence of these city laws challenges …

Dispossessing Resident Voice: Municipal Receiverships And The Public Trust, Juliet M. Moringiello

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

The residents of struggling cities suffer property dispossessions both as individual owners and as municipal residents. Their individual dispossessions are part of a cycle that often begins with industrial decline. In Detroit, for example, more than 100,000 residents have lost their homes to tax foreclosure over a four-year period that bracketed the city’s bankruptcy filing. Falling property values, job losses, and foreclosures affect municipal budgets by reducing tax revenues. As individual dispossessions exacerbate municipal financial crises, residents can also face the loss of municipal property. Struggling cities and towns often sell publicly owned property—from parks to parking systems—to balance municipal …

Dispossessing Detroit: How The Law Takes Property, Mary Kathlin Sickel

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

Introduction for the University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform's Symposium “Dispossessing Detroit: How the Law Takes Property,” hosted on November 9 and 10, 2019.

The Friday Night “Who Is Driving?” Debate Will Soon Come To An End: How Autonomous Vehicles Are Changing Our Lives And Societal Norms, Nicholas Calabria

Touro Law Review

No abstract provided.

Reconciling Police Power Prerogatives, Public Trust Interests, And Private Property Rights Along Laurentian Great Lakes Shores, Richard K. Norton, Nancy H. Welsh

Michigan Journal of Environmental & Administrative Law

The United States has a north coast along its ‘inland seas’—the Laurentian Great Lakes. The country enjoys more than 4,500 miles of Great Lakes coastal shoreline, almost as much as its ocean coastal shorelines combined, excluding Alaska. The Great Lakes states are experiencing continued shorefront development and redevelopment, and there are growing calls to better manage shorelands for enhanced resiliency in the face of global climate change. The problem is that the most pleasant, fragile, and dangerous places are in high demand among coastal property owners, such that coastal development often yields the most tenacious of conflicts between public interests …

The Democracy Ratchet, Derek T. Muller

Indiana Law Journal

This Article proceeds in five Parts. Part I identifies recent instances in which federal courts have invoked a version of the Democracy Ratchet. It identifies the salient traits of the Democracy Ratchet in these cases. Part II describes why the Democracy Ratchet has gained attention, primarily as a tactic of litigants and as a convenient benchmark in preliminary injunction cases. Part III examines the history of the major federal causes of action concerning election administration—Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, the Burdick balancing test, and the Equal Protection Clause. In each, it traces the path of the doctrine to …

Education Reform And Detroit’S Right To Literacy Litigation, Kristine L. Bowman

Washington and Lee Law Review Online

Ongoing education reform litigation arising out of Detroit, Michigan presents an innovative claim: Children have an unenumerated federal constitutional right of access to literacy. On June 29, 2018, the district court granted defendants’ motion to dismiss. The case is now on appeal to the Sixth Circuit and is expected to be argued in the first half of 2019. This litigation has already broken new ground and, regardless of the ultimate outcome, it is valuable because it invites us to revisit fundamental questions about rights, remedies, and the role of courts in education reform.

Environmental Injustice/Racism In Flint, Michigan: An Analysis Of The Bodily Integrity Claim In Mays V. Snyder As Compared To Other Environmental Justice Cases, Joshua V. Berliner

Pace Environmental Law Review

This Note examines the merits of the “bodily integrity” claim that the Flint residents have alleged in Mays (but does not discuss any claims asserted in Earley, the case Mays was consolidated with on appeal), and asserts that they should be successful on this claim on remand, assuming that the facts alleged in the Flint residents’ complaint are true. This Note outlines the alleged facts and then discusses the existing case law on bodily integrity claims generally, both in the non-environmental justice and environmental justice fields. Following is an explanation of the specific bodily integrity claim the Flint residents have …

Schuette And Antibalkanization, Samuel Weiss, Donald Kinder

William & Mary Bill of Rights Journal

In Schuette v. Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action, Justice Kennedy’s controlling plurality revised the political process doctrine and ended the practice of affirmative action in Michigan. In this opinion, Kennedy followed in the Court’s tradition of invoking antibalkanization values in equal protection cases, making the empirical claims both that antibalkanization motivated the campaign to end affirmative action in Michigan and that the campaign itself would, absent judicial intervention, have antibalkanizing effects.

Using sophisticated empirical methods, this Article is the first to examine whether the Court’s claims on antibalkanization are correct. We find they are not. Support for the Michigan …

The Failure Of Education Federalism, Kristi L. Bowman

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

Since the Great Recession of 2007–09, states have devoted even less money to public education and state courts have become even more hostile to structural reform litigation that has sought to challenge education funding and quality. Yet the current model of education federalism (dual federalism) leaves these matters largely to the states. As a result, state-level legislative inaction, executive acquiescence, and judicial abdication can combine to create a situation in which the quality of traditional public schools declines sharply. This is the case in Michigan, which is an unusually important state not only because the dynamics that are emerging in …

The Public Pension Crisis Through The Lens Of State Constitutions And Statutory Law, Kristen Barnes

Chicago-Kent Law Review

No abstract provided.

Pepperdine University School Of Law: Legal Summaries, Blair Castellanos

Journal of the National Association of Administrative Law Judiciary

No abstract provided.

From Wreckage Comes Reason: How Detroit’S Chapter 9 Filing Helps Develop A Practicable And Principled “Good Faith” Standard, Scott A. Krystiniak

William & Mary Business Law Review

The city of Detroit is beginning to rise from the ashes following decades of fiscal ineptitude, social failure, and corruption. Bolstered by protections under Chapter 9 of the Bankruptcy Code, Detroit has eliminated billions of dollars in debt and established a feasible plan for municipal reorganization. Now, Detroit is even considered an American “comeback story.” However, Detroit’s revitalization began on a tenuous foundation. The city’s creditors objected vigorously to the bankruptcy petition by claiming that Detroit had not filed its bankruptcy petition in good faith under § 921(c). Despite the relatively scarce and imprecise case law and jurisprudence surrounding § …

Disentangling Michigan Court Rule 6.502(G)(2): The "New Evidence" Exception To The Ban On Successive Motions For Relief From Judgment Does Not Contain A Discoverability Requirement, Claire V. Madill

Michigan Law Review

Michigan courts are engaging in a costly interpretative mistake. Confused by the relationship between two distinct legal doctrines, Michigan courts are conflating laws in a manner that precludes convicted defendants from raising their constitutional claims in postconviction proceedings. In Michigan, a convicted defendant who wishes to collaterally attack her conviction must file a 6.500 motion. The Michigan Court Rules generally prohibit “second or subsequent” motions. Nonetheless, section 6.502(G)(2) permits a petitioner to avoid this successive motion ban if her claim relies on “new evidence that was not discovered” before her original postconviction motion. Misguided by the similarity between the language …

Justice Sotomayor‟S Undemocratic Dissent In Schuette V. Coalition To Defend Affirmative Action, Adam Lamparello

University of Miami Race & Social Justice Law Review

No abstract provided.

Deboer V. Snyder: A Case Study In Litigation And Social Reform, Wyatt Fore

Michigan Journal of Gender & Law

On April 28, 2015, the Supreme Court will hear oral arguments for four cases from the Sixth Circuit addressing the constitutionality of state bans on same-sex marriage. This Note examines DeBoer v. Snyder, the Michigan marriage case, with the goal of providing litigators and scholars the proper context for our current historical moment in which (1) the legal status of LGBT people; and (2) the conventional wisdom about the role of impact litigation in social reform movements are rapidly evolving.

Michigan’S First Human Trafficking Court, Elizabeth Campbell

Saint Louis University Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Refusal To Extradite: An Examination Of Canada's Indictment Of The American Legal System, Jami Leeson

Georgia Journal of International & Comparative Law

No abstract provided.

Blueprint For The Great Lakes Trail, Melissa K. Scanlan

Michigan Journal of Environmental & Administrative Law

The Great Lakes are vast yet vulnerable. There is a need to focus the public’s attention on the significance of the lakes for the region as a cohesive, binational whole. To address this need, build on existing water law, and engage the public, this Article provides a blueprint to establish a Great Lakes Trail on the shores of the Great Lakes. The Trail will link together 10,000 miles of coastline and provide the longest marked walking trail in the world. It will demarcate an already existing, yet largely unrecognized, public trust easement and engage the public with their common heritage …

A Solution To Michigan's Child Shackling Problem, Gabe Newland

Michigan Law Review First Impressions

Detained children routinely appear before Michigan's juvenile courts shackled with handcuffs, leg irons, and belly chains. Once security officers bring a child to court in these shackles, the child usually remains in them for her hearing or trial. In Michigan, as in many other states, no statute or court rule requires the judge to decide whether shackles are necessary. This Essay argues that Michigan should pass legislation or amend state court rules to create a presumption against shackling children. Unless a child poses a substantial risk of flight or physical danger and less restrictive alternatives to shackling will not adequately …

An Overview Of The October 2005 Supreme Court Term, Erwin Chemerinsky

Touro Law Review

No abstract provided.

Utilizing Michigan Brownfield Policies To Incentivize Community-Based Urban Agriculture In Detroit, Nicholas Leonard

Michigan Journal of Environmental & Administrative Law

As residents have increasingly moved from urban centers to suburbs, several cities have not been able to create effective solutions to the problems that such population loss has presented. Abandoned properties have proven to be the primary problem, and nowhere is that problem more pronounced than in Detroit. Urban agriculture has been widely embraced on a grassroots level as a potential solution to the pervasive problems that abandoned properties present and that cities have been unable to solve. While urban agriculture networks have largely arisen outside of municipal control, several cities are beginning to recognize urban agriculture as a potential …

Invading The Realm Of The Dead: Exploring The (Im)Propriety Of Punitive Damage Awards Against Estates, Emily Himes Iversen

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

Punitive damages are traditionally understood, at least in part, as damages designed to punish. It should therefore come as no surprise that, in the majority of states that have decided the issue, courts have chosen not to allow punitive damage awards against the estates of deceased tortfeasors. After all, the tortfeasor can no longer be punished (at least by tort awards). Nonetheless, punitive damages can also serve other purposes, such as deterrence. This Note argues that Michigan, a state which has not yet taken a stance, should adopt the minority position that allows punitive damages to be awarded against estates. …

Sentence Creep: Increasing Penalties In Michigan And The Need For Sentencing Reform, Anne Yantus

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

The governor and several legislators have requested review of Michigan’s sentencing practices with an eye toward sentence reform. Michigan leads the country in the average length of prison stay, and by internal comparisons the average minimum sentence has nearly doubled in the last decade. This Article explores cumulative increases to criminal penalties over the last several decades as reflected in amendments to the sentencing guidelines, increased maximum sentences, harsh mandatory minimum terms, increased authority for consecutive sentencing, wide sentencing discretion for habitual and repeat drug offenders, and tough parole practices and policies. The reality for legislators is that it is …