Law Commons^™

Stories Told And Untold: Confidentiality Laws And The Master Narrative Of Child Welfare, Matthew I. Fraidin

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

In most states, child welfare hearings and records are sealed or confidential. This means that by law, court hearings and records may not be observed. The same laws and court rules also preclude those who are authorized to enter and watch from discussing anything learned or observed in a closed courtroom or from a sealed court record with anyone not involved in the case. It is the restriction on speech—on telling stories about child welfare—with which this Article is concerned.

The master narrative of child welfare depicts foster care as a haven for child-victims savagely brutalized by “deviant,” “monstrous” parents. …

Love As Legal Methodology: Comments On Love In A Time Of Envy, Naomi Mezey

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

In academic papers about emotion, it is not uncommon to find a kind of disconnect between the detachment of theoretical and scholarly language and the subject of the paper--the emotions. One of the lovely, and challenging, aspects of Jonathan Goldberg-Hiller's article is that it not only conveys the emotions that are its subject, but it brims with its own emotion; it reads like a text written out of shattered love. Goldberg-Hiller takes up Jean-Luc Nancy's contention that "love is shattered by its very essence. It fragments the self at the same time as it refracts into many forms." Goldberg-Hiller understands …

A Marriage Is A Marriage Is A Marriage: The Limits Of Perry V. Brown, Robin West

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The Ninth Circuit’s decision in Perry v. Brown, authored by Judge Reinhardt, has been widely lauded by marriage equality proponents for its creative minimalism. In keeping with commentators’ expectations, the court found a way to determine that California’s Proposition 8 violated the U.S. Constitution’s Equal Protection Clause, namely that the provision took away an entitlement that had previously been enjoyed by same-sex couples—the right to the appellation of one’s partnership as a “marriage”—for no rational reason. The people of California’s categorization and differential treatment of same-sex couples as compared with opposite-sex couples, the court held, failed the test of …

The Perils Of Empowerment, Jane H. Aiken, Katherine Goldwasser

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

This Article examines bystander norms of disinterest and blame that inform and undermine strategies for dealing with significant social problems such as domestic violence. Current strategies rely on individual “empowerment” to reduce such violence. These strategies reflect fundamental misconceptions and false assumptions about the nature of domestic violence, about why this sort of violence persists so stubbornly, and, ultimately, about what it takes to change behavior that has long been tolerated, if not actually fostered, as a result of deeply imbedded social and cultural norms. The net effect is that far from empowering abused women, let alone reaching the norms …

The Parent As (Mere) Educational Trustee: Whose Education Is It, Anyway?, Jeffrey Shulman

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The purpose of this Article is two-fold. First, the Article argues that the parent’s right to educate his or her children is strictly circumscribed by the parent’s duty to ensure that children learn habits of critical reasoning and reflection. The law has long recognized that the state’s duty to educate children is superior to any parental right. Indeed, the “parentalist” position to the contrary rests on an inflation of rights that is, in fact, a radical departure from longstanding legal norms. Indeed, at common law the parent had “a sacred right” to the custody of his child, and the parent’s …