Law Commons^™

Evaluating Child Care Legislation: Program Structures And Political Consequences, Lance Liebman

Faculty Scholarship

The American political system is not good at choosing among worthy goals and then adopting programs well designed to achieve the desired purposes. Scholars and activists continue to debate the success and failure of the last quarter century of efforts to reduce inequality and achieve other social reforms. But we have no well developed methodology for evaluating proposed programs and attempting to predict their likely consequences.

This Article asks what we know about choosing legal structures for programmatic efforts that seek social change. In particular, it asks whether we can predict relationships between different ways of pursuing public ends and …

Protecting The Parental Rights Of Incarcerated Mothers Whose Children Are In Foster Care: Proposed Changes To New York's Termination Of Parental Rights Law, Philip Genty

Faculty Scholarship

In the past decade, the number of female prisoners in New York state and city jails has risen dramatically. Currently, there are 1,890 women incarcerated in New York State prisons, and an additional 1,626 women confined in New York City jails. Approximately seventy- two percent of the women in state prisons are parents, and, according to one informal study, nearly sixty percent of the women in city prisons are single parents with minor children. While some of these women can make formal or informal child care arrangements with relatives or close friends, many others must turn to state-regulated foster care. …