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Interpreting The Fourteenth Amendment: Two Don’Ts And Three Dos, Garrett Epps
Interpreting The Fourteenth Amendment: Two Don’Ts And Three Dos, Garrett Epps
Garrett Epps
A sophisticated reading of the legislative record of the framing of the Fourteenth Amendment can provide courts and scholars with some general interpretive principles to guide their application of the Amendment to current legal problems. The author argues that two common legal conceptions about the Amendment are in fact, misconceptions. The first is that the Amendment was chiefly concerned with the immediate situation of freed slaves in the former slave states. Instead, he argues, the legislative record suggests that the framers were broadly concerned with the rights not only of freed slaves but of foreign-born immigrants in the North and …
Adult Rights As The Achilles’ Heel Of The Best Interests Standard: Lessons In Family Law From Across The Pond, Margaret Ryznar
Adult Rights As The Achilles’ Heel Of The Best Interests Standard: Lessons In Family Law From Across The Pond, Margaret Ryznar
Margaret Ryznar
Family law litigants have long searched for permutations of constitutional principles that gain access to federal courts. Typically, such litigants have been most successful with due process and equal protection arguments—even at the expense of the venerable “best interests of the child” standard in child-related cases. One legal system currently wrestling with this familiar clash between the interests of children and adults is that of England—where adults are armed with the rights granted by the Human Rights Act 1998, while children’s interests are given preference in an earlier act, the Children Act 1989. England’s strategy in dealing with this conflict …