Social Welfare Law Commons^™

To Yoder Or Not To Yoder? How The Spending Clause Holding In National Federation Of Independent Business V. Sebelius Can Be Used To Challenge The No Child Left Behind Act, Christopher Roma

Pace Law Review

States such as California, Texas, Montana, Nebraska and Pennsylvania all have either declined to apply for waivers out of the testing, accountability, and penalty schemes of No Child Left Behind; or, have had their applications rejected by the Department of Education. This Article argues that these states would have a legitimate challenge to NCLB as unconstitutionally coercive based on the precedent of Sebelius. As discussed more in the sections that follow, not only is NCLB and Title I the largest federal funding program behind Medicaid, it also shares many of the characteristics that the opinions in Sebelius found to be …

Social Insecurity: A Modest Proposal For Remedying Federal District Court Inconsistency In Social Security Cases, Jonah J. Horwitz

Pace Law Review

This Article addresses a relatively narrow but consequential problem in the system: the inadequacy of federal judicial resolution of appeals from the denial of Social Security disability benefits. It addresses the problem with an equally narrow, and hopefully equally consequential, solution: granting a published district court decision in such a case the power of binding precedent with respect to the judicial district in which the opinion is issued. In so doing, greater uniformity, consistency, fairness, and efficiency would be brought to a process that is badly in need of all.

The Article proceeds in five parts. Part I provides some …