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Fathers, The Welfare System, And The Virtues And Perils Of Child-Support Enforcement, David L. Chambers

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For half a century, Aid to Families with Dependent Children ("AFDC")' -the program of federally supported cash assistance to low-income families with children-has been oddly conceived. Congress has chosen to make assistance available almost solely to low-income single-parent families, not all low-income parents with children. At first many of the eligible single parents were women whose husbands had died. Over time, a growing majority were women who had been married to their children's father but who had separated or divorced. Today, to an ever increasing extent, they are women who were never married to the fathers of their children.2

Against Assisted Suicide - Even A Very Limited Form (Symposium: Assisted Suicide, Health Care And Medical Treatment Choices), Yale Kamisar

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Professor Robert Sedler is a leading constitutional law professor and a well-known civil liberties lawyer. I think he is right about many things. To cite but one example, I think he was right when he led the ACLU's successful legal attack on certain University of Michigan restrictions on "hate speech."' But I cannot agree with him about physician-assisted suicide, no matter how narrowly he frames the issue.2

Taxation Of Damages After Schleier - Where Are We And Where Do We Go From Here?, Douglas A. Kahn

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This article will examine the reasoning of the Schleier decision and speculate as to how taxation of pre-1996 damages will likely apply in light of Schleier. First, the article will set forth a very brief history of the judicial and administrative constructions of the statutory exclusion, and explore tax policy justifications for providing an exclusion from gross income for certain damages. These latter two items (set forth in Parts II and III of this article) are areas that have been extensively addressed previously by several commentators, including the author of this article.' The reason for exploring tax policy issues is …

How To Think About The Federal Commerce Power And Incidentally Rewrite United States V. Lopez, Donald H. Regan

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Almost sixty years after the "revolution" of 1937, we still do not have an adequate theory of the commerce power. The Court was right to abandon the theory of dual federalism epitomized by Carter v. Carter Coal Co.;' and it has got the right results in the major cases decided since then. But our post-1937 theory, whether before or after Lopez, is a mess. On the one hand, we have a collection of doctrinal rules that, if we take them seriously, allow Congress to do anything it wants under the commerce power. On the other hand, we continue to pay …

Imagining Children's Rights, Suellyn Scarnecchia

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Today, I will tell you some stories about real, live children, whose futures have been determined by our legal system. To speak of children's rights hypothetically, raises images of children suing to go live with their rich uncle or suing to demand a Nintendo system from their parents. I hope that by bringing you stories of the legal system's treatment of real children, you will have a better understanding of what I mean by children's rights and why they must be recognized. Although children's rights have been recognized in limited ways in the areas of free speech, criminal law and …

Judging Girls: Decision Making In Parental Consent To Abortion Cases, Suellyn Scarnecchia, Julie Kunce Field

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Judges make determinations on a daily basis that profoundly affect people's lives. On March 28, 1991, the Michigan legislature enacted a statute entitled The Parental Rights Restoration Act (hereinafter "the Michigan Act" or "the Act"). This statute delegated to probate court judges the extraordinary task of deciding whether a minor girl may have an abortion without the consent of a parent. Nothing in law school and little in an average judge's experience provide a meaningful framework for making such a decision. Although many commentators, including the authors, argue that decisions about abortion should be left to the woman regardless of …

At Issue: Should Active Euthanasia Be Legalized?, Yale Kamisar, Cheryl K. Smith

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The distinction between letting people die and killing them by lethal injection is now an integral part of the medico-legal landscape. This is the compromise we have arrived at in the struggle to take a humane approach toward seriously ill patients while still preserving as many traditional restraints against killing as we possibly can. This may be neither the logician's or the philosopher's way, but it may nevertheless be a defensible pragmatic way to do so.

Helping The Grim Reaper: Oregon's Measure 16 And Three Court Cases Put Assisted Suicide On A Fast Track To Supreme Court, Yale Kamisar, N. Schuyler, T. Balmer

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Last November, Oregon's voters passed by initiative the first physician-assisted suicide law in the nation. Measure 16 authorizes physicians to prescribe lethal medicaiton for competent, terminally ill adults if they make three separate requests, wait 15 days to reconsider, and get a second medical opinion of their prognosis. The new law was challenged immediately on several legal grounds; plaintiffs have won a preliminary injunction, and arguments have been scheduled in cross motions for summary jugement. Lee v. Oregon (D Or. No. 94-6467-ITO).

The Oregon court's decision will mark the fourth time in the past year that the once-obscure issue of …

An Introduction To Environmental Law In The United States Of America, Michael E. Herz

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There is an old joke about someone who, having taken a course in speed reading, is able to finish War and Peace in an afternoon. On bragging about this accomplishment, he is asked what the book was about. His entire response: "Russia." In attempting to fulfil my charge to summarize American environmental law in a few pages I fear that I risk a similar result. With such ruthless simplification, the reader may came away with no more understanding of this enormous, detailed, and complex body of law than the speed reader had of Tolstoy, knowing only that American environmental law …

Breaking The Cycle Of Despair: Street Children In Guatemala City, Tamara Rice Lave

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No abstract provided.

Taming The Wayward Children Of Monsanto And Sylvania: Some Thoughts On Developmental Disorders In Vertical Restraints Doctrine, Marc A. Fajer

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Law Review Symposium: A Hard Party To Crash For Crits, Feminists, And Other Outsiders Symposium On Trends In Legal Citations And Scholarship, Jean Stefancic

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Meet John Doe: It Is Time For Federal Civil Procedure To Recognize John Doe Parties, Carol Rice Andrews

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On The Topology Of Uniform Environmental Standards In A Federal System And Why It Matters (Symposium: Environmental Federalism), James E. Krier

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Uniform standards are much favored among the makers of federal environmental policy in the United States, which is to say, among the members of Congress. By and large-judging at least from the legislation it has enacted-Congress expects the air and water eventually to meet the same minimum levels of quality in every state in the country, and expects each pollution source in any industrial category or subcategory to be controlled just as much as every other such source, notwithstanding the source's location or other peculiar characteristics. There are exceptions to these generalizations, but they are exceptions and not the rule.1 …

A Child's Right To Protection From Transfer Trauma In A Contested Adoption Case, Suellyn Scarnecchia

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On August 2, 1993, I arrived at the home of Jan, Robby, and Jessica DeBoer' a few hours before the transfer. At 2:00 P.M. I would carry Jessica out of her home and deliver her to the parents who had won the case,2 her biological mother and father. This task probably would have been easier had I not spent eight days in the trial court listening to the experts explain that this transfer from one set of parents to another would harm Jessica.3 It would have been easier had I not recently obtained affidavits from other experts to persuade the …

Resolution Of Traffic Accident Disputes And Judicial Activism In Japan, Daniel H. Foote

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The topic of resolution of traffic accident cases in Japan has already seen two works in English: a 1989 article by J. Mark Ramseyer and Minoru Nakazato in the Journal of Legal Studies and a 1990 article by Takao Tanase in the Law and Society Review. Why yet another article?

First, despite the fine treatment of a wide range of issues in those articles, neither of those works gave much attention to what I regard as one of the most interesting and important aspects of the Japanese treatment of automobile accident cases: namely, the role of the judiciary and the …

Four Views Of Japanese Attorneys, Daniel H. Foote

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The four articles translated below appeared in a special collection entitled: Bengoshi--san Monosatari-or, A Tale of Lawyers. This collection was No. 198 in the Bessatsu Takarajma series, a series that contains such other tides as: How to Develop Brain Power (Noryoku toreningu no gijutsu, No. 41), The Court Game (Salban gemu, No. 169), and The Dark Side of Real Estate (Fudosan no ura, No. 177). As these titles ·reflect, publications in the series are aimed at the mass market. not the world of academics. A further caveat is thatr as with the majority …

Children's Task Force Reports, Donald N. Duquette, Cd Stephens

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When the public thinks of children and the law, high-visibility cases like Baby Jessica and Baby Richard come to mind. The human drama of a small child caught up in a titanic custody struggle attracts unrelenting media attention and triggers cries for law reform. Yet for every Baby Jessica and Baby Richard, thousands of children pass through our courts with little public attention but with consequences to them just as momentous and life altering as those cases featured on the national news shows. In 1991 State Bar of Michigan leadership began to ask whether our profession and Michigan's courts are …

Publicly Held Servitudes In The New Restatement, Stewart E. Sterk

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The first Restatement of Servitudes, adopted by the American Law Institute fifty years ago, largely ignored public law issues. Because condominiums were largely unknown and homeowners' associations were in their infancy, the Restatement did not discuss, let alone resolve, the problems that arise when property owners create governance structures by private agreement. Similarly, the Restatement accorded no special treatment to the problems that arise when government, as landowner or as regulator, enters into servitude relationships. The current Restatement has remedied these omissions. Its not yet completed chapter on Property Owners' Associations has already received considerable attention. Less noticed, however, have …

Bioethics With A Human Face, Carl E. Schneider

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This Article and the successor article I will shortly publish grow out of one reaction I have had to years of reading bioethical and legal literature. Let me begin by putting the point in its simplest, even crudest, form: That literature too often discusses the problems of health care in so disembodied and denatured a way that the patients and physicians, the family and friends, the dread and the disease are quite abstracted from the scene. The result is a literature that critically limits itself and that crucially oversimplifies the issues it confronts. There are, of course, reasons bioethical and …

Bioethics In The Language Of The Law, Carl E. Schneider

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What happens when the language of the law becomes a vulgar tongue? What happens, more particularly, when parties to bioethical discourse are obliged to borrow in their daily controversies the ideas, and even the language, peculiar to judicial proceedings? How suited are the habits, taste, and language of the judicial magistrate to the political, and more particularly, the bioethical, questions of our time? We ask these questions because, as the incomparable Tocqueville foresaw, Americans today truly do resolve political-and moral--questions into judicial questions. As Abraham Lincoln hoped, the Constitution "has become the political religion of the nation," and many Americans …

Pushing The Law To Encompass The Reality Of Our Families: Protecting Lesbian And Gay Families From Eviction From Their Homes - Braschi'S Functional Definition Of Family And Beyond, Paris R. Baldacci

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No abstract provided.

Religion And The Search For A Principled Middle Ground On Abortion, Michael W. Mcconnell

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Marriage, Morals, And The Law: No-Fault Divorce And Moral Discourse, Carl E. Schneider

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In this Essay, I want to reflect on no fault-divorce and the social attitudes that underlie it. In particular, I want to consider that reform in light of an article I wrote some years ago entitled Moral Discourse and the Transformation of American Family Law. There I argued that in recent years the language of American family law has changed notably: today family law issues are decreasingly discussed in the language of morality. In other words, legal institutions have decreasingly talked about those issues in moral terms. Rather, they have tended to avoid handling some moral issues altogether-often by …

Practicing Community (Book Review), Anthony V. Alfieri

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No abstract provided.

The Legal Regulation Of Genetic Discrimination: Old Responses To New Technology, Richard A. Epstein

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Incompletely Theorized Agreements Commentary, Cass R. Sunstein

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Reproductive Hazards After Johnson Controls, Mary E. Becker

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Security Interests Reconsidered, Douglas G. Baird

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The Hand Biography And The Question Of Judicial Greatness (Reviewing Gerald Gunther, Learned Hand: The Man And The Judge (1994)), Richard A. Posner

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No abstract provided.