Digital Commons Network^™

Miller V. Alabama And The (Past And) Future Of Juvenile Crime Regulation, Elizabeth S. Scott

Faculty Scholarship

This essay was the keynote address for a symposium on Miller v Alabama, the 2012 Supreme Court opinion holding unconstitutional under the Eighth Amendment a statute imposing a mandatory sentence of life without parole for juveniles convicted of homicide. The essay argues that Miller embodies a way of thinking about juvenile crime that has taken hold in the early 21st century – an approach that emphasizes the importance for legal policy of developmental differences between juveniles and adults. This emerging trend contrasts sharply with the regulatory approach of the 1990s when moral panics over juvenile crime fueled punitive law reforms …

Permanency Puzzle, Cynthia Godsoe

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Participation, Deliberation, And Decision Making: The Dynamics Of Inclusion And Exclusion In Mixed-Income Developments, Amy T. Khare, Mark L. Joseph

Faculty Scholarship

This paper explores the mechanisms, processes, and dynamics of participation and deliberation in three newly created, mixed-income communities being built on the footprint of former public housing developments in Chicago. Our findings reflect enduring dilemmas about the challenge of democratic participation and representation for low-income citizens in the context of urban revitalization efforts. In the current case, a fundamental tension exists between two orientations to organizing participation, one (dominant) orientation that privileges “mainstreaming” public housing resident participation into collaborative governance structures and existing market and civil society mechanisms, and another that suggests the continuing need for dedicated mechanisms that maximize …

Providing Attorneys For Children In Dependency And Termination Of Parental Rights Proceedings In Florida: The Issue Updated, Michael J. Dale

Faculty Scholarship

Florida's system for providing protection and safety to children in the State's child welfare system has changed over the past decade. Regretfully, the changes do not appear to have had a significant impact in two areas: increasing the safety and protection of children in the system' and providing children with independent attorneys to advocate on their behalf. Investigations, lawsuits, grand juries, amendments to court rules, and newspaper articles continue to demonstrate the myriad failures in the Florida system. Two notorious examples hi-lite the shortcomings: the cases of the foster child, Rilya Wilson, who disappeared in 2001, and Gabriel Myers, who …

Proposition 26: The Cost To All Women, Emma S. Ketteringham, Allison Korn, Lynn M. Paltrow

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Regression By Progression Unleveling The Classroom Playing Field Through Cosmetic Neurology, Helia Garrido Hull

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Social Welfare And Fairness In Juvenile Crime Regulation, Elizabeth S. Scott, Laurence Steinberg

Faculty Scholarship

The question of how lawmakers should respond to developmental differences between adolescents and adults in formulating juvenile crime policy has been the subject of debate for a generation. A theme of the punitive law reforms that dismantled the traditional juvenile justice system in the 1980s and 1990s was that adolescents were not different from adults in any way that was relevant to criminal punishment – or at least that any differences were trumped by the demands of public safety. But this view has been challenged in recent years; scholars and courts have recognized that adolescents, due to their developmental immaturity, …

Raising The Cut-Off: The Empirical Case For Extending Adoption And Guardianship Subsidies From Age 18 To 21, Mary Eschelbach Hansen, Joshua Gupta-Kagan

Faculty Scholarship

This article begins with the context: despite increases in the number of adoptions from foster care achieved in the 1990s, tens of thousands of children remain in foster care awaiting adoption or permanent guardianship. The following section provides background on subsidy law and policy. The section describes the recent history of federal and state subsidies for parents who adopt children from the state foster care systems; the section describes state subsidies for caregivers who become legal permanent guardians of children in the state child welfare systems, and the section describes the disparities between adoption and guardianship subsidies and the subsidies …

Taking It To Scale: Evaluating The Scope And Reach Of A Community-Wide Initiative On Early Childhood, Robert L. Fischer, Nina Lalich, Claudia J. Coulton

Faculty Scholarship

In implementing broad community initiatives, the ability to assess the delivery of services is a distinct challenge. Yet, understanding both the magnitude and cross-usage of services by target populations is often a precursor to effective program evaluation, program improvement and additional program planning. This research examines the extent to which a comprehensive early childhood initiative successfully reached young children and their families in a large urban county. By linking birth records and administrative datasets at the level of the individual child, the study tracks the experiences of children in respect to engagement in program services and their receipt of public …

The Cleaver, The Violin, And The Scalpel: Duty And The Restatement (Third) Of Torts, Aaron D. Twerski

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Romancing The Court, Jane M. Spinak

Faculty Scholarship

Problem-solving courts, created at the end of the 20th century, make court-based solutions central to addressing significant societal problems, such as substance abuse and its impact on criminal activity and family functioning. Yet, lessons gleaned from over 100 years of family court history suggest that court-based solutions to intractable social problems have rarely been effective. This article asks three questions of the problem-solving court movement: What problem are we trying to solve? Is the court the best place to solve the problem? What are the consequences of giving authority to a court for solving the problem? Answering those questions through …

Legal Accountability In The Service-Based Welfare State: Lessons From Child Welfare Reform, Kathleen G. Noonan, Charles F. Sabel, William H. Simon

Faculty Scholarship

Current trends intensify the longstanding problem of how the rule-of-law should be institutionalized in the welfare state. Welfare programs are being re-designed to increase their capacities to adapt to rapidly changing conditions and to tailor their responses to diverse clienteles. These developments challenge the understanding of legal accountability developed in the Warren Court era. This Article reports on an emerging model of accountable administration that strives to reconcile programmatic flexibility with rule-of-law values. The model has been developed in the reform of state child protective services systems, but it has potentially broad application to public law. It also has novel …

Brief For Pb&J, Family Services, Inc. As Amicus Curiae, Antoinette M. Sedillo Lopez, Iris Augusten, Deana M. Bennett, Amber Chavez, Kimberly Halpain, Leigh K. Haynes, Cody Lujan

Faculty Scholarship

PB&J, Family Services, Inc., through this brief as amicus curiae, has demonstrated that the decision rendered by the Court of Appeals was correct. The New Mexico Legislature did not draft NMSA 1978, § 36-6-1(D) (1973) to encompass the situation of a pregnant woman using drugs or alcohol during pregnancy. The Legislatures failure to pass legislation specifically criminalizing such conduct after careful consideration indicates that the Legislature did not intend for the statute to be so broadly construed. This is particularly true when considering the fiscal impact reports accompanying the proposed legislation. This decision by the Legislature is consistent with sound …

Storming The Castle To Save The Children: The Ironic Costs Of A Child Welfare Exception To The Fourth Amendment, Doriane Lambelet Coleman

Faculty Scholarship

This article first sets out the child welfare system's assumption that there is a child welfare exception to the Fourth Amendment and then describes the ways it is used to facilitate child maltreatment investigations. It goes on to analyze the validity of this assumption according to current Fourth Amendment doctrine including under the special needs administrative exception. (This analysis may be particularly useful to both family/children's law scholars as well as to Fourth Amendment scholars, as it examines all of the state and federal appellate cases addressing the subject, and provides a most up-to-date evaluation of the Supreme Court's special …

Achieving Batterer Accountability In The Child Protection System, Leigh S. Goodmark

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Dead To Rights: A Father's Struggle To Secure Mental Health Services For His Son. Georgetown Journal On Poverty Law And Policy, April Land

Faculty Scholarship

This Article analyzes the gap between children's statutory rights and their actual access to services within the educational, medical and juvenile justice systems. This Article lays out the strong statutory rights and protections in the areas of special education and contrasts them with actual experience in trying to secure appropriate education, Medicaid and the juvenile justice system. The Article concludes that the agencies responsible for administering federal law must not be permitted to continue to avoid compliance with clear statutory mandates. They are failing to meet their legal responsibilities by asserting that services should be provided by other agencies, rather …

Problem Solving In A Multidisciplinary Environment: Must Ethics Get In The Way Of Holistic Service, J. Michael Norwood

Faculty Scholarship

Authored with Alan Paterson. The article analyzes the strengths and weaknesses of delivering legal services as a part of a multidisciplinary practice (MDP). The analysis considers multidisciplinary practices from the perspectives of clients served, lawyers, the legal profession, and the general public, but emphasizes the quality of the relationships amongst the legal and nonlegal professionals involved in the MDP. While sounding a cautionary note about the need to preserve core ethical and professional values when implementing a MDP, the article seeks a balance among the common, and sometimes competing interests, of the public, the legal profession, and society whereby it …

Court Program Funding: Advice From The Trenches, Sheila Purcell

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Postsecondary School Education Benefits For Undocumented Immigrants: Promises And Pitfalls, Victor C. Romero

Faculty Scholarship

Should longtime undocumented immigrants have the same opportunity as lawful permanent residents and U.S. citizens to attend state colleges and universities? There are two typical justifications for denying them such opportunities. First, treating undocumented immigrants as in-state residents discriminates against U.S. citizen nonresidents of the state. Second, and more broadly, undocumented immigration should be discouraged as a policy matter, and therefore allowing undocumented immigrant children equal opportunities as legal residents condones and perhaps encourages "illegal" immigration. This essay responds to these two concerns by surveying state and federal solutions to this issue.

Florida's Foster Care System Fails Its Children, Timothy L. Arcaro

Faculty Scholarship

This article will attempt to draw attention to the pervasive problem of child sexual abuse in foster care by identifying circumstances that contribute to sexual victimization. Hopefully the discussion will illuminate the plight of child victims of sexual abuse and generate discourse on a new paradigm of protection initiatives for foster children. Part I of the article will explain child protection proceedings and how children enter the foster care system. Part II will describe common characteristics of state foster care systems. Part III will discuss traditional notions of child sexual abuse and their illusory application in the context of sexual …

Learning Through Service In A Clinical Setting: The Effect Of Specialization On Social Justice & Skills Training, Antoinette M. Sedillo Lopez

Faculty Scholarship

Arguing against the trend toward specialization in clinical legal education, this essay addresses potential limitations of specialized legal clinics in furthering the dual mission of clinical legal education: social justice and skills training. It points out that specialized clinics limit access to justice by leaving the myriad needs of clients partially unmet. They limit students' learning about the complex needs of clients and students' ability to discover broad inequities in the legal system. Specialization makes it more difficult to train students to be creative problem solvers, and affects their professional socialization

Law Making For The Baby Making: An Interpretive Approach To The Determination Of Legal Parentage, Marsha Garrison

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Formed By Thalidomide: Mass Torts As A False Cure For Toxic Exposure, Anita Bernstein

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Police Discretion And The Quality Of Life In Public Places: Courts, Communities, And The New Policing, Debra A. Livingston

Faculty Scholarship

The advent of community and problem-oriented policing – the so-called "quality-of-life" policing philosophies – raises complex questions concerning police discretion in addressing minor street misconduct and judicial response to that discretion. In this Article, Debra Livingston addresses these questions by reassessing the ways in which courts have employed the facial vagueness doctrine to limit police discretion in the performance of "order maintenance" tasks. Livingston contends that aggressive employment of the facial vagueness doctrine is an inadequate mechanism for limiting police discretion and at the same time could impair positive change in the direction of community and problem-oriented policing. As an …

Particularity And Generality: Challenges Of Feminist Theory And Practice In Work On Woman-Abuse, Elizabeth M. Schneider

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

The Privatization Of Family Law, Jana B. Singer

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Minor Changes: Emancipating Children In Modern Times, Carol Sanger, Eleanor Willemsen

Faculty Scholarship

Parents and their teenage children don't always get along. At some time during adolescent development, parents may turn into embarrassments and teenagers into domestic terrorists. For most families this is a phase. Adolescence is endured, the child accomplishes some degree of separation from parents, and the transition to adulthood advances.

In some families, however, the period is more like a siege than a phase. Conflict may last longer and be more strifeful, more intense. If the family is incapable or unwilling to resolve the tensions, an intractability may set in. In these cases, domestic tranquility seems attainable only when the …

The Violence Of Privacy, Elizabeth M. Schneider

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

The Boarder Baby And Foster Care Crises In New York City: Problems Of Policy And Poverty, James S. Bowen, Madeline Morris, Jose M. Rivera

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Divorce Reform And Gender Justice, Jana B. Singer

Faculty Scholarship

The modern shift from fault-based to no-fault divorce has disappointed those who expected the no-fault system to eliminate economic inequality between divorced women and men. The fact that women and their dependent children invariably experience economic hardship after a divorce has caused Lenore Weitzman and other commentators to romanticize the "good old days" of fault-based divorce. Professor Singer attacks the logic of this nostalgia by demonstrating that women were 'not[' better off under the fault-based system. She then proposes an investment partnership model of post-divorce allocation which would insure a fair result for both spouses.