Law Commons^™

Tax Enforcement At The Intersection Of Social Welfare And Vulnerable Populations, Michelle Lyon Drumbl

Scholarly Articles

This Essay engages with Professor Bernadette Atuahene’s theory of stategraft in the context of tax administration and the role that the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) plays in implementing certain social welfare benefits, including the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC). Specifically, it considers whether the IRS’s denials of the EITC to those who might otherwise be eligible and entitled to it constitutes a wrongful taking by the state or a violation of basic human rights. While this Essay concludes that denials of the EITC generally do not fit within Atuahene’s definition of stategraft, it highlights two particularly problematic concerns with modern …

Democratizing Abolition, Brandon Hasbrouck

Scholarly Articles

When abolitionists discuss remedies for past and present injustices, they are frequently met with apparently pragmatic objections to the viability of such bold remedies in U.S. legislatures and courts held captive by reactionary forces. Previous movements have seen their lesser reforms dashed by the white supremacist capitalist order that retains its grip on power in America. While such objectors contend that abolitionists should not ask for so much justice, abolitionists should in fact demand significantly more.

Remedying our country’s history of subordination will not be complete without establishing abolition democracy. While our classical conception of a liberal republic asks us …

Making Virtual Things, Joshua A.T. Fairfield

Scholarly Articles

People value virtual things—such as NFTs—because such assets trigger and satisfy deep-seated narratives of property and ownership. The cause of the recent series of failures to regulate virtual assets, and the resulting crashes, has been a failure to take seriously the ways people perceive and use the assets. Current legal frameworks fail to support buyers’ and users’ expectations of ownership in virtual things they purchase.

Making virtual things is a matter of social construction of value. Virtual things, like real-world things, have value because a community values them for a purpose. It therefore makes no sense to discount how and …

Movement Judges, Brandon Hasbrouck

Scholarly Articles

Judges matter. The opinions of a few impact the lives of many. Judges romanticize their own impartiality, but apathy in the face of systems of oppression favors the status quo and clears the way for conservative agendas to take root. The lifetime appointments of federal judges, the deliberate weaponization of the bench by reactionary opponents of the New Deal and progressive social movements, and the sheer inertia of judicial self-restraint have led to the conservative capture of the courts. By contrast, empathy for the oppressed and downtrodden renders substantive justice possible and leaves room for unsuccessful litigants to accept unfavorable …

Child Welfare Requires Adequate Remedial Services, Raymond C. O'Brien

Scholarly Articles

This Article argues that the focus of child welfare should be upon the adequacy of reasonable services provided to parents prior to and after their child has been declared dependent because of an abuse or neglect allegation. Admittedly, recent federal legislation funding rehabilitation services while permitting a child to remain with an offending parent may result in less trauma, but this feature should not distract from the point that states must develop adequate reasonable services, and these must be provided within a specified period of time. The consequence of inadequate reasonable services, unable to address adverse conduct within a specified …

Practical Abolition: Universal Representation As An Alternative To Immigration Detention, Matthew Boaz

Scholarly Articles

A federally funded universal representation program can serve as a practical first step toward the abolition of immigration detention and the other harsh enforcement mechanisms that are utilized today. While abolition is typically an ideology espoused by a small subsection of the general population, its purpose can be achieved through a less partisan and broader reaching ideal -- fiscal efficiency and responsibility. By demonstrating that the provision of counsel and other wrap around services is significantly less costly than immigration detention, while also showing that providing counsel and wrap around services is an extremely effective way to ensure compliance, this …

From Timbuktu To The Hague And Beyond: The War Crime Of Intentionally Attacking Cultural Property, Mark A. Drumbl

Scholarly Articles

This essay refracts the criminal conviction and reparations order of the International Criminal Court (ICC) in the Al Mahdi case into the much broader frame of increasingly heated public debates over the protection, removal, defacement, relocation, display and destruction of cultural heritage in all forms: monuments, artefacts, language instruction, art and literature. What might the work product of the ICC in the Al Mahdi proceedings -- and international criminal law more generally -- add, contribute or excise from these debates? This essay speculatively explores connections between the turn to penal law to protect cultural property and the transformative impulses that …

The Post-Truth First Amendment, Sarah C. Haan

Scholarly Articles

Post-truthism is widely understood as a political problem. In this Article, I argue that post-truthism also presents a constitutional law problem—not a hypothetical concern, but a current influence on First Amendment law. Post-truthism, which teaches that evidence-based reasoning lacks value, offers a normative framework for regulating information. Although post-truthism has become a popular culture trope, I argue that we should take it seriously as a theory of decision making and information use, and as a basis for law.

This Article uses the example of compelled speech to explore how post-truth rhetoric and values are being integrated into law. When the …

Situating The Corporation Within The Vulnerability Paradigm: What Impact Does Corporate Personhood Have On Vulnerability, Dependency, And Resilience, Heather M. Kolinsky

Scholarly Articles

As a result of the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2014 case Burwell v. Hobby Lobby, and the seemingly expanding notion of the corporation as a person within the traditional autonomous rights paradigm, a tension has developed between corporation as subject and corporation as institution. This evolution of corporation as person also highlights the problem of providing resilience to vulnerable subjects whose competing vulnerabilities are situated in the same corporate environment. Addressing this issue is of critical importance where employment has become the conduit for the responsive state to provide resilience to so many subjects, as well as the site of …

The Community Listening Project, Faith Mullen

Scholarly Articles

This report is the product of an effort of the DC Consortium of Legal Services Providers (“Consortium”) to learn from low income DC residents about the challenges they face and the barriers that prevent them from overcoming poverty by asking them, directly, about their most pressing problems.The Community Listening Project was envisioned as a companion to the DC Access to Justice Commission’s forthcoming report on unmet legal needs of low-income residents of the District of Columbia. Both the Community Listening Project and the Access to Justice Commission’s legal needs study are intended to provide critical information to enable the community, …

Gideon’S Army And The Central Theme Of Poverty, Cara H. Drinan

Scholarly Articles

Gideon’s Army, a powerful documentary film that follows the work of three public defenders in the South, provides a window into the well documented dysfunction of most public defender offices across the country. While following the life and work of these public defenders—Travis Williams, Brandy Alexander, and June Hardwick—the viewer sees what the academic literature has documented for decades: public defenders carry caseloads that are multiples of professional guidelines; compensation for public defenders is so paltry that many are barely making ends meet; the offices in which they work are resource-starved; guilty pleas are the default; and the public …

Making Turner A Reality - - Improving Access To Justice Through Court-Annexed Resource Centers And Same Day Presentation, Stacy Brustin

Scholarly Articles

This article will propose recommendations for implementing meaningful "alternative procedural safeguards." It will highlight a program that uses an innovative model of pro se assistance and limited representation, and will discuss the limitations that even the most innovative programs face in trying to offer adequate alternatives to full representation. The article will also analyze the ethical obstacles that court-based assistance programs face, and offer strategies that attorneys can use to meet their ethical duties regarding confidentiality, competence, avoidance of conflicts of interest, and independence of professional judgment.

While the procedural safeguards that the Court suggests in Turner might, in theory, …

A Study In Law And Literature: Themes Of Exceptionalism And Equity In British And American Culture, William J. Wagner

Scholarly Articles

The advent of a new scale of international terrorism on September 11, 2001 posed a case for moral and legal evaluation that appeared to some in the global community to evade the reach of received rules or principles of moral or political action. The perceived threat and a certain sense by some governmental actors to an entitlement of latitude in response seemed to sever the situation from rules and principles in a depth dimension of consciousness. For many, the case's enormity overwhelmed its abstract moral definition. The foreign policy response of the United States-the country which had been attacked-further reinforced …

Criminal Justice And The Public Imagination, Erik Luna

Scholarly Articles

As this symposium demonstrates, criminology has much to offer criminal law and procedure. But there are limits to this endeavor, such as when public policy is distorted by powerful emotions that ignore the lessons of legal doctrine and social science. This article presents one possible response in such circumstances: expanding the interdisciplinary relationship to include literary and cultural materials usually associated with the humanities. These works can inspire the public imagination in ways that law and criminology cannot, at times offering an alternative narrative to counter emotion-driven claims of necessity, for instance, and raising the exact type of questions that …

Faith In The Public Square: Some Reflections On Its Role And Limitations From The Perspective Of Catholic Social Thought, Lucia A. Silecchia

Scholarly Articles

In recent years, there has been a renewed interest in the proper role of religion in the public square. This paper offers brief reflections on the role for religious entities to play in the process of law-making and the development of public policy. It addresses this question NOT from the perspective of the government looking at religion to see what role it should play. Rather, it examines this question from the perspective of a religious group assessing what its proper role and moral obligations might be in the public square. Much of this discussion is taken, specifically, from principles of …

Safety Valve Closed: The Removal Of Non-Violent Outlets For Dissent And The Onset Of Anti-Abortion Violence, Mark L. Rienzi

Scholarly Articles

This Note examines abortion opposition over the past two centuries and the extent to which recent trends toward violence have followed from the elimination of major nonviolent methods of dissent. Part I explores the history of abortion opposition prior to Roe, noting that opponents during this period relied almost exclusively on legislative action to effect change. Roe removed this principal nonviolent outlet, and the first wave of anti-abortion violence in American history en-sued. Even within this post-Roe violence, an examination of the rise and fall of mass nonviolent civil disobedience in the late i98Os and the dramatic increase in anti-abortion …

Reflections On The Future Of Social Justice, Lucia A. Silecchia

Scholarly Articles

This article reflects on the nature of the key social justice questions of our time. It then explores five broad principles of Catholic social thought that may be brought to bear on those questions.

Homelessness: A Commentary And A Bibliography, Raymond B. Marcin

Scholarly Articles

Recently, there has been an upsurge of interest in the issue of homelessness, sparked partly by a shocking upsurge in the incidence of the phenomenon itself and partly by a maturation in our collective thinking on the issue. The upsurge of interest, at any rate, is strong enough to suggest the utility of a bibliography on the subject. The bibliography is to be considered the major part of and the raison d'etre for this article, with the commentary that follows representing the author's personal reactions and observations on reading and thinking about many of the items in the bibliography.

The Justice Conundrum, Marshall J. Breger

Scholarly Articles

The litigation explosion threatens to overwhelm the capacity of our judicial institutions to respond adequately to the needs of our society. An understanding of this crisis can be achieved only through the questioning of a number of principles central to our justice system. This essay will explore the contours of these questions and evaluate various responses to the litigation crisis. By their nature, the solutions suggested can be only tentative.

Legal Aid For The Poor: A Conceptual Analysis, Marshall J. Breger

Scholarly Articles

In this Article Professor Breger examines the competing justifications that have been advanced for the provision of free legal aid to those who cannot afford to engage a private attorney. Professor Breger argues that every citizen has the right to effective access to the courts to resolve disputes in that they aret he only state-sanctionedd ispute resolution mechanism. Because of the complexity of our legal system, effective access to the courts often requires the services of an attorney. Under this theory of "access rights" a person is entitled to free legal aid when necessary for the enforcement of a legal …