Law Commons^™

Constitutional Law—State Employees Have Private Cause Of Action Against Employers Under Family And Medical Leave Act—Nevada Department Of Human Resources V. Hibbs, 538 U.S. 721 (2003)., Gabriel H. Teninbaum

ExpressO

The Eleventh Amendment of the United States Constitution provides that non-consenting states are not subject to suit in federal court. Congress may, however, abrogate the states’ sovereign immunity by enacting legislation to enforce the provisions of the Fourteenth Amendment. In Nevada Department of Human Resources v. Hibbs, the Supreme Court of the United States considered whether Congress acted within its constitutional authority by abrogating sovereign immunity under the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA), which allows private causes of action against state employers to enforce the FMLA’s family-leave provision. The Court held abrogation was proper under the FMLA and state …

The Best Interest Standard: How Broad Judicial Discretion And Influences Of Social And Political Suggestion Have Led To An Abandonment Of The Rule’S Primary Purpose In Child Custody Decisions, Lakeisha J. Johnson

ExpressO

The vital questions in child custody disputes all concern that which is in the best interest of the child. Historically, interpretations of the “best interest” standard have been founded upon presumptions steeped in the notion of natural rights and duties based largely upon a mix of scientific and subjective conclusions regarding gender-based parenting roles and the need to sustain them. My research demonstrates that, as courts attempt to avoid the decisions of the past and submit to the societal will of the present, the modern application of the “best interest of the child” standard has led unexpectedly to an abandonment …

Does The Tax Law Discriminate Against The Majority Of American Children: The Downside Of Our Progressive Rate Structure And Unbalanced Incentives For Higher Education?, Lester B. Snyder

University of San Diego Law and Economics Research Paper Series

Our graduate income tax structure provides an incentive to shift income to lower-bracket family members. However, some parents have much more latitude to shift income to their children than do others. Income derived from services and private business-by far the majority of American income-is less favored than income derived from publicly traded securities. The rationale given for this discrimination is that parents in services or private business, as opposed to those in securities, do not actually part with control of their property. This article explores these tax broader (yet subtle) tax benefits and their impact on the majority of children …

Tanf And Its Implications On The Autonomy Of Indigent Single Mothers, Tanisha L. Jackson

William & Mary Journal of Race, Gender, and Social Justice

No abstract provided.

Providing Access To Generic Antiretroviral Drugs To People Living With Hiv/Aids In Developing Countries: An Examination Of Legal Obligations, Cheluchi Onyemelukwe

LLM Theses

The HIV/AIDS epidemic is a devastating medical, social and economic problem in many developing countries. Presently, the only therapeutic remedies for the disease are antiretroviral drugs, which do not cure HIV/AIDS but are effective in restoring the health of people living with HIV/AIDS. Unfortunately, these drugs are unavailable to many people living with the disease in developing countries. This has been attributed to the exorbitant prices resulting from the patent rights of multinational pharmaceutical companies over the drugs. Legal literature has therefore focused principally on intellectual property rights as obstacles to access to antiretroviral drugs in developing countries. This thesis, …

Why Family Cap Laws Just Aren't Getting It Done, Kelly J. Gastley

William & Mary Law Review

No abstract provided.

Mental Disorder And The Civil/Criminal Distinction, Grant H. Morris

University of San Diego Public Law and Legal Theory Research Paper Series

This essay, written as part of a symposium issue to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the University of San Diego Law School, discusses the evaporating distinction between sentence-serving convicts and mentally disordered nonconvicts who are involved in, or who were involved in, the criminal process–people we label as both bad and mad. By examining one Supreme Court case from each of the decades that follow the opening of the University of San Diego School of Law, the essay demonstrates how the promise that nonconvict mentally disordered persons would be treated equally with other civilly committed mental patients was made and …

Income, Work And Freedom, Philip L. Harvey

ExpressO

The ability of public policies to secure the economic and social rights recognized in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is proposed as a trumping supplement to the utility-maximization criterion of neo-classical welfare economics. Two progressive proposals for ending poverty and promoting personal development and freedom are then compared using this assessment criterion. The first proposal is that society guarantee everyone an unconditional basic income (BI) without imposing work requirements in exchange for the guarantee. The second proposal is that society use direct job creation to provide employment assurance (EA) for anyone who is unable to find decent work in …

A Realpolitik Defense Of Social Rights, Kim Lane Scheppele

All Faculty Scholarship

Social rights are controversial in theory, but many constitutions feature long lists of social rights anyway. But how can poor states ever hope to realize these rights? This article examines the practical bargaining over social rights that occurs when countries go broke and international financial institutions step in to direct internal fiscal affairs. Constitutional Courts can give their own governments leverage in bargaining with the IMF by making strong decisions defending social rights just at those moments. Because of the IMF's commitment to the rule of law, it is hard for the IMF to insist as part of the conditionality …

Community Determinants Of Volunteer Participation: The Case Of Japan, Mary Alice Haddad

Mary Alice Haddad

Why are some communities more civically engaged than others? Why do some communities provide services with volunteer labor whereas others rely primarily on government provision? When communities provide both volunteer and paid labor for the same service, how do they motivate and organize those volunteers? This article addresses these questions through quantitative tests of prevailing explanations for levels of civic engagement (e.g., education, TV viewing, urbanization) and qualitative analyses of case studies of three medium-sized cities in Japan, focusing particularly on the service areas of firefighting and elder care. The statistical analyses demonstrate that current explanations that rely on individual …

A State's Power To Enter Into A Consent Decree That Violates State Law Provisions: What "Findings" Of A Federal Violation Are Sufficient To Justify A Consent Decree That Trumps State Law?, David W. Swift

ExpressO

In the last forty years federal courts have played a prominent role in reshaping our public institutions. And while some scholars question the efficacy of these structural injuctions, the authority of federal courts to order such relief is generally unquestioned. What is open to debate, however, is whether state officials can agree to a remedy they would not have had the authority to order themselves; and if so, to what extent must an underlying constitutional violation be proved so as to justify the remedy?

This article discusses the competing theories and concludes that a remedy that violates state law may …

Evaluating Work: Enforcing Occupational Safety And Health Standards In The United States, Canada And Sweden, Daniel B. Klaff

ExpressO

The United States’ occupational safety and health enforcement system is breaking down. Klaff argues that much of this breakdown has to do with a fundamental lack of worker participation in the United States’ safety and health system. Klaff makes his case by comparing and contrasting the history and enforcement schemes of the United States, Canada, and Sweden. After arguing for economic rights as human rights, Klaff concludes by offering a set of recommendations for the United States’ occupational safety and health system based upon his value-centered analysis.

Boldly Going Where No Law Has Gone Before: Call Centres, Intake Scripts, Database Fields, And Discretionary Justice In Social Assistance, Lorne Sossin

Osgoode Hall Law Journal

This article focuses on the response of public law to bureaucratic disentitlement. Whether eligibility decisions for social welfare benefits are made on the basis of a face to face interview or telephone intake screening at a call centre, whether the questions are onerous for vulnerable applicants to answer, whether the bureaucratic hurdles can reasonably be surmounted or lead to the de facto exclusion of otherwise eligible applicants, all constitute questions which should be fundamentally intertwined with the question of whether a discretionary decision is legally valid. This is so not only because service delivery models and administrative design may determine …

The Changing World Of Employee Benefits, Maria O'Brien Hylton

Chicago-Kent Law Review

The employee benefits picture, at least for many plan participants and some plan sponsors, is a scary and bleak one. The number of workers with pension coverage is declining, health insurance rates are rising much faster than the rate of inflation, and the number of uninsured continues to rise as well. The decline in union density, the recent boost given by the U.S. Supreme Court to Any Willing Provider ("AWP") laws, and the deluge of recent benefits-related scandals are also all part of this landscape. This Article examines each of these issues, with a focus on reforms that would increase …

Commentary: Is It Time To Take The Broom And Really Clean House? A New Paradigm For Employee Benefits, Mary Ellen Signorille

Chicago-Kent Law Review

No abstract provided.

The "No Property" Problem: Understanding Poverty By Understanding Wealth, Jane B. Baron

Michigan Law Review

Could it be that understanding homelessness and poverty is less a function of understanding the homeless and the poor than of understanding how the wealthy come to ignore and tolerate them? This is one of the more intriguing suggestions of anthropologist Kim Hopper's Reckoning with Homelessness, and it echoes claims made by lawyers who, like Hopper, have spent much of their careers advocating on behalf of the homeless. While Hopper's new book is first and foremost a work of anthropology, its structure strongly parallels recent work by legal scholars who have sought to assess the effects of litigation and lobbying …

What Is Fiscal Responsibility? Long-Term Deficits, Generational Accounting, And Capital Budgeting, Neil H. Buchanan

Rutgers Law School (Newark) Faculty Papers

This article assesses three basic approaches to assessing the future effects of the government’s fiscal policies: traditional measures of the deficit, measures associated with Generational Accounting, and measures derived from applying Capital Budgeting to the federal accounts. I conclude that Capital Budgeting is the best of the three approaches and that Generational Accounting is the least helpful. Acknowledging that there might be some value in learning what we can from a variety of approaches to analyzing fiscal policy, I nevertheless conclude that Generational Accounting is actually a misleading or--at best--empty measure of future fiscal developments. The best approach to providing …

The Cocaine Vaccine, Dru Stevenson

ExpressO

The controversial new cocaine vaccine (TA-CD) has the potential to be an extremely effective treatment tool for recovering addicts, but it also presents opportunities for non-therapeutic uses, such as preventing cocaine use in the first place. It is foreseeable that the cocaine vaccine could become a condition of parole or probation, or receiving welfare payments, or for employment in certain occupations. Universal vaccination is also a possibility but less likely for political reasons. This article investigates each of these areas of potential use. Any setting where mandatory drug testing is currently in place could become a venue for the vaccination. …

The Importance Of Corporate Models, Benedict C. Sheehy

ExpressO

This article argues that the debate concerning the nature of the corporation is not finished and nor a mere intellectual exercise for interested legal academics. The current model of the corporation as an economic entity—the firm—has a number of imbedded value assumptions. Given the common territory between corporate law and economics, some scholars have come to identify the two as equal partners striving for the same ends. This is a serious error which has had and continues to have significant negative consequences for both the economic situation of the majority and justice in society. These value assumptions are being seriously …

When Daddy Doesn't Want To Be Daddy Anymore: An Argument Against Paternity Fraud Claims, Melanie B. Jacobs

ExpressO

No abstract provided.

Foster Care Placement: Reducing The Risk Of Sibling Incest, David J. Herring

ExpressO

No abstract provided.

Is The End Of The War In Sight: An Analysis Of Canada’S Decriminalization Of Marijuana And The Implications For The United States “War On Drugs”, Kara Godbehere Goodwin

ExpressO

Discussion of marijuana decriminalization efforts by Canadian government and comparison of United States/Canadian drug legislation and healthcare. Public policy justifications are discussed as well as medical marijuana and effects of drug use on the two countries' prison and healthcare systems.

A Sturdy Rogue, Bruce K. Miller

Faculty Scholarship

The Author discusses the Poor Laws in the times of the Tudor monarchs, known to us at the Elizabethan Poor Laws. The Author discusses the Oakley case which shows the durability and power of our Elizabethan heritage in shaping a special law of poor families; the very venerability of this heritage suggests that it must play an important social role.

Democratizing The American Dream: The Role Of A Regional Housing Legislature In The Production Of Affordable Housing, Thomas A. Brown

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

Economic, ethnic and racial residential segregation are ubiquitous across United States metropolitan regions. As a result, the majority of affordable housing is located in central cities or inner-ring suburbs, generally in areas of highly concentrated poverty. Outer suburbs are often exempt from providing significant housing for the economically disadvantaged regional citizens. This should not be. If housing policy in metropolitan regions were established in a democratic fashion, the give-and-take of the political process would create strong incentives for regional cooperation in the creation of affordable housing. Drawing together scholarship in the fields of local government law, administrative law, and housing …

Afterword: How Can We Save The Safety Net?, Frank W. Munger

Articles & Chapters

No abstract provided.

Consular Absolutism: The Need For Judicial Review In The Adjudication Of Immigrant Visas For Permanent Residence, 37 J. Marshall L. Rev. 577 (2004), Maria Zas

UIC Law Review

No abstract provided.

Reflections On Judicial Review And The Plight Of The Poor In A World Where Nothing Works, 37 J. Marshall L. Rev. 555 (2004), Walter J. Kendall Iii

UIC Law Review

No abstract provided.

Brown’S Legacy: Looking Back, Moving Forward, Wilhelmina M. Wright

William Mitchell Law Review

This keynote speech was delivered at the Lena O. Smith Luncheon on May 7, 2004. Lena O. Smith was the first African-American woman to practice law in Minnesota. In 1921, she graduated from Northwestern College of Law, a predecessor of William Mitchell College of Law. See generally Ann Juergens, Lena Olive Smith: A Minnesota Civil Rights Pioneer, 28 Wm. Mitchell L. Rev. 397 (2001).

Decoupling Tax Exemption For Charitable Organizations, Charles A. Borek

William Mitchell Law Review

[T]his article proposes a new approach to defining the term “charitable” for tax purposes that both respects the essence of tax-exempt eleemosynary activity and injects an element of clarity that has eluded the use of the term in modern tax parlance. Part I traces the evolution of the legal concept of charity, with emphasis on the shift in focus from poverty relief to social action facilitated through the device of trust law. I argue that it is in this shift of emphasis that the concept of charity became entangled in property concepts and thereby transformed into something wholly unrelated to …

Why Does It Matter Where I Live? Welfare Reform, Equal Protection, And The Maryland Constitution, Karen Syma Czapanskiy

Maryland Law Review

No abstract provided.