Law Commons^™

Prison Visitation Policies: A Fifty State Survey, Chesa Boudin

Chesa Boudin

This paper presents a summary of the findings from the first fifty-state survey of prison visitation policies. Our research explores the contours of how prison administrators exercise their discretion to prescribe when and how prisoners may have contact with friends and family. Visitation policies impact recidivism, inmates’ and their families’ quality of life, public safety, and prison security, transparency and accountability. Yet many policies are inaccessible to visitors and researchers. Given the wide-ranging effects of visitation, it is important to understand the landscape of visitation policies and then, where possible, identify best practices and uncover policies that may be counterproductive …

See No Evil, Hear No Evil, Speak No Evil; Stemming The Tide Of No Promo Homo Laws In American Schools, Madelyn Rodriguez

Madelyn Rodriguez

In several states, and many more local governments, teachers are being mandated to teach their students that homosexuality is inherently abhorrent and should be shunned. These so called “No Promo Homo” policies vary in scope; from those barring any positive discussion of homosexuality to those which insinuate the association of homosexuality with various social ills. As a result of these policies, teachers are being used as a conduit for misinformation and, more disturbingly, for discrimination and bias. Because teachers naturally have an immense impact on their students, the concepts and values advocated or discouraged by them will have an immeasurable …

Trouble At Home, Daniel Manne

Daniel Manne

In her Jacob Prize 2009 award-winning book, At Home in the Law: How the Domestic Violence Revolution is Transforming Privacy, Harvard Law School Professor Jeannie Suk mounts a sustained argument to the effect that under the guise of protecting women, coercive state power has weaseled its way into the hitherto sacred area of the home. Unfortunately, Professor Suk makes a number of errors in her book, including misreporting cases, misrepresenting statutes, and misunderstanding the law. Because so little is written in the area of domestic violence, it is critical to correct these errors before they have an effect on policy. …

The Racial Injustice Of The War On Drugs: The Sentencing Laws And Police Practices Responsible For The Injustice And A Policy Prescription For A New Way Forward, Brad R. Schlesinger

Brad R Schlesinger

The War on Drugs is a discriminatory policy that results in blacks being overrepresented as those arrested and imprisoned for drug crimes – creating incalculable damages to black communities and families. The culprits are sentencing laws and law enforcement tactics that cannot be considered race-neutral as these policies overwhelmingly affect blacks. While attempts to ameliorate these disparities through sentencing reform has had mild successes, these prescriptions are limited, failing to address the underlying problem: the way the drug war is policed. I contend that legalizing and regulating drugs is necessary to reverse the injustice and blatant discrimination of the drug …

Adding Insult To Indian Injury, Ryan Dreveskracht

Ryan Dreveskracht

No abstract provided.

The Good Faith Approach To Foreclosure Mediation: An Assessment Of Washington's Foreclosure Mediation Program, Scott P. Kennedy

Scott P. Kennedy

Since 2007, concerns over high home foreclosure rates have played a dominant role in U.S. economic news and policy, and several states have responded with bold statutory and regulatory innovations. In July of 2011, Washington State implemented one such innovation: the Foreclosure Fairness Act (FFA). It grants defaulting homeowners the right to initiate a mediation in which lenders must consider the alternatives to foreclosure in good faith. This article assesses the Washington model's potential to mitigate the forces frustrating foreclosure prevention. Despite the increasing viability of foreclosure's alternatives, national foreclosure rates remain high. Poor lender-borrower dialogue, a system of perverse …

Revictimizing Native Women For Politica Purposes, Ryan Dreveskracht

Ryan Dreveskracht

No abstract provided.

The Racial Injustice Of The War On Drugs: The Sentencing Laws And Police Practices Responsible For The Injustice And A Policy Prescription For A New Way Forward, Brad R. Schlesinger

Brad R Schlesinger

The War on Drugs is a discriminatory policy that results in blacks being overrepresented as those arrested and imprisoned for drug crimes – creating incalculable damages to black communities and families. The culprits are sentencing laws and law enforcement tactics that cannot be considered race-neutral as these policies overwhelmingly affect blacks. While attempts to ameliorate these disparities through sentencing reform has had mild successes, these prescriptions are limited, failing to address the underlying problem: the way the drug war is policed. I contend that legalizing and regulating drugs is necessary to reverse the injustice and blatant discrimination of the drug …

Private Lawmaking And The Architecture Of Confidentiality In Nonprofit Boardrooms, Norman I. Silber

Norman I. Silber

Abstract

Placement of the boundary line between transparent and confidential deliberation inside a boardroom affects the quality, efficiency, and fairness of corporate decision making. Policies which do not insist upon confidentiality can improve the perceived legitimacy of decisions and of those who make them; confidentiality can improve the ability to implement decisions effectively. The degree of transparency facilitated by these policies affects the volume and quality of available information. In the nonprofit boardroom, the boundaries that are set by governance rules also reflect and give shape to institutional structures and cultural norms.

This article explores justifications for changing from a …

Teaching Ethics In Criminal Justice To First Year Law Students: Or Efforts To Dislodge The Csi Effect, Susan Rutberg

Susan Rutberg

Teaching Ethics in Criminal Justice to First Year Law Students:

Or Efforts to Dislodge the CSI Effect[1]

Susan Rutberg[2]

ABSTRACT

This article discusses the implementation of an innovative first year course at Golden Gate University School of Law entitled “Lawyering Skills: Ethics in Criminal Justice.” The course, offered for the first time in the spring of 2011, was the product of curricular reform set in motion by the 2007 Carnegie Foundation Report, Educating Lawyers: Preparation for the Profession of Law. Golden Gate University has had a longtime focus both on practical legal education and ethical training. We devote a substantial …

Principio De Solidaridad, Acciones Populares Y Derechos Colectivos En Colombia: Aproximaciones Críticas A La Sentencia C-630 Del 2011 De La Corte Constitucional, Daniel Monroy

Daniel A Monroy C

ABSTRACT

This article presents a serious rapprochement to the arguments that the Constitutional Court put forward in the judgment C- 630 of 2011. The main objective of this article is to prove the weakness of the arguments, especially on those that are supported in the constitution´s principle of solidarity and those that derive in “duties’s consideration. This article beginning with some critiques to the class actions rights and it protection´s mechanism, bases in economic analysis. Afterward, base in the general description that the court have establish in the principle of solidarity, this article explain the different way how the court …

Debtor’S Prison In The Neoliberal State: “Debtfare” And The Cultural Logics Of The Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention And Consumer Protection Act Of 2005, Linda E. Coco

Linda E. Coco

The enactment of the Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act (“BAPCPA”) of 2005, amending the Bankruptcy Reform Act of 1978, marks a transformation in bankruptcy law and policy that is representative of larger shifts in dominant economic and political models from “embedded liberalism” to free market “neoliberalism.” BAPCPA’s provisions are part of the new practices of the emergent neoliberal state as they relate to the American middle class segment of the population. In disciplining the middle class, BAPCPA shifts the risk and the responsibility of the lending relationship onto consumer debtors. BAPCPA does this by keeping financially distressed individuals …

Legal Services Programs Can Avoid Service Reductions By Improving Efficiency And Effectiveness, Wayne Moore

wayne moore

This article describes how legal services for low-income people can be maintained or even increased despite recent decreases in funding, if some legal services programs increased their efficiency and effectiveness. Data is presented that indicates that some programs are much less efficient than others. Accepted methods are described for boosting staff output and efficiency without working faster or shortchanging time spent with clients. This can be accomplished using better technology (document generators), methods (telephone conversations can take much less time than face-to-face conversations), and systems (assigning common, routine cases to specially trained staff who use streamlined processes). Effectiveness is defined …

No Justice, Just Peas: Why Wal-Mart Will Not End D.C.’S Food Deserts, Emily R. Citkowski

Emily R. Citkowski

Without a significant policy shift away from corporate subsidies and towards local capital development, local entrepreneurs may need to abandon traditional for-profit business models in favor of alternative non-profit models that build upon existing community assets. Legislation meant to solve the problem of food deserts should prioritize community-based enterprise because of the capacity to localize capital, create living-wage jobs, and build accountability to community.

Moral Disengagement Of Medical Providers: Another Clue To The Continued Neglect Of Treatable Pain, Kelly Dineen

Kelly Dineen

The neglect of treatable pain is an ongoing reality for patients in all health care settings despite decades of research, education, institutional and organizational initiatives and regulatory reform. Most recently the Accountable Care Act and the Institute of Medicine have called for further work to understand and correct the continued inadequate treatment of pain. To date, research has identified a variety of barriers to treatment from educational deficits to biases to regulatory scrutiny with little change in practice. Yet, very little research has addressed the social cognitive mechanisms used by providers who continue to undertreat pain. This article explores the …

Too Many Teeth: Understanding The Medicare Secondary Payer Act And Its Threat To Businesses, James J. Hennelly Iii

James J. Hennelly III

The Medicare Secondary Payer Act (“MSP”), first enacted in 1980, has undergone several changes over the past three decades in an effort by the government to recoup some of its losses from conditional payments it makes on behalf of Medicare beneficiaries. In light of Congress’s many cost-cutting exploits of late, more attention should be drawn towards recent amendments to the MSP in an effort to find a healthy balance between the government’s interest in recouping its losses and private businesses’ interest in staying in business. Congress reacted to increasing Medicare costs in 2003 by inserting in the Medicare Modernization Act …

Non-Recourse Mortages – A Fresh Start, Ron Harris, Asher Meir

Ron Harris

In about a quarter of US states, all residential mortgages are essentially non-recourse, meaning that in case of default, the lender can only repossess the house but cannot collect on the private assets and future income of the borrower. This American innovation is now beginning to attract extensive interest abroad, but ironically in the US itself is getting a bad name. The law has been blamed for exacerbating the financial crisis, while stricken homeowners who take advantage of it have been scolded by lenders and even by the Secretary of the Treasury. We propose a fresh and more balanced look …

Whistleblowing, Public Employees, And The First Amendment, Mark Strasser

Mark Strasser

Recent revelations of extensive public wrongdoing illustrate the need for whistleblower protection so that governmental wrongdoing is more likely to come to light. While there is some statutory protection of whistleblowing as long as certain conditions have been met, a separate issue is the degree to which the Constitution protects whistleblowers under the First Amendment. Ironically, the constitutional protections for whistleblowers have decreased over the past several decades, leaving an impoverished system of protection for discussions of great public interest. This article analyzes the respects in which First Amendment protections for matters of great public import were once fairly robust …

Our Children, Ourselves: Ensuring The Education Of America's At-Risk Youth, Elizabeth Lamura

Elizabeth LaMura

This Article suggests using Connecticut as a model for (1) effective re-enrollment legislation and (2) framing litigation to challenge inequities in the education of at-risk youth. Children who are removed from the mainstream public school system – suspended, expelled or arrested and subsequently adjudicated delinquent – face innumerable obstacles when attempting to reintegrate into the public school system. In some circumstances, these youth are completely foreclosed from educational opportunities. In addition, instead of ensuring re-enrollment into public school, these youth are often diverted into Alternative Education Placements which provide inadequate learning environments and sub-par educational instruction, further hindering their ability …

Accommodating Vulnerability, Annette Ruth Appell

annette appell

Unlike other social categories, such as race, gender, sexual identity, and disability, the category of childhood has received little critical examination in the legal academy. Like other socio-legal categories with natural referents, however, childhood masks the contingency and normativity of behavior, expectations, power, and regulation, rendering the social order natural and inevitable. Childhood also scripts behavior and produces subordination and privilege in a manner unique to the adult–child dichotomy, but which also intersects with class, gender, race, sexuality, sexual identity, and ability. As such, the category bears examination not only for what it reveals about ourselves—adults, but also how to …

The Frozen Embryo: Scholarly Theories, Case Law, And State Proposals, Shirley D. Howell

Shirley D. Howell

Executive Summary

Fertility experts have been able to create human embryos outside the body since the 1970’s. Yet today both moral and legal questions persist regarding the use of In Vitro Fertilization (IVF). Seemingly, the use of IVF to assist infertile individuals and couples to procreate would be regarded almost uniformly positively. The procedure, however, has produced serious unintended consequences that continue to trouble theologians, physicians, and the courts. The ongoing legal debate centers on two principal questions: First, whether a frozen embryo should be regarded as a person, property, or something else; and, second, how to resolve disputes between …

Minors & Cosmetic Surgery: An Argument For State Intervention, Derrick Diaz

Derrick Diaz Mr.

This article focuses on whether a state may intervene to prevent minors from obtaining medically unnecessary cosmetic surgery. The article concludes that a state may prohibit such a procedure without running afoul of parental liberty interests by showing severe risk of harm to the minor. Furthermore, the article proposes that minors not have access to cosmetic surgery unless found by a court to be medically necessary. If medical necessity has been shown, then the parental presumption must control. However, if medical necessity has not been shown, then the service should be prohibited the same as any regulated service or product …

The Ppaca In Wonderland, David B. Kopel, Gary Lawson

David B Kopel

The question whether the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (“PPACA”) is “unconstitutional” is thorny, not simply because it presents intriguing issues of interpretation but also because it starkly illustrates the ambiguity that often accompanies the word “unconstitutional.” The term can be, and often is, used to mean a wide range of things, from inconsistency with the Constitution’s text to inconsistency with a set of policy preferences. In this article, we briefly explore the range of meanings that attach to the term “unconstitutional,” as well as the problem of determining the “constitutionality” of a lengthy statute when only some portions …