Law Commons^™

Can You Hear Me Now?: Making Participatory Governance Work For The Poor, Jaime Alison Lee

All Faculty Scholarship

Participatory governance engages people who are affected by a problem in the process of solving it. A participatory-governance approach to inner-city crime, for example, might include local residents in the process of designing a community-policing program. In recent decades, courts, legislatures, administrative agencies, and other institutions all have used participatory-governance approaches to tackle complex problems of law and public policy.

Some herald the potential for participatory-governance schemes to improve legal and policy outcomes, increase institutional accountability, empower marginalized groups, and further democratic ideals of self-determination and equality. Yet participatory-governance schemes can also promote the capture of public power by private …

Forgotten Fathers, Daniel L. Hatcher

All Faculty Scholarship

Poor fathers like John are largely forgotten, written off as a subset of the unworthy poor. These fathers struggle with poverty – often with near hopelessness – within multiple systems in which they are either entangled or overlooked, such as child-support and welfare programs, family courts, the criminal justice system, housing programs, and the healthcare, education, and foster-care systems. For these impoverished fathers, the “end of men” is often not simply a question for purposes of discussion but a fact that is all too real. In the instances in which poor fathers are not forgotten, they are targeted as causes …

A Traditional And Textualist Analysis Of The Goals Of Antitrust: Efficiency, Preventing Theft From Consumers, And Consumer Choice, Robert H. Lande

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This Article ascertains the overall purpose of the antitrust statutes in two very different ways. First, it performs a traditional analysis of the legislative history of the antitrust laws by analyzing relevant legislative debates and committee reports. Second, it undertakes a textualist or "plain meaning" analysis of the purpose of the antitrust statutes, using Justice Scalia's methodology. It does this by analyzing the meaning of key terms as they were used in contemporary dictionaries, legal treatises, common law cases, and the earliest U.s. antitrust cases, and it does this in light of the history of the relevant times.

Both approaches …

The Poverty Defense, Michele E. Gilman

All Faculty Scholarship

Poverty is correlated with crime, but it is widely assumed that it should not be a defense. In the 1970s, Judge David Bazelon challenged this assumption, proposing a rotten social background defense, that is, how growing up under circumstances of severe deprivation can subsequently impact a criminal defendant's mental state and actions. Relatedly, other theorists have posited that poverty should be a defense to crime based on poverty's coercive aspects or because society forfeits its right to condemn when it tolerates significant economic inequality. Critics counter that a poverty defense should not be adopted because it is not only inconsistent …