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Fordham Law Review

2017

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Articles 31 - 60 of 106

Full-Text Articles in Law

Introduction: Moore V. City Of East Cleveland: How One Grandmother Helped A Nation Redefine Family, Anne Williams-Isom May 2017

Introduction: Moore V. City Of East Cleveland: How One Grandmother Helped A Nation Redefine Family, Anne Williams-Isom

Fordham Law Review

When reviewing the Moore v. City of East Cleveland decision, it is impossible not to see one of the grandmothers that Harlem Children’s Zone (HCZ) routinely encounters in Inez Moore. While educating children is the primary focus of HCZ, working with the adults who bring those children through the doors is important to HCZ’s success. Miss Inez, as she would have been referred to by HCZ, illustrates the important role played by extended families in communities of color.


Complex Kinship Networks In Fragile Families, Tonya L. Brito May 2017

Complex Kinship Networks In Fragile Families, Tonya L. Brito

Fordham Law Review

This Article examines the complex kinship networks in families that experience multiple-partner fertility. Part I begins with a broad examination of the dramatic changes to the American family that have occurred over the past half century. Part I then highlights the broad diversity of forms present in today’s families, the evolving nature of American families, and how a two-tiered family system has emerged as patterns have diverged along class-based lines. Next, Part II turns to multiple-partner fertility, assessing what we know and do not know about this social phenomenon, including its prevalence, characteristics, and trends. Part III then addresses the …


Reflections On The Challenge Of Inez Moore: Family Integrity In The Wake Of Mass Incarceration, Ann Cammett May 2017

Reflections On The Challenge Of Inez Moore: Family Integrity In The Wake Of Mass Incarceration, Ann Cammett

Fordham Law Review

The U.S. Supreme Court case Moore v. City of East Cleveland has long been celebrated as affirming constitutional rights related to family integrity. The Moore holding specifically confirmed the Court’s obligation to scrutinize housing ordinances that regulate a traditional family’s household composition. By comparison and extension, one might assume that alternative family formations would trigger similar scrutiny, but the Court has been loath to extend these protections. Apart from the Court’s failure to increase protections beyond traditional extended families, an interesting phenomenon has gone largely unexplored in this jurisprudential framework. In the wake of late twentieth-century mass incarceration, lawmakers and …


Moore’S Potential, June Carbone, Naomi Cahn May 2017

Moore’S Potential, June Carbone, Naomi Cahn

Fordham Law Review

Part I of this Article briefly explores the culture wars that have consumed American politics since Moore. Part II discusses Moore’s uneasy position within the conception of family as a matter of choice versus tradition. Then, to the extent that the Moore Court addressed the changing family, Part III shows how it did so by treating the extended family as a manifestation of traditional family values, not the newly emerging substantive family values that valorize delay in childbearing and financial independence. Finally, Part IV considers Moore's missed opportunities to examine the relationship between family form, race, and …


Marriage Equality And Family Diversity: Comparative Perspectives From The United States And South Africa, Holning Lau May 2017

Marriage Equality And Family Diversity: Comparative Perspectives From The United States And South Africa, Holning Lau

Fordham Law Review

This Article proceeds in two parts. Part I examines the United States’s and South Africa’s competing approaches to same-sex marriage. Both countries’ highest courts ruled that excluding same-sex couples from marriage is unconstitutional, but they took divergent paths to reach that conclusion. This Article contends that the Constitutional Court of South Africa paved a better road for other countries to follow because it developed a superior conceptualization of the right to marry. Part II looks beyond same-sex marriage to explore new frontiers for reforming laws to address family diversity both in the United States and in South Africa. Specifically, Part …


Sharing A House But Not A Household: Extended Families And Exclusionary Zoning Forty Years After Moore, Solangel Maldonado May 2017

Sharing A House But Not A Household: Extended Families And Exclusionary Zoning Forty Years After Moore, Solangel Maldonado

Fordham Law Review

This Article proceeds in three parts. Part I briefly recounts the evolution of zoning laws and their effect on racial minorities. Next, Part II demonstrates how single-family zoning laws disproportionately exclude racial minorities from the most desirable blocks. Part II also examines how these laws economically and socially disadvantage minorities and hinder efforts to integrate neighborhoods and schools. Then, Part III uses Moore to explore potential solutions and concludes that, at minimum, zoning laws cannot exclude two-family homes that are occupied by extended family members. It also shows how Moore may support a more inclusionary approach to zoning.


Riding The Wave Or Drowning?: An Analysis Of Gender Bias And Twombly/Iqbal In Title Ix Accused Student Lawsuits, Bethany A. Corbin May 2017

Riding The Wave Or Drowning?: An Analysis Of Gender Bias And Twombly/Iqbal In Title Ix Accused Student Lawsuits, Bethany A. Corbin

Fordham Law Review

This Article offers the first empirical analysis of dismissal trends in reverse Title IX cases and highlights that most courts erroneously dismiss these lawsuits at the 12(b)(6) stage. Through a misinterpretation of plausibility pleading, these courts hold that accused perpetrators have not shown causal evidence of discrimination at the outset of the lawsuit. This prodismissal approach, however, violates Swierkiewicz v. Sorema N.A.’s proclamation complaint. This Article proposes a more flexible causal pleading scheme that satisfies Twombly, Iqbal, and Swierkiewicz and ensures accused perpetrators receive their day in court. Alternatively, this Article argues for limited predismissal discovery in …


Political Insider Trading, Michael R. Siebecker May 2017

Political Insider Trading, Michael R. Siebecker

Fordham Law Review

A fiduciary breach due to secret use of Business Organizations assets for personal gain marks the essential concern in both the insider trading realm and in the context of Business Organizations political spending. Therefore, adopting a similar common law fiduciary rule that Business Organizations managers must disclose the amount and target of political expenditures or refrain from engaging in political activity does not seem like much of an intellectual leap. Not only would such a common law disclosure duty fit neatly within existing Business Organizations governance principles, but the compelled transparency would not offend corporations’ First Amendment rights. In the …


Thinking Outside The Box: Reforming Commercial Discrimination Doctrine To Combat The Negative Consequences Of Ban-The-Box Legislation, Nina Kucharczyk May 2017

Thinking Outside The Box: Reforming Commercial Discrimination Doctrine To Combat The Negative Consequences Of Ban-The-Box Legislation, Nina Kucharczyk

Fordham Law Review

This Note suggests a new approach to address the unintended consequences of ban-the-box legislation. The solution to combat unconscious discrimination during the hiring process is not to eliminate ban- the-box laws entirely; instead, lawmakers must modernize and strengthen Commercial discrimination doctrine to empower racial minorities who suspect discrimination and to ensure employers are critically analyzing their hiring processes.


Leaders And Laggards: Tackling State Legislative Responses To The Youth Sports Concussion Epidemic, Chris Lau May 2017

Leaders And Laggards: Tackling State Legislative Responses To The Youth Sports Concussion Epidemic, Chris Lau

Fordham Law Review

In 2009, state legislatures began to enact concussion safety laws to protect youth athletes suffering from traumatic brain injuries sustained during the course of play. By 2014, all fifty states and the District of Columbia had enacted some form of youth sports concussion legislation. Yet these statutes vary widely across states in terms of the protections offered to youth athletes. This Note provides an analysis of state legislation by classifying all fifty-one statutes among distinct tiers ranging from least to most protective.


Jail Isolation After Kingsley: Abolishing Solitary Confinement At The Intersection Of Pretrial Incarceration And Emerging Adulthood, Deema Nagib May 2017

Jail Isolation After Kingsley: Abolishing Solitary Confinement At The Intersection Of Pretrial Incarceration And Emerging Adulthood, Deema Nagib

Fordham Law Review

In 2015, the U.S. Supreme Court held that allegations of excessive use of force in pretrial detention are subject to an objective standard. However, it is unclear whether the objective standard extends to claims arising out of different factual circumstances. The Second Circuit’s recent decision in Darnell v. Pineiro to extend Kingsley v. Hendrickson to conditions-of- confinement cases provides hope. This Note argues that Kingsley should extend to solitary confinement litigation—particularly the isolation of emerging adults in pretrial detention. Solitary confinement is a widespread practice in the criminal justice system, but the implications of its use in pretrial detention have …


John Moore Jr.: Moore V. City Of East Cleveland And Children’S Constitutional Arguments, Nancy E. Dowd May 2017

John Moore Jr.: Moore V. City Of East Cleveland And Children’S Constitutional Arguments, Nancy E. Dowd

Fordham Law Review

This Article is divided into three parts. First, I retell the story of Moore from John Jr.’s perspective and frame his potential claims. Second, I explore constitutional arguments under existing doctrine, using contemporary equal protection and substantive due process analyses. Finally, I suggest how a children’s rights perspective might be even more persuasive as a strategy for John Jr. as well as for achieving opportunity and equality on behalf of contemporary children living amid and affected by structural inequalities that impact their developmental capacity.


Other Mothers, Kevin Maillard May 2017

Other Mothers, Kevin Maillard

Fordham Law Review

There is a robust body of scholarship and jurisprudence addressing psychological parents, assisted reproductive technology, surrogacy, and same-sex parents, which reinforces the primacy of heterosexual marriage and procreation. This tradition suggests a vulnerability of parental status involving the other parent. Now that legal parenthood can be approached in a number of ways, it is time to take a critical look at the preeminence of motherhood and gestation in the determination of parental status and fitness.


Extending The Normativity Of The Extended Family: Reflections On Moore V. City Of East Cleveland, Angela Onwuachi-Willig May 2017

Extending The Normativity Of The Extended Family: Reflections On Moore V. City Of East Cleveland, Angela Onwuachi-Willig

Fordham Law Review

Part I of this Article briefly recounts the plurality decision in Moore before analyzing Justice Brennan’s concurring opinion and detailing how the concurrence affirms, rather than deconstructs, the notion of African American deviance in families. Next, Part II specifies the ways in which Justice Brennan could have truly uplifted African American families and other families of color by identifying and explicating the strengths of extended or multigenerational family forms among people of color and by showing how such family forms can be a model, or even the model (if one must be chosen), for all families. Then, Part III concludes …


(Beyond) Family Ties: Remote Tippees In A Post-Salman Era, Austin J. Green May 2017

(Beyond) Family Ties: Remote Tippees In A Post-Salman Era, Austin J. Green

Fordham Law Review

In Salman v. United States, the U.S. Supreme Court reaffirmed Dirks v. SEC, holding that a personal benefit may be inferred where an insider discloses material nonpublic information to a “trading relative or friend.” While the decision was viewed as a win for prosecutors, the Court’s limited holding did little to address issues pertaining to more complex tipping chains, such as those raised by the Second Circuit’s decision in United States v. Newman two years prior. Particularly, a remote tippee cannot always determine whether material nonpublic information was improperly disclosed at the time of receipt. Such a remote …


Paying Too Dearly For A Whistle: Properly Protecting Internal Whistleblowers, Leonardo Labriola May 2017

Paying Too Dearly For A Whistle: Properly Protecting Internal Whistleblowers, Leonardo Labriola

Fordham Law Review

In light of substantial disagreement among the circuits on which types of whistleblowers Dodd-Frank intends to protect, and newly proposed legislation which suggests a solution, this Note inspects Dodd-Frank’s whistleblower protections in an effort to better explain which types of Business Organizations whistleblowers should and should not be protected. This Note briefly outlines the United States’s repeated history of increased regulation following financial crises, culminating in the Sarbanes-Oxley and Dodd-Frank Acts. It then describes the goals that motivated these acts and how whistleblowers play an outsized role in accomplishing those goals. It also examines the critical statute for Business Organizations …


Rethinking The Foundational Critiques Of Lawyers In Social Movements, Scott L. Cummings Apr 2017

Rethinking The Foundational Critiques Of Lawyers In Social Movements, Scott L. Cummings

Fordham Law Review

This Article argues that the current moment invites reconsideration of these critiques. The rise of new social movements—from marriage equality to Black Lives Matter to the recent mobilization against President Trump’s immigration order—and the response of a new generation of movement lawyers eager to lend support has refocused attention on the appropriate role that lawyers should play in advancing progressive social change. Rather than fall back on familiar critical themes, the time is ripe for developing a new affirmative vision.


Lawyers' Ethics Beyond The Vanishing Trial: Unrepresented Claimaints, De Facto Aggregations, Arbitration Mandates, And Privatized Processes, Judith Resnik Apr 2017

Lawyers' Ethics Beyond The Vanishing Trial: Unrepresented Claimaints, De Facto Aggregations, Arbitration Mandates, And Privatized Processes, Judith Resnik

Fordham Law Review

Trials are a vivid variable in the world of litigation, as reflected in the title of this colloquium, Civil Litigation Ethics at a Time of Vanishing Trials. The conveners have wisely drawn attention to the disjuncture between legal ethics and today’s litigation world. In this Introduction, I argue that the challenges for lawyers loom larger than those reflected in the declining rate of trials. More facets of contemporary dispute resolution need to be engaged when contemplating the topics and roles that legal ethics need to address in the decades to come.


Civil Trials: A Film Illusion?, Taunya L. Banks Apr 2017

Civil Trials: A Film Illusion?, Taunya L. Banks

Fordham Law Review

As Judge Elrod’s comments suggest, the most well-known courtroom film classics, like 12 Angry Men, Anatomy of a Murder, or Witness for the Prosecution are about criminal trials. This fact may be unimportant because the distinction between criminal and civil trial films often is lost on the general public. Unanswered is whether the distinction between criminal and civil trials is important when determining the impact of the decline in real-life civil trials on American popular culture and courtroom films in particular. This question is the focus of this Article.


Rethinking The Foundational Critiques Of Lawyers In Social Movements, Scott L. Cummings Apr 2017

Rethinking The Foundational Critiques Of Lawyers In Social Movements, Scott L. Cummings

Fordham Law Review

This Article argues that the current moment invites reconsideration of these critiques. The rise of new social movements—from marriage equality to Black Lives Matter to the recent mobilization against President Trump’s immigration order—and the response of a new generation of movement lawyers eager to lend support has refocused attention on the appropriate role that lawyers should play in advancing progressive social change. Rather than fall back on familiar critical themes, the time is ripe for developing a new affirmative vision.


Settlement In The Absence Of Anticipated Adjudication, Howard M. Erichson Apr 2017

Settlement In The Absence Of Anticipated Adjudication, Howard M. Erichson

Fordham Law Review

This Article begins with an account of the lawyer’s role in settlement in what we might call the traditional litigation scenario—that is, litigation in which settlement negotiations are conducted in the shadow of anticipated adjudication. This Article then considers four scenarios in which the anticipation of adjudication is altered—resource inadequacy, judicial settlement pressure, lengthy calendar, and class actions not certified for litigation—and asks what effect we should expect each scenario to have on the interests of lawyers and clients regarding settlement. The final part asks what light this analysis sheds on the phenomenon of vanishing trials and concludes with a …


Demosprudence On Trial: Ethics For Movement Lawyers, In Ferguson And Beyond, Justin Hansford Apr 2017

Demosprudence On Trial: Ethics For Movement Lawyers, In Ferguson And Beyond, Justin Hansford

Fordham Law Review

This Article suggests that although civil litigation remains a viable tool, the vanishing trial has limited impact on movement lawyers because we can use the law to promote social change outside of the courtroom. The demosprudence framework helps us to understand this process. By applying this framework to the movement lawyering context, movement lawyers can adapt to the void in voice created by the vanishing trial in civil litigation and still help the movement.


Fairness Beyond The Adversary System: Procedural Justice Norms For Legal Negotiation, Rebecca Holland-Blumoff Apr 2017

Fairness Beyond The Adversary System: Procedural Justice Norms For Legal Negotiation, Rebecca Holland-Blumoff

Fordham Law Review

Part I of this Article provides background on procedural justice and its relationship to negotiation. Part II then discusses the results of a recent empirical study that I conducted on the factors that help shape perceptions of procedural justice in the negotiation setting. Lastly, Part III explores the strategic and ethical implications of these results for the practicing lawyer in settlement negotiations.


Busting Up The Pretrial Industry, Andrew S. Pollis Apr 2017

Busting Up The Pretrial Industry, Andrew S. Pollis

Fordham Law Review

While some argue that “[r]eturning to a trial model would be a significant step toward fulfilling the traditional expectations for the federal courts,” that step backward is unlikely to occur. But I agree that fixes are in order, and I offer two. First, we should consider requiring at least some parties to engage in early settlement evaluation—ideally before extensive discovery gets underway—by submitting cases to summary jury trials and imposing consequences on parties who choose to disregard the results. Second, we should allocate a greater percentage of judicial resources to discovery management through the routine appointment of special masters to …


Restraining Lawyers: From “Cases” To “Tasks”, Morris A. Ratner Apr 2017

Restraining Lawyers: From “Cases” To “Tasks”, Morris A. Ratner

Fordham Law Review

These regulatory and market mechanisms for restraining lawyers share a common thread but differ in their purposes, efficacy, and fairness. Despite these differences, the growing intensity of their focus, and their possible amplification of each other, suggest the possibility of the emergence of new professional norms that call on litigators to think more deeply and inclusively about value from the perspective of court and client when making litigation choices.


Closure Provisions In Mdl Settlements, D. Theodore Rave Apr 2017

Closure Provisions In Mdl Settlements, D. Theodore Rave

Fordham Law Review

Closure has value in mass litigation. Defendants often insist on it as a condition of settlement, and plaintiffs who can deliver it may be able to command a premium. But in multidistrict litigation (MDL), which currently makes up over one-third of the federal docket, closure depends on individual claimants deciding to participate in a global settlement. Accordingly, MDL settlement designers often include terms designed to encourage claimants to opt in to the settlement and discourage them from continuing to litigate. Some of these terms have been criticized as unduly coercive and as benefiting the negotiating parties—the defendant and the lead …


The Public Believes Predispute Binding Arbitration Clauses Are Unjust: Ethical Implications For Dispute-System Design In The Time Of Vanishing Trials, Victor D. Quintanilla, Alexander B. Avtgis Apr 2017

The Public Believes Predispute Binding Arbitration Clauses Are Unjust: Ethical Implications For Dispute-System Design In The Time Of Vanishing Trials, Victor D. Quintanilla, Alexander B. Avtgis

Fordham Law Review

Drawing on these findings, we discuss the pressing need for a wider ethic that applies to transactional attorneys who design binding arbitration clauses within adhesion contracts. We also draw lessons from behavioral legal ethics and social psychology. These lessons reveal that this wider ethic may be endangered by the situational influences that currently operate within law firms (and in-house) due to these two intersecting patterns. We discuss ways of altering the regulatory environment to encourage the wider ethic to flourish.


Constraining Monitors, Veronica Root Apr 2017

Constraining Monitors, Veronica Root

Fordham Law Review

Part I of this Article explains the failure of recent attempts by courts and legislators to constrain monitor behavior. Part II then argues that one reason for the lack of monitorship regulation lies in the reluctance of bar associations to oversee quasi-legal behavior. It then explains why reputation appears to be the primary factor reigning in monitor behavior today. Part III discusses implications of this Article’s findings. Specifically, it discusses concerns regarding the disclosure of information, the boundaries of the relationship between a monitor and other parties, and the ways a monitor’s identity might be utilized as a sanctioning mechanism. …


Due Process Without Judicial Process?: Antiadversarialism In American Legal Culture, Norman W. Spaulding Apr 2017

Due Process Without Judicial Process?: Antiadversarialism In American Legal Culture, Norman W. Spaulding

Fordham Law Review

For decades now, American scholars of procedure and legal ethics have remarked upon the death of the jury trial. If jury trial is not in fact dead as an institution for the resolution of disputes, it is certainly “vanishing.” Even in complex litigation, courts tend to facilitate nonadjudicative resolutions—providing sites for aggregation, selection of counsel, fact gathering, and finality (via issue and claim preclusion)—rather than trial on the merits in any conventional sense of the term. In some high-stakes criminal cases and a fraction of civil cases, jury trial will surely continue well into the twenty-first century. Wall-to-wall media coverage …


The Bellwether Settlement, Adam S. Zimmerman Apr 2017

The Bellwether Settlement, Adam S. Zimmerman

Fordham Law Review

This Article examines the use of bellwether mediation in mass litigation. Bellwether mediations are different from bellwether trials,” a practice where parties choose a representative sample of cases for trial to determine how to resolve a much larger number of similar cases. In bellwether mediations, the parties instead rely on a representative sample of settlement outcomes overseen by judges and court-appointed mediators.