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Governmental Inaction As A Constitutional Tort: Deshaney And Its Aftermath, Thomas A. Eaton, Michael Wells
Governmental Inaction As A Constitutional Tort: Deshaney And Its Aftermath, Thomas A. Eaton, Michael Wells
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DeShaney v. Winnebago County Department of Social Services is the Supreme Court's first major effort to define the scope of state and local governments' affirmative obligations under the fourteenth amendment. The Court rejected liability against a county welfare agency and a caseworker for failing to prevent a father from severely beating his four-year-old son. The Court intimated that constitutional affirmative duties exist only where the plaintiff is in the state's custody. Scholarly commentary reads the case as announcing a sweeping prohibition against the imposition of affirmative duties in other contexts. Professors Eaton and Wells demonstrate that the DeShaney opinion is …
Chaos And The Court, Glenn Harlan Reynolds
Chaos And The Court, Glenn Harlan Reynolds
Scholarly Works
Inspired by Laurence Tribe's "The Curvature of Constitutional Space," this Essay looks at some constitutional theorists' desire for certainty and predictability in law, and notes that such certainty and predictability is much less available even in the hard sciences than is generally believed, with simple and determinate systems sometimes producing wildly unpredictable results. It suggests that predictability of results may be a difficult goal for legal theorists, and offers some thoughts on alternative approaches.