Law Commons^™

How The State And Federal Tax Systems Operate To Deny Educational Opportunities To Minorities And Other Lower Income Students, Camilla E. Watson

Scholarly Works

The importance of education cannot be overstated. Education is a core principle of the American Dream, and as such, it is the ticket to a better paying job, homeownership, financial security, and a better way of life. Education is the key factor in reducing poverty and inequality and promoting sustained national economic growth. But while the U.S. Supreme Court has referred to education as "perhaps the most important function of the state and local governments," it has nevertheless stopped short of declaring education a fundamental right guaranteed under the Constitution. As a consequence, because education is not considered a fundamental …

No Jd? No Problem: Aall Annual Conference Review, Rachel S. Evans

Articles, Chapters and Online Publications

This installment of ALL-SIS Newsletter’s short reviews of AALL2020 conference programs is by Rachel Evans, Metadata Services and Special Collections Librarian at the University of Georgia School of Law’s Alexander Campbell King Law Library. It was originally published to the ALL-SIS blog. The session recording is available to conference registrants, and will be available to all members in 2021. The full review will appeared in the fall issue of the Newsletter.

Why Some Religious Accommodations For Mandatory Vaccinations Violate The Establishment Clause, Hillel Y. Levin

Scholarly Works

All states require parents to inoculate their children against deadly diseases prior to enrolling them in public schools, but the vast majority of states also allow parents to opt out on religious grounds. This religious accommodation imposes potentially grave costs on the children of non-vaccinating parents and on those who cannot be immunized. The Establishment Clause prohibits religious accommodations that impose such costs on third parties in some cases, but not in all. This presents a difficult line-drawing problem. The Supreme Court has offered little guidance, and scholars are divided.

This Article addresses the problem of religious accommodations that impose …

Tax Credit Scholarship Programs And The Changing Ecology Of Public Education, Hillel Y. Levin

Scholarly Works

The traditional model of public education continues to be challenged by advocates of school choice. Typically associated with charter schools, magnet schools, and tuition voucher programs, these advocates have recently introduced a new school choice plan, namely tax credit scholarship programs. More than a dozen states have adopted such programs, and hundreds of millions of dollars are now diverted each year from public programs to private schools. These programs are poorly understood and under-studied by legal scholars. This Article assesses the place of these programs within the ecology of public education, considers the fundamentally different approaches states have taken to …

John Paul Stevens And Equally Impartial Government, Diane Marie Amann

Scholarly Works

This article is the second publication arising out of the author's ongoing research respecting Justice John Paul Stevens. It is one of several published by former law clerks and other legal experts in the UC Davis Law Review symposium edition, Volume 43, No. 3, February 2010, "The Honorable John Paul Stevens."

The article posits that Justice Stevens's embrace of race-conscious measures to ensure continued diversity stands in tension with his early rejections of affirmative action programs. The contrast suggests a linear movement toward a progressive interpretation of the Constitution’s equality guarantee; however, examination of Stevens's writings in biographical context reveal …

Teaching Sicko, Elizabeth Weeks

Scholarly Works

This article provides insights in how to make up cancelled law classes to ensure compliance with American Bar Association accreditation instructional hours requirements. How to cover the missed course content. How to find mutually agreeable make-up class times and locations with a group of busy, upper-level law students. Faced with the prospect of having to make up two hours each of my Health Care Financing and Regulation course and my Public Health Law seminar, I turned to the teacher's little helper: the DVD player

The Course Of True Human Rights Progress Never Did Run Smooth, Diane Marie Amann

Scholarly Works

As the United States moves toward the inauguration in January 2009 of a new President, greater attention is paid to what the country might do to restore and reinforce its traditional role as a leader in the promotion of human rights. This essay warns against any assumption that innovation alone will assure greater enforcement of rights; its points of reference are not only the current administration, but also one long past, that of President John F. Kennedy. Rather than jump to embrace new, global concepts like responsibility to protect, therefore, it argues for careful pursuit of local change. It then …

Is There A Bias Against Education In The Jury Selection Process?, Hillel Y. Levin, John W. Emerson

Scholarly Works

Herbert Spencer famously said that a jury is “a group of twelve people of average ignorance.” That is not a particularly rosy picture of juror competence, but it presents a far better view than the one held by many -- if not most -- modern commentators. The more common contemporary sentiment was captured by Mark Twain when he wrote, in his inimitable style, “[w]e have a criminal jury system which is superior to any in the world; and its efficiency is only marred by the difficulty of finding twelve [people] every day who don't know anything and can't read.” Specifically, …

School Funding Litigation: Who's Winning The War?, John Dayton, Anne Proffitt Dupre

Scholarly Works

This Article examines how the landscape of school funding litigation has changed over the three decades since Serrano and Rodriguez. The first part of the Article sets forth the history of school funding litigation since Serrano and Rodriguez and unravels the legal theories that have driven the school financing cases, explaining past dispositions and point out likely future trends. At first blush it would appear that the attorneys seeking social change through greater equity in school funding are litigating similar issues in each state. Yet judges have approached these matters from different directions with results that vary significantly from state …