Law Commons^™

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

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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 …

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

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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 …

Experiencing Experiential Education: A Faculty-Student Perspective On The University Of Tennessee College Of Law's Adventure In Access To Justice Author, Robert C. Blitt

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This article functions both as a brief history lesson in experiential education and as a case study of an experiential course entitled “Human Rights Practicum” offered at the University of Tennessee College of Law in 2015. After briefly discussing historical and current trends in law school reform, including the rise of experiential education within the law school curriculum and the role played by technology in this context, the article turns to explore the impetus for the Human Rights Practicum, its development and implementation, as well as the software technology used to develop its final work product, a web-based “guided interview” …

Employment Discrimination In Legal Education: Selected Readings Relating To Women, Minorities, And Legal Writing, Lucille Jewel

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This bibliography is a collection of selected readings that address discrimination issues and attitudes relating to the employment of women and minorities in legal education.

Truancy Lawyering In Status Offense Cases: An Access To Justice Challenge, Dean Rivkin

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No abstract provided.

Learning From Detroit, Michael Lewyn

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Reviews a recent book about Detroit's problems.

The Ohio State University Dispute Resolution In Special Education Symposium Panel, Dean Rivkin

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No abstract provided.

The Trouble With Categories: What Theory Can Teach Us About The Doctrine-Skills Divide, Linda H. Edwards

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We might not need another article decrying the doctrine/skills dichotomy. That conversation seems increasingly old and tired. But like it or not, in conversations about the urgent need to reform legal education, the dichotomy’s entailments confront us at every turn. Is there something more to be said? Perhaps surprisingly, yes. We teach our students to examine language carefully, to question received categories, and to understand legal questions in light of their history and theory. Yet when we talk about the doctrine/skills divide, we seem to forget our own instruction.

This article does not exactly take sides in the typical skills …

No Child Left Behind - Representing Youth And Families In Truancy Matters, Dean Rivkin

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No abstract provided.

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

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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 …

Streaming While Teaching: The Legality Of Using Person Streaming Video Accounts For The Classroom, Jonathan I. Ezor

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Educators are constantly seeking new sources of relevant material to illustrate doctrinal and practice topics. With the growing understanding of students’ different learning styles, as well as the expansion of high-speed network connections and large displays in the classroom, streaming video has begun gaining popularity as an educational tool. Films, television programs, and real-time and archived legislative and court sessions may provide examples (both positive and negative) to enhance pedagogy. One increasingly common source for streaming content is a commercial video provider such as Netflix, Amazon, and Hulu. Even where such providers do not offer educational or institutional services, educators …

Of Carts And Horses: Organizing Remedies For The Classroom, Elaine W. Shoben

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No abstract provided.

Derrick Bell’S Community-Based Classroom, Joy Radice

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In Derrick Bell’s Community-based Classroom, I argue that Derrick Bell enhanced his participatory pedagogical approach to teaching constitutional law by intentionally creating community within the law school classroom — a community that humanized the students’ educational experience. This essay explores three ways in which he created community: through his participatory, student-centered course structure; his social classroom environment; and his interactive self-assessments. Over the past few years, legal education has come under indictment in the media for not adequately training lawyers for practice. Bell’s community-based classroom responds to this indictment, fusing both theory and practice in teaching doctrinal constitutional law courses …

Truancy Prosecutions Of Students And The Right [To] Education, Dean Rivkin

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Nationally, the high volume of prosecutions of students for truancy has constituted a perennial low visibility corner of the juvenile system. Rarely represented by counsel, students who are convicted often suffer serious sanctions, including incarceration, fines, unachievable conditions of probation, loss of driving privileges, and other burdensome restrictions. Although the process of truancy prosecutions differs state-by-state, and often court-by-court, the transparency and legality of these systems is subject to several on-going legal challenges asserting that, as a constitutional matter, the rule of law - embodying fairness, consistency, and the right to be heard - is systematically abused in truancy courts. …

John Paul Stevens And Equally Impartial Government, Diane Marie Amann

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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

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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

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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 …

Legal Advocacy And Education Reform: Litigating School Exclusion, Dean Rivkin

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School exclusion has existed as a dark side of public education since the creation of America's public schools. Several cases in the United States Supreme Court memorably invalidated State and school system efforts to deny equal educational opportunities to marginalized school children and youth. In these cases, the over-riding multiple values of education were poignantly articulated in the majority decisions.

School exclusion has stubbornly persisted. It takes many forms. This article surveys the most prominent pathways to school exclusion, highlighting what has been called the "School-To-Prison-Pipeline." Various legal challenges are also evaluated. The pros and cons of litigating school exclusion …

The Political Origins Of Secular Public Education: The New York School Controversy 1840-1842, Ian C. Bartrum

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As the title suggests, this article explores the historical origins of secular public education, with a particular focus on the controversy surrounding the Catholic petitions for school funding in nineteenth-century New York City. The article first examines the development of Protestant nonsectarian common schools in the northeast, then turns to the New York controversy in detail, and finally explores that controversy's legacy in state constitutions and the Supreme Court. It is particularly concerned with two ideas generated in New York: (1) Bishop John Hughes' objection to nonsectarianism as the 'sectarianism of infidelity'; and (2) New York Secretary of State John …

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

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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

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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 …

September 11th: Pro Bono And Trauma, Marjorie A. Silver

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No abstract provided.

New York Public School Financing Litigation (Symposium: New York State Constitutional Law: Trends And Developments), Leon D. Lazer

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No abstract provided.

Continuing Classroom Conversation Beyond The Four Whys, Jeffrey W. Stempel, Bailey Kuklin

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LAW school classes regularly prove Santayana's aphorism. Although nearly every law teacher desires to keep discussion focused and forward-moving, there are more than a few moments of thundering silence experienced in the classroom. Most of us adjust to this inevitability by positing some pedagogical virtue to still air and contenting ourselves with the knowledge that conversation-stopping “whys?” are usually delivered by us as teachers rather than the students. Perhaps we are underappreciative of the value discomfitting silence has, but we generally prefer that the conversation continue, that we miss the opportunity to feel simultaneously smug and uncomfortable, and that students …

Rethinking Religion And Public School Education, Marjorie A. Silver

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No abstract provided.

The Convergence Of Analogical And Dialectic Imaginations In Legal Discourse, Linda H. Edwards

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The dialogue over the role of narrative in the making and interpreting of law and in legal practice is often stalemated by confusion about the complex relationships between narrative and other forms of legal reasoning. Are narrative and rules opposing methods for interpretation and persuasion? Does narrative theory assert that lawyers can win cases by presenting a sympathetic story, without regard for the governing rule of law? If so, it is no wonder that conversations about narrative theory are so difficult.

This article explores the relationship between narrative and other forms of legal interpretation and persuasion. It relies on David …

"Academic Challenge" Cases: Should Judicial Review Extend To Academic Evaluations Of Students?, Thomas A. Schweitzer

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No abstract provided.

Book Review, Elaine W. Shoben

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The Burden of Brown by Raymond Wolters is a long book with a very short message: integration is bad, but desegregation is not. The distinction between the two is crucial to Wolters's analysis. Desegregation is the prohibition of officially sanctioned separation of the races. Integration, on the other hand, is the compelled mixing of the races for the sake of mixing. The "burden" of Brown v. Board of Education, according to Wolters, is that the Supreme Court has blurred this distinction and erroneously requires integration instead of merely prohibiting segregation. Wolters's thesis is that Brown had two prongs: one …

Reverse Political Checkoff Per Se Illegal As Violation Of Federal Election Campaign Act, Jay S. Bybee

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This casenote summarizes the district court for the District of Columbia’s decision in Federal Election Commission v. National Education Association.