Public Interest Commons^™

Fines, Fees, And The Carceral Economic Conditions Of Public Education, Thalia González

Washington and Lee Law Review Online

In this Article, I apply an expanded concept of education carcerality to identify and analyze a largely unexamined modality of punitive economic governance—intra-system educational fines and fees. Distinguished from other forms of childhood financial sanctions, including the criminalization of ordinary child and adolescent behavior in schools through the use of municipal fines and fees, these carceral-penal practices are exclusively defined, imposed, and collected within school systems themselves. Drawing on original data from 101 publicly available policies governing the two largest school districts by student population in each state and the District of Columbia, this Article contributes to the literature with …

Medicaid’S Broken Promise To Children, Jerron R. Wheeler

Washington and Lee Law Review

In the United States, poor children’s access to necessary healthcare is determined more by geography than medical need. This variation is not the result of thoughtful local tailoring but of excessive state autonomy and passive federal oversight. The result is a fragmented and unequal system that obscures accountability and fails the Nation’s most vulnerable children.

Building on scholarship showing how decentralized implementation of federal social programs can erode America’s social safety net, this Article examines how one of Congress’s most ambitious entitlements for children—Medicaid’s Early and Periodic Screening, Diagnostic and Treatment (EPSDT) benefit has been quietly undermined. In light of …

Poverty, Fresh Starts, And The Social Safety Net, Michelle Lyon Drumbl

Scholarly Articles

For decades low-income families have relied on the filing of individual income tax returns to claim critical social welfare benefits in the form of refundable tax credits, most notably the Earned Income Tax Credit and the Child Tax Credit. But what happens to those families when the social safety net is not enough to meet their financial obligations, and they must seek a fresh start by filing for bankruptcy?

This Article, at the intersection of tax law, bankruptcy law, and the social safety net, examines the ways in which state bankruptcy laws treat refundable tax credits when an individual debtor …

Mechanisms For Including Publics In Administrative Governance, Nina-Simone Edwards

Library Scholarship

This project’s fourth concept paper rethinks public participation in administrative processes. Although participation mechanisms are theoretically designed to enable those affected by regulations to influence their development, it is often extremely difficult for members of the public to meaningfully engage with agencies. After discussing institutional failures of current participation mechanisms, this report develops a set of principles to guide the redesign of public participation mechanisms. These include involving publics earlier in the process, building both public and regulatory capacity for meaningful, two-way communication, and reframing expertise as a public good.

The paper then proposes specific mechanisms to optimize communication between …