Social Welfare Law Commons^™

Navigating The Conundrum Of Mandatory Reporting Under The Pocso Act: Implications For Medical Professionals, Nanditta Batra

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To address the under reporting of sexual offences against children, the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences (POCSO) Act, 2012, makes reporting of such offences mandatory. The duty to report such offences has been extended to healthcare professionals. The inclusion of healthcare professionals within mandatory reporting, however, strikes at the very foundation of the doctor-patient relationship based on trust and confidentiality and conflicts with the patient confidentiality safeguards of the Mental Healthcare Act, 2017. It also has unintended public health consequences, such as denial of medical termination of pregnancy due to fear of prosecution under POCSO. An urgent reassessment of …

Re-Envisioning Child Well-Being: Dismantling The Inequitable Intersections Among Child Welfare, Juvenile Justice, And Education, Kele Stewart

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Twenty years after Shattered Bonds, Dorothy Roberts' indictment that the family regulation system polices, disrupts, and restructures Black families and communities remains urgent. Black families remain overrepresented in foster care with enshrined disparate treatment and outcomes. Black children are more likely to be removed from their homes, and their longer stays in foster care are characterized by placement instability, overly restrictive placements, the risk of abuse and exploitation, and inadequate mental health and other services. Black children also have worse educational outcomes than even other children in foster care, are over-referred to the juvenile justice system, and are more …

Steering Loan Modifications Post-Pandemic, Pamela Foohey, Dalie Jimenez, Christopher K. Odinet

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As part of federal and state relief programs created during the COVID-19 pandemic, many American households received pauses on their largest debts, particularly on mortgages and student loans. Others may have come to agreements with their lenders, likewise pausing or altering payment on other debts, such as auto loans and credit cards. This relief allowed households to allocate their savings and income to necessary expenses, like groceries, utilities, and medicine. But forbearance does not equal forgiveness. At the end of the various relief periods and moratoria, people will have to resume paying all their debts, the amounts of which may …

The Economics Of Class Action Waivers, Albert H. Choi, Kathryn E. Spier

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Many firms require consumers, employees, and suppliers to sign class action waivers as a condition of doing business with the firm, and the U.S. Supreme Court has endorsed companies’ ability to block class actions through mandatory individual arbitration clauses. Are class action waivers serving the interests of society or are they facilitating socially harmful business practices? This paper synthesizes and extends the existing law and economics literature by analyzing the firms’ incentive to impose class action waivers. While in many settings the firms’ incentive to block class actions may be aligned with maximizing social welfare, in many other settings it …

The Reincorporation Of Prisoners Into The Body Politic: Eliminating The Medicaid Inmate Exclusion Policy, Mira K. Edmonds

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Incarcerated people are excluded from Medicaid coverage due to a provision in the Social Security Act Amendments of 1965 known as the Medicaid Inmate Exclusion Policy (“MIEP”). This Article argues for the elimination of the MIEP as an anachronistic remnant of an earlier era prior to the massive growth of the U.S. incarcerated population and the expansion of Medicaid eligibility under the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010. It explores three reasons for eliminating the MIEP. First, the inclusion of incarcerated populations in Medicaid coverage would signify the final erasure from the Medicaid regime of the istinction between …

Taxing Parents: Welfarist Theories, Shannon Mccormack

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The Internal Revenue Code (the "Code") taxes parents inequitably. Couples with a sole earner are undertaxed compared to couples with dual earners and to single parents. Legal tax scholarship (including my own) has identified the many inequities that result from this sole-earner bias and have called for its elimination. But while these arguments have been sufficient for some, they do remain susceptible to the criticism that they are theoretically incomplete.

That critique might proceed as follows. Simply establishing that an inequity exists does not create a full argument for legal reform. After all, it might be argued, the Code plays …

Covid-19 Reflections On Resilience And Reform In The Child Welfare System, Robert Latham, Kele Stewart

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How The Covid-19 Pandemic Has And Should Reshape The American Safety Net, Gabriel Scheffler, Andrew Hammond, Ariel Jurow Kleiman

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Examining The Case For Socialized Law, Myriam E. Gilles, Gary Friedman

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Most people would agree with Frederick Wilmot-Smith that the rich have no greater claim to justice than the poor. And yet, as Wilmot-Smith points out in his provocative book, Equal Justice: Fair Legal Systems in an Unfair World, our laissez-faire legal-services markets ensure sharply unequal justice for rich and poor. The prescription at the heart of Equal Justice is the deprivatization of markets for legal services. To realize the ideal of equal justice, Wilmot-Smith would equalize the legal talent available to all and replace the market system with a centralized regime loosely analogous to socialized medicine.

Wilmot-Smith’s bold ideas …

Punishing Families For Being Poor: How Child Protection Interventions Threaten The Right To Parent While Impoverished, David Pimentel

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Two Deans Answer The Law School Wellness Questions They Hear The Most, Janet Stearns, David B. Jaffe

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Disability, Universalism, Social Rights, And Citizenship, Samuel R. Bagenstos

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The 2016 election has had significant consequences for American social welfare policy. Some of these consequences are direct. By giving unified control of the federal government to the Republican Party for the first time in a decade, the election has potentially empowered conservatives to ram through a bill to repeal the Affordable Care Act—the landmark “Obamacare” law that marked the most significant expansion of the social welfare state since the 1960s. Other consequences are more indirect. Both the election result itself, and Republicans’ actions since, have spurred a renewed debate within the left-liberal coalition regarding the politics of social welfare …

Medicaid Planning In Idaho, John A. Miller

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Medicaid Planning For Long-Term Care: California Style, John A. Miller

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Identity And Narrative: Turning Oppression Into Client Empowerment In Social Security Disability Cases, Jonel Newman

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Food Deprivation: A Basis For Refugee Status?, James C. Hathaway

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It is commonplace to speak of those in flight from famine, or otherwise migrating in search of food, as “refugees.” Over the past decade alone, millions of persons have abandoned their homes in countries such as North Korea, Sudan, Ethiopia, Congo, and Somalia, hoping that by moving they could find the nourishment needed to survive. In a colloquial sense, these people are refugees: they are on the move not by choice, but rather because their own desperation compels them to pursue a survival strategy away from the desperation confronting their home communities.

The question addressed here is whether persons in …

Using Preventive Legal Advocacy To Keep Children From Entering Foster Care, Vivek Sankaran

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Children may unnecessarily enter foster care because their parents are unable to resolve legal issues that affect their safety and well-being in their home.[...] Yet these kinds of legal needs for poor families are rarely met. On average, poor families experience at least one civil legal need per year, but only a small portion of those needs are satisfied. For about every six thousand people in poverty, there exists only one legal aid lawyer. So legal aid programs are forced to reject close to a million cases each year. This lack of legal services threatens the well-being of children[...] who …

Globalizing Social Finance: How Social Impact Bonds And Social Impact Performance Guarantees Can Scale Development, Deborah Burand

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While the SIB structure is still in its infancy, there is momentum building to globalize this social finance innovation so that it can help scale development goals around the world. Taking the SIB global is not a simple matter, however. This article explores several of the more challenging issues that are likely to arise in applying a SIB or elements of the SIB structure to social problems and development goals in developing countries. The article begins with a summary review of the goals and structures used in the two earliest SIBs. It then discusses key challenges and opportunities that SIBs …

Four Reforms For The Twenty-First Century, Barry C. Scheck

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What follows are my top four suggestions for judicial action and advocacy that can result in urgently needed and readily achievable reforms. Ass the American Judicature Society and its members consider their agenda and mission for the coming years, each of these issues deserves their support.

The Past And Future Of Deinstitutionalization Litigation, Samuel R. Bagenstos

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Two conflicting stories have consumed the academic debate regarding the impact of deinstitutionalization litigation. The first, which has risen almost to the level of conventional wisdom, is that deinstitutionalization was a disaster. The second story challenges the suggestion that deinstitutionalization has uniformly been unsuccessful, as well as the causal link critics seek to draw with the growth of the homeless population. This Article, which embraces the second story, assesses the current wave of deinstitutionalization litigation. It contends that things will be different this time. The particular outcomes of the first wave of deinstitutionalization litigation, this Article contends, resulted from the …

L3cs: An Innovative Choice For Urban Entrepreneurs And Urban Revitalization, Dana Thompson

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Social enterprises offer fresh ways of addressing seemingly intractable social problems, such as high levels of unemployment and poverty in economically distressed urban areas in the United States. Indeed, although social enterprises have deep and longstanding roots, the recent iteration of the social enterprise movement is gaining momentum in the United States and globally. Though there is not a singularly accepted legal definition of social enterprises, they are popularly known as businesses that use forprofit business practices, principles, and discipline to accomplish socially beneficial goals. Social entrepreneurs, those who operate social enterprises, eschew a traditional notion of charity, which primarily …

Anatomy Of An Aggregate Settlement: The Triumph Of Temptation Over Ethics, Lester Brickman

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In an aggregate settlement, usually of a mass tort claim, a defendant agrees to pay a specific dollar amount to be divided up by the lawyer among her multiple clients which may number in the hundreds and even thousands. Each client, therefore, is in competition with all of the lawyer’s other clients suing the same defendant for a share of the fixed sum. Rule 1.8(g) of the ABA Rules of Professional Conduct requires that each client give their informed consent to their allocation. To facilitate the settlement and the often quite substantial contingency fees to be earned, lawyers may mislead …

Guardianship For Persons With Mental Illness - A Legal And Appropriate Alternative?, Leslie Salzman

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The article critiques the U.S. guardianship system for individuals with psychosocial disabilities, arguing that it often unnecessarily restricts their autonomy by removing their legal right to make decisions. It advocates for supported decision-making models as a less restrictive alternative, aligning with the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) and the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD). The analysis emphasizes the importance of maximizing integration and participation in social, economic, and civic life, while highlighting the need for safeguards to ensure effective support without undue bureaucratic complexity.

Rethinking Guardianship (Again): Substituted Decision Making As A Violation Of The Integration Mandated Of Title Ii Of The Americans With Disabilities Act, Leslie Salzman

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In every state, when an adult has a diminished capacity to make decisions about personal affairs or property management, a court may transfer the individual’s right to make decisions to a guardian. This Article argues that, in most cases, it would be preferable to support decision making rather than supplant it through guardianship, and then seeks to locate a right to receive such support as a less restrictive alternative to the substituted decision making that characterizes guardianship.

Building on the reasoning in Olmstead v. L.C. and subsequent decisions interpreting the Americans with Disabilities Act’s integration mandate, this Article argues that …

Deleveraging Microfinance: Principles For Managing Voluntary Debt Workouts Of Microfinance Institutions, Deborah Burand

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This paper focuses on the challenges of responding to a deleveraging of the microfinance sector and offers guidelines for stakeholders in microfinance-regulators, policymakers, investors (debt and equity), donors, and microfinance providers-for how to address these challenges in the context of a microfinance institution debt workout so as to minimize undue disruption and damage to the microfinance sector as a whole.

Nonprofits And Narrative: Piers Plowman, Anthony Trollope, And Charities Law, Jill R. Horwitz

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What are the narrative possibilities for understanding nonprofit law? Given the porous barriers between nonprofit law and the literature about it, there are many. Here I consider two. First, nonprofit law and nonprofit literature are each enriched and made fully explicable by reference to the other. Nonprofit law has grown in parallel with literature. It may even be that important legal texts, texts about doing and being good, were imported directly from literary sources into law. Second, in writings ranging from sensational journalism to high literature, nonprofit laws and the scandals involving their violations have captured the public imagination for …

An Inclusive, Progressive National Savings And Financial Services Policy, Michael S. Barr

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How many of us walk by the signs for "Checks Cashed Here," "Money Orders for Sale," and "Payday Loans: Get Cash Quick" without thinking about the implications of those signs for the daily lives of lower-income households? Most of us can take for granted getting our paychecks directly deposited into our bank accounts, writing a check, or storing our money in an account. We often struggle to save for longer-term goals, such as our children's education, or retirement, but most of us, most of the time, do not worry whether our savings or insurance will be enough to get us …

The Social Security Administration's New Disability Adjudication Rules: A Significant And Promising Reform, Frank S. Bloch, Jeffrey S. Lubbers, Paul R. Verkuil

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The article evaluates the Social Security Administration's (SSA) new Disability Service Improvement (DSI) process, introduced in 2006, which aims to address inefficiencies and inconsistencies in disability adjudication. The reforms include key innovations such as Quick Disability Determinations (QDDs), the Medical and Vocational Expert System (MVES), and the replacement of the Appeals Council with the Decision Review Board (DRB). While the reforms represent a significant and promising step toward improving the disability determination process, the article identifies remaining concerns, particularly regarding the role of the Federal Reviewing Official (FRO) and rules for submitting evidence at administrative hearings.

Tax Preparation Services For Low- And Moderate-Income Households: Preliminary Evidence From A New Survey, Michael S. Barr, Jane K. Dokko

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Recently, researchers have begun to examine the financial service patterns of low- and moderate-income households. These behaviors are of interest because high cost financial services, barriers to saving, the lack of insurance, and credit constraints contribute to poverty and other socioeconomic conditions . Many low- and moderate-income households use alterna­tive financial service (AFS) providers, such as check cashers, for their financial services needs. Tax preparation firms are among the important financial service providers in the lives of low-income households. Such firms help households navigate the complicated process of filing their taxes, and many low-income households obtain sizeable tax refunds. At …

A Comment On Nielsen's And Albiston's Sample Selection Methodology, And Implications For The 'Have-Nots', Laura Nyantung Beny

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Professors Nielsen and Albiston revisit the 1978 article, The Public Interest Law Industry, by Joel F. Handler, Betsy Ginsberg, and Arthur Snow, which presents an empirical study of the public interest law ("PIL") industry in the mid-1970s. At that time, there were only eighty-six PIL firms or public interest law organizations ("PILOs") in existence in the United States. Then, PILOs tended to be small, had relatively small operating budgets, received most of their funds from private sources, and tended to focus most of their effort in a single substantive area, among other characteristics noted by Professors Nielsen and Albiston. However, …