Social Welfare Law Commons^™

Insuring Floods: The Most Common And Devastating Natural Catastrophes In America, Christopher French

Faculty Scholarship

Flooding is the most common natural catastrophe Americans face, accounting for 90% of all damage caused by natural catastrophes. Hurricanes Katrina and Sandy, for example, collectively caused over $160 billion in damage, but only approximately 10% of the Hurricane Katrina victims and 50% of the Hurricane Sandy victims had insurance to cover their flood losses. Consequently, both their homes and lives were left in ruins in the wake of the storms. Nationwide, only approximately 7% of homeowners have insurance that covers flood losses even though the risk of flooding is only increasing as coastal areas continue to be developed and …

Abolish Anonymous Reporting To Child Abuse Hotlines, Dale Margolin Cecka

Catholic University Law Review

All states allow the public to anonymously report suspicions of child abuse or neglect to a toll free central phone number. An extensive examination of the policy and practices behind anonymous reporting hotlines indicates that they are widely unregulated and susceptible to abuse. The possible repercussions of an anonymous phone call create costs to the family and society which do not outweigh the potential benefit of allowing anonymous public reports. Under the guise of protecting children, the law has developed in such a way that it infringes on the fundamental rights of parents and children. At the same time, anonymous …

Comments: Private Investment: Trojan-Horse Or Shining Knight For America's Public Housing Stock, Andrew Balashov

University of Baltimore Journal of Land and Development

The numbers are staggering. The nation's largest public housing authorities ("HA's") are in a state of crisis as a result of massive budget shortfalls. The Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) estimates it would take roughly $26 billion to remedy the problem. To put this in perspective, in 2014 the New York City Public Housing Authority had a $77 million deficit and $18 billion worth of "unfunded capital improvements," - a euphemism for basic upgrades to building systems such as water, heat, air conditioning, and elevators. At present, many of these systems are woefully below acceptable livability standards. This …

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

Articles

No abstract provided.

Is Medicare Advantage Entitled To Bring A Private Cause Of Action Under The Medicare Secondary Payer Act?, Jennifer Jordan

William Mitchell Law Review

No abstract provided.

‘The Greatest Wealth Is Health’: Patient Protected Health Information In The Hands Of Hackers, 31 J. Marshall J. Info. Tech. & Privacy L. 657 (2015), Samantha Singer

UIC John Marshall Journal of Information Technology & Privacy Law

This comment will analyze the specific requirements and stages that EPs/EHs must comply with in order to receive its Medicare and Medicaid incentives, how EHR technologies are being implemented, how EHR technologies are affecting patients' privacy with regard to hacking a patient‟s PHI, and what EHR technology vendors and EPs/EHs should be doing to improve patient privacy and security to prevent hacking and other breaches.

Part I of this comment will address hacking of PHI. Part II will analyze the security measures that EHR vendors must currently incorporate into EHR technology and how the lack of required security measures impacts …

Returning Citizens: How Shifting Law And Policy In Maryland Will Help Citizens Who Return From Incarceration, Khyla D. Craine, Esq., Glenn E. Martin

University of Baltimore Law Forum

In America, the concept of “time served” is a misnomer, as the shackles of a lifetime of collateral consequences make a criminal record a scathing obstacle for over 100 million Americans. Each year, more than 650,000 people are expected to reintegrate into our communities, often with substance abuse and mental health issues, minimal education, no job to sustain a life, and no stable home awaiting them.

While these numbers are staggering on their own, they do not reflect the even larger number of people who cycle through the court system and jails. For example, some take pleas for a lesser …

Health Justice: A Framework (And Calll To Action) For The Elimination Of Health Inequity And Social Injustice, Emily A. Benfer

American University Law Review

No abstract provided.

Changing Course In The Anti-Domestic Violence Legal Movement: From Safety To Security, Margaret E. Johnson

All Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

The Lack Of Deference To Medical Opinions In Adjudicating Social Security Disability Claims, Amrita Maharaj

Buffalo Law Review

No abstract provided.

Profiles - Chicago Literacenter, James Hagy

Rooftops Project

Business news is often filled with stories about incubator spaces and entrepreneurial hubs in which start-up companies can hang out, network, and grow. What might result when these concepts are adapted to bring together diverse not-for-profit organizations focused on similar missions? Professor James Hagy visits Stacy Ratner, Co-Founder and Creative Director of the Chicago Literacy Alliance, and Transwestern’s Larry Serota at the grand opening of Literacenter in downtown Chicago.

Assessing Soldiers' Mental Health: Meeting The Needs Of Veterans With Ptsd, Tbi, And Cte—Pre-Deployment, At Home, And In Court, Robert H. Ambrose

William Mitchell Law Review

No abstract provided.

It’S Not Just Ferguson: Missouri Supreme Court Should Consolidate The Municipal Court System, Michael-John Voss

Faculty White Papers

The municipal court system fans the flames of racial tension, oppression, and disenfranchisement by allowing municipalities to appropriate the court to act as government debt-collection agencies and implicitly charging the courts with ensuring the municipalities’ fine-generated revenues are sufficient to maintain inefficient governmental operations.¹ ArchCity Defenders, August 2014

The Municipal Court does not act as a neutral arbiter of the law or a check on unlawful police conduct. Instead, the court primarily uses its judicial authority as the means to compel the payment of fines and fees that advance the city’s financial interests.2 The harms of Ferguson’s police and …

Social Security Disability Insurance And Supplemental Security Income, Jennifer L. Erkulwater

Political Science Faculty Publications

Social Security Disability Insurance (DI) and Supplemental Security Income (SSI) are the foundation of the social safety net for Americans with disabilities. Both provide cash benefits, and because neither program is limited to specific impairments or to workers in particular occupations, as is the case with many public and private disability plans, they are broadly accessible to the American people and the most expensive of the nation's disability benefit programs. Excluding expenditures for health care, DI and SSI combined account for almost three-quarters of annual federal spending on the disabled (U.S. GAO 1999).

Disability benefits policy, though, has long been …

The Role Of The Profit Imperative In Risk Management, Christopher French

Faculty Scholarship

Risks in the world abound. Every day there is a chance that each of us could be in a car accident. Or, one of us could be the victim of a tornado, flood or earthquake. Every day someone becomes deathly ill from an insidious disease. Our properties are in constant peril—one’s house could catch fire at any time or a tree could fall on it during a storm. Any one of these events could have devastating financial consequences, and they are just a few of the many risks that impact our daily lives. One of the principal ways we manage …

Finding The Middle Ground On A Slippery Slope: Balancing Autonomy And Protection In Mandatory Reporting Of Elder Abuse, Benjamin Pomerance

Marquette Benefits and Social Welfare Law Review

Millions of older Americans suffer from physical, mental, emotional, or financial abuse. Frequently, their abusers are family members, close friends, or other individuals who occupy positions of trust in their elderly victims’ lives. Unfortunately, due to a variety of factors, elder abuse is a tragically underreported crime. Experts estimate that for every case of elder abuse revealed to law enforcement authorities, five more cases go unreported, allowing the abuse to continue unchecked.

To combat this secrecy surrounding elder abuse, federal and state lawmakers enacted statutes requiring certain people— or, in some jurisdictions, all people—to report instances of suspected elder abuse …

Do Us Proud: Poor Women Claiming Adjudicative Space At Cesr, Emily Paradis

Journal of Law and Social Policy

Claiming Our Rights was a feminist participatory action research project based at Sistering, a Toronto drop-in for women facing homelessness. At weekly meetings over the course of eighteen months, members learned about social and economic rights, gave testimony on their lived experiences, and undertook actions to claim their rights. Among other initiatives, the group—which members named FORWARD—contributed a report on women’s homelessness to the 2006 review of Canada by the United Nations Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. This paper draws upon observations of the group’s process and in-depth interviews with participants to assess this human rights education methodology. …

America's Disposable Youth: Undocumented Delinquent Juveniles, Karla M. Mckanders

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

Through discriminatory rhetoric state and local officials construct delinquent juvenile immigrant youth as the embodiment of a threat to public safety and American values. Accordingly, alleged delinquent undocumented immigrant children who have spent the majority of their lives in the United States, are subjected to discrimination and exclusionary practices, which enable lessened protections under the law. This article critically analyzes how undocumented delinquent youth, mainly Latino males, are constructed through the various narratives of immigrant children that are perpetuated by the media and policymakers, and how this impacts their treatment within the juvenile justice and immigration systems. Central to this …

Revoking Rights, Craig J. Konnoth

Publications

In important areas of law, such as the vested rights doctrine, and in several important cases--including those involving the continued validity of same-sex marriages and the Affordable Care Act--courts have scrutinized the revocation of rights once granted more closely than the failure to provide the rights in the first place. This project claims that in so doing, courts seek to preserve important constitutional interests. On the one hand, based on our understanding of rights possession, rights revocation implicates autonomy interests of the rights holder to a greater degree than a failure to afford rights at the outset. On the other …

Poverty, Dignity, And Public Housing, Jaime Alison Lee

All Faculty Scholarship

Antipoverty efforts are persistently subverted by broad societal contempt for poor people. The belief that poor people are morally and behaviorally inferior, and that their personal failings are the cause of their own poverty, is a staple of American opinion polls and political rhetoric. This presumption is so widespread that it even permeates antipoverty programs, which treat poor people with disdain even as they offer aid and assistance.

Income discrimination creates not just social stigma, but legal inequalities. The Supreme Court recognized some forty years ago that welfare law promoted wealth-based Constitutional inequalities, and responded by invoking the doctrines of …

Equity In Substantial Evidence, Or Using Article 78 Judicial Review To Achieve Justice For Public Housing Occupants, Janelle Greene

Cardozo Journal of Equal Rights & Social Justice

No abstract provided.

Community Lawyering: Introductory Thoughts On Theory And Practice, Michael R. Diamond

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

There are several fundamental questions that one might ask in seeking the meaning of the term "community lawyer." Albeit somewhat theoretical, the most basic questions involve delving into exactly what is meant by the term "community." For what, exactly, is the community-lawyer lawyering? Further, once a client has been identified, questions will arise about how the lawyer should relate to that client and about the role the lawyer ought to play in assisting the client to achieve its goals. There is a long and rich literature concerning the latter question but a fairly sparse body of legal writing on the …

Medicaid At 50: No Longer Limited To The "Deserving" Poor?, David Orentlicher

Scholarly Works

Professor David Orentlicher considers the significance of the passage of the Affordable Care Act on the Medicaid program. He discusses the expansion of the program's recipients from merely children, pregnant women, single caretakers of children, and disabled persons to all persons up to 138% of the federal poverty level. Professor Orentlicher argues that the Medicaid expansion reflects concerns about the high costs of health care rather than an evolution in societal thinking about the "deserving" poor. As a result, the expansion may not provide a stable source of health care coverage for the expansion population.

Antitrust, Competition Policy, An Inequality, Jonathan Baker, Steven Salop

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

Economic inequality recently has entered the political discourse in a highly visible way. This political impact is not a surprise. As the U.S. economy has begun to recover from the Great Recession since mid-2009, economic growth has effectively been appropriated by those already well off, leaving the median household less well off. The serious economic, political and moral issues raised by inequality can be addressed through a panoply of public policies including competition policy, the focus of this article. The article describes the channels through which market power contributes to inequality, and sets forth a range of possible antitrust policy …

A Government Success Story: How Data Analysis By The Social Security Appeals Council (With A Push From The Administrative Conference Of The United States) Is Transforming Social Security Disability Adjudication, Jeffrey Lubbers, Gerald K. Ray

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

This Article for the special issue on the Administrative Conference of the United States ("ACUS") focuses on how a collaboration between ACUS and the Social Security Administration ("SSA") has helped SSA use data analysis to bring about significant improvements in the quality and consistency of disability case review. SSA's efforts to closely analyze numerous data points in the disability adjudication process (encouraged by ACUS recommendations) have produced information that has led to breakthroughs in how training is provided and feedback is given to Administrative Law Judges and other key staff, which has in turn led to improved productivity and accuracy …

Destabilizing Property, Ezra Rosser

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

Property theory has entered into uncertain times. Conservative and progressive scholars are, it seems, fiercely contesting everything, from what is at the core of property to what obligations owners owe society. Fundamentally, the debate is about whether property law works. Conservatives believe that property law works. Progressives believe property law could and should work, though it needs to be made more inclusive. While there have been numerous responses to the conservative emphasis on exclusion, this Article begins by addressing a related line of argument, the recent attacks information theorists have made on the bundle of rights conception of property. This …

The Silliness Of Erisa: The Plan Is Not The Only Proper Party Defendant In An Erisa Benefits Claim, Don T. Bogan

Faculty Articles

No abstract provided.

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

Articles

No abstract provided.

The Theft Of Social Security, Constantine N. Katsoris

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

First Amendment Decisions - 2002 Term, Joel Gora

Touro Law Review

No abstract provided.