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Promoting Permanency and Human Rights
Get PDFAn increasing number of children are being cared for exclusively by grandparents or extended family. The majority of these caregivers are raising children outside of the foster care system without a formal legal status. In fact, kinship diversion, placing children whose parents cannot or will not care for them with family or friends outside of the foster care system, is encouraged by state and federal law. Informal kinship caregivers face many obstacles to providing care for children and they are more likely to be unemployed, receive government benefits, and be less educated, as compared with parents raising their own children. In addition, the majority of these caregivers live in poverty, and few receive adequate subsidies or other support for the children in their care. When an informal kinship caregiver living in poverty wishes to move for permanency, through adoption or permanent guardianship proceedings, the out-of-pocket expenses are an obstacle — the costs of a private adoption or permanent guardianship proceeding top $3,000, not including attorney’s fees. While adoptions and permanent guardianships are at least partially subsidized when the children are in foster care, the subsidies for these legal proceedings for informal kinship caregivers living in poverty are inadequate in many states. In those states, informal kinship caregivers living in poverty who wish to move for permanency for the children in their care are barred from doing so for lack of funds. Using a human rights lens to analyze the applicable law, regulations, and practices of all fifty states and the federal government, this article argues for the subsidization of private adoptions and permanent guardianships for kinship caregivers living in poverty
Medical Marijuana and the ADA: Following the Path Blazed by State Courts to Extend Protection
Get PDFThirty-three states across the country have legalized the use of medical marijuana for disabled individuals. Nevertheless, medical marijuana’s status in the workplace still faces significant uncertainty, because the current understanding of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) categorizes medical marijuana use as an “illegal use of drugs.” Thus, the ADA provides no protection for disabled employees seeking to treat their condition with medical marijuana. In recent years, courts deciding cases involving state medical marijuana and anti-discrimination statutes have brought a more patient-centered and pragmatic approach to the issue. These courts have offered an interpretation of the “illegal use of drugs” provision of the ADA that is both practical and in line with the purpose of the ADA: to protect discrimination against disabled individuals. This approach centers on the idea that the ADA was never intended to regulate drug use outside the workplace, nor was it intended to exclude from protection those individuals using drugs under supervision of licensed professionals. This Comment argues this approach should be adopted by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), and that employee use of medical marijuana should be protected and treated in the same way as other medications with significant side effects
Rethinking Lawyer Ethics to Allow the Rules of Evidence, Rules of Civil Procedure, and Private Agreements to Control Ethical Obligations Involving Inadvertent Disclosures
Get PDFThis Article seeks to align the rules of ethics with the rules of evidence, rules of civil procedure, and private agreements in confronting the vexing issue of inadvertent disclosures. It proposes a clear-eyed modification of Model Rule of Professional Conduct 4.4(b) to require a lawyer to use an inadvertent disclosure of confidential or privileged information unless prohibited by the rules of evidence, rules of civil procedure, or private agreement. This inadvertent-disclosure proposal fairly balances the interests of the justice system, civility in the legal profession, and protection of clients
Kindling the Fire: The Call for Incorporating Mandatory Mentoring Programs for Junior Lawyers and Law Students Nationwide
Get PDFCan You Relate? Bristol-Myers Narrowed the Relatedness Requirement but Changed Little in the Specific Jurisdiction Analysis
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Social Work as an Important Collaborator in Transdisciplinary Public Health Law: Why Does it Matter and Where Does it Fit?
Get PDFPublic health law has been a growing field over the last few decades. From the early days of its initial recognition as an academic and professional field to its more recent texts and treatises, public health law is continuing to define itself. To that end, Burris et al. recently published two works describing a transdisciplinary model of public health law and five essential services of public health law.
This article examines how the inclusion of social work in the model can be instrumental in forming better public health laws. The intentional inclusion of social work collaborators would supplement legal and public health expertise with expertise to meaningfully engage the community in law and policy development, implementation, and enforcement. Three areas specifically can be impacted by this engagement: (1) giving the community a voice in designing public health interventions in a way that increases buy-in; (2) using community organizing expertise to assist in getting evidence-based legal interventions with realistic enforcement mechanisms enacted into law at the local, state, or federal level; and (3) assisting in data collection for policy surveillance components by bringing in on-the-ground experts
Hypothesizing a Small Opioid MDL Settlement: An Argument for Local Public Health Action and Lessons from Big Tobacco
Get PDFIn response to the opioid epidemic, counties and cities across the United States waged In re: National Prescription Opiate Litigation, better known as the opioid MDL, against manufacturers and distributors of opioids. The county and city plaintiffs appear to have taken their litigation strategy straight from Big Tobacco playbook of the 1990s. This is to the great disdain of state attorneys general, who fronted Big Tobacco litigation with state-sponsored parens patriae litigation.
The state attorneys general vehemently assert that the MDL claims are the province of state governments rather than local governments. However, the attorney general-led Big Tobacco litigation of the 1990s left much to be desired. While the states were able to procure a 206 billion tobacco Master Settlement Agreement of 1998. Therefore, a smaller settlement would be best utilized by apportioning settlement proceeds directly to the local governments, which are the most impacted by the opioid epidemic
A Cursory Overview of the St. Louis City-County Merger Proposal
Get PDFIn this article, Nick Luisetti summarizes the Better Together Coalition\u27s proposal to merge the St. Louis City and County governments, and potential consequences to follow if the proposal passes a state-wide vote.https://scholarship.law.slu.edu/lawjournalonline/1010/thumbnail.jp
Evolving Societal Norms and the Fourth Amendment: Government Tracking of Cellphone Locations in an Era of Commercial Tracking
Get PDFIn Carpenter v. United States, the Supreme Court found that a warrant was required to obtain historical location data obtained from cell-site records connected with cellphone use. In this article, Paul Tahan examines whether this holding is likely to remain good law in an era where the GPS location of a smartphone is becoming increasingly public.https://scholarship.law.slu.edu/lawjournalonline/1007/thumbnail.jp