University of California Hastings College of the Law
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Betwixt and Between: Restorative Justice, DEI, and Education Carcerality
No full textAmerican K-12 public education is at a critical anti-civil rights inflection point amidst a rapidly changing landscape of federal and state education law and policy. From local anti-literacy measures to state “three strikes” exclusionary school discipline legislation to punitive federal executive orders, new legal mechanisms are conjoining to produce public school climates marked by structural violence, and the erasure of students with multiple marginalized identities. Attending to these political and legal realities is a growing cluster of legal scholarship empirically categorizing, and theoretically challenging, the rise of such anti-education civil rights obstructions. Though diverse in scope, analyses prominently center the direct effects of individual and structural mechanisms to police, punish, and exclude students from classrooms and schools. This focus has created an unattended space in the literature for interrogations centering broader collateral consequences of an expanding educational retrenchment movement. It is in this liminal gap in which this Article intervenes. Specifically, it extends prior work querying the future of school-based restorative justice under early forms of anti-woke legislation and “parental right” activism and examines new state and federal attacks on American public education that may limit the ability to advance, and in many instances, maintain restorative justice practices, policies, and programs in K-12 schools
The Pathway to and Consequences of Foster Parent Intervention in Dependency Cases
No full textOver the last 50 years, federal child welfare legislation has wrestled with how to reconcile the competing goals of the child welfare system: child protection, family preservation, and permanency. The United States foster care system has evolved alongside transformations in private adoptions. As the prospects for private adoption have dwindled, the pendulum has shifted toward prioritizing child protection. Youth in foster care have suddenly become the private adoption alternative. Most recently, some state courts have granted foster parents standing to intervene in termination of parental rights proceedings. In those cases, foster parents are permitted to battle with natural parents for their children—with the court’s permanent placement decision coming down to a “best interests” determination. Natural parents face patently unfair odds. The child welfare system is pitted against them from the point of removal.
This Note examines the historical and federal legislative context that made it possible for nonrelative foster parents to assert claims for adoption over the objection of natural parents whose parental rights have not been terminated. It considers the constitutional, case, and statutory law that intervening foster parents use to support their argument that intervention is warranted based on a psychological parent-child relationship. This Note rejects that argument— finding that foster parents’ reliance on these legal bases is ill-founded. This Note argues that permitting foster parents to intervene in termination of parental rights proceedings encroaches on the fundamental liberties of natural parents as articulated by the Supreme Court in Smith v. Organization of Foster Families for Equality and Reform and Santosky v. Kramer. Some states recognize the inherent disparity between natural parents and foster parents and warn against comparative assessments of foster parents’ and natural parents’ fitness. Others embrace those comparative assessments, with the justification that they promote “the best interest of the child.” Many states fall somewhere in between.
A “speedy path to permanency” with nonrelative foster parents should not be pursued when family preservation via reunification is possible. Foster parent intervention in termination of parental rights proceedings is contrary to Supreme Court jurisprudence and any rehabilitative or restorative purpose the child welfare system may have. We are in a critical moment: the threats to natural parents’ rights in dependency cases are more palpable than ever. The protections of Smith and Santosky need to be reinforced. Accordingly, this Note proposes that states amend their statutory schemes to prohibit or severely limit foster parent intervention in dependency cases unless parental rights have already been terminated. This Note recommends new federal legislation that removes the incentives for foster-adoption over reunification, and instead reallocates resources toward supporting reunification, and preventing removal in the first place
Flexible Work, Rigid Discrimination
No full texthttps://repository.uclawsf.edu/crej/1009/thumbnail.jp
State Restorative Justice Legislation 2020 – 2025: Confidentiality, Admissibility & Privilege
No full texthttps://repository.uclawsf.edu/crej/1002/thumbnail.jp