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America\u27s Hidden Foster Care System
Get PDFIn most states, child protection agencies induce parents to transfer physical custody of their children to kinship caregivers by threatening to place the children in foster care and bring them to family court. Both the frequency of these actions (this Article establishes that they occur tens or even hundreds of thousands of times annually) and their impact (they separate parents and children, sometimes permanently) resemble the formal foster care system. But they are hidden from courts, because agencies file no petition alleging abuse or neglect, and hidden from policymakers, because agencies do not generally report these cases.
While informal custody changes can sometimes serve children’s and families’ interests by preventing the need for state legal custody, this hidden foster care system raises multiple concerns, presciently raised in Supreme Court dicta in 1979 in Miller v. Youakim. State agencies infringe on parents’ and children’s fundamental right to family integrity with few meaningful due process checks. Agencies avoid legal requirements to make reasonable efforts to reunify parents and children, licensing requirements intended to ensure that kinship placements are safe, and requirements to provide foster care maintenance payments to kinship caregivers.
This Article explains how the present child protection funding system and recent federal financing reforms further incentivize hidden foster care without regulating it. Moreover, relatively recent state statutes and policies codify the practice without providing much regulation. In contrast to this trend, this Article argues for regulation: the opportunity for a parent to challenge the need for the custody change in court, limits on the length of time such custody changes can remain in effect without more formal action, the provision of counsel to parents (using money made available by a separate recent change in federal child protection funding), and requirements for states to report cases in which their actions lead to parent-child separations
Copyright Infringement Liability of Online Content Sharing Platforms in the US and in the EU after the Digital Single Market Directive: A Case Study
Get PDFThe EU copyright liability regime for internet service providers has significantly changed after the enactment of article 17 of the Digital Single Market Directive. Where two fairly similar systems once existed in the US and in the EU, there are now significant differences between the regimes with which service providers must comply in each region. This paper seeks to offer a practical view of the differences between both systems through a comparative analysis of the result that the application of each legal framework would have on an identical factual case. Specifically, this paper contrasts the decision reached by US courts in Capitol Records v. Vimeo with the hypothetical result that a EU court would deliver to those same facts in application of the Digital Single Market Directive
Legal Methods: Case Analysis and Statutory Interpretation
No full textThis updated casebook serves a course in introduction to legal reasoning. It is designed to initiate students in the legal methods of case law analysis and statutory interpretation. In a course of this kind, students should acquire or refine the techniques of close reading, analogizing, distinguishing, positing related fact patterns, and criticizing judicial and legislative exposition and logic.
Law students’ introduction to law can be unsettling: the sink or swim approach favored by many schools casts students adrift in a sea of substantive rules, forms and methods. By contrast, the Legal Methods course seeks to acquaint students with their new rhetorical and logical surroundings before, or together with, the students’ first encounters with the substance of contracts, torts, or other first year courses. This approach may not only be user friendly; it should also prompt students to take a critical distance from the wielding of the methods. In this way, students may avoid (or at least broaden) the tunnel vision that so often afflicts beginning law students.https://scholarship.law.columbia.edu/books/1090/thumbnail.jp
The Wolf at the Door: The Menace of Economic Insecurity and How to Fight It
No full textThis is an age of crisis. That much we can agree on. But a crisis of what? And how do we get out of it? Many on the right call for tax cuts and deregulation. Others on the left rage against the top 1 percent and demand wholesale economic change. Voices on both sides line up against globalization: restrict trade to protect jobs. In The Wolf at the Door, two leading political analysts argue that these views are badly mistaken.
Michael Graetz and Ian Shapiro focus on what really worries people: not what the rich are making but rather their own insecurity and that of people close to them. Americans are concerned about losing what they have, whether jobs, status, or safe communities. They fear the wolf at the door. The solution is not protectionism or class warfare but a return to the hard work of building coalitions around realistic goals and pursuing them doggedly through the political system. This, Graetz and Shapiro explain, is how earlier reformers achieved meaningful changes, from the abolition of the slave trade to civil rights legislation. The authors make substantial recommendations for increasing jobs, improving wages, protecting families suffering from unemployment, and providing better health insurance and child care, and they guide us through the strategies needed to enact change.
These are achievable reforms that would make Americans more secure. The Wolf at the Door is one of those rare books that not only diagnose our problems but also show us how we can address them.https://scholarship.law.columbia.edu/books/1233/thumbnail.jp
Short and Distort
Get PDFPseudonymous attacks on public companies are followed by stock price declines and sharp reversals. These patterns are likely driven by manipulative stock options trading by pseudonymous authors. Among 1,720 pseudonymous attacks on mid- and large-cap firms from 2010 to 2017, I identify over $20.1 billion in mispricing. Reputation theory suggests these reversals persist because pseudonymity allows manipulators to switch identities without accountability
The Role of Lawyers in Decarbonizing Society
Get PDFThis Essay concerns one current project to turn GHG reduction goals into actual laws that could achieve these goals. The project has four phases: (1) formulating the engineers’ recommendations; (2) identifying the existing laws that would help implement those recommendations, and the new laws that need to be written; (3) drafting the laws; and (4) attempting to persuade lawmakers at the federal, state, and local levels to adopt them. This Essay discusses each phase in turn. As will be shown, we are well into the third phase and starting the fourth, and are in need of volunteer lawyers to help with both.
This Essay also discusses an effort that grew out of the project that is the main subject – an effort to provide pro bono legal representation to communities that want renewable energy facilities but are facing opposition
Board Compliance
Get PDFWhat role do corporate boards play in compliance? Compliance programs are internal enforcement programs, whereby firms train, monitor and discipline employees with respect to applicable laws and regulations. Corporate enforcement and compliance failures could not be more high-profile, and have placed boards in the position of responding to systemic problems. Both case law on boards’ fiduciary duties and guidance from prosecutors suggest that the board should have a continuing role in overseeing compliance activity. Yet very little is actually known about the role of boards in compliance. This paper offers the first empirical account of public companies’ engagement with compliance at the board level, drawing on director-level data from BoardEx and data on federal organizational prosecutions from the Duke University and University of Virginia Corporate Prosecution Registry. We find that, despite a standard account that compliance has boomed, few boards actually adopt compliance committees. Less than five per cent of U.S. public companies have done so, although the proportion has grown steadily over time. We use our data to explore why boards establish compliance committees. Our results suggest that there is room for more constructive engagement with compliance by many boards. We conclude by recommending ways in which board compliance might be facilitated or encouraged: reconsidering norms about board size and independence, enhancing accountability of directors to regulators, and tightening state law fiduciary duties regarding oversight
Race and Reasonableness in Police Killings
Get PDFPolice officers in the United States have killed over 1000 civilians each year since 2013. The constitutional landscape that regulates these encounters defaults to the judgments of the reasonable police officer at the time of a civilian encounter based on the officer’s assessment of whether threats to their safety or the safety of others requires deadly force. As many of these killings have begun to occur under similar circumstances, scholars have renewed a contentious debate on whether police disproportionately use deadly force against African Americans and other nonwhite civilians and whether such killings reflect racial bias. We analyze data on 3933 killings to examine this intersection of race and reasonableness in police killings. First, we describe the objective circumstances and interactions of police killings and map those event characteristics to the elements of reasonableness articulated in case law. Second, we assess whether inherently vague constitutional regulation of lethal force is applied differently by officers depending on the civilian’s race, giving rise to a disproportionate rate of deaths among racial and ethnic minority groups. We then assess the prospects for remediation of racialized police killings by testing the effects of an existing evidence-based training curricula designed to reduce police use of deadly force towards persons experiencing mental illness.
We find that, across several circumstances of police killings and their objective reasonableness, Black suspects are more than twice as likely to be killed by police than are persons of other racial or ethnic groups; even when there are no other obvious circumstances during the encounter that would make the use of deadly force reasonable. Police killings of Latinx civilians are higher compared to whites and other racial or ethnic groups in some but not all circumstances. We find no evidence that enhanced police training focused on mental health crises can reduce the incidence of fatal police shootings of persons in mental health crisis or racial and ethnic disparities generally in police killings. Our findings suggest that the standards in constitutional case law fail to anticipate the circumstances of fatal police shootings and are therefore seemingly irrelevant in preventing racial disparities in police fatal police shootings. In light of this constitutional landscape, we argue that the ineffectiveness of enhanced police training to reduce shootings overall and racial disparity within these shootings may reflect the absence of race-specific components in their curricula. We suggest that the addition of training components that specifically address the role of race in officers’ perceptions of risk and their decision-making in potentially dangerous interactions with citizens may remediate both the incidence of police shootings and their apparent racial and ethnic disparity
Constitutional War Powers in World War I: Charles Evans Hughes and the Power to Wage War Successfully
Get PDFOn September 5, 1917, at the height of American participation in the Great War, Charles Evans Hughes famously argued that “the power to wage war is the power to wage war successfully.” This moment and those words were a collision between the onset of “total war,” Lochner-era jurisprudence, and cautious Progressive-era administrative development. This article tells the story of Hughes’s statement – including what he meant at the time and how he wrestled with some difficult questions that flowed from it. The article then concludes with some reasons why the story remains important today
COVID, Crisis and Courts
Get PDFOur country is in crisis. The inequality and oppression that lies deep in the roots and is woven in the branches of our lives has been laid bare by a virus. Relentless state violence against black people has pushed protestors to the streets. We hope that the legislative and executive branches will respond with policy change for those who struggle the most among us: rental assistance, affordable housing, quality public education, comprehensive health and mental health care. We fear that the crisis will fade and we will return to more of the same. Whatever lies on the other side of this crisis, one thing is certain: one part of our government grapples with the individual consequences of inequality and oppression day in and day out and it will continue to do so with even more urgency in the future: the state civil courts.
Even before the current crisis, as other branches of government have failed to address inequality, state civil courts have become the government actor of last resort for the tens of millions of Americans each year who suffer the consequences of these failures. Now, these same courts – for the first time in history – have quickly and nimbly changed the way they provide justice. Courts’ improvisation in the face of a global public health crisis present a permanent opportunity for social change. In contrast to burgeoning attention to state criminal courts, this role for state civil courts was hidden from those not directly involved and largely ignored by scholars. Now it is unavoidable. This essay lays out a framework for change that state civil courts should embrace as they reopen to the tidal wave of litigants