Hauptman-Woodward Medical Research Institute
Digital Commons @ University at Buffalo School of LawNot a member yet
8606 research outputs found
Sort by
From Marriage to Households: Towards Equal Treatment of Intimate Forms of Life
Get PDFLaw and attitudes around marriage have changed drastically in our own history and are widely different across cultures. Same-sex marriage is now legal, polyamorous relationships are on the rise, and, as an empirical matter, marriage serves a different purpose than it did as little as forty years ago -- marriage is no longer a prerequisite for sexual intimacy, cohabitation, or parenthood. There are no essential elements to a definition of marriage to which the state can appeal without arbitrarily restricting citizens’ possibilities with respect to their most intimate relationships. Therefore, because any state-sanctioned version of marriage will be arbitrary, the only justified form of marriage that the state can sanction is as a contract like any other, with the terms determined by the parties.From this premise, this Article proposes a shift from “marriage” as a status, with membership based on State approval, to the broader notion of “household” as a contract, with the parties themselves determining the members. Under this new legal approach, “households” supplant marriages as the atomistic factor in policy-making and social thinking. Households would replace marriages in receiving the State allocated benefits traditionally provided to married couples, but the parties themselves would define who is a member of the household. Equal treatment of independent relationships, free of state-imposed membership requirements, respects autonomy and diversity. Household constitution is grounded in voluntary choice, subject to the standard contract defenses concerned with illusory assent.Given the endless variety of intimate relations throughout history and across cultures coupled with the principle that citizens should be free to pursue intimate arrangements fit for them, we set out to justify the claim that formal recognition of family formation ought not to be limited to couples but must include the freedom to pursue arrangements involving more than two people. Insofar as there is only one form of boilerplate marriage, it cannot fairly be said that the decision to enter that marriage is a choice in the meaningful sense, which demands alternative feasible arrangements.We justify our approach on established principles of political liberalism and classical contract law, finding common trends toward openness and autonomy between the two traditions. A central tenet of political liberalism is state neutrality with respect to “the good life,” whereby the state provides the conditions for the actualization of human purposes without sanctioning one form of life over another. Especially in a pluralistic society such as the United States, for the state to favor this or that form of life is either to discriminate against those who live differently or to narrow the range of options for citizens arbitrarily, supplanting organic society’s variety and richness of human life with a prescribed homogeneity. Privileging married persons with government benefits and special taxation treatment violates these basic principles of political liberalism.Polygamy is one feasible alternative to monogamy that tests our allegiance to basic principles of liberalism and classical contract law. Other arrangements deserving of equal state treatment include nonromantic partnerships, temporary marriages, polyamorous arrangements, cohabiting couples, and multi-generational cohabitation, such as a mother and grandmother raising a child, among others: all equally “households.” While it is true that historically, polygamous relationships have been characterized by exploitation and oppression of women, proper polygamy -- the right to marry multiple, consenting, age-appropriate partners of whatever gender -- is not inherently harmful or unjust. Rather, patriarchal ideology, religious fanaticism, laws and norms limiting the education and professionalization of women, and economic dependence on men create the conditions for exploitation of women in polygamous (and monogamous) marriage. Our own traditional practices are immaterial toward the issue of whether polygamy is morally permissible and whether it ought to be legally so. Americans’ immediate associations of polygamy with the other race of people or the other religion are cause for initial skepticism of our intuitions about what is unjust or harmful.Arguably the greatest virtue of the United States is the slow but steady trend toward openness and tolerance. The trend does not skip over marriage law. From coverture to marital property to no fault divorce to gay marriage and cohabitation, we see a line of progress far from its finale. Just as our society has been made more just by the expansion of the concept of “citizen,” so too will the expansion of the concept of “marriage” serve the ends of a just society. This is so, even if the multi-cultural window is opened to family forms as objectionable to some as disagreeable speech protected by the First Amendment, and even if expanded to the point of abolition
Models of Other-Regarding Preferences and Redistribution
Get PDFDespite the increasing popularity of comparative work on other-regarding preferences, the implications of different models of altruism are not always fully understood. This article analyzes different theoretical approaches to altruism and explores what empirical conclusions we should draw from them, paying particular attention to models of redistribution preferences where inequality explicitly triggers other-regarding motives for redistribution. While the main contribution of this article is to clarify the conclusions of these models, we also illustrate the importance of their distinct implications by analyzing Western European data to compare among them. We draw on individual-level data from the European Social Survey fielded between September 2002 and December 2013
Reaching and Teaching Millennials: Designing the Future of Student Services
Get PDFToday\u27s students have come to expect library services that are quite different from their predecessors and law librarians must evolve to meet their needs. As law libraries in the United States face the realities of declining enrolment and decreasing budgets, it is imperative that we find new and creative ways to build positive relationships with our students while also preparing them for the realities of practicing law in an environment driven by rapid technological change. Three law librarians from the United States, Brian Detweiler, Kimberly Mattioli, and Mike Martinez, Jr., discuss their successes and failures in reaching out to their student populations, creating and evaluating various student-centred instructional programmes, and in establishing a strategic plan to meet the needs of millennial law students
Retying the House: How the Evolution of Prohibition Era Alcohol Beverage Laws Has Facilitated a Generation of Independent Craft Brewers
Get PDF
The Embedded Liberalism Compromise in the Making of the GATT and Uruguay Round Agreements
Get PDFPublished as Chapter 2 in The Future of International Economic Integration: The Embedded Liberalism Compromise Revisited, Gillian Moon & Lisa Toohey, eds.https://digitalcommons.law.buffalo.edu/book_sections/1386/thumbnail.jp
The New Wild West: Exploring Western New York’s Underground, Fraudulent Debt Collection Industry
Get PDFThe Orwell Court: How the Supreme Court Recast History and Minimized the Role of the U.S. Sentencing Guidelines to Justify Limiting the Impact of \u3cem\u3eJohnson v. United States\u3c/em\u3e
Get PDFIn recent years, federal criminal defendants have enjoyed great success in challenging “residual clauses” within the United States Code as unconstitutional. This began in 2015 when the United States Supreme Court, in Johnson v. United States,1 struck a portion of the Armed Career Criminal Act2 as void for vagueness. Johnson’s holding at first appeared monumental because it invalidated a provision commonly used to enhance the prison sentences of offenders with certain qualifying prior convictions. Subsequent developments, however, significantly dulled the impact of Johnson, thwarting the dramatic reduction in sentences it once foreshadowed.
This Article is about how Johnson came to be and the mechanisms through which the Supreme Court has subsequently weakened Johnson’s effect. It will describe two specific mechanisms: (1) the Supreme Court’s recasting of the history of federal sentencing in an attempt to contextualize the holding of Booker v. United States3 as a return to the bygone days of indeterminate sentencing; and (2) the Supreme Court’s evolving view of the role of the United States Sentencing Guidelines (Guidelines) in the federal criminal system that minimizes the Guidelines’ actual influence over a district court’s sentencing decisions. It will then explain why these mechanisms—one that exerts control over the past and one that exerts control over the present—are both unfounded. Finally, this Article will suggest ways in which those involved in federal criminal law—the United States Sentencing Commission (Sentencing Commission), Congress, the courts, and the criminal bar—can address the problems that the Court’s recent decisions have caused in our criminal justice system