Mitchell Hamline School of Law
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Jason’s Long Night at Camp Blood: Surveying the Independent Copyrightability of Jason Voorhees in the Wake of Horror Inc. v. Miller
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Facebook Nudes and Constitutional Feuds: How One State\u27s Law Threatens the First Amendment
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The Simultaneous Pursuit of Cost Recovery and Contribution under CERCLA: Making Sense of CERCLA\u27s Private Party Remedies in the Aftermath of Atlantic Research
Get PDFPutting Family First: The Need for Reform in Minnesota\u27s Foster Care Licensing Statutes and Processes to Support Relative Placement
Get PDFLike many states, Minnesota’s child protection system faces serious challenges in its mission to protect children and support families. The balance between child safety and family preservation is elusive. Minnesota has swung the pendulum significantly to the side that prioritizes child removal by using investigative versus collaborative approaches to intervention and under-utilizing family foster care as the preferred removal placement. The last several years in Minnesota have brought an onslaught of policy changes in intake and screening processes relating to child protection, which, along with other factors (including a huge uptick in infant removals born with drugs in their system), has resulted in a dramatic and alarming increase in the number of children being removed from their parents’ care. The number of children placed in Minnesota’s foster care system has increased exponentially as there have been more than 25,000 children are reported for abuse or neglect each year. Most children are removed due to neglect—not serious physical or sexual abuse. Irrespective of the cause, the fact that Minnesota had the sixth-highest removal rate in the United States is alarming and reason for reform.
This article tracks the history of foster care licensing requirements in Minnesota, discusses the real-life story of a grandmother with a grandchild placed in foster care, explains the federal mandates established through the Adam Walsh Act, discusses the existing flaws in the process, and highlights the ways in which Minnesota’s current statutory scheme and processes disproportionally impact communities of color. Finally, the article provides recommendations for both statutory and rule changes that will help relatives seeking to care for children through foster care
Risk & Rigor: A Lawyer\u27s Guide to Decision Trees for Assessing Cases and Advising Clients
Get PDFRisk and Rigor offers practical guidance to lawyers, mediators, and clients on using decision trees to more rigorously think through possible legal paths, risks, and consequences for more strategic litigation choices and settlement valuation.
For those entirely unfamiliar with decision tree analysis, or litigation risk analysis, the first few chapters provide grounding in its fundamental concepts and logic. They guide the reader through a carefully sequenced set of case examples and offer links to videos that demonstrate how to hand draw and calculate simple decision trees. Risk and Rigor then goes far beyond the basics, discussing how to think about structuring decision trees for complex cases—when simplification distorts reality and when too much complexity makes the tree less comprehensible and less meaningful. Drawing upon the fields of psychology and communication as well as expert elicitation and probability studies, it provides advice for lawyers, mediators, and clients on arriving at thoughtful and robust estimates of probabilities, damages exposure, and other tangible and intangible costs in the litigation context. There are abundant not-so-hypothetical case examples and their decision trees, as well as tips on best practices and mistakes to avoid when structuring a tree and estimating its numbers and percentages.
Recognizing that rigor alone is far from enough, the book explains how to collaboratively build and draw insights from decision trees in ways that work with emotion, psychology, and communication for client counseling, negotiation, and mediation. Offering examples of how to use the language and visual impact of decision trees in dialog with clients and opposing counsel, Risk and Rigor is an invaluable resource for lawyers and mediators seeking to facilitate reasoned settlement valuation while maintaining strong client relationships. Shortly after the book’s publication, readers will be able to find RiskandRigor.com, a website with additional resources related to risk assessment, cost estimation, case valuation, and decision trees for legal practice.https://open.mitchellhamline.edu/dri_press/1008/thumbnail.jp