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Deadly Deliberations: Nonunanimous Juries and the Equal Protection Tightrope of Capital Punishment
Full text linkThe Hidden Pain of Family Policing
No full textThe child welfare system ostensibly exists to protect children. However, its methods—investigating allegations of abuse and neglect, filing cases against parents in court, removing children from their parents, and, in thousands of cases each year, permanently severing the legal relationship between children and their parents—have been shown to inflict great harm on children, despite the system’s stated goal. This Article looks at the system’s impact from a different angle: the harm to parents. It is both common sense and a proven fact that a child’s well-being depends in large part on the health and well-being of their parents. Yet the law fails to account for—or even permit consideration of—the harms parents experience during these legal proceedings.
This Article argues that the reason the law fails to acknowledge or account for the grave harms inflicted on parents is because of a false perception that some parents are “bad” and therefore deserve to be punished. By combining legal analysis and social science research with the words of impacted parents, this Article situates the harm that parents experience within the larger structure of the system. It catalogues the behavioral, social health, emotional, mental, and physical harms parents endure throughout the various family policing stages including surveillance, investigation, the threat of child removal, actual family separation, and termination of parental rights. In doing so, it illustrates that the health, well-being, and dignity of parents—and therefore, their children and their communities—is attacked when the state intervenes and takes control of their parenting.
To meet the stated goal of the “child welfare” system—ensuring children’s well-being—this Article concludes that the law must acknowledge and honor parents’ dignity. Accordingly, it recommends a two-step process. First, it proposes policy changes that would reduce harm to parents and children in the long and short term. Second, contributing to the crucial work already begun by parent activists and scholars, this Article details how, and the extent to which, the child welfare narrative must shift to create empathy towards parents and recognize their dignity
From the Mouths of Babes: Evidentiary Issues, Child Declarants, and Statements Made for Medical Diagnosis or Treatment
Full text linkChanging the Game Plan: Using Section 504 to Protect Transgender Athletes from Title IX’s Shortcomings
No full textDumping the Fence: Unifying Tower Dumps and Geofence Searches as Reverse Location Searches
No full textElections Don’t Have Consequences—How Over 57% of Florida Voters Supported Abortion Rights and Still Lost
No full textInternational Abolitionist Advocacy: The Rise of Global Networks to Advance Human Rights and the Promise of the Worldwide Campaign to Abolish Capital Punishment
Full text linkThe modern international human rights movement began with the U.N. Charter and the U.N. General Assembly\u27s adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Although the movement to abolish the death penalty is rooted in the Enlightenment, global advocacy to halt executions and to abolish capital punishment has accelerated exponentially in recent decades. This Article discusses the origins of global networks to advance human rights and highlights the growing international advocacy, including by nation-states and nongovernmental organizations ( NGOs ), for a worldwide moratorium on executions and to abolish capital punishment altogether. The total number of countries conducting executions in the past few decades has declined dramatically, putting retentionist states, such as China, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, North Korea, and the United States, in an increasingly isolated position in the international community. Many nations now even refuse to extradite criminal suspects without assurances that the death penalty will not be sought. With more than 90 countries having already ratified or acceded to the Second Optional Protocol to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights ( ICCPR ), aiming at the abolition of the death penalty, and with scores of domestic and international NGOs now actively promoting abolition, the global movement to abolish capital punishment has made significant strides and holds tremendous promise, though much more work remains to be done. This Article highlights the path forward for advocates seeking the death penalty’s abolition in law—and de facto—across the globe, with a focus on international law and classifying the use of capital prosecutions, death sentences, and executions as acts of torture and clear violations of fundamental human rights. In particular, the Article discusses advocacy efforts before the United Nations, highlights the role of NGOs in leading that effort, and advocates for the recognition of a peremptory, or jus cogens, norm of international law prohibiting capital punishment in light of the modern conception of torture