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My Family Belongs to Me: A Child’s Constitutional Right to Family Integrity
Get PDFEvery day in the United States, the government separates children from their parents based on their parents’ immigration status, incarceration, or involvement in the child welfare system—and the children have no say in the matter. The majority of these families are racial minorities and economically underprivileged.
Under current law, children’s ability to assert a constitutional right to keep their families free from government intrusion is not always apparent. This is in part because a single piece of Supreme Court dicta has muddied an otherwise clear family integrity doctrine, and many federal circuits are silent on the issue. Further, many children’s advocates fail to assert this argument in court, or children appear without advocates at all. Accordingly, the law remains stagnant.
Under Fourteenth Amendment due process jurisprudence, parents have a well-established fundamental liberty interest in their relationship with their children. Parents can therefore forcefully assert a constitutional violation when the state seeks to infringe on their familial relationship through the child welfare, criminal, and/or immigration systems. A child’s assertion of the same right, however, has not been used with the same effect. As a result, the state is able to harm children without adequate constraints on its power. The recognition and assertion of a child’s enforceable constitutional right to family integrity is necessary because, without it, courts may make decisions about what is in a child’s best interest without hearing from the child herself, without considering and addressing any conflicting interests between the parent and the child, or on the basis of an incomplete record because the parents did not or could not assert their right to family integrity. As a result, children are often unintended victims of the legal systems targeting their parents. In these systems, children are frequently separated involuntarily from their families because of an allegation of neglect or abuse, a conviction or plea leading to incarceration, or a deportation proceeding against their parent. Without asserting her constitutional right to family integrity, a child has little power to stop her family’s separation.
This Article is the first to argue that children should assert their right to family integrity in legal proceedings against their parents that could result in the destruction of their family units. It comprehensively examines the legal, theoretical, and international law principles that support such arguments
Climate and transportation policy sequencing in California and Quebec
Get PDFWe compare flexible low-carbon regulations in the transportation sector and their interaction and sequencing with greenhouse gas emissions trading systems in California and Quebec. As momentum builds for greater climate action, it is necessary to better understand how carbon markets and other low-carbon transportation policies influence one another. First, we demonstrate that emissions trading between California and Quebec has been asymmetric, with linking having little influence on carbon prices from California\u27s perspective but leading to a considerable cost reduction from the point of view of Quebec. Second, we present evidence that Quebec has replicated many of California\u27s low-carbon transportation policies that promote increased electric vehicle use, where Quebec has an advantage, while deferring to the Canadian federal government with regard to policies that incentivize the production of other low-carbon transportation fuels. Third, we demonstrate that while the stringency of the policy mix of carbon pricing and flexible transportation regulations has increased over time in both jurisdictions, the stringency of flexible regulations has been more aggressively ratcheted up and is expected to continue to dominate. Overall, our findings suggest that the policy sequence observed in California and Quebec can be attributed to the political economy benefits that the selected instruments confer to governments seeking to move from the middle towards the bottom of the clean technology experience curve. We discuss a number of important research questions and associated hypotheses emanating from our findings, which provide the basis for more in-depth studies involving a larger universe of cases and economic sectors
Breaking Secondary Trauma: Developing Conviction Relief Legislation in the United States for Sex-Trafficking Victims
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Periods for Profit and the Rise of Menstrual Surveillance
Get PDFMenstruation is being monetized and surveilled, with the voluntary participation of millions of women. Thousands of downloadable apps promise to help women monitor their periods and manage their fertility. These apps are part of the broader, multi-billion dollar, Femtech industry, which sells technology to help women understand and improve their health. Femtech is marketed with the language of female autonomy and feminist empowerment. Despite this rhetoric, Femtech is part of a broader business strategy of data extraction, in which companies are extracting people’s personal data for profit, typically without their knowledge or meaningful consent. Femtech can oppress menstruators in several ways. Menstruators lose control over their personal data and how it is used. Some of these uses can potentially disadvantage women in the workplace, insurance markets, and credit scoring. In addition, these apps can force users into a gendered binary that does not always comport with their identity. Further, period trackers are sometimes inaccurate, leading to unwanted pregnancies. And, the data is also nearly impossible to erase, leading some women to be tracked relentlessly across the web with assumptions about their childbearing and fertility. Despite these harms, there are few legal restraints on menstrual surveillance. American data privacy law largely hinges on the concept of notice and consent, which puts the onus on people to protect their own privacy rather than placing responsibility on the entities that gather and use data. Yet notice and consent is a myth, because consumers do not read, cannot comprehend, and have no opportunities to negotiate the terms of privacy policies. Notice and consent is an individualistic approach to data privacy that envisions an atomized person pursing their own self-interest in a competitive marketplace. The needs of menstruators do not fit this model. Accordingly, this Essay seeks to reconceptualize Femtech within an expanded menstrual justice framework that recognizes the tenets of data feminism. In this vision, Femtech would be an empowering and accurate health tool rather than a data extraction device
An Incentive for Truth in Influencer Advertising: Enhancing Reporting by Awarding Consumers for Information That Leads to a Successful Enforcement Action
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