Date of Publication:
Rebecca C. Morgan and Randolph Thomas, Financial Exploitation by Agents Under Powers of Attorney: It Is a Crime!, 34 Criminal Justice 31 (2020)Clicking on the button will copy the full recommended citation.
Date of Publication:
Robyn Powell et al., Terminating the Parental Rights of Mothers with Disabilities: An Empirical Legal Analysis, 85 Mo. L. Rev. 1069 (2020)Clicking on the button will copy the full recommended citation.
A sizable body of scholarship indicates parents with disabilities – including physical, intellectual, psychiatric, and sensory disabilities – experience pervasive inequities that threaten their fundamental right to parenthood. In particular, compared to nondisabled parents, parents with disabilities are overrepresented in the child welfare system, receive inadequate family preservation and reunification services, and have disproportionate rates of termination of parental rights. Despite extensive legal and social science scholarship, however, there are no empirical analyses of judicial opinions to identify factors that predict termination of parental rights in cases involving parents with disabilities.
This is the first empirical legal study to analyze appellate decisions to determine predictors of termination of parental rights in appeals cases that included mothers with disabilities. In particular, we sought to understand whether a mother’s disability type was associated with the termination of parental rights. To that end, this study analyzed 2,064 appellate opinions decided between 2006 and 2016. We found that ninety-three percent of the cases resulted in the termination of parental rights. After controlling for a variety of parent, family, court, case, and policy characteristics, however, maternal disability type did not predict termination of parental rights. Nevertheless, the odds of termination of parental rights were higher for cases in which parents had substance use histories, household incomes below 200% of the federal poverty level, prior child welfare system involvement, negative expert testimony, or received family preservation and reunification services tailored to parents with disabilities. Conversely, the likelihood of termination of parental rights was decreased in cases that included positive expert testimony or were decided in the Southeast or West. The Article concludes by discussing the policy and practice implications of the study’s findings and identifying critical areas for further research.
Date of Publication:
Robyn Powell et al., The Americans with Disabilities Act and Termination of Parental Rights Cases: An Examination of Appellate Decisions Involving Disabled Mothers, 39 Yale Law & Pol'y Review 157 (2020)Clicking on the button will copy the full recommended citation.
The right to parent has long been regarded as one of our most treasured fundamental rights. Despite the disability rights movement’s many achievements, especially the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act (“ADA”) in 1990, the right to parenthood remains inaccessible to many people with disabilities. Scholars and advocates have posited that the ADA has not adequately protected the rights of parents with disabilities involved with the child welfare system, particularly at the termination of parental rights phase. This Article develops this critique as applied to an original empirical study of 2,064 appellate termination of parental rights decisions decided between 2006 and 2016 that involved mothers with disabilities. This is the first study to conduct quantitative analyses to identify factors that predict whether the ADA is raised or applied in these cases. In particular, we aimed to understand if a mother’s disability type predicts whether courts raise or apply the ADA.
This study found that the ADA was only raised in 6% of the decisions and only applied in 2% of the opinions. After controlling for parent, family, court, case, and policy characteristics, courts had a decreased likelihood of raising the ADA in cases involving mothers with psychiatric disabilities. Likewise, after controlling for parent, family, court, case, and policy characteristics, courts had lower odds of applying the ADA in cases involving mothers with psychiatric disabilities or multiple disabilities. Other factors were also associated with courts raising or applying the ADA, including criminal history, substance use history, prior child welfare system involvement, the presence of a disabled child, when the case was decided, geographical location, negative expert testimony, provision of family preservation or reunification services, and state dependency statutes that included parental disability as grounds for termination of parental rights. The Article concludes by discussing the policy and practice implications of the study’s findings and identifying directions for future research.
Date of Publication:
Marco Jimenez, Rethinking National Injunctions, 2020 Jotwell: The Journal of Things We Like 1 (2020)Clicking on the button will copy the full recommended citation.
Date of Publication:
D. Benjamin Barros, Filling the Supreme Court Vacancy – Four Scenarios, The Hill (2020)Clicking on the button will copy the full recommended citation.
Date of Publication:
Candace Zierdt and Kristen David Adams, International Sale of Goods, 75 Bus. Law. 2729 (2020)Clicking on the button will copy the full recommended citation.
Date of Publication:
Paul Boudreaux, Rethinking Segregation, 2020 Mich. St. L. Rev. 983 (2020)Clicking on the button will copy the full recommended citation.
In this time of high racial tensions, it is worth revisiting the debate over de facto housing segregation. For more than half a century, from the Fair Housing Act of 1968 through the recent Supreme Court decision in Inclusive Communities, law has ostensibly set a goal of housing integration. How can we assess this goal in an age when most Americans live in expanding suburbs? This Article analyzes the traditional assumptions about segregation and concludes that: (1) the longstanding perception that Black Americans are trapped inside central cities is no longer true, as most Black Americans now live in suburbs; and (2) today's re-emergence of racial segregation in the suburbs appears to be significantly the result of private ordering. The conclusions are based on demographic, sociological, and economic sources (with a special focus on the Washington, D.C., area), which are used to develop a simple model of how small preferences can lead to widespread suburban segregation. These conclusions may be discomforting for both progressive and conservative viewpoints of race relations. But the Article also concludes that the old legal goal of integration of minority races into a majority-White culture may, today, be seen as both naive and patronizing. De facto segregation may be inevitable and may hold some surprising benefits for minority persons in a rapidly diversifying twenty-first century America.
Date of Publication:
Will Bunting, Does Increased Access to Home Mortgage Money Decrease Local Crime Rates? Evidence from San Diego County, 84 Regional Science and Urban Economics 103570 (2020)Clicking on the button will copy the full recommended citation.
This study provides estimates of the impact of increased access to home mortgage credit on local crime rates and uses national home mortgage loan origination volume as a shift-share instrument for local home mortgage loan origination volume. The focus of the study is San Diego County from 2007-Q1 to 2013-Q1. The regression estimates indicate that increased access to home mortgage loans during this time period had a statistically significant negative impact on local crime rates: the baseline specification suggests that a ten percentage point increase in the growth in home mortgage loan originations decreases the growth in total crime incidents by approximately 2.75 percentage points. This finding is robust to different model specifications.
Date of Publication:
Will Bunting, Punishing Vandalism Correctly in an Access Economy, 34 Notre Dame J.L. Ethics & Pub. Pol'y 123 (2020)Clicking on the button will copy the full recommended citation.
This Article argues that the social impact of vandalism must be factored into the expected criminal punishment for this offense. Existing law does so unevenly. Acts of vandalism may have a positive social impact, either as street art or as a form of protected speech, or a negative social impact as costs that preclude the provision of public goods or goods traded upon the basis of access, and not ownership. In general, vandalism cannot be prevented by means of observable security measures; rather, vandalism must be deterred by means of higher expected criminal punishment. A large expected punishment, however, implicates what this article terms the “broken community theory of punishment.” Although broken community effects militate in favor of relatively minimal punishment for vandalism, a negative consequence of this punitive approach is less investment in the infrastructure or physical appearance of urban communities. A number of urban communities may, in fact, benefit significantly from vandalism laws that allow for greater capital investment by more harshly punishing the deliberate damage or destruction of public goods or goods traded upon the basis of access, as vandalism in the first-degree.
Date of Publication:
Roberta Flowers, Commentary on Do Elder Law Practitioners and the American Legal Profession Need and Ethical Confidentiality Rule or Can Both Do without ABA Model Rule 1.6?, 16 NAELA Journal 127 (2020)Clicking on the button will copy the full recommended citation.