In this issue of the Stetson Law Review, we present four prescient articles that focus on the transformative power of the law. The articles were selected pursuant to a call for papers issued by the New Law Professors Section of the American Association of Law Schools (AALS). As a professor at Stetson University College of Law, I had the opportunity to chair the New Law Professors Section during 2009, conduct the call for papers, and devote this issue of the Stetson Law Review to highlighting the works chosen. The effort would not have been possible without the help of my fellow section officers (Professors Linda Jellum, Steven Vladek, and Keith Blair) and the faculty advisor of the Stetson Law Review, Professor Mike Finch. The author of each of the pieces included here was able to present his or her article at the New Law Professors Panel during the AALS annual meeting held in New Orleans in January 2010. The goal of the call for papers was to give newer law professors the opportunity to present and get feedback on their work in that broad academic forum. The authors then continued to refine their theses and the finished products are being published here.
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The Race to the Top Fund (Fund), a competitive federal grant fund designed to spur educational reform at the state level, exposes the major deficit in President Barack Obama’s plan for reforming this country’s persistently lowest-achieving schools: a reluctance to acknowledge explicitly the relationship between struggling schools and concentrated poverty. The Fund encourages individual states to implement reforms in four areas: enhancing standards and assessments, improving data use and collection, increasing teacher effectiveness and achieving equity in teacher distribution, and turning around our lowest-achieving schools.
We lead our lives within a variety of institutions—including the labor market, public forum, and family—that exert different and often conflicting influences on our identities. The labor market, defined as all exchanges of work for wages, encourages us to accept existing hierarchies and mainstream ideologies, while the public forum functions best when we challenge entrenched power and think independently. Yet as we move between institutions, rather than constantly reinventing ourselves, we tend to retain the identities that we are most accustomed to inhabiting. For most of us, this means retaining our labor market identities, together with the hierarchies and ideologies they represent, across our interactions with all institutions. But we must realize that while the labor market’s hierarchies and ideologies arguably benefit our economy, they undeniably impoverish our democracy.
In prior work, I defined the “caregiver conundrum” to include all of the workplace policies and norms that make it difficult for working caregivers to balance work and family successfully, especially those caregivers who are “real” workers. Real workers are employees who get the job done—often very efficiently—but do not work as much as their non-caregiver counterparts, and sometimes they violate their employers’ attendance policies because they have children or other family members who need care. Real workers cannot always work overtime with little notice, and they might find travel and relocation difficult because of their family responsibilities. In sum, real workers are not “ideal” workers, yet ideal workers are what most employers want and expect. Most employers build workplaces around norms and policies designed for employees who can work full-time and overtime with no interruptions throughout their entire career. In other words, most workplaces are designed around men.
Hurricane Katrina, with 140 mile-per-hour winds, was one of the deadliest natural disasters to ever strike the United States. It impacted more than 93,000 square miles, caused approximately $100 billion in damage, and displaced more than 770,000 people. Worse still, it killed more than 1,300 people, leaving many families devastated. For some, the most lasting image or memory of Hurricane Katrina was the city of New Orleans where the media televised the daily struggles of the city’s inhabitants.
As one of the most, if not the most, progressive and inclusive anti-discrimination acts for non-heterosexual people in the United States, the District of Columbia Human Rights Act can still be improved. The Act already protects individuals on the basis of “sexual orientation,” but it would be more inclusive if its language were changed to protect individuals on the basis of their “lawful sexual conduct.” There is an important difference in the meanings of these two phrases. “Sexual orientation,” a product of the identity theory of sexuality, refers to sexuality as an inborn trait or identity. “Lawful sexual conduct,” rather, recognizes that it is not only an individual’s identity that causes some to be discriminated against; an individual’s conduct and actions are also equally relevant to anti-discrimination analysis.
In Save the Homosassa River Alliance, Inc. v. Citrus County, Florida, the Fifth District Court of Appeal broadened the scope of citizens’ standing to challenge whether development decisions are consistent with a local government’s comprehensive plan. In defining the meaning of an aggrieved or adversely affected party under Section 163.3215(2) of the Florida Statutes, the court held that plaintiffs need only allege a particularized interest, and not a particularized harm, in order to satisfy the statutory requirement that their grievance exceeds in degree the general interest in community good shared by all persons. Thus, the court held that an environmental group and its individual members who “demonstrated concern for the protection of the interests furthered by the comprehensive plan” had standing under Section 163.3215(2).
Johnnie is a registered sex offender. When he was eleven he touched his four-year-old half-sister’s vagina (over her underwear). A few months later, she performed oral sex on him at his request. Johnnie’s mother found out. She called the police and Johnnie spent sixteen months in a residential juvenile sex offender program, where he successfully completed treatment. When he was released, Johnnie’s mother wanted nothing to do with him, so he ended up living with his grandmother. Two months after he started at a new middle school, someone found Johnnie on the state’s Internet sex offender registry. Two days later, Johnnie walked into oncoming traffic and told a police officer he wanted to die. He transferred to an alternative school for juvenile delinquents. Even there, the harassment continued. Some of the other boys confronted Johnnie on the school bus, calling him a sex offender and yelling: “You tried to rape your sister!” As a result of anger and depression, Johnnie has twice been admitted to psychiatric hospitals. Not only is Johnnie suicidal, but when he transferred to yet another school and the harassment continued, he told a counselor that he wanted to kill another student for taunting him. Johnnie knows what he did to his sister was wrong and continues to feel guilty about it. Johnnie has never committed another sex offense. Nevertheless, his name,
photo, address, and school information continue to appear on the Internet registry, where they will likely remain for the rest of his life.
There is nothing like a sex scandal to grab people’s attention. In January 2008, the Detroit Free Press published sexually graphic text messages exchanged by Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick and his then chief of staff Christine Beatty, both of whom had vehemently denied that they were having an extramarital affair. The published messages revealed that Kilpatrick and Beatty lied under oath in a whistleblowers’ lawsuit and that Kilpatrick agreed to settle the suit for $8.4 million to keep the affair quiet. These revelations led to criminal charges that forced Kilpatrick to resign as mayor, give up his law license, pay restitution, and ultimately serve jail and probation time.
As this symposium demonstrates, to seek the law in literature and film is to cast a very broad net. The treasure recovered ranges from the sublime (Chekhov and Sophocles) and stunning (videotape of a 2003 capital sentencing hearing and the 2007 Swedish thriller “Solstorm”), to the ridiculous (“The Mikado” and “My Favorite Martian”) and beyond (John Waters’ “Trash Trilogy”). The symposium also shows the variety of ways of writing about law, literature, and film, from the Ruthann Robson’s experimental musings on Antigone to Russell Murphy and Kate Day’s very practical applications of narrative to legal education.