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.

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.