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"Over the past thirty years, there has been a dramatic shift in the way the legal system approaches family disputes. Traditionally, family disputes were resolved through an 'adversary' system: opposing parties appealed to a judge who determined which party was at fault and how the marital assets - including the children - should be divided. Now, many family courts are opting for a 'problem-solving' model in which courts attempt to restructure families by resolving both legal and nonlegal issues. At the same time, American families have changed dramatically. Divorce rates have slowed, while the number of children born and raised outside of marriage has increased sharply. Grandparents and same...
A gripping explanation of the biases that lead to the blaming of pregnant women and mothers. Are mothers truly a danger to their children’s health? In 2004, a mentally disabled young woman in Utah was charged by prosecutors with murder after she declined to have a Caesarian section and subsequently delivered a stillborn child. In 2010, a pregnant woman who attempted suicide when the baby’s father abandoned her was charged with murder and attempted feticide after the daughter she delivered prematurely died. These are just two of the many cases that portray mothers as the major source of health risk for their children. The American legal system is deeply shaped by unconscious risk percepti...
Suspension and expulsion rates have doubled over the past three decades as zero tolerance policies have become the normal response to a host of minor infractions that extend well beyond just drugs and weapons. Students from all demographic groups have suffered, but minority and special needs students have suffered the most. Derek Black weaves stories about individual students, lessons from social science, and the outcomes of courts cases to unearth an irrational system of punishment. While schools and legislatures have proven unable and unwilling to amend their failing policies, Ending Zero Tolerance argues for constitutional protections to check abuses in school discipline and lays out theories by which courts should re-engage to enforce students' rights and support broader reforms.
How globalization is undermining sustainable social environments for children This book uses the ecological model of child development together with ethnographic and comparative studies of two small villages, in Italy and the United States, as its framework for examining the well-being of children in the aftermath of the Great Recession. Global forces, far from being distant and abstract, are revealed as wreaking havoc in children’s environments even in economically advanced countries. Falling birth rates, deteriorating labor conditions, fraying safety nets, rising rates of child poverty, and a surge in racism and populism in Europe and the United States are explored in the petri dish of t...
The shocking truth about how state governments and their private industry partners are profiting from the social programs meant to support disadvantaged Americans Government aid doesn’t always go where it’s supposed to. Foster care agencies team up with companies to take disability and survivor benefits from abused and neglected children. States and their revenue consultants use illusory schemes to siphon Medicaid funds intended for children and the poor into general state coffers. Child support payments for foster children and families on public assistance are converted into government revenue. And the poverty industry keeps expanding, leaving us with nursing homes and juvenile detentio...
From divorce court to popular culture, alimony is a dirty word. Unpopular and rarely ordered, the awards are frequently inconsistent and unpredictable. The institution itself is often viewed as an historical relic that harkens back to a gendered past in which women lacked the economic independence to free themselves from economic support by their spouses. In short, critics of alimony claim it has no place in contemporary visions of marriage as a partnership of equals. But as Cynthia Lee Starnes argues ina The Marriage Buyout, alimony is often the only practical tool for ensuring that divorce does not treat todayOCOs primary caregivers as if they were suckers. Her solution is to radically rec...
Investigates social parents – people who function as parents but who may not be recognized as such in the eyes of the law What makes a person a parent? Around the world, same-sex couples are raising children; parents are separating and re-partnering, creating blended families; and children are living with grandparents, family friends, and other caregivers. In these situations, there is often an adult who acts like a parent but who is unconnected to the child through biogenetics, marriage, or adoption—the common paths for establishing legal parenthood. In many countries, this person is called a “social parent.” Psychologically, and especially from a child’s point of view, a social p...
This comprehensive Research Handbook provides an unparalleled overview of contemporary private law theory. Featuring original contributions by leading experts in the field, its extensive examinations of the core areas of contracts, property and torts are complemented by an exploration of a breadth of topics that cross the divide between private and public law, including labor law and corporate law.
The purpose of this volume is to compare the experiences of state efforts to control moral behavior in two countries (The Netherlands and the United States of America) by exploring the historical developments in regulating morality and the contemporary efforts to implement moral policies. The volume opens with an overview of the theoretical and historical setting of the debate about moral developments in the Netherlands and the United States. Various hypotheses are then tested by comparing the histories of prostitution and abortion policies in both countries in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the jurisprudence and legislation with respect to euthanasia, and the course and contents of family law (divorce, adoption, homo marriage). Apart from the comparative aspect, these case studies are highly informative and fascinating to read in and by themselves.
"In Injustice, Inc., Daniel L. Hatcher exposes how justice systems are harnessing America's history of racial and economic inequality into revenue-generating operations. Courts, prosecutors, probation, policing departments, and detention facilities are trading away ethics and justice to churn vulnerable children and adults into an unconstitutional factory enterprise. These justice institutions are entering contracts to make money removing children from their homes, monetizing harm from juvenile delinquency, child welfare and child support proceedings, extorting fines and fees, collaborating with private debt collectors, enforcing unpaid child labor, seizing property, incentivizing arrests and evictions, maximizing occupancy in detention and 'treatment' centers, and more. Hatcher details the disproportionately racialized harm and unconstitutionality of the injustice enterprise, and calls for opened eyes to our justice system failings--to walk a better path toward instilling truth into the words 'Equal Justice Under Law'"--