Chalimony: Seeking Equity Between Parents of Children with Disabilities and Chronic Illnesses

 

 

Karen Syma Czapanskiy

 

View Full Text (PDF)

 

Barred From Bankruptcy: Recently Incarcerated Debtors in and Outside Bankruptcy

Mona Lewandoski

Recently incarcerated individuals often have significant amounts of debt, including civil and criminal restitution, child support, taxes, personal loans, and ordinary consumer obligations. However, bankruptcy is often unavailable or unhelpful to these individuals. Many of the debts common among post-incarcerated debtors are nondischargeable in bankruptcy, and the problem is compounded by lack of affordable legal services and an economic culture of interpersonal lending that discourages formal discharge of debt. In response, a number of states have created ways of reducing or discharging such debts at sentencing, upon release from prison, or as part of the collections process. These procedures call into question the nondischargeability of debts common to the post-incarcerated population and suggest that bankruptcy should be made more widely available to recently incarcerated debtors.

View Full Text (PDF)

Law Enforcement and Intelligence Gathering in Muslim and Immigrant Communities After 9/11

David A. Harris

Since the attacks of September 11, 2001, law enforcement agencies have actively sought partnerships with Muslim communities in the United States. Consistent with community-based policing, these partnerships are designed to persuade members of these communities to share information about possible extremist activity. These cooperative efforts have borne fruit, resulting in important anti-terrorism prosecutions. But during the past several years, law enforcement has begun to use another tactic simultaneously: the FBI and some police departments have placed informants in mosques and other religious institutions to gather intelligence. The government justifies this tactic by asserting that it must take a proactive stance in order to prevent attacks by terrorists from outside the United States, and by so-called homegrown cells from within. The problem is that, when the use of informants in a mosque becomes known in a Muslim community, people within that community—the same people that law enforcement has so assiduously courted as partners against extremism—feel betrayed. This directly and deeply undermines efforts to build partnerships, and the ability to gather intelligence that might flow from those relationships is compromised or lost entirely.

As it stands, the law—whether in the form of Fourth Amendment doctrine, defenses in substantive criminal law, or cases and statutes supporting lawsuits against government surveillance—offers little help in resolving this dilemma. Further, change in either statutes or Supreme Court doctrine that might help address the problem seems vanishingly unlikely. Locally-negotiated agreements on the use of informants represent the best alternative route toward both security against terrorists and keeping Muslim communities inclined to assist in anti-terrorism efforts. In these agreements, law enforcement might agree to limit some of its considerable power to use informants in exchange for the continued cooperation of the community. The article discusses how such agreements might be reached, what they might strive to do substantively, and the problems they might encounter.

View Full Text (PDF)

Because of Intersex: Intersectionality, Title VII, and the Reality of Discrimination “Because of . . . [Perceived] Sex”

Ilana Gelfman

Abstract

The federal doctrine of sex discrimination in employment depends on the underlying yet unstated assumption that sex is binary: one is either a man or a woman, and there is no other possibility. The existence of intersex individuals challenges this assumption. This article asks how Title VII doctrine can be applied to intersex employees. In answering, the Article considers (1) the ramifications of the ever-developing definition of “because of . . . sex” in Title VII jurisprudence as applied to sexual minorities and (2) the implications of Title VII doctrine regarding mixedrace individuals for our understanding of how the law treats (and should treat) individuals “in between” the categories. The article moves beyond previous work, which suggests that intersex individuals be protected as a third sex category under Title VII, because that work only reinforces the exact sex categorizations that should be undermined by any serious examination of intersexuality. Instead, the article proposes a new model for protection against sex discrimination in employment—that of discrimination “because of perceived sex.”

View Full Text (PDF)