Article: “Private Tragedies? Family Law as Social Insurance”

New Article: Anne Alstott, Private Tragedies? Family Law as Social Insurance (forthcoming Harv. L. & Pol’y Rev. 2009).  Abstract below:

Family law is full of private tragedy. Case after case pits one family member against another in a zero-sum struggle for resources. Spouses battle over limited assets; parents clash over child support; and children fight each other for resources when parental income is stretched across multiple families.

But family law doesn’t simply pick up the pieces when individuals make bad choices or suffer bad luck. Instead, the law creates distributive rules that help determine which choices are bad ones – and whose bad luck carries ruinous consequences. Taking this view, it is not just the dysfunctional who live in law’s domain: successful families flourish amidst legal rules that protect some from life’s risks while leaving others vulnerable.

In this essay, I suggest that family law constitutes a form of social insurance, supplementing public programs that address life risks including poverty, unemployment, and disability. Both family law and social insurance recognize some relationships (and not others) and protect against some risks (and not others). Further, both systems of law can be understood as distributing risks ex ante – rather than simply addressing failure ex post.

To make the discussion concrete, I focus on two cases, one involving spousal support and disability, and the other involving child support for multiple families. The cases illustrate the interdependence of financial entitlements in family law and in social welfare and demonstrate that a range of changes in family law, social insurance rules, or other elements of law could alter the distribution of life’s risks – and thus the likelihood and consequences of apparently “private” tragedies.

The essay also builds on these examples to outline a larger project. Today, large-scale social insurance programs shield individuals against disruptions in working life, including retirement, disability, and unemployment. And yet disruptions in affective life – a divorce, a breakup, a parent’s exit, even living without a family – can impose equally severe shocks on individual lives. While at first it may seem uncomfortable to consider personal relationships a matter for state concern, I suggest that the normative theories and analytical tools used in structuring conventional social insurance can also be brought to bear in considering the possibility of insurance for disruptions in affective life.

CBO brief: “An Overview of Federal Support for Housing”

A brief, 8 page, summary of federal support for housing recently came out from the CBO and is available here.  Thanks to a Brookings post on whether policies should favor owners over renters for highlighting the CBO report.

News Article on guilt of young who inherit great wealth

News article of interest: Ian Shapira, “Grappling with a wealth of guilt: Young heirs seek moral balance between inherited windfalls, social responsibilities,” Washington Post, Nov. 20, 2009.

Conference: “Housing Justice Network” Mar. 7-8, 2010

The National Housing Law Project’s “Housing Justice Network Meeting” will be on Mar. 7-8, 2010 in Washington DC.  Some more info here.

Call for Papers: Law and Society 2010

From the Law and Society Association Website:

Call for Participation Due Date: December 8, 2009

CLICK HERE TO SUBMIT PAPERS

The 2010 Annual Meeting of Law and Society Association Thursday, May 27 through Sunday, May 30, at the Renaissance Chicago Hotel.

Theme: AFTER CRITIQUE: What is Left of the Law and Society Paradigm?

Born out of disillusionment with the failures of liberal legalism to deliver social justice or equality, law and society scholarship at the time aimed to expose those failures and challenge liberal legalism’s legitimating premises. Twenty years after the founding of LSA, during the decade of the 1980s, the critical impulse of law and society scholarship was itself put under the microscope by some who turned critique inward, calling out law and society scholars for embracing empty empiricism or for their complicity with legal and political elites. In this period, meta-debates raged over theoretical, methodological, and political questions.

More recently events in the academy and the world seem to have squelched our appetite for critique either of the legal order itself or of the premises and purposes of our own scholarship. In an era when the rule of law has come under sustained attach, can we go beyond celebrating it and allying ourselves with its projects? At a time when there are no dominant theoretical or methodological perspectives in the academy should we turn away from epistemological questions and just get on with our work?

The theme of the 2010 LSA Meeting–After Critique–invites us to consider the law and society enterprise today and to think about its future direction. We want to reflect on the various ways that law and society scholarship has been and should be engaged with the threat of terrorism and governmental responses to it, national and global attacks on the rule of law, questions of sovereignty and sovereign prerogative, the contemporary situation of identity politics, and the collapse of the global economy and the crisis of neo-liberalism.

We also want to think about whether there is anything meaningful and coherent in the phrase “law and society scholarship” as well as how we should position ourselves in relationship to other interdisciplinary enterprises, e.g. critical race theory, empirical legal studies, law, culture, and the humanities, etc. Is it time to revive our critical heritage as well as our traditions of theoretical and methodological self-scrutiny? What would this entail?

LatCrit XV, Denver University, Oct. 7-10, 2010: “The Color of the Economic Crisis: Exploring the Downturn from the Bottom Up”

Way in advance: Fifteenth Annual LatCrit Conference

The Color of the Economic Crisis:
Exploring the Downturn from the Bottom Up

University of Denver Sturm College of Law, Denver, Colorado, October 7-10, 2010

We are pleased to invite you to LatCrit XV, the Fifteenth Annual LatCrit (Latina and Latino Critical Legal Theory) Conference, which begins in Denver, Colorado at Noon on Friday, October 8 and concludes Saturday night, October 9, 2010.  This year’s theme is “The Color of the Economic Crisis:  Exploring the Downturn from the Bottom Up”. Look for the Call for Papers in the next month or so, and plan to use the handy online process to submit your LCXV panel or paper proposal soon!

JUNIOR FACULTY DEVELOPMENT WORKSHOP

As usual, we also will hold our Eighth Annual Junior Faculty Development Workshop, sponsored jointly with the Society of American Law Teachers (SALT), beginning at 9:00 a.m. Thursday, October 7 (the day before the conference program kicks off).

THE SPONSORING INSTITUTION

University of Denver Sturm College of Law is a top 100 law school situated on a gorgeous 125 acre campus with the majestic Rockies as its backdrop.  Its curriculum is innovative and global in its perspective with nationally ranked programs in environmental and natural resources law, legal writing, clinical training, international law and tax law.  The Sturm College of Law faculty has a long history of commitment to public service, in practice and in its scholarship.  Denver boasts a strong contingent of LatCrit, CRT and Law and Society scholars.  We are excited to return to Colorado for LatCrit XV, ten years after the Denver College of Law hosted LatCrit V in Breckenridge, Colorado.

THE CONFERENCE SITE

As in past years, the conference site is designed to be accessible, comfortable, self-contained and affordable in order to promote both formal and informal interaction, and to foster a relaxed community ambiance even as we engage in our serious work. This year, we will be staying at the newly renovated Doubletree Hotel in the Denver Tech Centre, located just a short Light Rail ride from Denver University and easily accessible from the Denver Airport.  The hotel is a 305-room modern facility offering complimentary wireless high speed internet in the guest rooms, a business centre, fitness centre, indoor and outdoor pools, a full service restaurant, and their famous chocolate chip cookies.

-Thanks to Rashmi Goel for the heads up.

Reports: “The Value of A Credit Score” & “Remittance Transparency”

The Appleseed Foundation has two new reports of interest:

1. Jordan Vexler et al., “The Value of a Credit Score: Developing an Equitable Model for the Use of Credit Histories in Financially Underserved Communities,” Appleseed Foundation, Feb. 2009.
2. Ann Baddour et al., “Remittance Transparency: Strengthening Business, Building Community: Pilot Results from the “Fair Exchange” Effort to Improve Pricing and Service Disclosures for International Remittance Transactions”

The second of these is close to my heart and my earlier paper on Immigrant Remittances.

Collection of Social Entreprenuership Grants

The hope is that I will collect a list of social entrepreneurship grants and granting institutions that students who want to do poverty work can apply to, but right now I know I am missing many funding organizations/grant programs.  So if you know of ones I missed, please email them to me and I will add to the list.  =)

Form: Institution (deadline)

• Echoing Green (Dec. 2, 2009)
• Berkeley Law Foundation (Jan. 15, 2010)
• Draper Richards Foundation (no deadline)
• Initiative for Public Interest at Yale (Feb. 5, 2010)

Article: “The Paradox of Public Sector Labor Law”

Article: Martin H. Malin, “The Paradox of Public Sector Labor Law,” 84 Ind. L. J. 1369 (2009).  And on SSRN here.  The abstract is below:

Although the percentage of employees represented in collective bargaining in the public sector is more than five times the percentage in the private sector, collective bargaining for public employees remains very controversial The two most powerful arguments against public employee collective bargaining is that it is antidemocratic and that it impedes effective government. Concern with the antidemocratic effects of public sector collective bargaining leads courts and labor boards to narrow the scope of what must be negotiated. Concerns with collective bargaining impeding effective government leads to backlash by the legislative and executive branches against public employee unions.

This article contends that the narrowness of the scope of bargaining that results from concerns over the antidemocratic nature of public employee bargaining leads to public employee bargaining impeding effective government. The law of negotiability channels channels employees and their unions away from participation in and responsibility for decisions affecting the risks of the public sector enterprise and into negotiating contract provisions that protect them from those risks. Public employee unions have performed that role very effectively, so effectively that the results can impede effective government. The article examines numerous cases where, in spite of the law, public employers have involved employees and their unions in decisions affecting the risks of the enterprise with very positive results. The article urges that jurisdictions break away from the private sector model which classifies every subject as either one on which collective bargaining is mandated or which is left to the unilateral control of management and develop alternative vehicles of employee-union voice in public sector decision-making.

Video of William J. Wilson on “More than Just Race: Being Black and Poor in the Inner City”

The National Poverty Center at the University of Michigan has posted video of William J. Wilson discussing “More than Just Race: Being Black and Poor in the Inner City” which is also the the name of his new book.  Could be good for class.