New Article: Fostering First-Generation Student Success in Law School

New Article: Lisa R. Pruitt & Nirav Bhardwaj, Fostering First-Generation Student Success in Law School, 75 Alabama Law Review 741 (2024). Abstract below:

This Article was written for the Alabama Law Review’s 2022-2023 symposium, “Our History, Our Future,” which marked the 150th anniversary of the University of Alabama Law School and the 50th anniversary of the institution’s first Black graduates. Authors for this symposium issue were invited to explore who is being excluded from legal education. We use this opportunity to address how law schools can better support first-generation (“first-gen”) students, typically defined as those for whom neither parent has a bachelor’s degree.

What we call the first-gen project is especially salient given the Supreme Court’s 2023 ruling in Students for Fair Admissions vs. Harvard, which held unconstitutional the use of race as a basis for affirmative action in higher education admissions. The first-gen category provides an alternative basis for assisting many students of color, as well as socioeconomically disadvantaged white students. Indeed, we see first-gen programs as opportunities to foster viewpoint diversity, while also bridging the growing cultural and ideological divides polarizing our nation. The opportunities stem from the fact that first-gen programs bring together ethnically and racially diverse students on the basis of their shared class status. The programs may thus foster cross racial coalition building as first-gen students see what they have in common.

This Article surveys first-gen programming in U.S. law schools, the broad goal of which is to retain students and help them to thrive, thereby increasing their educational and career achievement. We link this goal to extensive research on the growing challenge of upward mobility. In addition, we synthesize research by dozens of scholars from a range of disciplines who have studied first-gen students, and we do so with a view to identifying interventions that help students succeed. We also summarize what quantitative data collected by the Law School Survey of Student Engagement (LSSSE) and the National Association of Law Placement (NALP) reveal about the first-gen student population in U.S. law schools.

Lastly, we offer insights from a seminar Pruitt teaches at UC Davis. The course, created for first-gen students, draws on both scholarly literature and memoir to explore the first-gen experience. The seminar provides a space for students to surface and tell their own first-gen stories, drawing on those narratives as sources of empowerment. We reveal some of the challenges, pitfalls, and successes of this curricular offering in the context of an institution highly focused on race and racial disadvantage. We also discuss other curricular offerings that could foster a sense of belonging—and success—for first-gen law students.

New Article: Mobility and Inequality in the Professoriate: How and Why First-Generation and Working-Class Backgrounds Matter

New Article: Vincent J. Roscigno et al., Mobility and Inequality in the Professoriate: How and Why First-Generation and Working-Class Backgrounds Matter, Socius 9 (2023).

Interesting survey results on the importance of poverty law

A new article–Eric Martinez & Kevin Tobia, What Do Law Professors Believe About Law and the Legal Academy?, 112 Geo. L.J. 111 (2023)–looks at, among other things, what law professors feel are central areas of study and what areas law professors feel should be central areas of study. Among all areas, Poverty Law had the third most people who believed it should be more central than it was currently. Why does this matter? As Martinez and Tobia explain, “law professors by and large rated areas such as Native
American law and poverty law—as well as areas such as natural resources, regulated industries, legislation, energy law, and consumer law—as signifcantly less central to the legal academy than they should be plausibly provides weight in favor of the view that these areas should be more central moving forward.”

Personally, I am somewhat doubtful that Poverty Law will scroll up high enough in the priority lists of appointments committees for schools to actively recruit and hire for Poverty Law. And my impression, only anecdotal and too personal I know but based on the fact that while schools often ask me to write tenure letters I am almost never asked to identify who would be a good “poverty law hire”, is that schools haven’t really been in the hire for poverty law mode. They will hire people who do poverty law but as a secondary matter to other interests or in connection with work done in a more major field like Property, Civil Procedure, or even CRT. I don’t see this changing but perhaps I am wrong. In the last few years there have been a number of schools who have prioritized hiring people who specialize in Indian law, and with a somewhat limited number of Native academics that has meant a fair number of lateral offers. Hopefully Martinez and Tobia’s article is onto something, capturing a mood among faculty that Poverty Law should be elevated, and we might start to see a lateral market develop in the Poverty Law space just as it has been appearing in the Indian law space the last few years. Certainly, and again this is anecdotal, the student interest in Poverty law seems to have been consistently high ever since Black Lives Matter helped students see better the importance of race and, relatedly, structural inequality.

New Blog Post: Who Cares About Efficiency?

New Blog Post: Luke Herrine, Who Cares About Efficiency?, LPE Blog (Oct. 11, 2023).

Extended Deadline: Poverty Law Section’s New Voices Program at the AALS Annual Conference

Extended Deadline: For those interested, please submit an abstract (500 words or less) for the Poverty Law Section’s New Voices Program at the AALS Annual Conference. The Section has extended the deadline from Sept. 1, 2023 to Sept. 10, 2023. Following is a link to the submission page and details: forms.gle/tD6tgXqTAmuS9aAaA.

New Article: Racial Time

Yuvraj Joshi, Racial Time, 90 Univ. Chi. L. Rev. (2023). Abstract Below.

Racial time describes how inequality shapes people’s experiences and perceptions of time. This Article reviews the multidisciplinary literature on racial time and then demonstrates how Black activists have made claims about time that challenge prevailing norms. While white majorities often view racial justice measures as both too late and too soon, too fast and too long-lasting, Black activists remind us that justice measures are never “well timed” within hegemonic understandings of time. This Article ultimately argues that United States law embodies dominant interests in time. By inscribing dominant experiences and expectations of time into law, the Supreme Court enforces unrealistic timelines for racial remedies and ‘neutral’ time standards that disproportionately burden subordinated groups. Because the legal enactment of dominant time perpetuates structural inequalities, this Article urges United States legal actors to consider and incorporate subordinated perspectives on time. The Article concludes with a series of recommendations for centering these perspectives and rendering them intelligible and actionable in law.

New Article: The Abolition of Food Oppression

Etienne C. Toussaint, The Abolition of Good Oppression, 111 Geo. L. J. 5 (2023). Abstract Below.

Public health experts trace the heightened risk of mortality from COVID-19 among historically marginalized populations to their high rates of diabetes, asthma, and hypertension, among other diet-related comorbidities. However, food justice activists call attention to structural oppression in global food systems, perhaps best illuminated by the prevalence of unhealthy fast-food restaurants (and the lack of healthy alternatives) in low- income Black and Hispanic/Latinx neighborhoods nationwide. In response, local governments have begun to prioritize local food production to reduce food insecurity. Yet, even well-intentioned food justice initiatives, such as urban farming programs, can perpetuate structural inequities by glorifying entrepreneurialism or privatization as effective solutions to poverty. Further still, when lawmakers propose targeted relief programs for food insecure communities, such as the Biden Administration’s federal debt relief program for socially disadvantaged farmers, they are routinely challenged on constitutional grounds for preferencing non-White racial and ethnic groups. Thus, food insecurity in the urban ghettos and rural towns of America persists.

To defeat this impasse, this Article advocates an abolition constitutionalist framing of food insecurity in the United States. Specifically, it argues that framing the problem of food insecurity in historically marginalized communities as a badge of the antebellum system of chattel slavery invokes the legislative potential of the Thirteenth Amendment’s Enforcement Clause. Although the Supreme Court has empowered Congress to pass laws necessary for abolishing all badges and incidents of slavery, there remains a lack of clarity on the scope of material conditions or forms of discrimination that constitute such lingering harms, leading some lower courts to limit the Amendment’s enforcement to literal slavery or involuntary servitude.

Accordingly, this Article proposes a dignity based normative framework to assess the nature of injuries or material conditions that are proximately traceable to the political economic system of American slavery. Using the problem of food insecurity as a guiding explanatory thread, this framework reveals how modern badges of slavery can inflict: (i) equality-based; (ii) liberty-based; and (iii) integrity-based dignitary harms. These dignitary harms, individually and collectively, can perpetuate the types of oppression levied by chattel slavery; in this instance, the exploitative, marginalizing, and violent harms of food oppression. Whether modern-day food oppression is animated by state action (or inaction) or by private actors, it not only hinders public health and degrades democracy, but most importantly, it also violates the spirit and letter of the Thirteenth Amendment.

New Article (Forthcoming): Immigrant Workers’ Voices as Catalysts for Reform in the Long-Term Care Industry

Shefali Milczarek-Desai & Tara Sklar, Immigrant Workers’ Vices as Catalysts for Reform in the Long-Term Care Industry, Ariz. State L. J. (2023). Abstract Below.

The COVID-19 pandemic exposed a long-term care crisis that has been brewing for decades. It also offered lessons for much-needed reform to the long-term care industry. One such lesson is that both older Americans and their caregivers experience unnecessary suffering and death due to entrenched industry practices that marginalize long-term care aides, a worker population that is increasingly made up of immigrant and migrant (“im/migrant”) women. Even though im/migrant women constitute at least one-third of the long-term care workforce, their perspectives are largely absent from the legal and public health literature and national conversations around long-term care reform. Indeed, to date, no systematic and comprehensive attempt has been made to collect and publish the lived experiences of im/migrant women who work as long-term care aides in the U.S. This Article is the first to use empirical data, collected by the authors through qualitative interviews of im/migrant aides in Arizona, to explore and analyze the failures of state and federal laws and policies, including Arizona’s paid sick leave law, to protect long-term care aides and the vulnerable, older, adult population that relies on their caregiving.

The Article describes the use of critical race and health law theories to inform the study’s design and details the study’s methodology and findings. Through the voices of im/migrant women aides, the Article demonstrates that this subset of frontline, essential workers consistently experience violations of state and federal employment and labor laws and face significant barriers to accessing their workers’ rights, including paid sick time and protection from employer retaliation. The study’s findings show that im/migrant aides work in conditions that are unsafe not only for them but also for their patients. Together, these failures contribute to poor quality of care, chronic labor shortages, and increased potential for harm in future public health emergencies. The Article draws on im/migrant women’s voices to make recommendations for changes to laws and policies in Arizona and nationwide to help these workers and a rapidly growing, aging, American population. This research fills a critical gap in the literature regarding the shortcomings of workplace laws and healthcare policies in long-term care settings. It comes at a moment when the country’s long-term care system must be changed or face a crisis of epic proportions that will leave older adults and their loved ones with few, if any, options.

New Article: The Bitter Ironies of Williams V. Walker-Thomas Furniture Co. In the First Year Law School Curriculum

Duncan Kennedy, The Bitter Ironies of Williams V. Walker-Thomas Furniture Co. In the First Year Law School Curriculum, 71 Buffalo L. Rev. 2 (2023). Abstract Below:

This article severely criticizes the way first-year law teachers and casebook writers teach the famous case of Williams vs. Walker-Thomas Furniture Co. The court granted relief to a poor Black woman, living on welfare in a poor neighborhood of the District of Columbia in 1965, who had signed a series of one-sided credit sale contracts for household goods. The case has stood, against the intention of the holding, for the conventional wisdom that the regulation of terms in consumer contracts hurts the people it is supposed to help (Part I and II). The second part of the article presents in strictly conventional neo-classical welfare economic terms the better, although still only marginally accepted, position that the consequences are variable depending on the configuration of the market in question (Part III). The third part collects the surprisingly large amount of data available about the market and the specific transaction in Williams. It shows that given the exploitative character of the seller/lender’s sales practices, it is overwhelmingly likely that banning the clause in question benefited Ms. Williams at the expense of Walker-Thomas (Part IV and V). The conclusion argues for the relevance of the analysis to today’s analogous consumer credit abuses.

New Article: A Holistic Approach to Eviction Prevention During the COVID-19 Pandemic: Challenges and Opportunities for the Future

Sara Gold, Toby Guerin, and Kerri McGowan Lowrey, A Holistic Approach to Eviction Prevention During the COVID-19 Pandemic: Challenges and Opportunities for the Future, 68 Wash. Univ. J. L. & Pol’y 183 (2023). Abstract Below:

Many people suffered a loss of income during the COVID-19 pandemic, and many low-income renters became unable to pay rent to their landlords. Tenants without the ability to pay rent feared and faced eviction, and many were unaware of the legal eviction process or protections offered by federal, state, and local eviction moratoria. Anticipating a great need for legal and social services, four clinics within the University of Maryland (UMB) Carey School of Law’s Clinical Law Program joined forces in collaboration with the UMB School of Social Work to launch the Eviction Prevention Project (EPP). The EPP is a holistic, inter-professional, trauma-informed intervention through which clinical law students and social work students working under faculty supervision educated, advised, counseled, and represented low-income clients in two of Maryland’s largest jurisdictions. This Article describes the EPP model within the context of clinical legal education and shares insights about lessons learned after the EPP’s inaugural year for other programs seeking to do similar work.