Has Time Expired for Time-Out Rooms?

An issue that continues to raise serious concerns for education leaders surrounds the treatment of students with disabilities who behave unacceptably. In Honig v. Doe (1988), the Supreme Court acknowledged that in such cases, among the procedures available to educators is “the use of study carrels, timeouts, detention, or the restriction of privileges” (p. 325). Time-out rooms—typically small rooms where students who misbehave are sent until they can safely regain their composure—continue to be used in most jurisdictions, subject to state oversight via statutes and regulations (U.S. Department of Education 2010)

Freedom of the Church and our Endangered Civil Rights: Exiting the Social Contract

In this comment I suggest that the “Freedom of the Church” to ignore the dictates of our various Civil Rights Acts, whether in the ministerial context or more broadly, created or at least newly discovered by the Court in Hosanna-Tabor, is a vivid example of a newly emerging and deeply troubling family of rights, which I have called elsewhere “exit rights” and which collectively constitute a new paradigm of both institutional and individual rights in constitutional law quite generally. The Church’s right to the ministerial exception might be understood as one of this new generation of rights, including some newly recognized by the Court over the last two decades, some with a slightly older lineage, and some sought after but not yet won by litigants—the point of which is to exempt their holders from legal obligations which are themselves constitutive of some significant part of civil society and to thereby create, in effect, separate spheres of individual or group sovereignty into which otherwise binding legal norms and obligations do not reach. They are “rights to exit” civil society and the social compact at its core, or at least, rights to exit some substantial part of it

Thomas Terry v. City of Pittsburgh

USDC for the Western District of Pennsylvani

In Re: Kelley Troy Cooley

USDC for the Western District of Pennsylvani

Ethics and the Use of Coercion in the Treatment of Psychiatric Patients

Involuntary psychiatric treatment occurs under such conditions as the medicating or placing in treatment facilities of patients without their consent. Such involuntary treatment has been litigated in the Supreme Court; however, the Court’s rulings have been applied to incarcerated persons, with the notable exception of the 1975 ruling in O’Connor v. Donaldson, a case argued as a civil rights violation. Using O’Connor v. Donaldson as a framework, this paper argues that forcing non- violent psychiatric patients to take medication, or be otherwise treated against their will, is an unethical practice and must be discontinued. This practice of forcible treatment violates the due process rights of patients, and is a violation of accepted medical ethics

Mullen v. Thompson

USDC for the Western District of Pennsylvani

Retreat of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973: Southeastern Community College v. Davis

The aftermath of the VietNam war found many disabled veterans incapable of readjusting to civilian life