Participatory Lawyering & The Ivory Tower: Conducting a Forensic Law Audit in the Aftermath of Virginia Tech

The tragic events at Virginia Tech in 2007 sent a cold wind blowing through the halls of higher education institutions: a Virginia Tech student, who had fallen through the cracks of the school\u27s mental health services and disciplinary procedures, armed himself with firearms and murdered thirty-two students and a professor before committing suicide. In the wake of that massacre, several states and individual interest groups issued reports on campus readiness for similar catastrophes. A consistent theme throughout those reports emphasized the necessity for individual institutions to review their procedures to deal with campus violence. This Article focuses on that institutional review and the role of lawyers in assisting colleges and universities in formulating better and more comprehensive procedures for preventing campus violence in general, but with an emphasis on preventing similar catastrophes, or at worst, minimizing their devastation. The lawyer has the best opportunity to assist by participating in the process rather than either dictating its conduct or reviewing the product after the fact. Preventive lawyering and collaborating with the academy are the only successful means for adequately addressing comprehensive plans that manage the risks raised by the needs of the new consumer student and that create a campus culture that does not tolerate campus violence. Specifically, this Article summarizes how the lawyer\u27s collaboration with the academy should neatly incorporate the academic ends of the institution with legal ends that could minimize both the harm and the costs of campus violence

Annual Report of the White House Task Force on the Middle Class

[Excerpt] The White House Task Force on the Middle Class, chaired by Vice President Joe Biden, was created by President Obama a little more than one year ago, shortly after the Administration took office. The mission of the Task Force, as stated in the Executive Order that created it, is to work with our member agencies and councils to ensure that the economic challenges facing the American middle class, challenges that predate the recession that was deepening as the Task Force was formed, always remain front and center in the work of the Administration. Over the past year, this has been our singular focus. Of course, in the context of the deepest recession since the Great Depression, the Administration’s first priority for the middle class has been restoring job growth by stabilizing an economy that was in freefall. This economic contraction has dealt a serious blow to middle-class families, with staggering losses to their jobs, their savings, and the value of their homes. The Vice President, in his role as the Administration’s chief overseer of the Recovery Act, has played a critical role in this central part of our economic agenda. And of course, the President’s health care reform agenda targets one of the most important—and too often most precarious—aspects of middle-class life. But at the same time, the Task Force has worked to address some of the longer term challenges facing the middle class: balancing work and family responsibilities, college access and affordability, and retirement security. And while restarting the engine of job creation is the Administration’s highest priority, the Task Force is working to ensure that the jobs that are created as the economy begins to recover are good jobs. This report details our activities in pursuing policy solutions to these challenges over the past year. The report also highlights some of the key Administration initiatives supported by the Task Force, many of which are part of the President’s Fiscal Year 2011 Budget

Opening the Door to the American Dream: Increasing Higher Education Access and Success for Immigrants

Describes the demographic and educational characteristics of the immigrant population in the United States, and discusses barriers faced by legal immigrants seeking to enroll in postsecondary education

Security, population and governmentality : UK counter-terrorism discourse (2007-2011)

Over the past decade, governments worldwide have taken initiatives both at a national and supra-national level in order to prevent terrorist attacks from militant groups. This paper analyses a corpus of policy documents which sets out the policy for UK national security. Informed by Foucault’s (2007) theory of governmentality, as well as critical discourse analysis and corpus linguistics, this paper analyses the ways in which the liberal state in late modernity realizes security as discursive practice. A corpus of 110 documents produced by the UK government relating to security in the wake of the 7/7 attacks between 2007 and 2011 was assembled. The paper analyses the discursive constitution of the Foucaultian themes of regulation, knowledge and population, though carrying out a qualitative analysis of relevant key wards, patterns of collocation, as well as features of connotation and semantic prosody