Brief Of The John Marshall Law School Veterans Legal Support Center & Clinic as Amici Curiae in Support of Petitioner, Ortiz v. United States of America (Supreme Court of the United States 2015) (No. 15-488)

QUESTIONS PRESENTED 1. Does the Federal Tort Claims Act\u27s (“FTCA”) allow children of active duty mothers to bring birth injury claims against the federal government as the Fourth, Eighth, and Eleventh Circuits have held, or should the Feres doctrine be expanded to bar a child\u27s birth injury claim when government negligence injures the child of an active duty mother, as the Tenth Circuit has held? 2. Does treating birth injury claims of the children of active duty military mothers differently than the children of active duty military fathers constitute unconstitutional gender discrimination

The Illinois Veterans Treatment Court Mandate: from Concept to Success

Veteran Treatment Courts in Illinois - The VTC Mandate In Illinois, several VTCs already exist. These courts have seemingly been successful in achieving the outcomes that matter to veterans and communities. Because of the preliminary success of these courts, Illinois Governor Bruce Rauner signed House Bill 5003 (HB 5003) into law on August 14, 2016, which amends the Veterans and Servicemembers Court Treatment Act of 2010 by providing that each judicial circuit shall—rather than may—implement a VTC by January of 2018 (Public Act 099-0807). In addition to this legislation, in November of 2015, the Administrative Office of the Illinois Courts (AOIC) initiated an application and certification process requiring all problem-solving courts (PSCs), which include VTCs, to obtain certification prior to hearing cases. These two state actions—HB 5003 and AOIC’s certification process— together mean that every judicial circuit in the state is required to execute a thorough and comprehensive plan for implementing a VTC by January of 2018. 3 Unti

Precarious Positions: Toward a Theory and Analysis of Rhetorical Vulnerability

In this project, I develop a framework for treating rhetoric as a system for managing vulnerabilities to and through discourse. I contend that, through rhetoric, we are all put into a fundamentally precarious position, an unavoidable state of exposure to material, social, institutional, and rhetorical forces that work to condition us as both agents and audiences. Rhetoric is not simply something we use; it is also something that we respond to, something to which we are continuously exposed, whether we like it or not. There is, in other words, a necessary concern for vulnerability at the heart of rhetorical theory and praxis, which makes it possible to analyze rhetorical genres and situations in terms of how vulnerabilities are managed by rhetors, audiences, and others. In my first chapter, I examine current scholarship on vulnerability within and beyond rhetorical studies, ultimately arguing that vulnerability is both a universal condition and a unique position. I then apply this framework in my next chapter to the rhetoric of the Westboro Baptist Church (WBC), which I describe as “trolling rhetoric” designed to provoke responses rather than persuade audiences. In my third chapter, I examine how opponents of the WBC attempt to manage their rhetorical vulnerability through legal appeals to decorum. Finally, in my fourth chapter, I examine the citational composing methods of the God Loves Poetry movement, an online initiative that manages rhetorical vulnerability by redacting the WBC’s documents into poems