Gender and Nonfinancial Matters in the ALI Principles of the Law of Family Dissolution

The question for this issue is gender issues in the American Law Institute’s Principles of the Law of Family Dissolution. Overall, the Principles are an impressive effort to create clarity and coherence, given the disorganized and evolving state of family law. This commentary raises a few questions about the Principles’ treatment of nonfinancial issues, and suggests that this treatment should raise concerns about women’s interests upon divorce. First, I will briefly review the ALI’s position on nonfinancial matters. Second, I will discuss why the limitation to financial losses should matter to women; that is, I will investigate the costs of excluding nonfinancial losses. Finally, I will consider the two reasons given for this limitation in the Principles’ section on compensatory losses, where the issue is most directly addressed. Those reasons are incommensurability (or the problem of valuation), and avoiding fault determinations. Neither is sufficient to sustain the exclusion of nonfinancial matters, once their importance is understood

Developmental Justice and the Voting Age

Several municipalities have lowered the voting age to 16, with similar bills pending in state legislatures and one considered by Congress. Meanwhile, advocates for youth are trying to raise the ages of majority across an array of areas of law, including ages for diverting criminal conduct into the juvenile justice system (18 to 21); buying tobacco (18 to 21); driving (16 to 18); and obtaining support from the foster care system (18 to 21). Child welfare advocates are fighting the harms of Adultification, meaning the projection of adult capacities, responsibilities, and consequences onto minors. In legal and social history, seeing 16- and 17-year-olds as possessing adult capacities has connected with holding them responsible for adult decision-making, particularly in the criminal justice system, but also in disciplinary mechanisms at school. This effect is dramatically worse for children of color. These two movements are in tension; child welfare advocates are fighting Adultification while democracy advocates are fighting for younger entry into the adult political sphere. But the age of majority is not a technicality. It is a thick fabric of public and private laws formed for the protection of children and adolescents, an interwoven safety net, whose efficacy depends on the strength of the weave. Indeed, the age of majority plays a protective role in our 18-year-old voting age; the 16-year-old franchise exposes youth to constitutionally protected campaigning, inviting commercial and political interests to target teenagers with “political speech.” Currently, public law shields teenagers from this contact for fear they will be exploited, and private law enables parents to constrict campaign interactions with teenagers. Countless similar underappreciated harms of Adultification can carelessly deprive children of educational, housing, employment, and civic futures. The minor extant intrusions on the age of majority, such as the driving age, pale in comparison to the civic meaning of lowering the age of the franchise. When the voting age dropped from 21 to 18, states lowered their legal age of majority from 21 to 18 in response, influencing policies such as aging out of foster care and entitlement to child support beyond 18. As a core marker of citizenship, voting has had a powerful anchoring effect on ideas about civic maturity. Lowering the benchmark for civic maturity threatens to anchor a lower age for civic protection, as occurred when the 26th Amendment passed. This Article contends that 16- to 18-year-olds are entitled to their childhoods, as Greta Thunberg contends, with our protection and support, not to the burdens of adult hopes, adult expectations, adult uses, and adult consequences. It makes a claim for developmental justice grounded in participatory democracy. Lowering the voting age works at cross-purposes to the essential task of protecting youth from premature engagement with the criminal justice system, and with the long-term disenfranchisement that can come with that entanglement. With Adultification risking criminalization and criminalization risking disenfranchisement, current thinking about youth voting exposes disparities in public ambition for the future political participation of youth arising from the disparities in their childhood experiences

Grounded Applications: Feminism and the Law at the Millennium

The conference topic is feminism in the twenty-first century, a dialogue between academics and practicing attorneys. The first order of business will be to resist the millennium invitation to come up with evermore novel, overarching formulations of the mission and means of feminism. At the end of the twentieth century we know quite a bit about the problems presented by feminists and the problems within feminism. We have had a long history of insightful intellectual discourse on questions of equality and on the meaning of gender. We also know that it takes time to absorb and apply broad insights in particular contexts, and to reformulate and refine those insights ever-so-slightly, not just radically, in light of that contextual application. The challenging task is not to forget what we do know. To suggest that feminism in the twenty-first century needs a new overarching theory, a new paradigm, would suggest that its current insights have failed. It seems to me, instead, that one important aspect of the future of feminist legal approaches will be in asking how some of the debates we\u27ve already had apply to particular legal questions in light of the most detailed account we can make of the relationship between women\u27s lives and that particular legal question. In other words, not every feminist legal academic needs to be creating a theory of feminism. We can instead be scholars of particular legal fields or of particular experiences common to some or all women and ask how the law responds to that experience. This is applied feminist legal theory. In my remarks, I\u27m going to explore two very familiar feminist debates: how to understand women\u27s differences from men, and how to understand women\u27s differences from one another. The exploration of these debates will be in the context of a particularly, though by no means exclusively, female experience: domestic labor or family care. I hope that our dialogue on this exercise may teach us something more about the feminist debates, but more, I hope it can assist in developing a more satisfying legal response to the substantive issue in light of feminist insights

Sprawl, Family Rhythms, and the Four-Day Work Week Symposium: Redefining Work: Implications of the Four-Day Work Week - Redefining Work: Possibilities and Perils

We evaluate the four-day work week against the background of other institutional and social practices and constraints. But we fix these other variables when considering the value of this work reform. For example, workers enjoy the commute time and expense savings associated with a four-day week. These savings would mean little if the commutes in question were negligible. Therefore, the value of the four-day work week depends in part on the social history that gave us increasingly substantial commutes. This Article seeks to highlight some of the institutional practices that influence the adoption of a four-day work week, particularly those associated with sprawl. It compares the reform to school districts that operate a four-day school week as a cost-saving measure. School systems choose a four-day week because they are rural and long distances create particularly serious time and transportation costs. This comparison helps to reveal the role sprawl and its impact on commutes plays in the four-day work week reform. In addition, the four-day work week depends on being different from other workplaces for its benefits. The odd hours for commutes are needed to relieve pressure on the roads. The irregular hours for the opening of government offices are effective because they coincide with non-work hours for private sector employees. While new distances may necessitate a four-day work week, irregular, unsynchronized hours come with a cost. Synchronized non-work hours allow communities to share common civic time and allow families to develop social rhythms of non-work time together. The four-day work week reform, which derives its benefit from irregularity, undermines common community and family rhythms

The Legal Design for Parenting Concussion Risk

This Article addresses a question as yet unexplored in the emerging concussion risk literature: how does the statutorily assigned parental role in concussion risk management conceptualize the legal significance of the parent, and does it align with other areas of law that authorize and limit parental risk decision-making? Parents are the centerpiece of the “Lystedt” youth concussion legislation in all fifty states, and yet the extensive legal literature about that legislation contains no discussion of parents as legal actors and makes no effort to situate their statutory role into the larger legal framework of parental authority. This Article considers the Lystedt framework from the perspective of other law engaging parental authority and parental decision-making, placing Lystedt’s parental role in that larger family law framework. That lens reveals that the Lystedt legislation may be using the cultural capital of parental authority to shield youth athletic leagues from having to fully grapple with concussion risk. Under the Lystedt framework, parents are unwittingly functioning as an impediment to safety improvements, shielding athletic associations from conventional pressures to improve. The operation of Lystedt is in this way a departure from related areas of law that set boundaries on parental authority to accept risk of injury on behalf of a child, including limitations on the enforcement of parental waivers of liability. Finally, Lystedt unrealistically elevates parental responsibility without adequately providing parents the capacity and opportunity to be effective protectors of their children’s welfare. I argue that in a time of intense cultural ambivalence about concussion risk in athletics, the rich concept of parental authority is expropriated in the Lystedt concussion statutes to avoid threats to the structure of youth sports that would otherwise be vulnerable to pressures to change in order to reduce concussion risk. The NFL lobbied states to adopt this legislation, under which parents function to preserve the status quo

Characterization of Atmospheric Turbulence over Long Horizontal Paths Using Optical Slope Measurements

Atmospheric turbulence has long been recognized as one of the fundamental factors affecting optical systems operating through the atmosphere. Turbulence over vertical paths has been well characterized, both theoretically and experimentally. Much less is known about turbulence over long, horizontal paths. Perturbations of the wave front phase can be measured using a Hartmann wave front sensor (H-WFS). Theoretical expressions for the tilt removed structure function of the H-WFS slope measurements were derived and evaluated using quadrature. These slope structure functions are functions of the phase structure function. The Kolmogorov turbulence model was assumed. Simulated H-WFS slope measurements were generated using an adaptive optics simulation code. The effects of deterministic aberrations on the structure function estimator were illustrated using the simulated slope measurements. Average slope removal was shown to be effective in removing the effects of aberrations. Five H-WFS measurement data sets from the ABLE ACE database were analyzed for homogeneity, isotropy, and fit to theory. The ABLE ACE experiment recorded H-WFS measurements over horizontal paths 20-200 km in length. Results indicate that the turbulence encountered appears to be homogeneous and isotropic and seems to fit the Kolmogorov turbulence model

Deliverable Male

Williams pays particular attention to the way men negotiate a masculine self-image that sits uneasily with the reality of family care. How should this tension be managed? Williams favors some form of preserving masculine self-image by reframing the subject to one of worker empowerment rather than family care. This strategy aims at political efficacy and coalition building. Asking men to imitate women’s successes, it might be argued, is interesting but too threatening to be attractive. This Essay nonetheless leans in that direction. This Essay will first look at the evidence for the decline in men’s status. Williams investigates the evidence in the workforce, and I’ll highlight some particularly interesting evidence from recent years. I will add to that evidence from elementary, secondary, and higher education, and elaborate a bit on the evidence from men’s role in families. From this section emerges the “end of men” hypothesis that begs the important question: What can be done to reverse the trend? Williams recognizes the challenge of the task and sees the difficulty in the choice to either support traditional masculine performance or to transform it. This same tension is visible in the greater literature about masculine anxieties. I will argue that, as painful as it may be, Williams is right that the economic success of men depends on the transformation of masculinity to incorporate a desire for the skills currently gendered female in the workforce, family life, and educational institutions. In places, Williams seems to embrace a “covering” strategy for men that might sit between traditional masculinities and reformation, one that seeks to accommodate the affront to men’s dignity implied in transforming their masculine performance. I incline more toward ripping off the Band-Aid, but I embrace Williams’s general emphasis and will explicate some of the implications for extending her agenda into the debates within education in particular