Home Rules

Thousands of American cities and towns are responding to social problems like bullying, drug abuse, and criminality by passing ordinances that hold individuals responsible for the wrongful acts of their family members and friends. Parental liability ordinances impose sanctions on parents when their children engage in bullying or other targeted behaviors; mandatory terms in rental housing leases require the eviction of tenants whose family members, friends, or guests engage in unlawful acts; and nuisance ordinances require evictions when a threshold number of calls to police is exceeded, even though such calls are often related to another person\u27s wrongful or abusive behavior. Cities typically rely on home rule authority to pass these ordinances, and these ordinances in turn create new home rules for the households affected. These new home rules are a form of thirdparty policing, and through them, the city is becoming an increasingly significant player in governing families and regulating intimate spaces. These home rules cut against the standard understanding of the home as mostly private and self-governed, and instead configure it as a site of state-required risk management and crime prevention. In so doing, these ordinances destabilize families and disrupt kinship structures, regardless of whether one is able to comply with them or not. Further, the ordinances allocate the burdens of preventing crime and managing risk in a manner inflected with gender, race, and class issues. Fortunately, the dynamism of localism can promise a better solution to the social problems that prompted these ordinances in the first place

Trends in Weight Perception, Weight Loss Behaviors, and Body Mass Index among Young Adults: An Analysis of Race and Gender

This study investigates the relationship between Body Mass Index (BMI), weight perception, and weight loss behaviors over time in a cohort of young adults. Using data from the National Longitudinal Study of Youth, 1997, we track changes in BMI and weight perception from ages 12 to 40. Results indicate that while BMI increases over time for all young adults, young men more frequently perceive changes in weight over time compared to young women. Moreover, we find substantial weight perception disparities among young women but not young men. Overall, results indicate that the social perception of weight and weight loss behaviors are closely related to gender and race for young adults.https://digitalcommons.snc.edu/collaborative_presentations/1080/thumbnail.jp

Plaintiff Cities

When cities are involved in litigation, it is most often as defendants. However, in the last few decades, cities have emerged as aggressive plaintiffs, bringing forward hundreds of mass-tort style claims. From suing gun manufacturers for the scourge of gun violence, to bringing actions against banks for the consequences of the subprime mortgage crisis, to initiating claims against pharmaceutical companies for opioid-related deaths and injuries, plaintiff cities are using litigation to pursue the perpetrators of the social harms that have devastated their constituents and their communities. Many courts and commentators have criticized these plaintiff city claims on numerous grounds. They argue that, as a doctrinal matter, cities lack standing, fail to meet causation standards, and stretch causes of action like public nuisance beyond all reasonable limits. Further, they argue that, as a theoretical matter, plaintiff cities are impermissibly using litigation as regulation, overstepping their limited authority as creatures of the state, and usurping the political and legislative process. This Article demonstrates that each of these critiques is mistaken. Plaintiff city claims are legally, morally, and sociologically legitimate. And, as a practical matter, they are financially feasible even for cash-strapped or bankrupt cities. Moving beyond mere economic accounting, though, plaintiff city claims have value of a different sort: for plaintiff cities, litigation is a form of state building. By serving as plaintiffs and seeking redress for the harms that impact a city\u27s most vulnerable residents, plaintiff cities are demanding recognition not just for those impacted constituents, but also for themselves, as distinct and meaningful polities. In so doing, plaintiff cities are renegotiating the practical and theoretical meaning of cities within the existing political order, and opening up new potential paths for urban social justice

Discriminatory Dualism

This Article identifies and theorizes a significant butpreviously overlooked feature of structuraldiscrimination: it frequently develops into two seeminglyopposing, yet in fact mutually supportive practices. This“discriminatory dualism” occurs in multiple contexts,including policing, housing, and employment. Inpolicing, communities of color experience overpolicing(i.e., the aggressive overenforcement of petty crime) at thesame time as they experience underpolicing (i.e., thepersistent failure to address violent crime). In housing,redlining (i.e., the denial of credit to aspiringhomeowners based on race) combines with reverseredlining (i.e., the over-offering of credit on exploitativeterms) to suppress minority homeownership. And inemployment, sexual harassment (i.e., unwanted sexualattention) combines with shunning (i.e., the refusal toengage with women workers at all) to deny equalopportunity in the workplace.While scholars working in these discrete fields havenoted each of these individual paradoxes, this Articleargues that these paradoxes are iterations of the samebroader phenomenon. Three critical insights flow fromthis recognition. First, understanding discriminatorydualism as a common technology of oppression allowspolicymakers to better anticipate its movements andidentify discriminatory dualism as it arises in othercontexts. Second, this frame diagnoses why previousreform mechanisms have failed. Third, it surfaces the distinct harms caused by discriminatory dualism.Because each paradox is made up of two co-existing,contradictory strands that simultaneously deny andsupport each other’s existence, discriminatory dualismcreates destabilizing systems that confoundconceptualization and countermobilization efforts. Theconceptualization challenges create hermeneuticalinjustices, and the countermobilization challenges makediscriminatory dualism difficult to combat.Nevertheless, understanding the dynamic and systemicprocesses of discriminatory dualism offers tools to beginthe necessary work of dismantling it

Law's Erotic Triangles: A Conversion, Inversion, and Subversion

The erotic triangle, in which two men compete for a desired woman, is a foundational archetype of Western culture. This dissertation, through its three separately-published articles, examines how this cultural archetype is manifested in law and legal structures, and the relationship between law’s erotic triangulations, gender inequality, and third-party responsibility. Each of the three articles of this dissertation focuses on a different manifestation of third-party responsibility, and each offers its own self-contained argument. At the same time, the “graphic schema” of the erotic triangle analytically enriches each of them. The erotic triangle is a “sensitive register […] for delineating relationships of power and meaning,” and using it in this context illuminates the shifting ways gender, power, and legal responsibility circulate in these male-female-male legal structures. Together, the articles suggest that law both replicates and reproduces erotic triangulations in ways that contribute to gender inequality, but also that it may be an important site for their renegotiation. The first article, A New Tortious Interference with Contractual Relations: Gender and Erotic Triangles in Lumley v. Gye, explores how the tort of interference with contractual relations was created out of a factual scenario involving an erotic triangle (two rival opera-house managers competing for the services of a renowned chanteuse). The court converted past regulations of erotic triangles (in particular, criminal conversation, which allowed a husband to bring an action against a man for sexual interference with his wife) into a new cause of action, one which removed a triangulated woman’s responsibility for breaching a contract, and instead assigned responsibility to the man who induced her to breach. While this first iteration involves the removal of responsibility from a triangulated woman, the second article, Home Rules, involves an inversion of this responsibility allocation: here responsibility is removed from a usually male wrongdoer and instead imposed upon a triangulated woman. Home Rules examines how, through a series of ordinances, local governments are imposing responsibility on female heads of household for the wrongful actions of their typically male household members. In so doing, local governments disrupt kinship structures and assert the state’s dominance over the family and intimate life. The third article, Triangulating Rape, evidences a more positive shift in responsibility. It traces the transformation of rape law as a progression from a tradition of erotic triangulation to a subversion thereof. Unlike the historical rape law triangle, in which rape is legally constructed as a wrong that one male does to another through the body of a woman; and unlike the criminal rape law triangle, in which rape is legally constructed as a wrong that one man does to the state through the body of a woman; civil actions in which women bring claims against both perpetrators of sexual assault and the third-party entities that facilitate or fail to prevent those assaults allow harmed women to assert their own subjectivity and climb out of their traditionally passive role in the erotic triangle. In so doing, this reconfigured triangulation ultimately challenges the gender status quo that produces sexual harms, and suggests that subverting the usual functioning of triangulated patterns may hold promise as a tool of social change

Two Loves I Have...

https://digitalcommons.usu.edu/english_3315/1000/thumbnail.jp

Physical activity and nutrition interventions for older adults with cancer: a systematic review

Purpose: The aim of this review was to summarize the current literature for the effectiveness of activity and nutritional based interventions on health-related quality of life (HRQoL) in older adults living with and beyond cancer (LWBC). Methods: We conducted systematic structured searches of CINAHL, Embase, Medline, Cochrane CENTRAL databases, and bibliographic review. Two independent researchers selected against inclusion criteria: (1) lifestyle nutrition and/or activity intervention for people with any cancer diagnosis, (2) measured HRQoL, (3) all participants over 60years of age and (4) randomized controlled trials. Results: Searches identified 5179 titles; 114 articles had full text review, with 14 studies (participant n = 1660) included. Three had nutrition and activity components, one, nutrition only and ten, activity only. Duration ranged from 7days to 1year. Interventions varied from intensive daily prehabilitation to home-based gardening interventions. Studies investigated various HRQoL outcomes including fatigue, general and cancer-specific quality of life (QoL), distress, depression, global side-effect burden and physical functioning. Eight studies reported significant intervention improvements in one or more QoL measure. Seven studies reported using a psychosocial/theoretical framework. There is a gap in tailored nutrition advice. Conclusions: Among the few studies that targeted older adults with cancer, most were activity-based programmes with half reporting improvements in QoL. Future research should focus on or include tailored nutrition components and consider appropriate behaviour change techniques to maximize potential QoL improvement. Implications for Cancer Survivors: More research is needed to address the research gap regarding older adults as current recommendations are derived from younger populations