The Inappropriate Imposition of Court-Ordered Mediation in Will Contests

Mediation settlements that are shaped or driven by non-legal considerations are not problematic, unless and until the process of mediation is designed and imposed upon the parties through state action (namely, the judicial system). Because the approach taken in mediation ineradicably strains against the legal rules applied by the courts adjudicating those same cases, a legitimate question arises as to whether or not instituting court-ordered mediation programs that mandate mediation in will contest cases is appropriate. The contention of this Article is not that mediation is inappropriately used by the parties to a will contest case, but instead that court-ordered mediation is inappropriate

Funeral Poverty

This Article makes a unique contribution to the literature by drawing attention to the financial burden of death service being shouldered by those who are “relatively poor,” or those for whom everyday life may be a financial struggle. The thesis is equal parts positive, normative, descriptive, and prescriptive: it is imperative that options be made available to transition human remains in a way that does not exacerbate cycles of poverty and allows for the living to preserve dignity. This need calls for important changes to existing legal structures, including modernization of consumer protection regulation, change to laws regulating the death service industry, and recharacterization of expenses for tax purposes. An overview of the death industry in the United States is explored in Part I, as a discussion of casket versus cremation as the path most followed. Part II traces the underlying economics of “shuff[ling] off this mortal coil” in the United States, and the limited options (beg, borrow, surrender) that are available to assist the struggling consumer. The structure of any marketplace influences consumption, and Part III considers gaps in marketplace regulation that highlight or exacerbate structural features such as uncertainty of need, information asymmetry, vulnerability of the consumer, and inelasticity of the marketplace. Part IV considers the multifaceted issue of funeral poverty and the potential long-term implication of these extraordinary expenses upon families. The Article concludes with a cohesive framework of solutions responsive to the unique structural features of the death services marketplace, by which funeral poverty issues may be comprehensively addressed in the United States

Ethical Exploitation of the Unrepresented Consumer, The

This article begins in Section I with a brief overview of the debt industry. Section II describes the circumstances of an unrepresented defendant in the adversarial system of justice. The conventional codes of professional responsibility are weighed against a broader framework of normative ethics in Section III. Section IV illustrates how the particulars of the debt-buying setting are emblematic of broader issues. Two solutions are then discussed in Section V: One broadly targets the failure of attorneys\u27 ethical codes to account for the collapse of the adversarial myth in cases involving unrepresented litigants; the other is a more tailored solution that addresses the specific abuses in the industry which serves as the concrete setting for this Article