Protecting the Parental Rights of Incarcerated Mothers Whose Children are in Foster Care: Proposed Changes to New York\u27s Terminaton of Parental Rights Law

This Article examines the parental rights of incarcerated mothers under New York\u27s foster care and termination of parental rights laws. It describes the foster care system in New York, the grounds for a termination of parental rights proceeding, and the problems that persist despite New York\u27s legislative reforms. After examining these problems, the author proposes several legislative solutions, which include: (1) improving incarcerated parents\u27 access to court proceedings; and (2) requiring social services agencies and prison officials to provide the services necessary to maintain and strengthen the parents\u27 parental relationships. This Article concludes that, while New York has enacted legislation that recognizes the special needs of incarcerated parents whose children are in foster care, further legislation is necessary to address the problems that remain unresolved

The State\u27s Role in the Regulation and Provision of Legal Services in South Africa and the United States: Supporting, Nudging, or Interfering?

An independent legal profession is said to be “the bulwark of a free and democratic society.” It is also said that a high measure of independence of mind and action by legal actors is necessary for the maintenance of the rule of law. However, too often, there is the allegation (within the sociological literature in particular) that the legal profession has used the concepts of independence and the rule of law as a shield or cuirass rather than as a sword. The image of lawyers representing unpopular clients fearlessly and advocating on behalf of unpopular causes, so as to uphold legal rights, is replaced with images of lawyers using these self-same concepts to preserve the status quo, favor those with high social status and pursue self-regulation for self-interest rather than for any so-called public interest. It is against this contested terrain that this Article looks at, from a comparative perspective, regulatory efforts in both the United States and South Africa in untraditional and controversial ways to address what these countries perceive as societal failings

Robust Design by Antioptimization for Parameter Tolerant GaAs/AlOx High Contrast Grating Mirror for VCSEL Application

A GaAs/AlOx high contrast grating structure design which exhibits a 99.5% high reflectivity for a 425nm large bandwidth is reported. The high contrast grating (HCG) structure has been designed in order to enhance the properties of mid-infrared VCSEL devices by replacing the top Bragg mirror of the cavity. A robust optimization algorithm has been implemented to design the HCG structure not only as an efficient mirror but also as a robust structure against the imperfections of fabrication. The design method presented here can be easily adapted for other HCG applications at different wavelengths.Comment: (c) 2013 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other users, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works for resale or redistribution to servers or lists or reuse of any copyrighted components of this work in other work

Experimental Demonstration of Spectral Intensity Optical Coherence Tomography

We demonstrate experimentally quantum-inspired, spectral-domain intensity optical coherence tomography. We show that the technique allows for both axial resolution improvement and dispersion cancellation compared to conventional optical coherence tomography. The method does not involve scanning and it works with classical light sources and standard photodetectors. The measurements are in excellent agreement with the theoretical predictions. We also propose an approach that enables the elimination of potential artifacts arising from multiple interfaces

Procedural Due Process Rights of Incarcerated Parents in Termination of Parental Rights Proceedings: A Fifty State Analysis

Disruption of families through incarceration of parents has become an increasingly serious problem over the past decade. The prison population has grown dramatically, and for women prisoners the increases in the population are particularly striking. From 1980 through 1990, the number of women incarcerated in state and federal prisons increased from 13,420 to 43,845, an increase of 227 percent. In a single year, from 1988 to 1989, the number of incarcerated women increased by 24.4 percent. In 1990 there were an additional 37,844 women in local jails. For men the prison population increased by 130 percent from 316,401 to 727,398 between 1980 and 1990. A large portion of these prisoners are parents. Although statistics concerning the number of parents separated from their minor children through incarceration are imprecise and not entirely reliable, some information is available. In 1986, 67.5 percent of the state women prisoners in the United States had at least one child under the age of eighteen, and 68 percent of those women had more than one child. Assuming that a similar percentage of women confined to federal prisons and local jails are parents and that the 1986 estimate is valid for 1990 data, there probably were at least 55,000 mothers of minor children incarcerated nationally in 1990. There were undoubtedly an even larger number of incarcerated fathers in 1990. In 1986, 54.4 percent of male prisoners had children under the age of eighteen. In addition to the growing numbers of parents who are separated from their children, increasing sentence lengths mean that these families are being kept apart for longer periods of time. In 1986 approximately one-third of the women sentenced to state prison received maximum sentences of seven years or more, and almost 93 percent received sentences with a maximum of four .years or more. For men the average maximum sentence was seven years

Clients Don\u27t Take Sabbaticals: The Indispensable In-House Clinic and the Teaching of Empathy

After almost 12 years in law teaching, I approached my first sabbatical with a single goal: to free myself from cases. At that time my clinic clients were primarily parents who were involved in family court proceedings in which they were trying to preserve their parental rights and get their children out of the foster care system. Such cases are emotionally draining for both the client and the lawyer. Thus, while I welcomed the chance to have a semester off from teaching and attending faculty and committee meetings, I felt that I needed a break from the demands of lawyering on behalf of clients. It did not work out that way. Given that the clinic would not be taught during my semester off, my dean was less than thrilled about the idea of hiring a lawyer simply to handle my 25 or so open clinic cases. At first I was prepared to push the issue, but upon closer examination of my caseload, I realized the obvious – the handful of especially demanding cases involved clients to whom the clinic and I had the greatest personal obligation

The Challenges of Developing Cross-Cultural Legal Ethics Education, Professional Development, and Guidance for the Legal Professions

The broad goal of this paper is to describe the need, and provide a framework, for engaging in cross-cultural conversations among lawyers, law teachers, and others, who are using legal ethics as a vehicle for improving the legal professions and the delivery of legal services. All legal cultures struggle with the question of how to educate students and lawyers to be ethical professionals and how to regulate the legal profession effectively. The purpose of the cross-cultural conversations discussed in this paper would be to develop principles of legal ethics education, professional development, and regulation of the legal professions that can be applied across cultural contexts. The paper is not primarily concerned with the ethics of transnational practice, an issue that has been analyzed very well by others. While the current U.S. ethical rules have relatively little to say about transnational practice, the Council of Bars and Law Societies of Europe (hereafter CCBE ) has dealt with this in a sustained and comprehensive manner. The CCBE has promulgated the Code of Conduct for European Lawyers and the Charter of Core Principles of the European Legal Profession. The Code of Conduct was first promulgated in 1988, while the Charter was adopted much more recently, in 2006. As of 2008, forty-one countries had signed on to the CCBE Charter and Code of Conduct. A review of national codes of legal ethics reveals the influence of the CCBE approach. There is a good deal of uniformity among these, and the CCBE Charter and Code of Conduct are apparently the models for many of the recently enacted or amended Codes

Some Reflections about Three Decades of Working with Incarcerated Mothers

Almost thirty years ago I was a second-year student in a law school clinic. I was making my first legal visit to a prison. My client, whom I will call Dina, was meeting me to talk about some visitation issues with her young son. When she came into the visiting room she was poised and professional in demeanor. She began to explain that her son was being cared for by his paternal grandmother. The grandmother was unwilling to bring him to the prison to see her. As a result Dina had not seen her son for several months. Suddenly, and without warning, she broke down and began to sob. I was hooked. I knew that whatever else I could accomplish in my unfolding legal career, I wanted to make it possible for Dina to see her son. This turned out to be one of my proudest legal victories – I simply visited Dina\u27s own mother to talk to her about the situation. She offered to call the paternal grandmother, and her effort was successful. Dina and her son were finally able to start seeing each other. Soon after my graduation from law school I learned that Dina had been released from prison at her first parole board appearance

Reflections on US Involvement in the Promotion of Clinical Legal Education in Europe

What is the influence of the United States on European clinical legal education? The first reaction of many would be that this is not a particularly difficult question to answer. After all, clinical legal education is largely a US invention. Although one can find early examples of clinics in European law schools, the large-scale development of law school clinical education happened in the United States beginning in the 1960s. At present, there are clinical programs in each of the 207 American Bar Association (ABA)-approved US law schools. The Clinical Legal Education Association now lists 1,325 clinical teachers in its membership directory. So how could the United States not be a major influence on clinical legal education in Europe and elsewhere? This chapter will suggest, however, that the story is more complicated than it might at first appear: in the most visible areas – especially funding – the US contributions have had less of an impact than commonly thought. But, at the same time, the USA has contributed in ways that are both subtler and more enduring