Recent WLR Forward Articles
Court Reform for Progressives: A Primer on Constitutional Considerations
This brief and basically unannotated essay lays out some constitutional considerations associated with prominent (and some not so prominent) proposals for Supreme Court reform circulating among progressives. The essay has four parts, dealing successively with low-hanging fruit (about which there are few constitutional questions—though not none), statutory term limits including “bells-and-whistles” proposals for accomplishing effective term limits, jurisdiction-stripping, and Court expansion. The conclusion: proposals for Court reform raise rather deep questions about the kind of democratic self-governance system we want to have—as does resistance to such proposals (that is, saying that Court reform is a bad idea raises deep questions about the kind of democratic self-governance system we want to have and which the objector believes to be close to what we actually have).
November 6, 2024Conscription of Private Attorneys to Represent Indigent Criminal Defendants in States and Territories
This year marked the sixtieth anniversary of Gideon v. Wainwright, the seminal case in which the Supreme Court of the United States held that the Sixth and Fourteenth Amendments to the Constitution guarantee a right to court-appointed counsel to indigent criminal defendants charged with serious offenses. Very few would argue with that basic proposition today. Instead, the contemporary debate is whether to recognize a “civil Gideon,” i.e. a right to court-appointed counsel for indigent civil litigants.
September 11, 2024Taxing Vulnerable Children and Families Through Stategraft: It is Time to End Racialized Wealth Extraction in Foster Care
As unjust and counterproductive public policies go, taxing vulnerable children and families is among the worst. For years, experts have been sounding the alarm that foster care “child support”—making parents pay the state when it takes away their children—is bad family policy and fiscal policy. Importantly, critics have also pointed to the myriad ways the practice is unlawful. New guidance from the federal government to the states provides a generational opportunity to dismantle this form of stategraft in the foster care system. In this Case Study we highlight promising legislative and administrative responses to the recent federal guidance.
June 22, 2024- More Forward Articles