Suchergebnisse

This paper argues that courts and legislatures should recognize and protect adult relationships other than marriage, in two ways. First, couples in committed, cohabitating relationships should be protected when their relationship dissolves—even if they are not formally married. The law in this area is currently inconsistent and confusing, and should be cleaned up to reflect the reality of the lives of committed couples in need of legal protection. Second, all states should establish a registration scheme along the lines of Colorado's designated beneficiary law, which allows couples to flexibly design their legal relationship. This status should include specific arrangements about the ownership of property over the course of a long relationship, and should also be expanded to allow people to enter into more than one such relationship at a time, as long as the rights and obligations are not inconsistent. Given the number of couples operating outside of traditional marriage today, these two reforms will increase certainty of legal outcome and better protect the reliance interests of those in committed relationships.

Discusses issues of fairness in distribution of financial benefits by the government's Victim Compensation Fund (VCF) to surviving family members of those killed in Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks.

For the past twenty tears, courts have faced a wide array of claims alleging misconduct by schools and their officials. These claims have involved diverse injuries, including: negligence in permitting functional illiterates to pass through the school system; negligent misdiagnosis of learning disabilities; and failure to deliver a promised package of educational skills and services. The judiciary has almost uniformly refused to allow recovery, in tort or otherwise, for such injuries. Some courts have conceded that, on the pleadings, a good case might be made out. Plaintiffs have nonetheless been turned away because of courts' related concerns with untrammeled litigation and with invading the province of the legislative and administrative bodies charged with operating the schools. This Article adopts the position that such a wastebasket approach to claims of educational injury is unjustified, and should be abandoned. The Article first attempts to sort out the various kinds of cases that courts have treated identically. It then proposes that a proper focus on the kinds of representations made in the educational setting, and plaintiff's sometimes forced reliance on those representations, can aid in the resolution of these disputes without justifying judicial fears. This emphasis on representation and reliance is justified through an examination of the role that representational notions play in other areas of tort law. Armed with the ordnance of representation, the Article then reconsiders a wide range of educational malpractice cases, suggesting approaches and solutions to problems that have thus far evaded principled analysis.