Volume 53, Issue 1

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The Sentencing Judge’s Role in Safeguarding the Parental Rights of Incarcerated Individuals

Issues Volume 53, Issue 1

By Anna Iskikian

Incarcerated parents face a disproportionate risk of having their parental rights terminated. According to a recent analysis of three million child-welfare cases nationwide, parents whose children have been placed in foster care due to their incarceration, but who have not been accused of child abuse, endangerment, or drug use, are more likely to lose their parental rights than parents who have physically or sexually assaulted their children. A dramatic rise in the prison population and the passage of the Adoption and Safe Families Act (ASFA) have driven the increase in the loss of parental rights among incarcerated parents. Furthermore, sentencing guidelines and mandatory minimums constrain a judge’s ability to adequately consider a defendant’s parenthood at sentencing.

This Note examines the sentencing judge’s role in preventing the termination of parental rights of incarcerated parents and proposes the establishment of a judicial recommendation against termination proceedings while a parent is incarcerated. Part II of this Note examines the history of criminal sentencing and the historical practice of granting a judicial recommendation against deportation (JRAD) to noncitizen defendants. Part III analyzes the disproportionate rate at which incarcerated parents lose their parental rights as compared to nonincarcerated parents. Part IV argues for amending the ASFA to implement the JRAD’s analog in the parental rights context and concludes that accounting for loss of parental rights at sentencing serves retributive, deterrent, and rehabilitative aims.

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Strict Tort Liability for Police Misconduct

Issues Volume 53, Issue 1

By Elias R. Feldman

The disproportionate rates at which police use wrongful deadly force against racial minorities in the United States is a matter of significant national concern. This Note contributes to the ongoing conversation by proposing a new legal reform, which calls for the state law imposition of strict tort liability on municipal governments for police misconduct. Such a reform could remedy the harms of police misconduct more fully than the existing laws do.

Under the Restatement (Third) of Torts, a person who is found by a court to have carried on an “abnormally dangerous activity” will be subject to strict liability for physical harm resulting from that activity. An abnormally dangerous activity is one which creates a foreseeable and highly significant risk of harm even when reasonable care is exercised in its performance; it is also an activity of “uncommon usage” in the sense that the risk it creates is nonreciprocal. In Part II, this Note explains how the policies and practices of modern policing, in conjunction with human cognitive limitations, cause policing to create a foreseeable and highly significant risk of harm even when performed with reasonable care. Part III then explains how policing’s risk is disproportionately borne by racial minorities, and how this nonreciprocity of risk imposes a dignitary harm on third-party racial minorities distinct from the physical harm suffered by police misconduct’s immediate victims. Part IV, in turn, discusses how policing’s nonreciprocal risk also makes policing “uncommon” in the relevant sense. Having established that policing is the kind of activity to which strict liability can be properly applied as a matter of law, this Note argues in Part V that imposing strict tort liability on municipalities for police misconduct is desirable as a matter of policy because strict liability rules are uniquely effective at correcting the misallocation of social costs and benefits stemming from nonreciprocal risk. Finally, this Note concludes in Part VI by anticipating possible political and legal objections to the proposed reform.

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The Starting Point: Structuring Newark’s Land Use Laws at the Outset of Redevelopment to Promote Integration Without Displacement

Issues Volume 53, Issue 1

By Malina Welman

In 2017, New Jersey’s largest municipality, Newark, made history when its city council passed an inclusionary zoning ordinance requiring, in part, that at least twenty percent of new residential projects be set aside for moderate- and low-income households. Acknowledging the surge of development moving down along New Jersey’s Gold Coast, policymakers brought forth this legislation to ensure that, as Newark inevitably redevelops into a more economically prosperous urban center, the city concurrently provide a realistic opportunity to generate affordable housing. By placing affordability at the forefront of its concerns, Newark has thus demonstrated its commitment to equitable growth, but this Note principally argues that in isolation, the inclusionary zoning ordinance is more symbolic than it is effective upon analyzing its terms. Therefore, while a mandatory, city-wide inclusionary zoning program is a necessary first step, true integration in redeveloping cities can only be realized by enacting a combination of anti-displacement and equitable growth regulations tailored to the particular needs of its residents.

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Measuring the Impact of Mergers on Labor Markets

Issues Volume 53, Issue 1

By Aryeh Mellman

While the Department of Justice (DOJ) traditionally reviews mergers solely in terms of their impacts of prices for consumers, the antitrust laws were enacted to deal with broader socio-political problems like industrial concentration as well as prices. A new line of research on labor market concentration suggests an additional area of concern for antitrust law, noting that even as mergers decrease prices, they can increase labor market concentration, keeping wages low for employees of merging companies.

This Note analyzes a merger through the lens of its predicted impact on wages, rather than prices. Part II lays out the evolution of antitrust law and merger review from its early multifaceted socio-political focus to its current narrow economic angle. Part III then questions whether the price-focused consumer welfare standard is as complete as it appears to be. Next, Part IV reviews the literature on labor market concentration and demonstrates how the tools that measure concentration in the product market can easily do the same in the labor market. Part V conducts a retrospective empirical analysis of a past merger, assessing whether it would have passed DOJ muster had the agency considered its effect on wages. Finally, Part VI suggests possible changes to the merger review process in light of the research and case study.

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