Author Archive for rachel-godsil
Re-igniting the Movement for Integration
posted by Rachel Godsil
Most of us recognize that our society will be stronger if our students are educated in diverse settings and our neighborhoods not divided by race or ethnicity. Yet integration in education and housing remains an elusive goal and is often seen as secondary to measurable academic achievement or affordable housing.
The politics of integration are also complex. When is integration in a neighborhood cause for celebration and when has it shaded into the dreaded gentrification? Are poor children of color most likely to be effectively educated in opportunity rich, integrated schools or will the teachers and administrations in such schools favor kids from wealthy families with helicopter parents? These questions are real and should be topics for debate among policy makers, researchers, community residents, and parents.
Unfortunately, this complexity and, to an even greater extent, anxiety about even acknowledging race have led many to shy away from these issues. Not everyone, though. Over 300 people attended a conference this past week at Howard University School of Law, entitled Reaffirming the Role of School Integration in K-12 Public Education Policy: A Conversation Among Policymakers, Advocates and Educators. The conference brought together Obama administration officials, civil rights advocates and researchers, educators, and parents. If you are interested in the discussion, you can access the live blog here.
November 15, 2009 at 9:16 am
Posted in: Uncategorized
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No Right to Retire?
posted by Rachel Godsil
Courts regularly grapple with the competing principles of autonomy and obligation in the context of family law. How to reconcile these principles – when gender, money, relative status, jealousy, spite, avarice are involved – is a fascinating challenge for judges. These issues are also fun to teach since they are often uncomfortably close to most people’s own experiences.
On Monday, the Massachusetts Supreme Court considered a variant of the autonomy/obligation condundrum in Pierce v. Pierce - in which the Court was basically asked to decide whether a higher earning spouse has a “right to retire” and be exempted from otherwise on-going alimony obligations.
Rudolph Pierce was a well-compensated attorney. In the divorce agreement from Carniece, his wife of 32 years, he agreed to pay $110,000 year in alimony until either party died or she remarried. When he decided to retire from his partnership at age 65, he argued that he should be relieved of any obligation to pay alimony and asked the court to adopt a rebuttable presumption that all alimony should be terminated when (1) the supporting spouse retires from employment at a customary retirement age and has no actual earned income, (2) the parties’ marital assets, including their retirement assets, had been equally divided at the divorce, and (3) the parties have the same amount of liquid assets at the time of the provider spouse’s retirement.
The trial court agreed to a significant modifcation of Rudolph’s obligation – to $42 k – but held that in light of Carniece’s recent loss of her job, the fact that she was not yet t entitled to Social Security, and that Rudolph continued to have significant earning capacity (in addition to his assets and his current wife’s salary), he wasn’t off the hook altogether. The Supreme Court rejected Rudolph’s rebutabble presumption and affirmed the multi-factoral test generally applicable to modification requests.
My first thought (which the Court echoed) is why (at age 57), Rudolph agreed to such a high alimony award without a change upon his retirement. A cynic would suggest that this might have been intentional so that his wife would agree to a fairly equal division of property despite the parties’ differential earning capacity (his wife had been the primary caretaker of the children and home though she worked outside of the home as well).
Cynicism aside – this is a difficult issue. Rudolph’s arguement that declining to accept the presumption would grant the recipient spouse “effective veto power over the provider spouse’s retirement decision” was wildly exaggerated. But the Court did impose limitations on when a “supporting spouse” will be able to retire – and for some, the idea of having to continue to work to support a former spouse will seem deeply problematic.
November 11, 2009 at 2:06 pm
Tags: gender
Posted in: Family Law
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From the other side at AALS . . .
posted by Rachel Godsil
It has been a decade since I slept poorly at the Wardman in November – and I must admit to having some unpleasant flashbacks. Last night, like 10 years ago, I got lost on my way to an interviewing suite. I still find the bar scene a little anxiety producing. So – to those of you interviewing today – many of us on the other side of the couch do have empathy for you!
Needless to say, I acknowledge the difference. We on the interviewing side are happily (hopefully) ensconced as academics – a position that is frankly worth running from hotel suite to hotel suite. We are (hopefully) happy to talk about the benefits of our particular institution. And it has been fabulous to read the scholarship of those on the market.
I thought I’d post this morning mainly to wish you all good luck — and to explain why I am not posting anything substantive until next week. And a quick tip: when you are given the opportunity to ask any questions – find a question that allows for an interesting and idiosyncratic answer. I promise that every school will have an identical answer to the ubiquitous “what support does your institution have for junior faculty.” We all have colloquia, research stipends, and collegial sharing of documents. We all generally do try to give junior faculty reasonable teaching loads, etc. And if we don’t do any of these things, we won’t acknowledge it here!
November 6, 2009 at 5:34 am
Tags: academia
Posted in: Uncategorized
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Engaged – and Engaging – Scholarship – Paul Butler’s Let’s Get Free
posted by Rachel Godsil
I am thrilled to be back at Concurring Opinion – thanks to Solangel, Dan and the other regulars for having me. The timing of this visit is propitious for me – I am returning from a policy-focused (and surprisingly non-academic) sabbatical and I have been thinking a great deal about how best to stay engaged in policy/politics while also returning to academic culture. The worlds of advocacy and academia are distinct, obviously, and reconciling them can be challenging.
While I have been wrestling with these challenges, some of our academic colleagues, have I think, been meeting them – Richard Thompson Ford’s, The Race Card, Kenji Yoshino’s, Covering are two examples. Most recently, and in some ways the most salient to my own aspirations, is Paul Butler’s recent book, Let’s Get Free: A Hip-Hop Theory of Justice.
Butler’s book is extraordinary – he is a wonderful writer and tells a compelling story about his days as a prosecutor and his own improbable arrest and trial. But while books by lawyers about their practice are often fun reads – and this one is – what is most impressive is that Butler’s book is a theory of criminal justice. Butler is doing far more than telling a good story about lawyering. He has taken his scholarly agenda (which as many of us know has landed him impressive placements in law reviews) and rendered it readable. He weaves high level traditional theory, data, narrative, very candid self-critique, and insights from hip-hop. It may seem like a gimmick to have a sentence containing Snoop Dogg and Jeremy Bentham – but in Butler’s book, it’s not. He obviously knows both intimately and uses them to brilliant effect (and for the record, I don’t particularly like hip-hop).
November 3, 2009 at 3:56 pm
Posted in: Book Reviews, Civil Rights, Uncategorized
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Thanks for the Conversation!
posted by Rachel Godsil
I’d like to thank Dan and other other folks at Concurring Opinions for the opportunity to participate in the ongoing discussion. During my time here, I tried to touch on some of the issues that are important to me — and I thank you all for your interesting and provocative responses to my posts.
October 14, 2006 at 10:20 am
Posted in: Uncategorized
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Supporting Racially Inclusive Schools
posted by Rachel Godsil
Yesterday, briefs supporting school districts’ authority to adopt race conscious student admissions plans in public schools were due to the Supreme Court. The plans in both cases, Meredith v. Jefferson School District and Committee of Involved Parents v. Seattle School Board, were upheld in their respective circuits — and are extraordinarily important to anyone who is concerned about racial integration in our public schools. As the NAACP Legal Defense Fund stated in its website today, these cases give the Court an opportunity to preserve some measure of integration in our public schools, or to end the era of Brown. In interests of full disclosure, I co-authored a brief with my colleague Michelle Adams on behalf of the National PTA arguing that education in a multi-racial context is a compelling government interest. Our brief, and the many other amicus briefs submitted in the case, are available here.
Many of the multiple amicus briefs focused on the specific benefits to children from primary and secondary education in a multi-racial setting. These briefs assume that the parties have the burden of meeting the strict scrutiny standard — thus establishing that the use of race this context serves a compelling interest and that the means are narrowly tailored. Others, however, argue a very different point. As Michelle Adams noted here in June when the Supreme Court took these cases, in Judge Kozinski’s concurrence in the 9th Circuit, he disputed that strict scrutiny applied in the context of non-magnet public schools. He suggested that any admissions plan that does not involve competition between racial groups and does not favor one race over the other does not carry any sort of racial stigma — and therefore that strict scrutiny need not apply. NAACP LDF presents this argument most thoroughly and completely in its amicus brief
These cases will undoubtedly garner a great deal of attention, both because of the importance of the issues to public schools throughout the country, and also because they will give us a sense of how the loss of Justice O’Connor and the ascension of Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Alito will affect the Court’s decisionmaking on race issues more generally.
October 11, 2006 at 10:27 pm
Posted in: Civil Rights
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Not Responding to Guantanamo — Is “Outside My Area” an Excuse?
posted by Rachel Godsil
I would like to revisit Dave Hoffman’s concern that this blog may have let its readers down by failing to address the habeas/torture legislation passed last week. I have felt similar angst not as a blogger, but as a lawyer/law professor more generally. Do I (do we) have an obligation to be involved when critical legal rights are at stake? Like many who have been deeply troubled by the administration’s treatment of Guantanamo detainees and its actions undermining civil liberties during the years since September 11, I have excused my lack of involvement on grounds that the issues are not my area, or are outside the bounds of my expertise.
During this same period, two of my colleagues, Mark Denbeaux and Baher Azmy, have thrown themselves into the fray and are hosting a teach-in tomorrow at Seton Hall Law that will be webcast to colleges and universities around the country. Mark and Baher have both represented Guantanamo detainees — indeed, Baher’s client, Murat Kurnaz, was released August 24, 2006 after being held by the United States since October 2001. The teach-in program looks to be extraordinarily informative and I encourage people to find a way to connect to it.
Some of those who responded to Dave’s post suggested that our country is not at the point where the failure to respond can be likened to the Germans during the holocaust. But is that our standard? I accept that the general concept of a division of labor gives me leave to allow others to become expert on important legal topics. It is also true that multiple tragedies in this country and around the world are ongoing and one can’t take personal responsibility for them all. The difference of course is when our own government is responsible — and particularly when clear political moments arise as they did last week. I appreciate the efforts of many law professors to lobby Congress — and the many terrific discussions in the blogosphere. But I join Dave in thinking that those of us who think that our government has gone seriously awry (and I recognize that not all share this view) have some obligation.
What might our obligations entail? At the very least, we should all have weighed in to our representatives about last week’s legislation. Likely those of us who have a platform — like a blog — should acknowledge critically important political or legal events if only by linking to those whose blogs contain extensive discussions. Today, for example, Frank Pasquale posted a thoughtful discussion of both the teach-in tomorrow and John Yoo’s troubling interview on NPR. Linking to others has the effect both of alerting our readers to where they can find sound analyses and also adding to the chorus of dissenting voices. We should also aspire to deeper engagement. I feel an enormous debt of gratitude to those, like Baher and Mark, who have devoted extraordinary time and energy to representing detainees and organizing a sustained response. I am confident that tomorrow’s teach in will contain a detailed discussion of ways to become involved. I will provide a full description in a post tomorrow.
October 4, 2006 at 8:58 pm
Posted in: Current Events
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Should Female Legal Academics Blog?
posted by Rachel Godsil
In Yale Pocket Part, two new essays raise the question of whether women in legal academics should spend time blogging. Only one of the essays discusses this question explicity — Rosa Brooks in her candid and thoughtful What the Internet Age Means for Female Scholars? However, for women academics deciding whether to blog, I think the other essay, Brian Leiter, Why Blogs are Bad for Legal Scholarship may also be a must read.
In her essay, Brooks describes gendered challenges to academic success. The most salient is the time many women spend engaging in caretaking and housework — to the detriment of scholarship. The fact that women are often more pressed for time than men might suggest that valuable time should not be spent blogging. (Why am I not finishing the paper I am working on right now instead of musing about blogging!?)
However, Brooks also notes that not only must legal academics write great scholarship, they also have to ensure that their scholarship is read and noticed. Typically, conferences, colloquia, and visiting semesters are the best ways to promote scholarship. More women than men are also hampered here by family obligations or working spouses who are unwilling to uproot themselves for cross-country semesters or years. So, Brooks suggests, the internet provides a convenient way to advance own’s ideas and name. Though she observes that blog culture can be hostile to women and overly testosterone driven, Brooks seems cautiously optomistic that the internet and blogging might prove quite useful to women:
I can think of several younger scholars—including some women—whose careers have clearly been helped by blogging and commenting on blogs, activities that have gotten them noticed by people who then go on to read and be impressed by their more “serious” work. It’s too soon to say, but I suspect that the Internet age may gradually help eliminate the practice of making visits a predicate of lateral faculty offers. To the extent that blogging can help people get to know a scholar’s style of thinking, why put everyone to the trouble and expense of term- and year-long visits?
Enter Brian Leiter. Leiter appears hostile to blogs as means for those not already recognized as legal superstars to promote their ideas. He says so quite explicity:
[M]y sense is that blogs have been bad for legal scholarship, leading to increased visibility for mediocre scholars and half-baked ideas and to a dumbing down of standards and judgments.
Two mechanisms still exist for counteracting these developments. First, more first-rate scholars may enter the blogosphere, and use their pre-Internet gravitas to shift the terms of discussion. Second, the shift to peer-refereed publications in the legal academy—most of the best work in law and economics and law and philosophy, for example, now appears in faculty-edited journals—will ameliorate the significance of availability cascades on non-expert mediators like students and journalists.
It seems therefore, that Leiter (and any who agree with him) will give little credence to ideas posted in the blogosphere unless an already established legal superstar (those with pre-Internet gravitas) provides an introduction or some other sort of cover. Now, I presume Leiter would respond that he is not arguing that an idea or theory is mediocre simply because it is advanced by someone not already known by the heavy weights of the legal academy. However, the challenge for those not already in the club is to find vehicles for their work to be read. Once it is read, hopefully it will be judged on its merits. If Leiter’s view is widely shared, blogs will not prove useful alternatives to conferences or visits.
So –for women deciding whether to spend precious time blogging, the big question appears to be whether Leiter’s view will prevail.
September 22, 2006 at 1:03 pm
Posted in: Feminism and Gender
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Gender and the Eve-of-Wedding Prenup
posted by Rachel Godsil
Gender wars are alive and well in the blogsphere recently. While it seems to me that more than enough cyber ink has been spilled over boobgate and the fracas over Above the Law, I do think that the role of gender in law and culture continues to be actually difficult and worth discussing. I am teaching Family Law for the first time this semester and have noticed that my students often find ideals of formal sex equality extremely unsatisfying. As an example, I offer the enforceability of the eve of wedding prenup.
Let’s imagine a couple — Catherine and Fred. Catherine is a 23 year old nurse and Fred is a 39 year old neurosurgeon. On the night before their wedding, Fred’s lawyer presents Catherine with a prenup limiting her to support payments of $200 per week with a max of $25,000 should their wedded bliss end in divorce. Catherine signs — without any legal advice. Should this be enforceable?
September 18, 2006 at 8:24 pm
Posted in: Civil Rights, Feminism and Gender
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Racial Politics and Eminent Domain in Brooklyn
posted by Rachel Godsil
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Two hotly contested issues — the role of race in political representation and the use of eminent domain for economic development — collided in the contest for the 11th Congressional District in Brooklyn yesterday. The 11th has been represented by an African American since Shirley Chisolm first won in 1968. The Congressional race began to receive national attention when David Yassky, a white city councilman, moved into the district to seek the seat vacated by Major Owens against three black challengers, Carl Andrews, Yvette Clarke, and Chris Owens (Major’s son) . The District is also home to the City’s controversial plan to use eminent domain to support the Forest City Ratner development in Atlantic Yards, which will include an arena designed by Gehry and 6,800 units of housing. Yassky and Clarke both supported the Atlantic Yards development — with some criticisms of scope, while Owens vocally opposed it.
Yvette Clarke won the seat with 31% of the vote to Yassky’s 26%. Andrews won 23% and Owens trailed behind with 20%. What is the message to draw from Clarke’s victory? What role did race or gender play? How significant was her support for Atlantic Yards?
September 13, 2006 at 12:28 pm
Posted in: Politics
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Visceral Memories
posted by Rachel Godsil
I didn’t plan on writing about 9/11 today. The media would seem to have the topic sufficiently covered. I did not personally lose a loved one on that day. But I did travel through the World Trade Center via the Path train from Brooklyn to Newark five years ago and again this morning. My husband and then-two-year-old daughter saw the second building fall down from Brooklyn’s Promenade. I was unable to go home to them that night five years ago since the City was sealed and then walked through the empty, smoldering City the next day making my way back to Brooklyn. For any in the New York area, the weather today is eerily reminiscent of five years ago — though I agree with a colleague who said that five years ago might have been even more brilliant. Perhaps for these reasons, winding my way this morning through the many World Trade Center visitors, police officers, and army officials made a powerful impression.
It goes without saying that other cities and countries have experienced — and some are still experiencing — atrocities similar to or worse than September 11. Knowing that intellectually does not eliminate my slightly sick feeling. Today’s New York Times op-ed page contains several essays from writers about terrorist strikes outside of the US– Istanbul, Nairobi, Madrid, London, Mumbai. The theme that seems to resonate in each is the need for the tragedy and loss to be remembered. I wonder whether those outside of the areas directly affected by 9/11 feel today’s anniversary deeply? Relatedly, though, what are we or should we be doing with the dread, the grief, the anxiety?
September 11, 2006 at 10:43 am
Posted in: Current Events
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Post-Tenure Stress and Status
posted by Rachel Godsil
Thank you (I think) to Dan for this guest stint on Concurring Opinions and the generous introduction. My ambivalence (which might seem somewhat snarky) actually stems from stress, induced by the ambiguity of the task of guest-blogger on this particular blog if one is not a privacy or criminal law guru. What topics will be of interest? How does one generate reams of clever comments, inspire a vibrant cyberconversation? Should you keep writing even if you can’t find your copy of Thorstein Veblen or de Tocqueville to bolster your own petty musings? In other words, what are the rules for achieving some degree of success on Concurring Opinion?
These questions are related, in my view, to the particular nature of stress experienced by many already-tenured legal academics. This topic was raised in brief by a slightly tongue-in-cheek post on PrawfsBlawg last week, phrased as the guilt that, despite having “the best job in the world,” many law professors still consider themselves stressed. A few follow-up posts suggested that the only real stress in our job is achieving tenure – or perhaps those few rare occasions on which one looks like an idiot in front of 90 law students. I disagree – and in fact think that in some respects, this job becomes more stressful post-tenure. It all depends on how we define stress.
September 6, 2006 at 2:50 pm
Posted in: Blogging, Culture, Law School
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