Transgender Healthcare is Medically Necessary

Americans have dueling and irreconcilable expectations of the healthcare industry. On the one hand, they believe that access to healthcare should be an affordable and accessible entitlement—their privilege as American citizens. On the other hand, when Americans seek treatment, they expect it to be flawless—they demand the best physicians and the best care centers.

However, since the passage of the Medicare legislation in 1965, Americans have been unable to agree on how people should receive healthcare and who should receive it. The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010 (ACA), known as “Obamacare,” is the latest healthcare fix. In response, Americans elected Republican Donald Trump—who ran on repealing “Obamacare”—to the presidency just six years later. Now, especially as the COVID-19 pandemic exposes many of the failures within the current United States healthcare systems, Americans are once again debating healthcare and asking, “what should this look like?” Should the federal government create universal single-payer healthcare plans? Or would it be better to cut Medicare and Medicaid spending and reduce the number of insured?

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The Outlawed Family: How Relevant is the Law in Family Litigation?

The involvement of the law in the family is generally considered inevitable and desirable. The family is often depicted as the locus of important and delicate problems, which demand legal intervention through designated tools commonly referred to as “family law.” This Paper questions the veracity of this depiction with regards to the paradigmatic family dispute—divorce. Divorce cases are composed of three sub-cases: the divorce itself (i.e., the legal separation of the parties), child custody, and the division of property. The Paper examines whether, and to what extent, courts and legal rules decide family disputes. It argues that, with the rise of personal considerations such as autonomy and the best interest of the child, the law has become almost irrelevant to divorce and that courts currently have little substantive influence over custody disputes. The diminishing importance of the law in these contexts is particularly striking when compared to the reality of matrimonial property issues. Family law addresses familial considerations, legal norms, and judicial procedures. Based on the shortcomings this Paper identifies in the regulation of divorce and child custody, namely the gap between the perceived and actual regulation of these matters, this Paper calls for reconsideration of the regulation of these issues.

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Online Dispute Resolution: Mediating in the Time of COVID-19

By Adrienne Baker

It has been one year since our law school transitioned entirely online. The phrases “novel coronavirus” and “social distancing,” once peculiar word pairings, quickly became ubiquitous, upending our expectations for the foreseeable future. However, it’s clear that COVID-19 has catapulted Online Dispute Resolution (ODR) into the spotlight. In this universally stressful year, there is great promise for online mediation.

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The Elasticity of Protected Speech: A Balance of Breadth

“The right to swing my fist ends where the other man’s nose begins” is an axiom not always, but often attributed to Oliver Wendell Holmes. Whichever learned individual penned it, the quotation exemplifies the omnipresent and judicially confounding tension between “freedom of” and “freedom from” speech and expression.

In reviewing In re Welfare of A.J.B., the Minnesota Supreme Court invalidated Minnesota’s stalking-by-mail statute and narrowed the mail-harassment statute. Under the first statute, stalking-by-mail occurs when a person “repeatedly mails or delivers or causes the delivery by any means, including electronically, of letters, telegrams, messages, packages” and “the actor knows or has reason to know [this conduct] would cause the victim under the circumstances to feel frightened, threatened, oppressed, persecuted, or intimidated.” Pursuant to the second statute, mail harassment occurs when an actor “with the intent to abuse, disturb, or cause distress, repeatedly mails or delivers or causes the delivery by any means, including electronically, of letters, telegrams, or packages.”

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Wisconsin’s 3/5 Compromise: Prison Gerrymandering in Wisconsin Dilutes Minority Votes to Inflate White Districts’ Population

Let the case of the slaves be considered, as it is in truth, a peculiar one. Let the compromising expedient of the Constitution be mutually adopted, which regards them as inhabitants, but as debased by servitude below the equal level of free inhabitants, which regards the SLAVE as divested of two fifths of the MAN. James Madison wrote The Federalist No. 54 defending the infamous three-fifths compromise, which allowed White southern slaveowners to aggregate political power on the backs of their Black slaves, without representing their interests in any substantive way.

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Emerging Themes from the Healthy Food Policy Project’s COVID-19 Food Access Municipal Policy Index

By Rachel Lantz, with support from other contributors to the Healthy Food Policy Project (HFPP), including Amanda Karls, Claire Child, Lihlani Nelson, Rebecca Hare, Sally Mancini, and Whitney Shields. HFPP is a collaboration between the Center for Agriculture and Food Systems at Vermont Law Schools (CAFS), the Public Health Law Center (PHLC) at Mitchell Hamline School of Law, and the Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity at the University of Connecticut. HFPP is funded by the National Agricultural Library, Agricultural Research Service, U.S. Department of Agriculture.

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Minnesota’s System of Justice by Geography in Child Protection Proceedings: Base Issues in Minnesota’s Parental Representation Scheme and in the Discretionary Appointment of Counsel Under Section 260C.163.

In dealing with issues of parental representation, states must contend with the United States Supreme Court’s decision in Lassiter v. Department of Social Services of Durham County, North Carolina. The Court, using the factors established in Mathews v. Eldridge, held that there is no constitutional right to counsel for parents in child protection cases. This decision has led states to develop varying statutory schemes for parental representation in child protection cases. Differences in statutes by state lead to differences in outcomes for parents and children across the nation. While there are many factors that contribute to differing outcomes in legal disputes, research indicates that states providing representation to all parents in child protection proceedings leads to better outcomes for both parents and children within their state.

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