Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: In the 1996 decision, Jaffee v. Raymond, the United States Supreme Court recognized a federal common law psychotherapist-patient privilege, resolving a sharp split in the federal appeals courts. However, in the years since the decision, the state of the privilege remains far from certain. Most significantly, courts’ application of the principle of the “at issue” waiver – meaning that a person is deemed to have waived some or all of the protection of the privilege by placing her mental condition in issue in litigation – has led to inconsistent and unprincipled results, creating a body of case law in disarray.

A court’s conceptualization of waiver of the psychotherapist-patient privilege can have an enormous impact on the course of litigation. The issue of waiver has the potential to arise in any case in which a plaintiff seeks emotional distress damages, as well as in cases alleging discrimination on the basis of mental illness. Since federal courts are a primary forum for the vindication of civil rights, the courts’ approach to the psychotherapist-patient privilege can have a significant impact, and perhaps a chilling effect, on the choices made by those who may seek relief under federal civil rights laws. This paper proposes a more reasoned and coherent approach to the issue of waiver of the psychotherapist-patient privilege; one which is not only consistent with the formulation of the privilege established in Jaffee but also ensures that the concept of waiver does not vitiate the privilege entirely.

Publication Type: Proceeding

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: This paper profiles and analyzes participation and demographic and biographical characteristics of interns in the AFL-CIO sponsored Union Summer labor activist and education program. The quantitative analysis has two primary functions: first to provide an overview of the demographic composition of the program and the educational and union affiliations of interns, and second to investigate what variables correlate with commitment, success, or subsequent levels of participation. This research demonstrates the way in which social scientific analyses of social movement activity can aid activists in determining larger movement patterns and the consequences of their strategic choices.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: Elite law schools in the United States serve a gate-keeping function into the profession of law, a profession which dominates positions of power in all branches of government as well as in the business world. As a sub-system of the legal system, elite law schools are important cites of institutional power. These historically exclusively white institutions have opened their doors to people of color in post-civil rights America, but they remain white spaces. Through an ethnographic examination of two elite law schools, I find that the dominant practices and discourses in these schools are characterized by color-blind racism. As a result, students of color within these spaces face systematic, if sometimes subtle, challenges to their ability, their intelligence, their perceptions, and their right to even be in the law school. Examining the racial hurdles faced by law students of color who must negotiate color-blind racism, reveals the mechanisms by which notions of liberal individualism and color-blind racism work within the institution of elite law schools to justify and reproduce white power and privilege, while simultaneously disavowing it.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: Immediately after September 11th, many commentators posited a link between the political mass murder on that day and the growing division of the world into haves and have-nots. This paper focuses on global inequalities of wealth and power. The title is taking from the striking lament of a World Bank economist reflecting on the rapid growth of income inequality across households in the early 1990s: Such a high inequality is sustainable precisely because the world is not unified, and rich people do not mingle, meet, or even know about the existence of the poor other than in the most abstract way. The paper outlines the basic facts of contemporary global inequality and its origins, looking especially at the control that people have over their own lives. It argues that such inequality creates an ethical problem for the privileged, even if does not contribute to security problems. It then considers the three paths by which growing international inequality indirectly contributes to contemporary violent transnational conflicts. Finally, it explains, both abstractly and with concrete examples (albeit limited numbers of them) a range of ways in which the world's privileged can come to see reducing global inequality as a moral imperative, perhaps even as one of the few things that can surely provide meaning to the alienated lives of those in the unprecedentedly wealthy and powerful nations.