Volume 10, Spring 2013, Issue 3
Eric Cory Rosenberg
There is a long history of political maneuvering that surrounds social welfare legislation and government entitlement programs at both the national and state level. One aspect that has received increased attention during the recent economic downturn is mandatory drug screening, which has been a tool for politicians seeking to conserve taxpayer resources and limit the State’s complicity in drug addiction. Especially in times of economic crisis, welfare recipients have become a scapegoat for politicians in conservative, cash-strapped states. This note will not seek to establish a political position, but will examine the current Fourth Amendment paradigm for challenging such legislation and ultimately propose alternatives to withholding welfare, suggesting a new means for challenging legal barriers to the receipt of social welfare under the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. View More
Gary Minda
Jürgen Habermas has recently warned that the sovereign debt crisis in Europe is transforming democratic governments into “economic governments” threatening not only economic disaster, but also the end of the world’s first supranational project – the European Union. And, according to Habermas, Europeans seem not to understand their Europe, and instead have used economic austerity as an excuse for denying democratic and constitutional possibilities at summit meetings, bailouts, and in new anti-democratic economic agreements. Habermas encourages his readers to understand the lessons of the past while looking ahead to new cosmopolitan possibilities freed from the twentieth century experiences of world war and economic depression. And, yet, few seem to be listening or heeding Germany’s most renowned political philosopher. European leaders focus on fiscal integration, Europe-wide banking supervision, and tighter economic policies, but little concern is given to citizen participation in governance. Without democratic integration, the European project risks creating economic, not democratic government. What are at stake are the basic social arrangements created in the post- World War era for sharing the wealth, the burdens and the responsibilities of workers and investors essential to a constitutional democracy. This Review Essay argues that Habermas’s response to the European crisis is relevant to the debt crisis in America, but his democratic aspirations need to be grounded in work, worker organizations, and the reality of workplaces, and not some ideal space for democratic discourse or commutative action. Habermas’s vision for a democracy at the transnational level is not a possibility as long as economic government recreates social conditions that look more like the ones created by the discredited nineteenth-century peonage system than by twenty-first century democracy. View More
Ellen Camburn
The right of personal privacy in the United States includes the abortion decision. This right to an abortion is governed by case law that protects both the state’s interest in the health of the woman and that of potential life from the outset of pregnancy. However, the parameters of this decision are continually changing due to state legislation that purports to make the decision well informed, but in doing so adds additional requirements that many argue violate the woman’s and her physician’s constitutional rights. View More