Word: legalism
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Among the legal considerations: Are lawyer-brokered independent adoptions allowed in the state where the couple resides? (Six states prohibit private adoption.) Which of the birth mother's expenses can be paid by the adoptive parents? Hospitalization? Maternity clothes? How long does she have to change her mind about giving up her child? Does the birth father, who in most cases is out of the picture, have to give his consent? Because of their laws, California and Texas have become magnets for couples seeking independent adoptions, while Minnesota and Michigan have none. "There are probably more infants from Minnesota placed...
...refuge for the disadvantaged, the dispossessed and the dissident. We are entering an era in which increasingly the court will be less a court of last resort." One result is that many would-be federal lawsuits will be filed in more liberal state courts; another is that legal disputes may be translated into political battles, to be fought in the corridors of state legislatures and the halls of Congress...
...Legal scholars trace the origins of the court's rightward swing to Richard Nixon's four appointments to the high bench. Reagan gave the right a working majority by naming his new Justices -- Sandra Day O'Connor, Antonin Scalia and Anthony Kennedy -- on the basis of conservative ideology. The three appear to have forged an alliance with Byron White and William Rehnquist, whom Reagan elevated to Chief Justice in 1986. Together, says Geoffrey Stone, dean of the University of Chicago Law School, they form a "gang of five that increasingly operates without taking into consideration the views of the other...
...Michigan law professor Yale Kamisar: "The Warren Court took cases where Government won ((in lower courts)). This court seems to be taking cases where Government lost below. It is putting liberal judges back in line." Civil rights and civil liberties groups have taken note. Ronald Ellis of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund admits that, in order not "to tempt the fates," his organization has refrained from appealing cases to the high court and is considering filing more suits in state courts...
...reach. Designed to be a short-term arrangement ending in either adoption or the child's return to a competent parent, foster care has become a kind of indeterminate sentence. Only about half of all foster children return home; many of the rest are suspended in a legal limbo by parents who make little effort to regain their children but refuse to relinquish them fully. Although federal law mandates that a child whose mother shows no inclination to plan for his or her future within 18 months should be made available for adoption, an absentee parent can thwart such attempts...