VOLUME 84:1 (Forthcoming)
Article
Author: Thalia González, University of California College of the Law, San Francisco
Title: Fines, Fees, and the Carceral Economic Conditions of Public Education
Abstract:
In this Article, I apply an expanded concept of education carcerality to identify and analyze a largely unexamined modality of punitive economic governance—intra‑system educational fines and fees. Distinguished from other forms of childhood financial sanctions, including the criminalization of ordinary child and adolescent behavior in schools through the use of municipal fines and fees, these carceral‑penal practices are exclusively defined, imposed, and collected within school systems themselves. Drawing on original data from 101 publicly available policies governing the two largest school districts by student population in each state and the District of Columbia, this Article contributes to the literature with three principal findings. First, that intra‑system educational fines and fees are nearly ubiquitous across jurisdictions. Second, these economic obligations give rise to compounding non‑economic punishments when students and families are unable to pay, including the withholding of diplomas, grades, and transcripts. Third, existing protective policy provisions are highly variant, unevenly designed, and no districts examined provide categorical waivers. These findings affirm a central claim that this form of fines and fees constitute a pervasive and unregulated system of economic education carcerality and underscore the pressing need for critical praxis among economic justice, education law, and youth justice advocates and scholars to contest and dismantle the operation of institutionalized carceral economic conditions within public schools.
Essay
Author: Kyle Pinder, Partner, Morris, Nichols, Arsht & Tunnell LLP (Wilmington, Del.)
Title: Life After Moelis: A Trulia Moment for Governance Claims?
Abstract:
At the height of the merger‑tax litigation bubble, the Delaware Court of Chancery issued its In re Trulia Stockholder Litigation decision, which disincentivized meritless M&A disclosure claims. Similarly, for the past several years, Delaware corporations have faced a wave of facial validity challenges to charter, bylaw, and governance‑agreement provisions. Most of these claims end the same way: The corporation amends the challenged provision and pays a mootness fee, often while maintaining that the provision was lawful all along. Two recent Delaware Supreme Court decisions may disrupt that sequence. Kellner v. AIM ImmunoTech Inc. confirmed that a facial validity challenge fails unless the provision cannot operate lawfully under any set of circumstances, foreclosing claims built on hypothetical abuses. Moelis & Co. v. West Palm Beach Firefighters’ Pension Fund clarified that facial invalidity is not synonymous with voidness: A provision the corporation could have implemented by other lawful means is merely voidable, and challenges to it may be subject to cure, laches, and other equitable defenses. Because only a meritorious claim can support a mootness fee, those decisions substantially reduce the incentive to challenge long‑standing, voidable governance provisions in the abstract. These opinions signal a preference to conserve judicial resources for live disputes challenging such governance arrangements where the plaintiff has real skin in the game, such as during a pending or threatened proxy contest.
Student Note
Author: Fonda Pham, J.D. Candidate at Washington and Lee University School of Law
Title: Deportation by Deception: Coerced Administrative Voluntary Departures and the Illusion of Choice
Abstract:
Administrative voluntary departure allows noncitizens facing removal to leave the United States by waiving their right to a hearing before an immigration judge. Although this process provides noncitizens with a quicker alternative to a lengthy removal hearing, the process is not always as “voluntary” as its name suggests. Over the past four decades, noncitizens have alleged that immigration officers threatened and intimidated them in order to obtain waivers of consent, including threats against family members, prolonged detention, and physical abuse. Although the Fifth Amendment of the Constitution states that all persons physically present in the U.S. must receive due process protections regardless of legal status, immigration officers often ignore these protections during the voluntary departure process.
This Note discusses how voluntary departure coercion is not only a product of individual agent misconduct, but also a result of the broad, unrestrained power granted to government officials. The Note outlines the obstacles making coercion difficult to redress, which include evidentiary challenges, limitations on judicial review, and restrictions to bringing legal actions against government officials. To tackle these concerns, the Note imports principles from criminal procedure and constitutional waiver doctrine to develop procedural reforms that may ensure the voluntariness of departure.
