Lawyers be a-ballin'?

Canadian lawyers protest legal aid de-funding in 2014
(Sally T. Buck via Flickr CC BY-NC-ND 2.0).
My wife was a legal services attorney after law school.
Her salary could not have paid both law school debt
and even a modest mortgage.

A student loan specialist giving advice on The Takeaway this morning said, "Don't live like a lawyer when you're a student, and you won't live like a student when you're a lawyer."

Betsy Mayotte, founder and president of The Institute of Student Loan Advisors, was repeating an aphorism, she said, as a caution against students borrowing more than they need for higher education. Don't count on any program for loan forgiveness, she warned; rather, assume that you'll have to pay back every dime.*

That's sound, conservative economic advice, especially for an America stretched thin on credit card debt and short on long-term savings. But for anything, I could not work out how the aphorism embodied the message.

What does it mean to "live like a lawyer"?

Mayotte had just cautioned students that they should take the time, however boring the task sounds, to read the whole of their promissory notes. The notes well explain what borrowers are in for, she advised, and "no one told me that" will not later be an excuse to default on debt.

Also good advice. But doesn't living like a lawyer mean being supremely attentive to the fine print and acting conservatively in anticipation of adverse circumstances?

In her informative and insightful book, How to Be Sort of Happy in Law School, Professor Kathryne M. Young related research that successful lawyers are more often natural pessimists, marking a contrast with the successful optimists who have the lead in the other professions, clergy and medicine. That's because a lawyer's job is to prepare for the worst, while clergy and doctors are busy instead coaxing their clients toward a joyful salvation of one kind or another.

Did the aphorism mean to be an optimist when a student, so you don't have to be a student when you're a pessimist?  What does that even mean?

You, dear reader, are no doubt quicker on the draw than I, so you've probably worked it out. It dawned on me an hour or so later:

Don't live like a baller when you're poor, or you'll be poor when you're supposed to be ballin'.

The problem is that "lawyer" doesn't mean rich to me. 

I'm a lawyer. Not rich. My wife's a lawyer. Also not rich. I checked.

The vast majority of my former students work in public service jobs, if they're in JD-required positions at all. And even the few in private practice: not rich. Okay, I can think of one. But I think he was rich already.

Don't get me wrong. We're not struggling. Two JDs put our household income in the 90-something percentiles, according to the DQYDJ calculator, with me in the 90s as an individual and my wife, who has a master's degree, as well as her law degree, in the 70s. 

But income is only one measure of wealth, and, I daresay, not the most important. We both went into serious debt to get those JDs. Our home is mortgaged. We had not paid off our graduate education by the time our only child went to university. And we could not afford to get her through four years without her going into debt, too. 

Neither of us started off loaded. We still buy our clothes at Goodwill and Savers. Habits die hard. I just threw away my wife's socks with holes in them while she was out of the house. She won't do it. But I think she deserves better.

When I left law practice in 1996, I was making $50k, which is about $95k adjusted for inflation. I left that for my first job in academics, where I made $35k—$15k less than the IT guy. "Supply and demand," the dean said.

Now I make more. But after advancing in academics for 25 years, I still make less than the average lawyer in the mid-Atlantic, where I practiced, and just a little more than the nationwide average starting salary for a first-year associate.

The takeaway is that I don't associate being a lawyer with being rich. And it's alarming if people are going to law school with that expectation, or if that's how the public sees lawyers. "Kill all the lawyers" was the suggestion of a butcher.

I just finished some physical therapy for an injured shoulder. The bill for that, to my insurer, was $355 per hour. I saw a podiatry specialist recently. That was billed at $122 for what I think was scheduled as a 15-minute appointment, though it took less than 10.  We'll call it $488 per hour.  I like both those providers, but neither is a superstar gracing the cover of Physicians Weekly.

A very gross number, but the average U.S. lawyer's billable hour now runs about $300. The lawyer has more investment in education than the physical therapist, if a bit less than the doctor. The lawyer is a bargain. Clergy is a better bargain, but that's their thing.

Why isn't the saying, "Don't live like a doctor when you're a student, and you won't live like a student when you're a doctor"?

Well, of course, not everyone in healthcare is rich, either.  My wife had an ER visit and hospital stay, no procedures, last summer that was billed at about $13,000 for two days. At the same time, one of my nieces and one of my brothers work as nurses in hospitals; neither of them is making bank. Where's the money going?

I don't know what the right graduate school investment is to get rich. I didn't make it. Maybe whatever gets you to be a healthcare CEO. Be the owner of the hospital, not a provider in it.

Law and medicine can open the door to opportunity, to improve your lot if you're not living comfortably. I'm not knocking that. But no one should go into educational debt without a plan at least to do better than status quo. And plans should be based on realistic expectations.

The aphorism doesn't fit. Worse, it's dangerously misleading. We've got a problem in America with access to education and upward socioeconomic mobility. Simplifying the narrative to suggest that a professional degree will necessarily afford return on investment is not part of the solution.

* I've been reading about the challenges against the Biden student loan forgiveness order. You can follow the legal story at Reason. I'd love to see the plan go through; my daughter would benefit. I'm sorry to say, though, I think the challengers are right: the President exceeded his authority. The unfortunate political outcome, I predict, is that the Administration will be blamed for breaking a promise, and the Supreme Court will be blamed for enforcing the law, both thereby suffering unwarranted further damage to already embattled credibility. Meanwhile, Congress, which in fact held the key to untie the President's hands, but can't ween itself off addiction to money, and especially Democrats, who passed on a real opportunity to make a difference for access to education and socioeconomic opportunity, will escape accountability.

With regard to the title of this post, you can read more about the circumfix a-/-ing at Wiktionary. Read more about "the habitual be" at Slate.

I've been away from the blog for a while owing to an exhausting, if variably rewarding and challenging December and January. I'm back in the saddle now and look forward to catching up on some matters I'm eager to share. Thank you for your patience, and stay tuned!

Oops. We accidentally linked healthcare to your job.

mohamed_hassan (pixabay.com)

I stand with the rest of the world in awestruck horror of America's stubborn insistence that access to healthcare should be a function of both one's wealth and the largesse of one's employer.

Critics of the free market are quick to conclude that it has failed the American worker.  Economic libertarians are just as quick to tout the essentiality of free contract.  Before we make any decisions about the free labor market, maybe we should try it out.  A market in which a worker can't change jobs for fear of a recurring cancer or a bankrupting accident is not a free labor market.

For the NPR podcast Throughline, Lawrence Wu set out recently to explain how we arrived at the problem of employer-dependent healthcare.  The description of the episode, "The Everlasting Problem" (Oct. 1, 2020), reads:

Health insurance for millions of Americans is dependent on their jobs. But it's not like that everywhere. So, how did the U.S. end up with such a fragile system that leaves so many vulnerable or with no health insurance at all? On this episode, how a temporary solution created an everlasting problem.

For This American Life and Planet Money, Alex Blumberg and Adam Davidson also addressed this subject back in 2009.  Their bit ran only 11 minutes, but I have never forgotten the shocking fact that "four accidental steps led to enacting the very questionable system of employers paying for health care."

'Miss Juneteenth' speaks both to problems of our times and to timeless problems

Thanks to the Duke (University) Screen/Society, yesterday, I virtually attended a screening and discussion of the 2020 film from Vertical Entertainment, Miss Juneteenth.  It is an insightful and gratifying film, so I want to make this note of it.  In our covid era, it's easy to miss new releases.

Written and directed by Channing Godfrey Peoples, Miss Juneteenth is the story of Fort Worth, Texas, teen Kai (Alexis Chikaeze) and her mom, Turquoise Jones (Nicole Beharie), as Kai prepares to participate in the Miss Juneteenth beauty pageant, a pageant that her mother happens to have won, back in the day.

Yet that description unfairly oversimplifies the film, as would any description that confined the story by race or class.  The film richly portrays Turquoise and Kai's lives.  It explores mother-daughter conflict, romantic entanglements, and socioeconomic struggles. Simultaneously, the film comments softly, not heavy-handedly, on pageant culture, civil rights, the American dream, and, of course, never trumpeted yet omnipresent, the glorious but unfulfilled promise of freedom marked by Juneteenth.

In a striking scene set in a Juneteenth museum, the young contestants are being oriented on Juneteenth history by a passionate docent when the schoolmarmish pageant wrangler directs the kids' attention to framed pictures of past Juneteenth queens.  The docent was speaking to the legacy of slavery, driven out of the American South, while the pageant director educates the girls on such etiquette nuances as table manners imported with the Pilgrims.  The girls' gazes drift to the latter display, which, I contend, speaks subtly but powerfully to how African-American communities have long wrestled with the fine line between cultural subjugation and assimilation that courses through American history from Reconstruction to Civil Rights to present day.  I'm reminded at once of Mike Pence's oddly third-person reference from Fort McHenry in August to "American people ... standing with ... our African-American neighbors" and Dulce Sloan's missive this week on The Daily Show with Trevor Noah, "The Messed Up History of Black Hair in America."

A character in the film once comments, "Ain’t no American dream for black folks.”  As we wondered at the latest news of government ineptitude yesterday morning, contemplating how our salaries are going down while our workloads are going up, my wife speculated that the anger and resentment that people both black and white feel toward the lack of opportunity for upward mobility in this country is really much the same.  The difference, she suggested, is that black people have always known that meritocracy is an American myth, while white people are just figuring it out.  (She cited Michael Sandel on WBUR talking about his Tyranny of Merit.)

Miss Juneteenth has given me a lot to chew over.  I haven't even mentioned my own daughter's foray into the pageant world when she was a teen: Miss Rhode Island High School 2016!  In Miss Juneteenth, as Turquoise is working herself to death to scrape together the money to support Kai's pageant bid, Kai's father, Ronnie (Kendrick Sampson), shakes his head: "An $800 dress just don’t make no sense to me."

Word for word, I swear, Peoples stole that line from me.

Here is the trailer from Vertical Entertainment.

Happy Constitution Day.

Poor development choices may bolster quality-of-life disparity on Tanzania's Msasani Peninsula

 Coco Beach, Msasani Peninsula, Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. All photos RJ Peltz-Steele CC BY-SA 4.0.

The short length of Coco Beach is the touristic gem of Tanzania's largest city, Dar es Salaam, which, for all its rugged charms, is not rich with touristic gems. Coco Beach sits on the eastern, Indian Ocean, coast of the ritzy Msasani Peninsula, just a few kilometers northwest of the CBD.

Msasani says a lot about wealth stratification in Africa. The worsening wealth gap is an issue that vexes me in the United States. But we've got nothing on many an African country. Where subsistence living is the norm, and social safety nets are nearly non-existent, the disparity between haves and have-nots gets closer at each end to all and nothing. And as on Msasani, the extremes are often abruptly juxtaposed. The peninsula is home to subsistence fishermen, and the polluted beaches of the slipway, in the west, and the luxury condominiums of posh Oyster Bay, in the east.

Luxury condo building on the road from Oyster Bay to Sea Cliff Village

I walked the peninsula from west to east and saw, in the span of just a few kilometers, ramshackle wood dwellings on potholed dirt trails without plumbing, in the west and center, and gated condo complexes with marble-esque, statued facades, in the east. While the former teemed with human life, the latter were eerily vacant, deserted of all but the occasional maintenance worker. I assume the condos are mostly second-home getaways and vacation rentals for the well-to-do in high season and on weekends. (I was reminded of the dark-windowed high rises that loom over Central Park West, New York.)

Qatar's is the most modest of the beachfront embassies.

At that, the most striking residences of the eastern Msasani are not luxury homes, but foreign embassies, including those of Qatar, Brazil, Canada, Ireland, the UAE, and Saudi Arabia. (The U.S. embassy and others are in Oyster Bay, but in the interior.) They line the main coastal road that runs between Oyster Bay and Coco Beach, which runs on northward to swank Sea Cliff Village and the Yacht Club.

Present service structures on Coco Beach, astride road construction.

At present, it isn't easy to cross this road, because a massive construction project runs all along the length of Coco Beach. I had hoped that this construction would improve the beach for touristic use that might fuel economic development to benefit the peninsula's have-nots. What passes for services on the beachfront now are wood shacks of dubious hygiene, selling drinks and snacks that might prove hazardous to foreign GI tracts. One municipal toilet building has seen better days and is now inaccessible anyway because of the construction. Alas, no, a local on the beach informed me: The purpose of the construction is to convert the shoulderless, two-lane, asphalt coast road into a four-lane highway, because, he said, the embassies want better and more secure access.

Nearly completed end of beachfront highway entering the CBD.

Many an American city can today tell tales of costly woe for having built transportation and utility infrastructure along prime waterfront property. It's bad enough that embassies, with their high, secure walls, occupy this land on the peninsula to begin with. Their inefficient use of prime real estate, distant from the administrative offices of the CBD, and in the company of Tanzania's "one percent" and cloistered ex-pats, sounds an awakward echo of colonial elitism.  To boot, now, the embassies and luxury homes will soon be served by a four-lane road that will further limit public access from the peninsula to the already underdeveloped beachfront.

Tanzania in 1974 moved its capital de jure to central Dodoma, in an effort to broaden economic opportunity in the country beyond Dar es Salaam. Nevertheless, concentration of development in Dar is still a problem that plagues the country. A businessman in the northeastern town of Arusha told me there's mounting resentment there about rural taxes paying for big-city infrastructure. (Boston says hello, western Massachusetts.) Maybe foreign nations can help Tanzania take a step forward by transferring their embassies from walled beachfront luxury to central locations with better access to government, whether Dar or Dodoma, on condition that appropriate public development of the Msasani Peninsula be left in their wake.  After all, foreign diplomatic posting is supposed to be a hardship, and it's compensated accordingly.

The new highway runs in front of the historic Ocean Road Hospital, where a street sign bears a familiar name.

SCOTUS, climate change, drug addiction, immigration highlight law and policy issues at UMass colloquium

Today at the Fifth UMass Interdisciplinary Legal Studies Colloquium in Boston, scholars talked about a range of intriguing work, from politics to climate change to drug legalization, being done across the University of Massachusetts campuses—Amherst, Boston, Dartmouth, and Lowell, and Law (at Dartmouth) and Medical (at Worcester).  Here’s a taste.

View of Boston from One Beacon Street today.  "Back Bay is called 'Back Bay' for a reason," UMass Dartmouth Professor  
Chad McGuire said, referring to reclaimed land that is threatened by rising sea levels.

Law and Policy Inside the Beltway
Panel 1—Moderated by yours truly

Queer Sacrifice in Masterpiece Cakeshop, Jeremiah Ho, UMass Law.  Professor Ho explicated his theory of “interest convergence,” and how a lack thereof explains the result in the U.S. Supreme Court’s recent decision in the LGBTQ-rights cakeshop case.  His research shows how images—sometimes literally—of gay identity have informed public and judicial perception of LGBTQ rights cases.  Three more cases lie on the horizon, in the Court’s next term, Ho said, so stay tuned.   Meanwhile preview his "Queer Sacrifice" work, just out in the Yale Journal of Law and Feminism, at SSRN.

Can Presidents Influence Public Attitudes Toward the Supreme Court? Evidence from a Survey Experiment, Paul M. Collins, Jr. (blog), Department of Political Science, UMass Amherst.  Collins’s long-term research digs deep into how statements and action by the President of the United States exert influence over public perception of the U.S. Supreme Court and its decisions.  What the President says matters; consider, Collins proffers, the White House has a whole office dedicated to SCOTUS spin.  Collins also notes that low public knowledge of the Court is a factor in allowing public opinion to be influenced by forces external to the Court.  I can’t help but think about the Court’s intransigence on cameras and public access.  Anyway, Collins has discovered that the public is more easily influenced on “low salience” issues, but less so on “high salience” (I’d say “hot button”) issues, such as immigration.

On the Supreme Court of the United States of America (and Congruent Agencies and Ministries in the Term of President Donald Trump), Judge Francis Larkin, UMass Law.  Judge Larkin shared observations of recent events in President-Court interaction.  He recalled FDR’s Court-packing plan, relative to its recent resurgence in politics (e.g., WaPo).

Forcing Disclosure, Justine Dunlap, UMass Law.  Professor Dunlap is looking at mandatory disclosures under Title IX, especially faculty duties.  She observes that the evolution of Title IX over recent decades, under administrations from both sides of the aisle, have fairly sought to respond to a real problem of unredressed sexual harassment and assault on college campuses.  But the responses have not always been well tuned.  And mandatory reporting, however well intentioned, can put faculty in the impossible bind of having to betray student trust.  (Professor Julie Baker in Q&A aptly noted also that the consequences of ill-tuned reporting schemes for accused perpetrators are not always conducive to dispute resolution or justice.)  Dunlap talked about a system being implemented at the University of Oregon that contemplates a third class of potential “reporter”—rather than all or nothing, a “student-directed reporter.”

Recovery, Resiliency, and Equality in Economic Development
Panel 2—Moderated by Professor Justine Dunlap, UMass Law

Opening for Business: Tax-Haven Economy and the State of Exception in Puerto Rico, Jose Atiles, Department of Political Science, UMass Amherst.  Professor Atiles is working on Puerto Rico and U.S. development strategies.  He explained that there are two prevalent approaches to development policy concerning the island, one the “blank canvas” approach, which encourages recovery investment on the selling point that, more or less, my words: there’s nothing there at present; two the “PR is open for business” approach, which seeks to exploit the island’s legal status as a tax haven.  Both of these representations are animated by a “neoliberal-colonial rationality,” and that troubling mindset is reflected in the law that facilitates these strategies.

I’m reminded of the colonial terra nullius doctrine with respect to the blank canvas, and the local-policy-characteristic Everett casino debate with respect to “open for business.”  Puerto Rico and its people are not our offshore plaything.  In Q&A, I asked Atiles what it would take for us to start thinking about PR more like we do Missouri.  Statehood and independence each have advantages and drawbacks, which he explained summarily; what won’t save PR, he said, is the status quo.

A “Least Regrets” Framework for Coastal Climate Change Resiliency Through Economic Development, Chad McGuire and Michael Goodman, College of Arts and Sciences, UMass Dartmouth.  Professor McGuire continues his renowned work on environmental conservation and climate change, and now he’s brought public policy numbers wizard Professor Goodman (also president of the UMass Dartmouth Faculty Senate) onto the team to look at the economics.  They’re attacking the problem of aligning shorter-term economic incentives with the longer-term public interest in saving the human race from extinction.

I just saw Dan Gardner on The Daily Show talking to Roy Wood Jr. (video embedded below) (let me remind everyone that I shook Roy’s hand in East Providence) talking about how our “caveman” brains don’t well process the threat of climate change because it’s too abstract, that we need more urgent messaging.  McGuire and Goodman have it.  As I’m wearing a sweater in May, McGuire observed: “Spring has become less of a thing, and winter moving into summer is becoming more of a thing.”  We’ve lost 15-30 days of winter in New England, he shows with data, and seasonal transitions are becoming more abrupt.  Then he directs us toward the view of Boston from our huge glass windows here in the 32nd floor of One Beacon Street.  “Back Bay is called ‘Back Bay’ for a reason,” McGuire said.  Boston sits on filled-in bay.

At lunch, McGuire told me about rubber buffers that run through Boston streets to absorb shifts in the aqueous earth beneath.  And he told me about the latest alarming findings from the Ross Ice Shelf.  Our society has invested a great deal in developing low-lying land, and we’re going to have reconcile that policy with our climate game.

Human Rights Responses to Economic and Social Inequalities—A Book Proposal, Gillian MacNaughton, School for Global Inclusion and Social Development, UMass Boston.  For my money—both figuratively and literally—Professor MacNaughton’s work is what we need to save humanity from catastrophe—after and assuming we figure out how to survive climate change.  MacNaughton takes what we know and bemoan about inequality of wealth and opportunity in the United States and runs writ large with the problem.  As she wrote in her abstract: “The Global Wealth Report 2017 reveals that the wealthiest 1% of the global population owns 50% of global assets, while the poorest 50% owns less than 1%.”  Building on the U.N. Sustainable Development Goals, she plans to propose putting some punch behind international treaty guarantees of social and economic equality, such as we might start to address this problem on the global level.  I’ve often lamented that our increasingly disparate economic stratification will be our undoing in the United States if we don’t address it.  It’s worth being reminded how much more desperate the situation already is worldwide.  See also Professor MacNaughton's recent co-edited book, Economic and Social Rights in a Neoliberal World (Cambridge University Press 2019).

Drug Use and Abuse, and the Criminal Justice System
Panel 3—Moderated by Professor Julie Baker, UMass Law

Is Marijuana the Gateway Drug? Maybe Not, But Its Legalization Could Be, Nikolay Anguelov, College of Arts and Science, UMass Dartmouth.  Professor Anguelov is known to many of my readers and former students as the author of the 2015 book, The Dirty Side of the Garment Industry: Fast Fashion and Its Negative Impact on Environment and Society (CRC Press) (Amazon).  I have heard him speak many times to awestruck and sometimes squirming audiences about the connection between their affordable clothing and Bangladesh waterways poisoned with dye and arsenic.  Anguelov is more recently author of From Criminalizing to Decriminalizing Marijuana: The Politics of Social Control (Lexington Books 2018) (Amazon).  Anguelov is now fine-tuning his formidable research into marijuana use.  His early data invite the conclusion that legalization—which I as a libertarian have favored—might be contributing to the opioid epidemic at least by “contributing to the cultural normalization of drug use and experimentation.”  Ruh-roh, Shaggy.  This is going to require further research, and I’m anticipatorily squirming in my H&Ms.

Recovery Coaches in Opioid Use Disorder Care, Matthew Maughan, UMass Medical.  When opioid addiction turns to recovery, attorney Matthew Maughan is the policy guru to turn to.  Informed by his multifaceted experience and research, he explained the role and peculiar success of the “recovery coach.”  It might be awkwardly unorthodox in terms of developing a large-scale model, but sometimes a block grant for an activity tailored to a person’s specific needs offers the best hope for recovery and might as well be cost effective.  Maughan recounted the story of a recovery accomplished through mental clarity achieved on the water on a kayak, under the guidance of a recovery coach.  That’s got to cost less than any bill I’ve ever gotten from a medical clinic.

Locating Cannabis Equity: Defining Areas Impacted by Drug Criminalization, Michael Johnson, Professor and Chair, McCormack Graduate School, UMass Boston, and Jeffrey Moyer, doctoral candidate in public policy, UMass Boston.  Moyer is working with Professor Johnson to study the intersection of enforcement and anti-discrimination.  Specifically, he asks whether the Massachusetts “Cannabis Control Commission’s use of a race-neutral variable is effective in selecting areas disproportionately impacted by criminalization.”  Part of the work has entailed mapping all drug arrests, which generates some compelling graphics when overlaid with demographic data.  I am reminded of being a journalism intern at WJZ-TV in Baltimore in the early 1990s, when we made an analog map—this was when we were still working on DOS-based computers—literally putting color pushpins in a map of Baltimore to look at the coincidence of murders with factual and demographic elements.  That was a time when we were first talking about the problem of race and policing “where the crime is.”  We also walked five miles to school, uphill both ways.

Moyer shows analysis of geographic data on police enforcement, obtained in part through a public record request.

To Plea or Not to Plea: A Virtual Simulation of Plea-Bargain Scenarios, Miko M. Wilford, Psychology Department, UMass Lowell; Annabelle Frazier, doctoral candidate in applied psychology, UMass Lowell; Kelly Sutherland, doctoral candidate in applied psychology and prevention science, UMass Lowell.  With doctoral candidates on a new applied psychology track at UMass Lowell, Professor Wilford is taking a behavioral look at plea bargaining, that irksome feature of the criminal justice system that we don’t like to talk about, even while we know it results in some guilty pleas calculated to avert draconian outcomes (my take).  Really they’re looking at the research of plea bargain research, trying to refine how we learn about people's decision-making processes in these high-stakes circumstances.  Perhaps no surprise once you think about it, it is difficult to simulate having so much at stake with volunteers in psychology-lab experiments.  The team is working on new, high-tech models using animations to engender empathy and generate better results.  See more at the project website, Pleajustice.org.

Personal Rights at the Borders

Panel 4—Moderator: Misty Peltz-Steele, UMass Law

Controlling Asylum: A Genealogical Analysis of Gender and Race Intersectionality, Phil Kretsedemas, College of Liberal Arts, UMass Boston.  Professor Kretsedemas is studying the status of domestic violence survivors and Latin American asylum seekers relative to Matter of A-B, an AG-Sessions opinion “that dramatically curtails asylum protections for survivors of domestic violence, and for many other people who have been persecuted by non-state actors.”  A U.S. District Court has lately pushed back on Sessions’s conclusions, Kretsedemas said, as he investigates the problem from critical dimensions of gender and racial equality.  Kretsedemas’s approach is further informed by comparative law, as he draws on parallel legal perspectives from foreign tribunals, including the U.K. House of Lords, and from parallel cultural perspectives, such as Guatemalan views on gender roles within families.  Present policies, focusing for example unduly on familial cohesion, have gravely injurious impact, for example failing to protect women from female genital mutilation.  Kretsedemas locates these policies in a context that includes family separation, though the latter issue has garnered greater public attention.

Troubling Bodies: The Office of Refugee Resettlement and the Unaccompanied Pregnant Teen, Shoshanna Ehrlich, College of Liberal Arts, UMass Boston.  Also examining a perhaps under-recognized issue within our vast immigration policy debate, Professor Ehrlich is studying the federal government’s “literal refusal to release [young women] from . . . custody so they may access abortion care,” plainly violating their civil rights, Ehrlich asserts.  Even the U.S. Government waived argument in the courts as to whether the teens involved here enjoy U.S. constitutional rights.  Yet in government memos discovered in ACLU litigation, Ehrlich shared in her presentation, Scott Lloyd, director of the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR), opined that abortions desired even by teens impregnated by rape are not in the young women’s best interests.  Lloyd was removed from his post and “transferred to HHS’s Center for Faith and Opportunity Initiatives,” Rolling Stone reported in November 2018.  He was later summoned to testify in Congress about family separations, Politico reported in February 2019.  Ehrlich told of interviewing parents the government separated from their children, and the trauma that resulted, wondering how the government could at the same time justify refusing abortions on the rationale that mothers should not be separated from their unborn children, despite their personal circumstances and decisions.