Todos los capítulos de Mistaken Alliances : Capítulo 181 - Capítulo 190

The fiftieth anniversary of Carter Group arrived in October.Killian had been planning for eight months and the result was exactly what he had said it would be. Meaningful rather than spectacular. Though the two were not always as different as he had suggested, because this particular meaningful thing turned out to be quite large.He had spent the eight months gathering people.Not the investors and board members and financial press that attended the shareholder events. The other people. The people who had been connected to the company's work at every stage of its history.The early employees, the people who had been with the company in its first decade, three of whom were still alive and two of whom could travel.The foundation partners. Jonas and the program coordinators and the advocacy organization staff who had worked alongside the social investment arm.The families from the access programs. Not individually, but through representatives from the advocacy organizations who could

February and the research front produced an unexpected alliance.Marcus Williams had come to New York for the spring semester as a visiting researcher at Columbia through a program the law school ran for promising first-year students from other institutions. He had a desk on the fourth floor. He was twenty-three years old and he worked with a focused intensity that reminded me of Clara at the same age.He and Rosa worked side by side three days a week.Rosa was twenty years old. Marcus was twenty-three. They had different temperaments. Rosa was precise and architectural in her thinking, building from the foundation outward. Marcus was intuitive and associative, finding connections between things that did not appear connected until he named them.Together they were producing the family court retroactivity argument at a pace that surprised both Priya and Josephine.On a Thursday afternoon in February I was in my office reviewing the latest draft of their joint section when I heard rais

Fall and the ninth paper was submitted.Rosa and Marcus Williams.Rosa's name first because she had started the argument and held it throughout and the family court retroactivity argument was hers in the foundational sense.Marcus's name second because he had found the insight that made the argument possible and had built the ongoing harm section that was the paper's constitutional spine.Sixty-one pages.The family court retroactivity argument. Whether adults who had been in family court proceedings as children, without independent constitutional representation, had standing to seek redress for the ongoing harm of the inadequate proceeding.The two-theory approach. The ongoing consequences theory as primary. The continuous person theory as secondary.Both pathways to the same destination.Submitted to the Michigan Law Review.Accepted in four weeks.Rosa called me when the acceptance came.She said, "Michigan."I said, "The ninth paper."She said, "Marcus Williams."I said, "Yes."Sh

January and the new year opened with something from a direction nobody had been watching.A message arrived at the Columbia research team from a law student in Seoul.Her name was Ji-Young Park. She was a third-year student at Seoul National University Law School. She had been reading the access framework papers since her first year. She wrote in precise English that she had been developing an argument about whether the adequacy standard could be applied through South Korea's constitutional framework, specifically through the right to trial and the principle of substantive due process in the Korean Constitution.She had a thirty-page preliminary analysis.She asked whether anyone on the research team would read it.Priya forwarded it to me with a note that said: The pattern continues.I read it.Ji-Young Park had done something I had not seen before.She had mapped the access framework's constitutional logic onto a non-common-law constitutional system. The Korean Constitution operate

The call from Mississippi came on a Wednesday morning in October and it changed the shape of the year.Marcus Williams called Rosa first.Rosa called me second.She said: "There is a case."I said: "Tell me."She said: "A woman named Dorothea Simms. I'm fifty-four years old. Jackson, Mississippi. She was in a family court proceeding at age eleven. Placement dispute. Her parents were separating and the proceeding determined who she lived with and where she went to school and what happened to the first four years of her adolescence."I sat with this."How long ago?" I said."Forty-three years," she said."The ongoing harm," I said."The placement that was decided in that proceeding put her with her father in a rural county with no access to the educational resources she had in the city," she said. "She has documentation of what she lost. The school transfer records. The test score drop. The college application that was not submitted because the rural school did not have a guidance couns