Your Children’s Ultimate Weapon: Suing You for Emotional Distress?

In what surely must be one of those “truth is stranger than fiction” stories comes the news that two siblings, one 20 and one 23, sued their mother for intentional infliction of emotional distress from “bad mothering.”

In 2009, Steven Miner II and his sister Kathryn Miner sued their mother, Kimberly Garrity, for emotional distress due to her alleged bad parenting and requested $50,000 in damages.

Although the Miner children grew up in Barrington Hills, Illinois, in a $1.5 million home, they apparently felt deprived of a proper mother. 

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Learning to Learn the Law: Becoming Legal Readers

Ah, the start of another academic year.  Each fall brings a new group of incoming law students, eager to embark on the adventure called law school.  But what is it we actually do here in law school?

Professors Tracey E. George and Suzanna Sherry from Vanderbilt Law School have said that law school has three purposes:  1) to teach basic legal doctrine; 2) to help students learn how to use that doctrine; and 3) to teach students how to teach themselves the law. 

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The Constitutional Equality of Women

For young women coming of age today, their equality with men seems assured.  As youngsters they’ve played on co-ed sports teams; they’ve often been more successful than boys in school; they’ve pursued careers in previously male-dominated fields like math and science, medicine and law.  For them, women have always been able to vote, abortion has always been legal, and women have reached high places in politics.  Many probably have mothers (and fathers) who came of age during and after the second wave of feminism, believing they would raise their daughters to believe in their capacity to be equal citizens.

It might surprise some women, then, to learn that women’s equality is not guaranteed, at least not constitutionally.

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