Day: January 23, 2002

Supreme Court Declines to Consider Odd Child Support Case

On January 7, 2002, the Supreme Court refused to hear the appeal of Morgan Wise who was ordered by a Texas court to pay child support even though DNA tests confirm he cannot possibly be the father of the boy named in the support order.

Wise’s case started in 1999 when his youngest son, Rauli, was diagnosed with cystic fibrosis. Cystic fibrosis is a genetic disease that can occur when both father and mother carry a defective gene. Genetic testing showed, however, that Wise was not a carrier of that gene.

Further paternity tests showed that Wise was the biological father of only one of the four children born during his marriage to Wanda Fryar. The two divorced in 1996.

But as far as family courts in Texas were concerned, the paternity tests were completely irrelevant. Under common law that dates back hundreds of years, all children born within a marriage are presumed to be biologically related to the father, end of story. This may have made a lot of sense when it was literally impossible to prove paternity, but those days are long since past.

States vary widely on when paternity can be disputed. In some states, disputing paternity must be done within the first few years after a child is born. Other states have laws allowing fathers to introduce genetic evidence at any time to avoid paying child support for children whom they are not biologically related.

Jeffery Leving of the Fatherhood Education Institute argues that the Wise’s case represents a sexist approach to the obligations of parenthood. Leving writes,

What would happen if we applied the same twisted logic to a woman married to a man who fathered a child from an extramarital affair? Would we proclaim that because she was married to her husband, she is the legal mother of the child born of the affair and force her to financially support another woman’s child? We would do no such thing, yet there are men who are court ordered to pay in the analogous situation.

Leving notes that Ohio, Colorado, Iowa and Louisiana all have laws which allow men to be released from child support requirements if DNA testing proves they are not the biological father of the children named in support awards. Leving argues that the mothers in these cases should pursue the legitimate fathers of the children for child support, which certainly seems to make a lot more sense than forcing deceived fathers to continue to pay child support.

Sources:

In genetic testing for paternity, law often lags behind science. Tamar Lewin, The New York Times, March 11, 2001.

U.S. Supreme Court decision ignores men’s rights. Jeffery Leving, Fatherhood Educational Institute, January 15, 2002.

Best Comment Yet on Guantanoma Controversy

…comes from Globe and Mail columnist Margaret Wente who writes:

I had a nightmare that I was flying on an airplane with both a terrorist and Liberal MP John Godfrey. The terrorist tried to ignite the fuse in his shoe bomb and blow the plane to smithereens. As the other passengers jumped all over him and strapped him down with belts and ties, Mr. Godfrey leaped to his feet and started shouting, “Remember the Geneva Convention!”

Robert Nozick Dead at 63

Philosopher Robert Nozick died this morning at the age of 63. An obituary at Harvard University’s Gazette notes that Nozic was one of the most influential philosophers of the late 20th century.

Among other things, Nozick was almost singlehandedly responsible for the rise in academic interest in libertarian-oriented philosophies with his 1974 book, Anarchary, State and Utopia which was a devestating critique of John Rawls’ Theory of Justice. And he didn’t stop there. As the Harvard Gazette puts it,

In “Philosophical Explanations,” Nozick took on subjects that many academic philosophers had dismissed as irrelevant or meaningless, such as free will versus determinism and the nature of subjective experience, and why there is something rather than nothing. In dealing with these questions, he rejected the idea of strict philosophical proof, adopting instead a notion of philosophical pluralism.

A truly original thinker who will be missed.

What Was Australian Welfare Agency Sniffing?

A government-funded agency in Australia was allowing children to sniff paint and glue fumes under supervision by welfare workers. Workers at Berry Street Victoria — an Australian welfare organization that was started in the late 19th century — watched children as young as 12 years old sniff fumes in order to get high.

The organization receives about $15 million in funding from Victoria’s Department of Human Services, and even the organization was threatened with a withdrawal of that funding, Berry Street Victoria chief Sandie de Wolf had said that “a small number of kids will still be able to use them [paint/glue] in our back yards,” though she has since backed off and banned supervised inhalant session at all of the organization’s children’s homes in Victoria.

De Wolf had argued that the purpose of the supervised sniffing was to keep young people safe while they sought to find a way out of their drug addiction. The Australian Herald Sun quoted Les Twentyman of Open Family, an Australian organization that seeks to help children, as being outraged at the revelations. Twentyman told the Herald Sun,

I’ve done some pretty controversial things in my time, but even I would go so far as to say that we should not be watching kids sniff this stuff. Harm minimization is something I’ve always been an advocate for, but in this case we’re talking about young kids.

Twentyman predicted that eventually the kids involved would probably sue the government over the supervised sniffing. “I think I can predict with some confidence that we’ll be seeing a class action from these damaged children in a few years,” Twentyman said.

You have to wonder what the welfare agency was sniffing when they adopted such an absurd policy.

Source:

Backdown on sniffing rooms. Nikki Protyniak, Herald Sun (Australia), January 23, 2002.

Enron and Derivatives: Regulation Is the Problem, Not the Solution

Andrew Hofer offers a persuasive argument that less, not more, regulation would be a better solution to prevent future debacles like that of Enron.

Politicians tend to think that regulations fix problems, but as Hofer argues, the reality is that proscriptive regulations tend to create a market for even more complex derivatives (which can become a cycle, as we see in the tax code, with complex rules leading to complex tax shelters, leading to ever more complex tax rules and even more complex tax shelters). Hofer writes,

If you haven’t figured it out yet, regulation is often the derivative salesman’s best friend. Complicated rules encourage complex transactions that seek to conceal their true nature. Regulatory rules on investment quality have always had this perversely symbiotic relationship with Wall Street. And the same can be said for the ridiculously complicated federal taxation rules and increasingly byzantine Financial Accounting Standards, both of which have inspired massive derivative activity as the engineers find their way around the code maze.

The solution, though, is relatively straightforward — replace regulation designed to dictate a firm’s behavior with regulation designed to force firms to disclose, disclose, and disclose some more. “If Enron had to disclose the books of its many affiliates,” Hofer writes, “they never would have entered into all of these accounting-driven transactions.”

Hofer’s article goes into a lot more detail, especially about some of the shenanigans in the insurance industry caused by excessive regulation.

Source:

Derivatives and Regulation. Andrew Hofer, January 22, 2002, MoreThanZeroSum.Com.

Court Upholds Right-to-Work Laws on Reservations

This month the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit ruled 9-1 that Native American reservations can pass right-to-work laws.

Several years ago the Western Council of Industrial Workers Local 1385 filed unfair labor practices against the Pueblo of San Juan after it passed a right-to-work law. The National Labor Relations Board sued the Native American reservation but lost in trial court, in its first appeal, and now on its second appeal.

Right-to-work laws make it illegal to compel people to join a union in order to gain employment. The Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals in this case ruled that, “The legislative enactment of the Pueblo’s right-to-work ordinance was also clearly an exercise of sovereign authority over economic transactions on the reservation.”

Source:

U.S. appellate court upholds right of Indian reservations to ban forced unionism. National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation, Press Release, January 15, 2002.