Social Workers and the Fourth Amendment

It should come as no surprise that social workers and other child welfare workers are covered by the Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution. What might be surprising is that the most conservative federal district courts are taking the lead in defining this new and rapidly evolving constitutional mandate, most notably the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals (covering Wyoming, Utah, Colorado, New Mexico, Oklahoma and Kansas). Applicable to the states through the Fourteenth Amendment's Due Process Clause, the Fourth Amendment provides: "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable ...

Protections for Foster Children Enrolled in Clinical Trials

The following testimony was presented to the House Committee on Ways and Means Subcommittee on Human Resources on Wednesday, May 18, 2005 at a hearing on Protections for Foster Children Enrolled in Clinical Trials. Alan Fleischman, M.D., Senior Advisor, The New York Academy of Medicine, New York, New York Roberta Harris, Deputy Secretary, Wisconsin Department of Health and Family Services, Madison, Wisconsin Marjorie Speers, Ph.D., Executive Director, Association for the Accreditation of Human Research Protection Programs, Inc. Moira Szilagyi, M.D., Ph.D., Fellow of the American Academy of Pediatrics, on behalf of the American Academy of Pediat...

Federal Regulation of International Adoption

Introduction It has been over ten years since the United States signed the Hague Convention on Intercountry Adoption. It has been nearly seven years since the White House transmitted the treaty to the Senate for ratification. It has been four years since the Senate ratified the treaty and President Clinton signed the enabling legislation, the Intercountry Adoption Act (IAA) into law. It has been over three years since the State Department held a series of public meetings to elicit information to inform the process of writing implementing regulations. International adoption has been a widely accepted practice in the United States for over fifty ...

Foster Care Meets the Third Reich

Over one year ago, the Alliance for Human Research Protection in New York City alerted the federal Food and Drug Administration that they had “reason to believe that federal regulations for the protection of children as research subjects have been seriously violated in federally funded HIV research.” Kudos also to Liam Scheff who in December 2003 broke the story of the drug trials in an online article entitled “The House That AIDS Built”. AHRP’s letter to the FDA states that “a series of Phase I and Phase II drug experiments were conducted on infants and children who were under the guardianship of the New York ...

Intercountry adoption: Who are the good guys?

The January 5, 2005 CNN headline read, “Trafficking a threat to tsunami orphans.” Within days after the tsunami hit, Indonesia had begun putting into place policies which prohibited any child under age 16 from leaving the country. Why? The Indonesian Embassy’s press secretary in Washington explained that “"the government would like to protect the children from potential traffickers.” It had cause for concern – estimates of children trafficked each year range from a half a million to four million. Is this concern sufficient to interfere with legitimate intercountry adoption? Indeed, is intercountry adoption an act of unparalleled ...

Social Work and the Courts

This book will give social workers a good introduction to the law as it affects the practice of social work and social work in general. The book is well designed for use by non-lawyers because its chapters are organized by subject matter rather than by legal principles. Therefore, for example, the reader can quickly go to those cases dealing with aging or income maintenance. Other parts of the book are helpful to social workers interested in learning more about the laws and legal decisions that affect their profession. There is a brief section that explains 'how to use this book' that will enable the nonlawyer reader to engage in additional reading. ...

When a Child Safety Plan = Coercion

The recent trend in child protective services (CPS) of creating safety plans received a set back recently in federal court. Judge Rebecca R. Pallmeyer of the United States District Court, Northern District of Illinois ruled that in-home safety plans created by the Illinois Department of Children and Families (DCFS) were illegal because they were secured in a coercive manner. The coercion at issue was the CPS worker's express or implied threat of to take the child into protective custody lasting more than a brief or temporary period of time. The court also ruled that DCFS failure to provide a mechanism to review safety plans once they were put in ...

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