Handling Lost/Destroyed Records in Child Welfare Tort Litigation

A recently published article in the American Bar Association's Child Law Practice examines the potential effects of failing to preserve or produce evidence in the child welfare context. Best practices are offered from three perspectives—the plaintiff, the defending agency, and the court. Litigation involving public and private social services agencies should make administrators and attorneys keenly aware of the obligation to preserve evidence. Across the country, torts regarding individual children in the child welfare system are common. Professor Daniel Pollack and his co-author Associate Professor Dale Margolin explain that while lost records ...

How To Screen Adoptive and Foster Parents

Screening potential adoptive and foster parents is an extremely difficult task, yet many social workers who screen applicants and supervise placements have no written guide to aid in their decision making or to measure competency of technique. How To Screen Adoptive and Foster Parents: A Workbook for Professionals and Students serves as a comprehensive guide for social workers to draw on when making decisions for foster care/adoption placement. Based on case histories, research data, and interpretive analysis, this workbook teaches specific interview skills and analytical decision-making techniques necessary to competently evaluate each unique ...

Child Elopement from Foster Care and Residential Settings

The National Runaway Switchboard reports that between 1.6 and 2.8 million youth run away each year. It also reports that there has been “a significant increase in the number of crisis calls identifying abuse or neglect as a reason for the call, with abuse calls up 33 percent and neglect calls up 54 percent between 2005-2008" (National Runaway Switchboard Crisis Caller Trends, 2009, p. 2). Youth in out-of-home care often choose conduct that does not ensure their own safety. They elope from foster homes, group homes, or other residential settings at an unknown rate. When children are known risks for eloping a court may find that is the legal duty ...

Wrongful Death of Children in Foster Care

The first law review article on the topic of wrongful death of children in foster care has just been published. It is co-authored by Daniel Pollack, Professor at the School of Social Work at Yeshiva University in New York City and a frequent expert witness in child welfare lawsuits, and Gary Popham, Jr., an attorney in Arizona. For a PDF of the article please contact Professor Pollack. For more articles on ChildLaw by Professor Pollack click here.

Legal Immunity for CPS Workers who Lie?

The critics and plaintiffs’ attorneys are out there. They seethe with frustration in their assertion that there are child protection workers who are as dysfunctional and flawed as some of the abusive and neglectful parents they investigate. They feel mistreated, ambushed, without recourse to a neutral oversight authority, and fume that the courts will believe the word of child protection workers over their clients. And yet, when there is a credible allegation that a child protection worker has knowingly made misleading or false statements which resulted in the wrongful removal of a child, their criticism and anger seem justified. Such misrepres...

When Qualified Immunity Protects Social Workers from Lawsuits

As social work has developed into an increasingly seasoned, mature, and specialized profession, the role of the social worker has also changed. So too is the expectation that social workers will ensure that they are satisfying all legal responsibilities owed to their clients. Although many public sector social work administrators and practitioners are concerned about liability litigation and qualified immunity, no national studies of appellate cases have been published. This study explores when social workers are and are not successful in asserting qualified immunity when sued in civil court under 42 U.S.C. § 1983. 42 U.S.C. § 1983 Generally, ...