ability-to-pay determination under Turner v. Rogers safeguards

The U.S. Supreme Court’s Turner v. Rogers decision plausibly requires the equivalent of a simple, explicit determination of present ability-to-pay in the case of an unrepresented child-support debtor facing incarceration via a civil-contempt order.  Individual jurisdictions that do not provide indigent child-support debtors with counsel must implement such due-process safeguards.  Florida’s statute that sets out the legal determination of civil indigent status provides a good example of how the Turner v. Rogers safeguards could be implemented.

Under Florida Statutes, Section 57.082, a person applying for a state-provided attorney in a civil case is required to file a form that includes basic financial information.  The clerk of the court reviews that form using two simple rules:

  1. An applicant, including an applicant who is a minor or an adult tax-dependent person, is indigent if the applicant’s income is equal to or below 200 percent of the then-current federal poverty guidelines prescribed for the size of the household of the applicant by the United States Department of Health and Human Services.
  2. There is a presumption that the applicant is not indigent if the applicant owns, or has equity in, any intangible or tangible personal property or real property or the expectancy of an interest in any such property having a net equity value of $2,500 or more, excluding the value of the person’s homestead and one vehicle having a net value not exceeding $5,000.

Using these rules, the clerk decides if the applicant is indigent or not indigent.  The Florida statute explicitly requires a simple determination of ability-to-pay:

The duty of the clerk in determining whether an applicant is indigent is limited to receiving the application and comparing the information provided in the application to the criteria prescribed in this subsection. The determination of indigent status is a ministerial act of the clerk and may not be based on further investigation or the exercise of independent judgment by the clerk.

The applicant is allowed to request judicial review of the clerk’s decision if the clerk finds the applicant not indigent.  If the clerk determines that the applicant is indigent, the applicant receives counsel under a monthly payment plan that requires payments of no more than 2% of the applicant’s average monthly income.

The Florida statute provides a model for processing show-cause orders for considering incarcerating unrepresented child-support debtors.  If the child-support debtor does not have counsel, he or she should be given the opportunity to have a Turner ability-to-pay determination. The Turner ability-to-pay determination would follow from the Florida model, with the child-support debt due netted from the applicant’s income.  If the Florida model found the applicant indigent, then the applicant would not be eligible to be incarcerated for child-support debt.

Incarcerating indigent child-support debtors is inhumane, greatly worsens the debtors’ ability to earn income, and has large public costs, financial and social.  Incarcerating child-support debtors without due process safeguards is also illegal.  If the Turner v. Rogers decision is reasonably implemented, it is an important step toward justice under law.

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Read more:

meditation on media

The truth is in the candle.  And the candle still burns, and the media cannot overcome it.

The video above contains pieces from: Olafur Eliasson,  Round Rainbow, at the Hirshhorn Museum; Paul Sharits, Shutter Interface, at the Hirshhorn Museum; and Nam June Paik, One Candle, Candle Projection, at the U.S. National Gallery of Art.

superpages yellow pages shrink 48%

While the yellowbook yellow pages directory maintained its size from 2010 to 2011 editions, the superpages yellow pages directory has shrunk 48% in equivalent listing size from the 2009-2010 Northern Virginia East edition to the 2011-2012 edition.  The number of pages in the later directory fell 25%.  Community magazine, area maps, community interest, and coupons sections that existed in the 2009-2010 edition were eliminated in the 2011-2012 edition.  In addition, the print size of individual listings was made larger.  The page reduction and the increase in print size compounded to produce a reduction of 48% in equivalent listing size.

San Francisco recently passed a law requiring that yellow pages directories be distributed only on an opt-in basis.  Telephone companies have recently succeed in getting white page directories to be distributed on an opt-in basis.  These changes are consistent with lessening material resource use and increasing environmental sustainability.

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Statistics on superpages yellow pages directories 2009-2010 and 2011-2012 for Northern Virginia East edition (Excel version)

fuck communication economics

Recent scholarship on fuck jurisprudence has been downloaded 28,305 times from SSRN. This scholarship ranks fifteenth among SSRN’s all-time most downloaded papers.  That’s an impressive achievement.

As an ambitious spare-time scholar, I thought of this achievement when I heard someone on the metro say, “He has no fucking idea!”  What about fuck communication economics?

Fucking in “no fucking idea” functions semantically as an intensifier.  Fuck is also a common ejaculation: fuck! Fuck and its derivative forms are verbally performed in a variety of positions: verb, noun, adjective, adverb, e.g. “he got fucked over,” “I don’t give a flying fuck,” “she’s a fucking idiot,” “that’s a fucking beautiful dog.”  In communication, fuck has achieved astonishing penetration and has been highly generative.

Fuck’s communication market success occurred despite considerable irregularity. The scholarly literature has analyzed well this irregularity:

[fuck] exhibits syntactic irregularity (e.g., the word’s noncompliance with the English reflexivization rule in allowing the object pronoun you instead of yourself in the common imprecation “Fuck you!” — cf. “Punish yourself!” or “Abuse yourself!” vs. *“Punish you!” or *“Abuse you!”); if one analyzes the common imprecation not as an imperative (with the underlying subject you) but rather as a speech act, the word exhibits pragmatic irregularity (e.g., the word’s inability to co-occur with hereby when used as a speech act verb of condemning or cursing — cf. “I hereby condemn you” and “I hereby curse you” vs *“I hereby fuck you”).[1]

Words that are irregular tend to have shorter communication industry lifetimes.  Fuck, however, has had a long history.  Some etymological evidence indicates that fuck predates the development of the English language.  Fuck appeared in an Italian-English dictionary in 1598.[2]  Many communication goods have come and gone while fuck has endured.

To better grasp fuck’s valued attributes, imagine that the word leeniddle replaced fuck.  If you fully believe that languages are fundamentally arbitrary social constructions, then words have no essential significance, and a leeniddle is as good as a fuck.  In that imagined alternate universe, the person on the metro would have said, “He has no leeniddling idea!”  If you think that’s plausible, you have no fucking common sense of the real world.

The phonological form of fuck supports its use.  The initial f blows air through lips pressed to teeth.  The short, low u echoes dread.  This efficiently monosyllabic word then ends with a harsh, explosive k.  Four-letter words have a characteristic linguistic and sensory form.  Fuck has a superb design for obscenity.

horse's ass

Notes:

[1] Noguchi, Rei R. 1996.  “On the historical longevity of one four-letter word: the interplay of phonology and semantics.” Maledicta 12: 29-43, at. p. 30. The phrases that have a preceding asterisk in the above quote are phrases that a competent English speaker would not normally produce.

[2] Read, Allen Walker.  1934.  “An Obscenity Symbol.” American Speech 9: 264-79, at p. 268.