Professor Dobris Cited in Forbes
Research by Professor Emeritus Joel Dobris is cited in a Forbes magazine article on "affluenza," a kind of extreme consumerism that figured in the defense of a Texas teen who pled guilty to charges of intoxicated manslaughter in an automobile crash that left four fatalities. The Forbes article quotes Dobris along with Senator Elizabeth Warren, economist Robert Frank, and others in seeking to define the term.
Dobris, in an article published in the Cleveland State Law Review in 2000, defined affluenza as "a ‘disease' that strikes when the earned millions of middle-class parents turn good bourgeois children into wastrels." The passage was quoted by Forbes and also the TaxProf Blog.
Joel C. Dobris is a Professor of Law Emeritus with UC Davis School of Law whose special interests include property, trusts and estates, estate planning, and trust and nonprofit investing.