Law Commons^™

Multiple Foster Care Placements Should Be Considered A Mitigating Factor In Criminal Proceedings, Daniel Pollack, Khaya Novick Eisenberg Dr., Amanda Dolce Esq.

Ohio Northern University Law Review

No abstract provided.

Criminal Law As Family Law, Andrea L. Dennis

Georgia State University Law Review

The criminal justice system has morphed dramatically over the last several decades, achieving more pervasive control over the lives of individuals than ever before. The expansion began with the proliferation of criminal statutes, generating the now well-known concept of over-criminalization. The expansion also encompassed increasing the range of possible sanctions for criminal misbehavior and creating overlapping enforcement regimes. Two more instances of criminal justice expansion include mass surveillance and policies and practices that swept youth out of the juvenile justice system and into the criminal justice system. A product of the expansion has been mass incarceration; more individuals than at …

Criminal Law As Family Law, Andrea L. Dennis

Scholarly Works

The criminal justice system has expanded dramatically over the last several decades, extending its reach into family life. This expansion has disproportionately and negatively impacted Black communities and social networks, including Black families. Despite these pervasive shifts, legal scholars have virtually ignored the intersection of criminal, family, and racial justice. This Article explores the gap in literature in two respects. First, the Article weaves together criminal law, family law, and racial justice by cataloging ways in which the modern criminal justice state regulates family life, particularly for Black families. Second, the Article examines the depth of criminal justice interference in …

Faultless Guilt: Toward A Relationship Based View Of Criminal Liability, Amy Sepinwall

Amy J. Sepinwall

No Money, No Lawyer — No Children: The Right To Counsel For Indigent Defendants In Nevada Termination Of Parental Rights Proceedings, Erik J. Foley

Nevada Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Sex And The Shari’A: Defining Gender Norms And Sexual Deviancy In Shi’I Islam, Haider Ala Hamoudi

Articles

This paper demonstrates that modern authoritative jurists working within the Shi’i tradition have developed their rules respecting sex regulation to serve three primary commitments. The first of these is that there is an intense and near debilitating desire on the part of human beings generally, though mostly men, for a great deal of sex. This desire must be satisfied, but it also must be tightly controlled. This is because of the second commitment, which is that excessive licentiousness is a form of secular distraction from a believer’s central obligation to worship God. Finally, and perhaps the most interesting, is the …

Constrained Choice: Mothers, The State, And Domestic Violence, Rona Kaufman Kitchen

Rona Kaufman Kitchen

Mothers who are the victims of domestic violence face unique challenges in their quest for safety. The legal response to domestic violence requires that mothers respond to abuse in specific state-sanctioned manners. However, when mothers respond accordingly, such as by reporting abuse and leaving the abusive relationship, their safety and the safety of their children is not guaranteed. Moreover, by responding in state-sanctioned manners, mothers risk a host of negative consequences including increased threat to their immediate and long-term safety, the loss of their children, undesired financial, health, and social consequences, and criminal prosecution. On the other hand, when mothers …

Holistic Pregnancy: Rejecting The Theory Of The Adversarial Mother, Rona Kaufman Kitchen

Rona Kaufman Kitchen

In its zealous effort to protect the lives and health of unborn children, the law frequently views the expecting mother with suspicion. In its most extreme form, the law regards the potential mother as a potential murderess. This perspective does not reflect the nature of pregnancy, it undermines the autonomy of loving mothers, and it is detrimental to children. Regardless of whether there is any conflict between mother and fetus, the State presumes the mother to be a threat to her fetus and subjugates her rights as a result. The State interferes with the mother’s autonomy, bodily integrity, parental rights, …

Family Court, Queens County, In The Matter Of Joseph G., Annette Thompson

Touro Law Review

No abstract provided.

When Women Kill Newborns: The Rhetoric Of Vulnerability, Susan Ayres

Faculty Scholarship

This chapter explores feminist jurisprudence regarding women who commit acts of violence, focusing specifically on questions of agency in neonaticide (killing a newborn). A case study approach illustrates the debate in feminist theory between same-treatment and different-treatment of women as compared to men. While some feminist criminologists urge that women who kill must be viewed the same as men (as having agency and responsibility), other feminists question this approach and point out that women who commit crimes that intersect with family law receive disproportionately harsh treatment and should be treated differently than men.

This chapter contends that the paradox raised …

Re-Problematizing Anger In Domestic Violence Advocacy, Deborah Cantrell

Publications

Feminist advocacy commits wholeheartedly to a woman’s autonomous choices about how to respond to domestic violence, prioritizing a woman’s own lived experiences and her own assessments of her needs and goals over other supposedly “objective” assessments. Feminists robustly privilege individual choices of women in part as a way of revealing anti-woman bias in the dominant, patriarchal legal system as well to reject male constructions of feminine behavior. In feminist domestic violence advocacy, scholars and advocates have argued that a woman’s autonomous choices include capacious choices about the kinds of emotions that a woman might express about being subjected to abuse. …

Prison, Foster Care, And The Systemic Punishment Of Black Mothers, Dorothy E. Roberts

All Faculty Scholarship

This article is part of a UCLA Law Review symposium, “Overpoliced and Underprotected: Women, Race, and Criminalization.” It analyzes how the U.S. prison and foster care systems work together to punish black mothers in a way that helps to preserve race, gender, and class inequalities in a neoliberal age. The intersection of these systems is only one example of many forms of overpolicing that overlap and converge in the lives of poor women of color. I examine the statistical overlap between the prison and foster care populations, the simultaneous explosion of both systems in recent decades, the injuries that each …

Beyond Family Law, Sarah Abramowicz

Law Faculty Research Publications

Family law has traditionally been treated as an exceptional field, a marginalized and special case in which the usual rules of the legal canon do not apply. This Article argues that the current challenge to family-law exceptionalism has been largely one way, to the detriment of a central concern of family law: the protection of children and of the parent-child relationship. Family-law scholars have focused primarily on whether and how to import the tools and insights of other areas of law into the zone of family relations, while largely overlooking the possibility that the tools and insights of family law …

Stop The Killing: Potential Courtroom Use Of A Questionnaire That Predicts The Likelihood That A Victim Of Intimate Partner Violence Will Be Murdered By Her Partner, Amanda Hitt, Lynn Mclain

All Faculty Scholarship

Judges in domestic cases often underestimate the risk to a mother and her children that an angry and abusive father or other intimate partner poses. In a recent Maryland case, for example, two judges refused to deny a father visitation or require that visitation be supervised, despite the fact that the father had threatened suicide. During the father’s unsupervised visitation, he drowned all three of his children, then attempted to kill himself.

The Danger Assessment tool (the D.A.) developed by a Johns Hopkins Nursing professor and validated by herself and other social scientists shows how much the father’s thoughts of …

Voluntarism, Vulnerability, And Criminal Law: A Response To Professors Hills And O'Hear , Ethan J. Leib, Dan Markel, Jennifer M. Collins

Faculty Scholarship

This Response addresses the criticisms of our project by Professors Rick Hills and Michael O'Hear. Before we address those challenges, we first want to reiterate our gratitude to the B.U. Law Review for hosting an exchange based on our article, Punishing Family Status (forthcoming BU LR, December 2008), and to Professors Hills and O'Hear for their careful and subtle analysis of that article. Additionally, it's worth recapitulating what our bottom-line conclusions are so we can better see if there are any practical disagreements with our critics. Summarizing quickly: we support decriminalization in the cases of parental responsibility laws (based on …

Punishing Family Status, Jennifer M. Collins, Ethan J. Leib

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

This Article focuses upon two basic but under-explored questions: when does, and when should, the state use the criminal justice apparatus to burden individuals on account of their familial status? We address the first question in Part I by revealing a variety of laws permeating the criminal justice system that together form a string of family ties burdens, laws that impose punishment upon individuals on account of their familial status. The seven burdens we train our attention upon are omissions liability for failure to rescue, parental responsibility laws, incest, bigamy, adultery, nonpayment of child support, and nonpayment of parental support. …

Punishing Family Status , Jennifer M. Collins, Ethan J. Leib, Dan Markel

Faculty Scholarship

This Article focuses upon two basic but under-explored questions: when does, and when should, the state use the criminal justice apparatus to burden individuals on account of their familial status? We address the first question in Part I by revealing a variety of laws permeating the criminal justice system that together form a string of family ties burdens, laws that impose punishment upon individuals on account of their familial status. The seven burdens we train our attention upon are omissions liability for failure to rescue, parental responsibility laws, incest, bigamy, adultery, nonpayment of child support, and nonpayment of parental support. …

Introduction: The Challenge Of Lionel Tate, Elizabeth S. Scott, Laurence Steinberg

Faculty Scholarship

Legal reforms over the past generation have transformed juvenile crime regulation from a system that viewed most youth crime as the product of immaturity into one that is ready to hold many youths to the standard of accountability imposed on adults. Supporters of these reforms argue that they are simply a response to the inability of the traditional juvenile court to deal adequately with violent youth crime, but the legal changes that have transformed the system have often been undertaken in an atmosphere of moral panic, with little deliberation about consequences and costs.

In this book we argue that a …

Pro Se Litigation: Best Practices From A Judge's Perspective, Hon. Beverly W. Snukals, Glen H. Sturtevant Jr.

University of Richmond Law Review

No abstract provided.

Domestic Terror (The Sniper Suspect's Divorce Records Show Patterns Of Power And Control And Missed Opportunities By The System To Intervene.), Jane C. Murphy

All Faculty Scholarship

Over the past few months, we have learned much about the violent, troubled life of sniper suspect John Allen Muhammad. Whether or not he pulled the trigger - some recent reports have pointed to his 17-year-old companion Lee Boyd Malvo as the main shooter - there is no doubt in the minds of domestic-violence experts that this adult is responsible for these deaths.

While many pundits conclude that we will never know what motivated the sniper suspect, to domestic violence experts his is an all-too-familiar story of a man whose relationships with the women and children - possibly including Malvo …

Dealing With Complex Evidence Of Domestic Violence: A Primer For The Civil Bench, Jane C. Murphy, Jane H. Aiken

All Faculty Scholarship

New laws and policies aimed at protecting victims of domestic violence have been adopted across the country throughout the last twenty years. The legal approaches taken to protect battered women and control family violence have brought about significant changes in family law. New laws include statutes permitting civil protection or restraining orders, and laws requiring that domestic violence be considered in custody and visitation decisions. Both of these types of statutory reforms can provide protection to adult victims of domestic violence and their children. Evaluating a parent’s fitness by considering past acts of violence to other family members results in …

Comparativist Ruminations From The Bayou On Child Custody Jurisdiction: The Uccja, The Pkpa, And The Hague Convention On Child Abduction, Christopher L. Blakesley

Scholarly Works

Interstate and international jurisdictional problems are often vexing. They are worse in matters of child custody. In the past, jurisdiction to obtain custody or to modify a custody decree required only presence or domicile. The United States population is transient and custody decisions are subject to modification. The volatility of child custody disputes and the tendency of parents to move to different and separate jurisdictions traditionally caused and continue to cause difficult problems for children, parents, and the legal system. Before the promulgation of the Uniform Child Custody Jurisdiction Act (UCCJA) and the Parental Kidnapping Prevention Act (PKPA), it was …

Due Process Rights Of Parents And Children In International Child Abductions, Dorothy C. Daigle

Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law

Rising divorce rates in recent years have led to increasingly frequent abductions of children by one parent away from the other parent. Often, abducting parents move the children to different jurisdictions in which the parents believe they can obtain a more favorable decision on custody. To remedy this problem, twenty-nine nations joined in 1980 to adopt the Hague Convention on the Civil Aspects of International Child Abduction. This Convention mandates the immediate return, upon request, of the abducted child to the state of habitual residence of the child. The Convention includes several limited exceptions to this mandate, applicable at the …

Why Civil Protection Orders Are Effective Remedies For Domestic Violence But Mutual Protective Orders Are Not, Elizabeth Topliffe

Indiana Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Case Digest, Journal Staff

Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law

The purpose of the Case Digest is to identify and summarize for the reader those cases that have less significance than those which merit an in-depth analysis. Included in the digest are cases that apply established legal principles without necessarily introducing new ones. This initial digest includes cases reported from January through September,1971. Henceforth, the Winter issue will include cases reported from April through September, and the Spring issue will contain cases reported from October through March. The cases are grouped into topical categories, and references are given for further research. It is hoped that attorneys, judges, teachers and students …

Abstracts Of Recent Cases, T. E. P.

West Virginia Law Review

No abstract provided.