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Vanderbilt Law Review

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Family

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Federal Visions Of Private Family Support, Laura A. Rosenbury Nov 2014

Federal Visions Of Private Family Support, Laura A. Rosenbury

Vanderbilt Law Review

The individual states have long played a primary role in defining the legal family in the United States, with states often determining who does and does not enjoy the legal status of spouse, parent, and child. Two recent U.S. Supreme Court cases, Astrue v. Capatol and United States v. Windsor,2 acknowledged and affirmed the diverse definitions of family that flow from this federalist approach. Yet these cases do not solidify the states' place in defining family for purposes of marriage, parentage, divorce, and death. Instead, they foreshadow an increasingly federal conception of family status-a conception that values private family support …


The Law Of Adoption: Ancient And Modern, Leo A. Huard Jun 1956

The Law Of Adoption: Ancient And Modern, Leo A. Huard

Vanderbilt Law Review

Sir Henry Maine tells us that adoption is one of the oldest and most widely employed of legal fictions. Without it, he asserts, society would scarcely have escaped its swaddling clothes. It commanded the approval of the greater number of archaic societies and has proven to be the most perdurable of all artificial relationships designed to prolong the continuity of family existence.

The family is the basic group of most primitive societies. Those who were related by blood naturally gravitated to each other to form this first ring of society's organization. In the same way successively higher organizational units were …