Law Commons^™

The Dangers Of Disclosure: How Hiv Laws Harm Domestic Violence Survivors, Courtney Cross

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People living with HIV or AIDS must decide whether, how, and when to disclose their positive status. State laws play an outsized role in this highly personal calculus. Partner notification laws require that current and former sexual partners of individuals newly diagnosed with HIV be informed of their potential exposure to the disease. Meanwhile, people who fail to disclose their positive status prior to engaging in sexual acts-even acts that carry low to no risk of infection-can be prosecuted and incarcerated for exposing their partners to HIV. Although both partner notification laws and criminal HIV exposure laws were ostensibly created …

Families Across Borders: When Immigration And Family Law Collide-Minors Crossing Borders, Stewart Chang

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No abstract provided.

Racial Anxieties In Adoption: Reflections On Adoptive Couple, White Parenthood, And Constitutional Challenges To The Icwa, Addie C. Rolnick

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The Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA) is under fire from people who argue that it interferes with adoptions and violates the constitution by doing so. The current crop of lawsuits is an outgrowth of a 2012 case in which the Supreme Court heard its second-ever challenge to the law. While the Court sidestepped the most far-reaching anti-ICWA arguments, the majority opinion evidenced a deep skepticism about the law. This skepticism led the Court to narrow the law’s application so that it didn’t apply to the family involved, and it seemed to invite further challenges to the law.

From Victims To Litigants, Elizabeth L. Macdowell

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This Article reports findings from an ethnographic study of self-help programs in two western states. The study investigated how self-help assistance provided by partnerships between courts and nongovernmental organizations implicates advocacy and access to justice for domestic violence survivors. The primary finding is that self-help programs may inadvertently work to curtail, rather than expand, advocacy resources. Furthermore, problems identified with self-help service delivery and negative impacts on advocacy systems may be explained by the structure of work within self-help programs and the nature of partnerships to provide self-help services. The Author uncovers previously unseen impacts of self-help programs on survivors …

Subsidized Egg Freezing In Employment: Autonomy, Coercion, Or Discrimination?, Ann C. Mcginley

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In 2014, Apple and Facebook announced that they would provide up to $20,000 for female employees to freeze their eggs as an employment benefit. These announcements raised mixed reviews. Some applauded the decision because they believe that egg freezing may offer to women more control over their reproductive choices. Others argued that the new benefit sends the wrong message to women and that encouraging good parenting by giving better parental leave and child care policies would be more beneficial to families. Others were concerned that this “benefit” applies only to professional or managerial-class women, but may not be helpful to …

Is Gay The New Asian?: Marriage Equality And The Dawn Of A New Model Minority, Stewart Chang

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In this Article, Professor Chang analyzes the historic role of family in the politics of exclusion in the United States, evaluates the ways in which the stereotyping of Asian Americans as a model minority has perpetuated these politics, and warns against the possibility of a similar fate for gay and lesbian Americans. As a model minority, Asian Americans have been set as a standard against which other minority groups, particularly African Americans, are measured. Around the same time Asians were being extolled for their hard work and family values, Congress released the Moynihan report on the problem of broken families …

Civil Protection Orders: Increased Access And Narrowed Enforcement, Courtney Cross

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No abstract provided.

Separated At Adoption: Addressing The Challenges Of Maintaining Sibling-Of-Origin Bonds In Post-Adoption Families, Rebecca L. Scharf

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This Article explores the ways children, many of whom are in foster care, are psychologically harmed by the law’s failure to ensure that the bonds they have with their siblings-of-origin are not permanently broken when one of the siblings is adopted; it therefore proposes ways that courts can better protect children from the psychological harm of having a biological sibling permanently removed from their life. It suggests that what is needed is a framework that allows visitation by biological siblings with whom children have formed attachments without unnecessarily intruding on the fundamental liberty interest of the adoptive parents at issue …

The Ninth Circuit’S Treatment Of Sexual Orientation: Defining “Rational Basis Review With Bite”, Ian C. Bartrum

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When the Ninth Circuit handed down Witt v. Department of the Air Force, President Obama and then-Solicitor General Kagan declined to take an appeal to the Supreme Court. At the time, it seemed that most advocates of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” believed that the administration made that decision because it was afraid the Supreme Court would reverse the Ninth Circuit. If that fear was perhaps well-founded in 2009, it is certainly less so now. In the wake of SmithKline Beecham Corp. v. Abbott Laboratories, as well as recent District Court decisions, opponents of federal constitutional protection for gay people …

Flexible Feminism And Reproductive Justice: An Essay In Honor Of Ann Scales, Lynne Henderson

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Professor Ann Scales began her distinguished career by taking feminism and reproductive justice seriously. She became a leading feminist voice and influence on a number of topics. In later years, she returned to concerns about reproductive justice by presciently emphasizing the need to preserve women’s access to abortions.

This Essay discusses Professor Scales’s concerns and feminist method and then turns to reproductive justice. The Essay notes that, with Scales, a right to abortion is foundational for reproductive justice. The Essay then examines the increasing narrowing of access to abortion through law. The Essay next examines a current crisis over access …

Dreams Of My Father, Prison For My Mother: The H-4 Nonimmigrant Visa Dilemma And The Need For An "Immigration-Status Spousal Support", Stewart Chang

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In this article, Professor Stewart Chang uses the situation of H-4 visa derivatives in the Asian Indian immigrant community as a case study to expose and critique larger incongruities within current American immigration policy, which on the one hand has historically extolled individuality, equality, and workforce participation as avenues to the American Dream, while enforcing gender hierarchy and dependency through requirements that prioritize family unity on the other. These incongruities remain largely unnoticed because the culture of dependency is often attributed to traditional ethnic culture, which then becomes the site of scrutiny and blame. The H-4 visa dilemma in the …

Theorizing From Particularity: Perpetrators And Intersectional Theory On Domestic Violence, Elizabeth L. Macdowell

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The role of identity-based stereotypes about perpetrators in domestic violence cases has not received much attention in legal scholarship, which has instead focused on the identities of victims. However, stereotypes governing who is a recognizable victim (e.g., that victims are white, middle-class, passive, and dependent women in heterosexual relationships) cannot by themselves explain why nonconforming victims are sometimes successful in family court cases and other, more “perfect” victims are not. Drawing on intersectionality theory, which studies the ways experiences are shaped by the interaction of multiple identity categories, I argue that understanding this phenomenon requires a relational analysis that examines …

Psychological Parentage, Troxel, And The Best Interests Of The Child, Rebecca L. Scharf

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No abstract provided.

When Courts Collide: Integrated Domestic Violence Courts And Court Pluralism, Elizabeth L. Macdowell

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This Article proposes court pluralism as a new theory for analyzing the role of the justice system in addressing domestic violence. It argues that a systemic view of the justice system is essential to developing coherent reform strategies, and lays out the foundation for taking into account the unique functions of civil and criminal justice in domestic violence cases. In doing so, the Article challenges the one-dimensional characterization of a fragmented court system as bad for victims of domestic violence that dominates legal scholarship, and shows that court fragmentation can be an opportunity and potential source of protection from systemic …

Social Security Spouse And Survivor Benefits 101: Practical Primer Part Ii (Or Another Reason To Put A Ring On It), Francine J. Lipman

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No abstract provided.

Deadbeats, Deadbrokes, And Prisoners, Ann Cammett

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Historically, child support policy has targeted absent parents with aggressive enforcement measures. Such an approach is based on an economic resource model that is increasingly irrelevant, even counterproductive, for many low-income families. Specifically, modern day mass incarceration has radically skewed the paradigm on which the child support system is based, removing millions of parents from the formal economy entirely, diminishing their income opportunities after release, and rendering them ineffective economic actors. Such a flawed policy approach creates unintended consequences for the children of these parents by compromising a core non-monetary goal of child support system – parent-child engagement – as …

Social Security Benefits Formula 101: A Practical Primer, Francine J. Lipman

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No abstract provided.

When Reading Between The Lines Is Not Enough: Lessons From Media Coverage Of A Domestic Violence Homicide-Suicide, Elizabeth L. Macdowell

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In October 2008, Karthik Rajaram murdered his wife, mother-in-law, sons and, ultimately, himself, in a wealthy Los Angeles suburb. This Article analyzes media reports about the deaths to illustrate the resilience of patriarchy and significant gaps in research and scholarship about domestic violence, and suggests a strategic approach to building counter-narratives about violence against women.

The Article is composed of five parts. Part I is the Introduction. Part II draws on narrative theory and critical media scholarship to lay the groundwork for analysis, and to show why media coverage of homicide-suicide is implicated in the production of dominant ideology.

Part …

How Embedded Knowledge Structures Affect Judicial Decision Making: An Analysis Of Metaphor, Narrative, And Imagination In Child Custody Disputes, Linda L. Berger

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We live in a time of radically changing conceptions of family and of the relationships possible between children and parents. Though undergoing "a sea-change," family law remains tethered to culturally embedded stories and symbols. While so bound, family law will fail to serve individual families and a society whose family structures diverge sharply by education, race, class, and income.

This article advances a critical rhetorical analysis of the interaction of metaphor and narrative within the specific context of child custody disputes. Its goal is to begin to examine how these embedded knowledge structures affect judicial decision making generally; more specifically, …

Ketubah, The Marriage Contract Under Jewish Law, And Its Application In Secular Legal Systems, Marketa Trimble

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The article presents ketubah, an institute of Jewish law that is unknown in the current Czech academic literature; it describes its evolution and content, and the manner in which secular countries with large Jewish communities deal with it. Throughout the centuries ketubah achieved a standardized format that has been adjusted to local customs. Additionally, there are attempts to use ketubah to solve the problem of agunah – the problem of parties who have obtained a secular divorce but not a divorce under Jewish law because the other party prevented it. Some legal systems, such as those of the State of …

Standing In Babylon, Looking Toward Zion, Katherine R. Kruse

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This article defends the triumph of vision at the 2006 UNLV Conference on Representing Children in Families by examining the interrelationship between idealism and realism in the definition of lawyers' roles and the importance of idealized visions to the process of reforming dysfunctional systems. This article suggests that the vision of lawyering for children sketched in the UNLV Recommendations--though based in idealism--is both deeply realistic and ultimately practical. This article thus affirms the choice of the group of idealists who stood together for a few days in modern-day Babylon to keep their eyes trained on the vision of Zion as …

Expanding Collateral Sanctions: The Hidden Costs Of Aggressive Child Support Enforcement Against Incarcerated Parents, Ann Cammett

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Legal barriers or "collateral consequences" arising from criminal convictions came to the forefront of the legal and policy discourse at the dawn of the twenty-first century, as the population of people with criminal convictions skyrocketed. These barriers act as restrictions to post-incarceration reentry into society, including the resumption of employment, occupational licensing, access to housing and public benefits, driving privileges, educational loans, immigration, voting rights, and other means of economic survival and civic re-engagement.

What is barely examined are the ways in which these barriers affect family law, specifically in the area of child support and the debt accrued by …

Justice Miriam Shearing: Nevada's Trailblazing Minimalist, Mary E. Berkheiser

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Nevada Supreme Court Justice Miriam Shearing retired at the end of her second term on January 4, 2005. Over the nearly thirty years of her very public life on the bench, many have written of her accomplishments as the firs woman to enter the brotherhood of the Nevada judiciary. With Justice Sharing’s retirement, the time is ripe for an examination of her judicial decisions during the twelve years she served on the Nevada Supreme Court. The analysis here provides one perspective on her body of work. It begins, as it must, with a glimpse into the person behind the work.

Making Work Pay: Promoting Employment And Better Child Support Outcomes For Low-Income And Incarcerated Parents, Ann Cammett

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The New Jersey Institute for Social Justice prepared this report in response to concerns about child support debt—in particular as it creates a barrier to employment for low-income parents and works at cross-purposes with the goals of the child support program. Drawing on examples from other states, this report identifies a range of policies that inform child support practice in New Jersey and offers administrative, legislative, and programmatic solutions to address child support arrears owed by low-income and incarcerated parents.

Attorneys' Perceptions Of Child Witnesses With Mental Retardation, Rebecca Nathanson

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Children with mental retardation are more likely to be abused than the general population, yet are often denied access to the justice system. Research on children without mental retardation has revealed skepticism as to their reliability as witnesses in the court of law. Even more so, children with mental retardation face the issue of credibility because of their age and disability. This study assesses attorneys' perceptions of child witnesses with mental retardation. Thirty-nine criminal attorneys completed a 33-item questionnaire designed to assess their opinions of the abilities of adults and of children with and without mental retardation to recall and …

Between Dependency And Liberty: The Conundrum Of Children’S Rights In The Gilded Age, David S. Tanenhaus

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Although legal scholars often assume that the history of children's rights in the United States did not begin until the mid twentieth century, this essay argues that a sophisticated conception of children's rights existed a century earlier, and analyzes how lawmakers articulated it through their attempts to define the rights of dependent children. How to handle their cases raised fundamental questions about whether children were autonomous beings or the property of either their parents and/or the state. And, if the latter, what were the limits of parental authority and/or the power of the state acting as a parent? By investigating …

Of Child Welfare And Welfare Reform: The Implications For Children When Contradictory Policies Collide, Kay P. Kindred

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On August 22, 1996, President Bill Clinton signed into law the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 (hereinafter, “PRWORA” or the “welfare reform law”), which replaced the Aid to Families and Dependent Children Program (“AFDC”), the nation’s primary cash-assistance program, with the Temporary Assistance to Needy Families Program (“TANF”), funded by block grants to states. PRWORA represented a dramatic change in social welfare policy in the United States. Among the many changes effected by the law in the nation’s social welfare programs were: (1) the increased authority of the states over cash-assistance programs for needy families, giving …

The Effects Of The Courtroom Context On Children's Memory And Anxiety, Rebecca Nathanson

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Modifications of the courtroom environment have been proposed to enhance the ability of child witnesses to offer complete and accurate testimony and reduce system-induced stress. However, these interventions have often been conceived without the benefit of empirical data demonstrating intervention efficacy. The present study examines the effects of the courtroom context on children's memory and anxiety. Eighty-one eight- to ten-year-olds participated in a staged event involving bodily touch, and two weeks later their memory for the event was tested. Half of the children were questioned in a mock courtroom in a university law school, and half were questioned in a …

The Effects Of The Courtroom Context On Children’S Memory And Anxiety, Rebecca Nathanson

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Modifications of the courtroom environment have been proposed to enhance the ability of child witnesses to offer complete and accurate testimony and reduce system-induced stress. However, these interventions have often been conceived without the benefit of empirical data demonstrating intervention efficacy. The present study examines the effects of the courtroom context on children's memory and anxiety. Eighty-one eight- to ten-year-olds participated in a staged event involving bodily touch, and two weeks later their memory for the event was tested. Half of the children were questioned in a mock courtroom in a university law school, and half were questioned in a …

Introduction To Symposium, The Rights Of Parents With Children In Foster Care: Removals Arising From Economic Hardship And The Predicative Power Of Race, Ann Cammett

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Professor Cammett introduces a symposium at the Association of the Bar of the City of New York exploring the predicament posed by the surge of child removals through neglect petitions, and the subsequent placement of those children in foster care. The panel’s published comments offer some poignant reflections on the crisis of the child welfare system.