Law Commons^™

Evolution And Revolution In Family Law, Victoria M. Mather

Faculty Articles

Family law has significantly changed over the last twenty-five years, and certain areas will likely continue to change. Family law tends to follow, rather than lead, social upheaval and adjustment in family decisions and structures. The most important legal changes in family law are a result of massive shifts in American social, political, and economic constructs in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s.

Family law will continue to evolve because of three critical developments. First is the expansion of the concept of what constitutes a “family” in the modern context. Next is the treatment of children as autonomous individuals, separate and …

Child Care Enterprise, Community Development, And Work, Peter R. Pitegoff

Faculty Publications

Child care enterprise can be a vehicle for community-based economic development. Beyond the critical goal of child care service, day care as an enterprise can help build capacity for job creation and entrepreneurship in the inner city and in disadvantaged communities. Stable child care institutions with quality jobs can sound a counterpoint to the feminization of poverty. The demand for child care services is substantial and growing. In single parent families and in households with two working parents, day care is essential to enable parents to work or go to school. Further, high quality early childhood programs can have a …

Child Protection Law, Suellyn Scarnecchia

Book Chapters

The Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments to the U.S. Constitution protect a parent's custodial rights. However, such rights are not absolute and may be terminated. There is no substantive due-process right to live together as a family. Doe v Oettle, 97 Mich App 183, 293 NW2d 760 (1980). Parents are not held to ideal standards in the care of their children but to minimum statutory standards. Fritts v Krugh, 354 Mich 97, 92 NW2d 604 (1958).

Starting Down The Road To Reform: Kentucky's New Long-Arm Statute For Family Obligations, Louise Everett Graham

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

Kentucky has long needed a comprehensive family law provision for its long-arm statute. Before the general long-arm statute was amended by the 1992 General Assembly, it addressed only a narrow class of paternity cases among its specific jurisdictional provisions, ignoring the need for long-arm jurisdiction in other domestic relations cases. A second long-arm statute provided jurisdiction over some nonresidents to establish or enforce child support obligations. In the contexts of divorce and child support, Kentucky's failure to claim constitutionally available jurisdiction deprived Kentucky residents of important protection.

Recent amendments to Kentucky statutes fill previous gaps and expand Kentucky's jurisdiction in …

Implementing Custody Mediation In Family Court: Some Comments On The Jefferson County Family Court Experience, Louise Everett Graham

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

The Jefferson Family Court's custody mediation service was developed as part of a larger program creating the first family court system in Kentucky. The mediation service's connection with the Family Court has influenced both practical and policy aspects of its development. Any description of the mediation project necessarily entails some description of the court system that created it.

This Article describes the structure of the Jefferson Family Court and the custody mediation process as it has developed in Jefferson County. A review of one community's approach to custody mediation may be useful not only as a blueprint for a system's …

Organic Goods: Legal Understandings Of Work, Parenthood, And Gender Equality In Comparative Perspective, Paolo G. Carozza

Journal Articles

The United States and Italy have taken quite different approaches toward providing legal protections for working parents. This Article uses a comparative perspective to highlight crucial aspects of the American legal and cultural attitudes towards parental leave. The author demonstrates how deeply rooted beliefs about equality, work, and family life have influenced the development of parental leave law. In particular, the Article describes how Italian law rests on notions of fundamental social equality, as well as on views concerning the importance of the interests of children and the family. As a result of this broad conception of the interests involved, …