Law Commons^™

The Illusory Imputation Of Income In Marital Settlement Agreements: "The Future Ain't What It Used To Be", Timothy L. Arcaro, Laura Miller Cancilla

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Child, Family, State, And Gender Equality In Religious Stances And Human Rights Instruments: A Preliminary Comparison, Linda C. Mcclain

Faculty Scholarship

The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) recently began its third decade. Why has the United States still not ratified the CRC, celebrated as the most widely ratified international human rights treaty in history? Once again, this question is on the table: Congressional resolutions that President Obama should not transmit the CRC to the Senate for advice and consent rapidly followed intimations that the Obama Administration had some qualms about the U.S. keeping company only with Somalia in not ratifying it. Some scholars contend that enlisting the unique resources of religions would help to ground a culture …

What's So Hard About Sex Equality?: Nature, Culture, And Social Engineering, Linda C. Mcclain

Faculty Scholarship

Why is sex equality so hard to achieve? Social cooperation between women and men in various domains of life is assumed to be a fundamental and necessary building block of society, but proves hard to secure on terms of equality. One answer is that feminist quests for equality in private and public life are a form of misguided social engineering that ignores natural sex difference. This chapter examines arguments that nature and culture constrain feminist law reform. Appeals to nature argue that brain science and evolutionary psychology find salient differences between women and men, limiting what social engineering can achieve …

Sprawl, Family Rhythms, And The Four-Day Work Week, Katharine B. Silbaugh

Faculty Scholarship

We evaluate the four-day work week against the background of other institutional and social practices and constraints. But we fix these other variables when considering the value of this work reform. For example, workers enjoy the commute time and expense savings associated with a four-day week. These savings would mean little if the commutes in question were negligible. Therefore, the value of the four-day work week depends in part on the social history that gave us increasingly substantial commutes. This Article seeks to highlight some of the institutional practices that influence the adoption of a four-day work week, particularly those …

Marriage Pluralism In The United States: On Civil And Religious Jurisdiction And The Demands Of Equal Citizenship, Linda C. Mcclain

Faculty Scholarship

“Legal pluralism” is hot, particularly in family law. As family law and practice in the United States have become global due to the globalization of the family, some argue it is time for U.S. family law to embrace more legal pluralism so that civil government would cede jurisdictional authority over marriage and divorce law to religious communities. They point to forms of pluralism already present in U.S. family law, such as covenant marriage (available in three states) and New York’s get statutes. They suggest the U.S. should learn from how many other nations allocate jurisdiction over marriage and divorce law …

Disestablishing The Family, Alice Ristroph

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Fragmentation And Consolidation In The Law Of Marriage And Same-Sex Relationships, David D. Meyer

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Chalimony: Seeking Equity Between Parents Of Children With Disabilities And Chronic Illnesses, Karen Czapanskiy

Faculty Scholarship

Many thousands of children experience serious disabling conditions such as autism and debilitating chronic illnesses such as asthma. Caring for these children is often so demanding that caregiving parents cannot remain employed outside the home. Parental resources available to these children are also limited because an unusually high percentage of them live with only one parent. Nonetheless, surprisingly few cases involving families with a disabled or chronically ill child appear in the family law case law or scholarly literature. Even where child support and alimony are concerned, these families are seen only at the margins.

In my recent article, I …

Which Came First The Parent Or The Child?, Mary P. Byrn, Jenni Vainik Ives

Faculty Scholarship

From the moment a child is born, she is a juridical person endowed with constitutional rights. A child’s parents, however, do not become legal parents until a state statute grants them the fundamental right to raise one’s child. The state, therefore, exercises considerable power and discretion when it drafts the parentage statutes that determine who becomes a legal parent. This article asserts that the state, through its parens patriae power, has a duty to act as an agent for children when it drafts its parentage statutes. In particular, the state must adopt parentage statutes that satisfy children’s fundamental right to …

Annual Survey Of Periodical Literature, Nancy Ver Steegh

Faculty Scholarship

The Annual Review of Periodical Literature provides a sampling of law review articles published between November 1, 2008, and October 31, 2009. The survey highlights the variety and depth of family law scholarship produced during the year and calls attention to currently debated "hot topics." Readers are encouraged to read articles of interest in their entirety because the summaries included in the survey are necessarily abbreviated.

Purple Haze (Book Review), Clare Huntington

Faculty Scholarship

This is a review of Red Families v Blue Families: Legal Polarization and the Creation of Culture. By Naomi Cahn & June Carbone. New York: Oxford University Press. 2010

Embracing The Affective Family, Clare Huntington

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Feminism As Liberalism: A Tribute To The Work Of Martha Nussbaum Symposium: Honoring The Contributions Of Professor Martha Nussbaum To The Scholarship And Practice Of Gender And Sexuality Law: Feminism And Liberalism, Tracy E. Higgins

Faculty Scholarship

In this essay, I revisit and expand an argument I have made with respect to the limited usefulness of liberalism in defining an agenda for guaranteeing women's rights and improving women's conditions. After laying out this case, I discuss Martha Nussbaum's capabilities approach to fundamental rights and human development and acknowledge that her approach addresses to a significant degree many of the objections I and other feminist scholars have raised. I then turn to fieldwork that I have done in South Africa on the issue of custom and women's choices with regard to marriage and divorce. Applying Professor Nussbaum's capabilities …

Pregnant Man?: A Conversation, Darren Rosenblum, Noa Ben-Asher, Mary Anne Case, Elizabeth F. Emens, Berta E. Hernández-Truyol, Vivian M. Gutierrez, Lisa C. Ikemoto, Angela Onwuachi-Willig, Jacob Willig-Onwuachi, Kimberly Mutcherson, Peter Siegelman, Beth Jones

Faculty Scholarship

I'm a law professor who works on gender, sexuality, and culture in the international and comparative context. That's my head working. In "real" life, my partner, Howard, and I have been engaged in having a baby together for several years, a project that came to fruition with the birth of our daughter Melina. Of course, such a project evokes intensely complex feelings and thoughts. Beyond a simple transposition of the personal onto the political, I feel so fortunate to have engaged in myriad conversations with a variety of friends and colleagues who think much more carefully about the family and …

All In The Family, Angela Onwuachi-Willig, Jacob Willig-Onwuachi

Faculty Scholarship

Your essay “Pregnant Man?” highlights many significant issues concerning the intersection of law, gender, sexuality, race, class, and family. In an earlier article A House Divided: The Invisibility of the Multiracial Family, we explored many of these issues as they relate to multiracial families, including our own. Specifically, we, a black female-white male married couple, analyzed the language in housing discrimination statutes to demonstrate how law and society function together to frame the normative ideal of family as heterosexual and monoracial. Our article examined the daily social privileges of monoracial, heterosexual couples as a means of revealing the invisibility of …

Embracing The Affective Family: Tribute To Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Clare Huntington

Faculty Scholarship

Scholars are often quick to label the affective family a relic. Indeed, the description of this panel invites us to "return to the conventional understanding of the family as a primarily affective, altruistic, and solidaristic social domain," and then asks "[w]hat is to be done with this archaic remnant of separate spheres ideology?"' As this description accurately expresses, the separate spheres ideology demands that we bifurcate emotion and rationality, directing the former into the family and the latter into the market.

Although I reject the separate spheres ideology, I am not ready to disown the affective family. The corrective to …

A Conversation About Problem-Solving Courts: Take 2, Jane M. Spinak

Faculty Scholarship

The University of Maryland Law Journal of Race, Religion, Gender and Class symposium on problem-solving courts surfaced a wide array of issues on the meaning and practices of these courts. My prepared remarks at the symposium addressed the first issue discussed in this article: the potential disparate impact of problem-solving courts on minority families who are disproportionately affected by these court processes. The second part of the article draws on the discussion during the symposium to reflect on the difficulty supporters and critics of the problem-solving court movement have in talking and listening to each other.

Filling The Due Process Donut Hole: Abuse And Neglect Cases Between Disposition And Permanency, Joshua Gupta-Kagan

Faculty Scholarship

Abuse and neglect cases involve constantly changing facts. They “are unlike civil cases, which typically involve only facts gone by ... The ultimate parties in interest are the [children] themselves. And for them, their lives are ... ongoing event[s].” A child’s need to return to his parent may ebb or flow. His parent’s fitness may improve, regress, or remain the same. Federal law, followed in all states that wish to receive federal funds to support foster care, requires regular permanency hearings so family courts can make decisions based on evolving factual situations. These decisions, and the lack of greater procedural …

The Impact Of The Adoption And Safe Families Act On Children Of Incarcerated Parents, Arlene F. Lee, Philip Genty, Mimi Laver Child Welfare League Of America

Faculty Scholarship

On November 9, 1997, President Bill Clinton signed the Adoption and Safe Families Act of 1997 (ASFA) to improve the safety of children, to promote adoption and other permanent homes for children, and to support families. The changes in ASFA are important to ensure the safety of children and increase their likelihood of placement in permanent homes. The change that requires close examination is the timeline for initiating the termination of parental rights (TPR) proceedings. Many people have questioned whether these changes, if applied in their strictest terms, have had a detrimental effect on children of prisoners, because a large …

Familial Norms And Normality, Clare Huntington

Faculty Scholarship

Social norms exert a powerful influence on families. They shape major life decisions, such as whether to marry and how many children to have, as well as everyday decisions, such as how to discipline children and divide household labor. Emotion is a defining feature of these familial social norms, giving force and content to norms in contexts as varied as reproductive choice, parenting, and same-sex relationships. These emotion-laden norms do not stand apart from the law. Falling along a continuum of involvement that ranges from direct regulation to choice architecture, state sway over social norms through their emotional valence is …

The Emotional State And Localized Norms: Reply Piece, Clare Huntington

Faculty Scholarship

I am grateful to Professor Fineman for her probing and engaged response to my Article. I will take this opportunity to make explicit some of the implicit assumptions of the Article that Professor Fineman identifies as worthy of elaboration.