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Articles 1 - 24 of 24
Full-Text Articles in Family Law
Conceptualizing Legal Childhood In The Twenty-First Century, Clare Huntington, Elizabeth S. Scott
Conceptualizing Legal Childhood In The Twenty-First Century, Clare Huntington, Elizabeth S. Scott
Michigan Law Review
The law governing children is complex, sometimes appearing almost incoherent. The relatively simple framework established in the Progressive Era, in which parents had primary authority over children, subject to limited state oversight, has broken down over the past few decades. Lawmakers started granting children some adult rights and privileges, raising questions about their traditional status as vulnerable, dependent, and legally incompetent beings. As children emerged as legal persons, children’s rights advocates challenged the rationale for parental authority, contending that robust parental rights often harm children. And a wave of punitive reforms in response to juvenile crime in the 1990s undermined …
Legal Issues In Child Welfare Cases Involving Children With Disabilities, Joshua B. Kay, Frank E. Vandervort
Legal Issues In Child Welfare Cases Involving Children With Disabilities, Joshua B. Kay, Frank E. Vandervort
Book Chapters
This chapter examines the legal framework applicable when child maltreatment and disability intersect. It begins with a brief description of the constitutional foundation forparent-child-state relations. It provides an overview of relevant federal child welfare laws, which today shape each state’s child protection system. It then considers the application of various federal laws governing work with children and families when a child has a disability. In doing so, we consider the Americans with Disabilities Act, the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, and Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act, and we touch upon Social Security benefits for children. This chapter does not …
A Postcolonial Theory Of Spousal Rape: The Carribean And Beyond, Stacy-Ann Elvy
A Postcolonial Theory Of Spousal Rape: The Carribean And Beyond, Stacy-Ann Elvy
Michigan Journal of Gender & Law
Many postcolonial states in the Caribbean continue to struggle to comply with their international treaty obligations to protect women from sexual violence. Reports from various United Nations programs, including UNICEF, and the annual U.S. State Department Country Reports on Antigua and Barbuda, the Bahamas, Barbados, Dominica, Jamaica, and Saint Lucia (“Commonwealth Countries”), indicate that sexual violence against women, including spousal abuse, is a significant problem in the Caribbean. Despite ratification of various international instruments intended to eliminate sexual violence against women, such as the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, Commonwealth Countries have retained the …
Confrontation And The Re-Privatization Of Domestic Violence, Deborah Tuerkheimer
Confrontation And The Re-Privatization Of Domestic Violence, Deborah Tuerkheimer
Michigan Law Review First Impressions
When the Supreme Court transformed the right of confrontation in Crawford v. Washington, the prosecution of domestic violence predictably suffered as a result. But commentators at the time did not anticipate how the Court’s subsequent Confrontation Clause cases would utterly misconceive the nature of domestic violence, producing a flawed understanding of what constitutes a “testimonial” statement. Although the Court’s definition was especially problematic in the domestic violence context, its overly rigid approach finally became intolerable in Michigan v. Bryant, a 2011 case that did not involve domestic violence. In Bryant, the Court resurrected a public–private divide that …
For Nontraditional Names' Sake: A Call To Reform The Name-Change Process For Marrying Couples, Meegan Brooks
For Nontraditional Names' Sake: A Call To Reform The Name-Change Process For Marrying Couples, Meegan Brooks
University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform
In a large number of states, women are encouraged to take their husbands’ surnames at marriage by being offered an expedited name-change process that is shorter, less expensive, and less invasive than the statutory process that men must complete. If a couple instead decides to take an altogether-new name at marriage, the vast majority of states require that each spouse complete the longer statutory process. This name-change system emerged from a long history of naming as a way for men to dominate women. This Note emphasizes the need for name-change reform, arguing that the current system perpetuates antiquated patriarchal values …
Family History: Inside And Out, Kerry Abrams
Family History: Inside And Out, Kerry Abrams
Michigan Law Review
The twenty-first century has seen the dawn of a new era of the family, an era that has its roots in the twentieth. Many of the social and scientific phenomena of our time - same-sex couples, in vitro fertilization, single-parent families, international adoption - have inspired changes in the law. Legal change has encompassed both constitutional doctrine and statutory innovations, from landmark Supreme Court decisions articulating a right to procreate (or not), a liberty interest in the care, custody, and control of one's children, and even a right to marry, to state no-fault divorce statutes that have fundamentally changed the …
An Incomplete Revolution: Feminists And The Legacy Of Marital-Property Reform, Mary Ziegler
An Incomplete Revolution: Feminists And The Legacy Of Marital-Property Reform, Mary Ziegler
Michigan Journal of Gender & Law
As this Article shows, the conventional historical narrative of the divorce revolution is not so much incorrect as incomplete. Histories of the divorce revolution have focused disproportionately on the introduction of no-fault rules and have correctly concluded that women's groups did not play a central role in the introduction of such laws. However, work on divorce law has not adequately addressed the history of marital-property reform or engaged with scholarship on the struggle for the Equal Rights Amendment to the federal Constitution. Putting these two bodies of work in dialogue with one another, the Article provides the first comprehensive history …
Surrender And Subordination: Birth Mothers And Adoption Law Reform, Elizabeth J. Samuels
Surrender And Subordination: Birth Mothers And Adoption Law Reform, Elizabeth J. Samuels
Michigan Journal of Gender & Law
For more than thirty years, adoption law reform advocates have been seeking to restore for adult adoptees the right to access their original birth certificates, a right that was lost in all but two states between the late 1930s and 1990. The advocates have faced strong opposition and have succeeded only in recent years and only in eight states. Among the most vigorous advocates for access are birth mothers who surrendered their children during a time it was believed that adoption would relieve unmarried women of shame and restore them to a respectable life. The birth mother advocates say that …
The Devil Comes To Kansas: A Story Of Free Love, Sexual Privacy, And The Law, Charles J. Reid Jr.
The Devil Comes To Kansas: A Story Of Free Love, Sexual Privacy, And The Law, Charles J. Reid Jr.
Michigan Journal of Gender & Law
On Sunday, September 19, 1886, Moses Harman, the editor of the radical newspaper Lucifer the Light-Bearer, presided over an inherently contradictory event-a free-love marriage ceremony between his associate editor, the thirty-seven-year-old Edwin Walker, and Moses' own daughter, the sixteen-year-old Lillian. The case that the two Harmans and Walker wished to present aimed to transform marriage from a public to a private relationship and from a permanent and exclusive one to a temporary one that permitted potentially many partners. State v. Walker and its parties have received some scholarly notice, but the truly radical quality of the arguments Moses, Edwin, and …
Against The New Maternalism, Naomi Mezey, Cornelia T. L. Pillard
Against The New Maternalism, Naomi Mezey, Cornelia T. L. Pillard
Michigan Journal of Gender & Law
Parenting is a major preoccupation in law and culture. As a result of efforts of the American women's movement over the past forty years, the legal parent is, for the first time in history, sex-neutral. Our law has abandoned restrictions on women's education, employment, and civic participation that sprang from and reinforced beliefs about the primacy of motherhood as women's best destiny. On the flip side, U.S. law now also generally rejects formal constraints on men's family roles by requiring sex-neutrality of laws regulating custody, adoption, alimony, spousal benefits, and the like. The official de-linking of presumptive parenting roles from …
Afterword: Elite Principles: The Ali Proposals And The Politics Of Law Reform, Carl E. Scheider
Afterword: Elite Principles: The Ali Proposals And The Politics Of Law Reform, Carl E. Scheider
Book Chapters
The Reporters of the PRINCIPLES were distinguished legal scholars who produced a serious and ambitious document. The contributors to the present volume subject the PRINCIPLES to probing, thoughtful, and illuminating analysis. At the volume's beginning, Professor Glendon puts the problems of family law in a broader perspective by examining the challenges families today face in living good lives. Now, at the volume's close, I want to put both the PRINCIPLES and the essays in a broader perspective. I need not vivisect the PRINCIPLES; that is admirably done by the essayists. Rather, I proffer a tool for understanding the PRINCIPLES more …
Marriage Law: Obsolete Or Cutting Edge?, Michigan Journal Of Gender & Law
Marriage Law: Obsolete Or Cutting Edge?, Michigan Journal Of Gender & Law
Michigan Journal of Gender & Law
Over the past hundred years, social and cultural expectations surrounding various forms of committed relationships have changed dramatically, and contemporary legal systems have struggled to adapt. The result has been an extraordinary opportunity to test fundamental assumptions about law, about the cultural understandings that are enforced through state power, and about the mechanisms that drive law's evolution. The Michigan Journal of Gender & Law has drawn together an exceptional group of panelists who will discuss these questions throughout the day.
Marriage And Belonging, Ann Laquer Estin
Marriage And Belonging, Ann Laquer Estin
Michigan Law Review
Marriage is a quintessentially private institution. Justice Douglas put the point this way in 1965, writing for the Supreme Court in Griswold v. Connecticut: "We deal with a right of privacy older than the Bill of Rights - older than our political parties, older than our school system. Marriage is a coming together for better or for worse, hopefully enduring, and intimate to the degree of being sacred. It is an association that promotes a way of life, not causes; a harmony in living, not political faiths; a bilateral loyalty, not commercial or social projects. Yet it is an association …
Are We Protecting The Wrong Rights?, Jennifer L. Saulino
Are We Protecting The Wrong Rights?, Jennifer L. Saulino
Michigan Law Review
Elizabeth Bartholet, in her book Nobody's Children, takes a strong step toward beginning a new kind of dialogue about abused and neglected children. She positions herself as a liberal who has come to terms with the fact that traditional liberal ideals are in conflict with the needs of abused and neglected children (p. 5). In doing so, she tries to convince her readers that, regardless of ideology, we all should have a different focus in the area of child abuse and neglect law. She uses Sabrina as one of several examples of how programs for abused and neglected children that …
Ex Proprio Vigore, James J. White
Ex Proprio Vigore, James J. White
Articles
The National Conference of the Commissioners on Uniform State Laws (NCCUSL) is a legislature in every way but one. It drafts uniform acts, debates them, passes them, and promulgates them, but that passage and promulgation do not make these uniform acts law over any citizen of any state. These acts become the law of the various states only ex proprio vigore - only if their own vitality influences the legislators of the various states to pass them.
Promulgating The Marriage Contract, Lynn A. Baker
Promulgating The Marriage Contract, Lynn A. Baker
University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform
I begin Part I of this Article by positing several logically necessary, but insufficient, conditions that precede a state's decision to promulgate a law more aggressively than usual. I then show that each of these conditions was met with regard to the economic terms of the marriage contract in virtually all states by 1975. In Part II, I explore what Louisiana's unusually aggressive promulgation of certain terms of the marriage contract reveals about the legal system's conception of the marital relationship as of 1975. In Part III, I discuss what is added to that conception of the modern marital relationship …
Some Aspects Of Householding In The Medieval Icelandic Commonwealth, William I. Miller
Some Aspects Of Householding In The Medieval Icelandic Commonwealth, William I. Miller
Articles
There has been much, mostly inconclusive, discussion about how to define the household in a manner suitable for comparative purposes. Certain conventional criteria are not very useful in the Icelandic context, where it appears that a person could be attached to more than one household, where the laws suggest it was possible for more than one household to be resident in the same uncompartmentalised farmhouse; and where headship might often be shared. Definitions, for example, based on co residence or on commensalism do not jibe all that well with the pastoral transhumance practised by the Icelanders. Sheep were tended and …
The Legal History Of The Family, Lee E. Teitelbaum
The Legal History Of The Family, Lee E. Teitelbaum
Michigan Law Review
A Review of Governing the Hearth: Law and the Family in Nineteenth-Century America by Michael Grossberg
What Causes Fundamental Legal Ideas? Marital Property In England And France In The Thirteenth Century, Charles Donahue Jr.
What Causes Fundamental Legal Ideas? Marital Property In England And France In The Thirteenth Century, Charles Donahue Jr.
Michigan Law Review
Categorizing broadly, the marital property systems of the Western nations today are divided into two types: those in which husband and wife own all property separately except those items that they have expressly agreed to hold jointly (in a nontechnical sense) and those in which husband and wife own a substantial portion or even all of their property jointly unless they have expressly agreed to hold it separately. The system of separate property is the "common law" system, in force in most jurisdictions where the Anglo-American common law is in force. The system of joint property is the community property …
Chancery Practice On The American Frontier: A Study Of The Records Of The Supreme Court Of Michigan Territory, 1805-1836, William Wirt Blume
Chancery Practice On The American Frontier: A Study Of The Records Of The Supreme Court Of Michigan Territory, 1805-1836, William Wirt Blume
Michigan Law Review
The act of Congress of January 11, 1805, which created Michigan Territory out of Indiana Territory, provided that the new territory should have a government "in all respects similar" to that provided for the Northwest Territory by the Ordinance of 1787. The Ordinance had provided for the appointment of a court to consist of three judges who should have "a common law jurisdiction. "
Conditions And Limitations In Restraint Of Marriage, Olin Browder Jr.
Conditions And Limitations In Restraint Of Marriage, Olin Browder Jr.
Michigan Law Review
From ancient times it has been a practice of testators to provide for the termination of a devised estate upon the marriage of the devisee, or to make their gifts conditional upon a beneficiary's marrying in a prescribed manner. In this way, a parent may hope to extend beyond his death his influence over recalcitrant or irresponsible offspring. But restraints on marriage may have other purposes. More often than not, a testator, by limiting an estate until marriage or by providing for forfeiture upon marriage, may merely seek to assure the maintenance of a female beneficiary until a husband assumes …
Wills - Legacies On Impossible Or Illegal Conditions Precedent
Wills - Legacies On Impossible Or Illegal Conditions Precedent
Michigan Law Review
If a devise of realty be upon a condition subsequent which is impossible of performance or which is illegal as being malum prohibitum, it is generally held that the condition is void, but the devise is free and single. In this respect the law pertaining to legacies upon condition materially agrees with that upon devises of realty. But perhaps one of the most unusual distinctions drawn in the law of property is that which is drawn between an illegal or an impossible condition precedent to a legacy of personalty and an illegal or an impossible condition precedent to a …
Divorce - Recrimination As A Defense
Divorce - Recrimination As A Defense
Michigan Law Review
If both parties have a right to divorce, neither party has. This judicial pronouncement, paradoxical and puzzling as it must seem, at least to the lay mind, nevertheless embodies the kernel of the doctrine of recrimination as it is applied in divorce cases by modem courts. One party seeks divorce and proves beyond doubt that he or she is entitled to relief. But, if it is found that the complaining party too, is guilty of conduct for which a divorce may be granted, the court turns a deaf ear to both. For, in the oft quoted words of Chancellor Wallworth, …
Book Reviews, Burke Shartel, Grover C. Grismore, S C. Ho, S M. Ho, Evans Holbrook, Henry M. Bates
Book Reviews, Burke Shartel, Grover C. Grismore, S C. Ho, S M. Ho, Evans Holbrook, Henry M. Bates
Michigan Law Review
History of the San Francisco Committee of Vigilance of 1851. By Mary Floyd Williams. University of California Publications in History, Volume XII. "Berkeley: The University of California Press. 192I. Pp. xii, 543.