Family Law Commons^™

All That Heaven Will Allow: A Statistical Analysis Of The Co-Existence Of Same Sex Marriage And Gay Matrimonial Bans, Deirdre Bowen

Deirdre M Bowen

This article offers the first analysis to date of national data evaluating whether defense of marriage acts (mini or super-DOMAs) preserve and stabilize the family. After finding that they do not—just as same sex marriage does not appear to destabilize families—the article analyzes what variables are, in fact, associated with family stability. Specifically, those variables are: families below the poverty line; men and women married three or more times; religiosity; percent conservative versus liberal in a state; disposable income; percent with bachelor’s degree; and median age of first marriage. Next, the article applies the sociological concepts of moral entrepreneurism and …

Innocent Spouse Relief - Relief From The Sneaky Spouse, Corinna Marie Cicmanec

Corinna Cicmanec

Innocent Spouse Relief: Relief from the Sneaky Spouse

This article discusses Internal Revenue Code § 6015, also known the as Innocent Spouse provision. This provision offers relief to spouses from the joint and several liability that stems from filing a joint return. Innocent Spouse Relief is available in certain situations when one spouse is “sneaky” in regards to disclosing financial information to the other spouse and the IRS. This article specifically analyzes how §6015 affects women, and the hurdles women face when filing successful claims. This paper explores the current problems with §6015 claims process, and suggests options for the …

A Home With Dignity: Domestic Violence And Property Rights, Margaret Johnson

Margaret E Johnson

This Article argues that the legal system should do more to address intimate partner violence and each party’s need for a home for several reasons. First, domestic violence is a leading cause of homelessness and family homelessness. Second, the struggle over rights to a shared home can increase the violence to which the woman is subjected. And third, a woman who decides that continuing to share a home with the person who abused her receives little or no system support, despite the evidence that this decision could most effectively reduce the violence. The legal system’s current failings result from its …

Termination Of Copyright Transfers: The Author Spouse’S Last Laugh, Llewellyn Joseph Gibbons

Llewellyn Joseph Gibbons

The 1976 Copyright Act provides that an author may unilaterally terminate a transfer of copyright approximately 35 years after the initial transfer. In community property states, state law assumes that through the magic of the operation of state law, the author-spouse transfers the copyright that federal law initially vests in the author to the community property (marital) estate. Author-spouses are now entering the period when they may begin to terminate any putative copyright transfer to the community property estate or terminate other transfers that may be the basis for pre-or-post-nuptial agreements, property settlements, or dissolution decrees in divorce actions. This …

Manufacturing Moral Panic As Political Distraction: An Empirical And Social Theoretical Analysis Of Domas, Deirdre Bowen

Deirdre M Bowen

This article offers the only empirical analysis to date of national data evaluating the claim that defense of marriage acts (DOMAs) preserve and stabilize the family. After concluding that they do not, the article analyzes what variables are, in fact, correlated with family stability. Specifically, the relationships between families below the poverty line, men and women married three or more times, religiosity, percent conservative versus liberal in a state, disposable income, percent with bachelor’s degree, and median age of first marriage, and marriage and divorce trends is fully explored. Next, the article applies the sociological concepts of moral entrepreneurism, which …

I Wanna Marry You: The Irrelevancy And Distraction Of Doma, Deirdre Bowen

Deirdre M Bowen

This article offers the only empirical analysis to date of national data evaluating the claim that defense of marriage acts (DOMAs) preserve and stabilize the family. The article examines marriage and divorce changes in trends for every state over the last ten years for which data is available comparing changes, if any, before and after a DOMA was enacted or same sex marriage was permitted. After concluding that DOMA does not play a role in either divorce or marriage changes in trends or rates, the article explores what variables are, in fact, correlated with family stability. Given that poverty, religiosity, …

Bringing Up Baby: Adoption, Marriage, And The Best Interests Of The Child, Robin Fretwell Wilson, W. Bradford Wilcox

Robin Fretwell Wilson

In the piece, Professor Brad Wilcox and I ask who should care for children when their biological parents cannot? This is a question of potentially explosive dimensions under new definitions of legal parentage proposed in this volume of the WILLIAM & MARY BILL OF RIGHTS JOURNAL. This question is also important today for evaluating state adoption laws. A significant number of states bar consideration of a prospective adopter’s marital or non-marital status. We believe these laws miss an important opportunity to maximize the best interests of each child being placed. In this piece, we take an exclusively child-centered approach, drawing …

A Strategy For Teaching Objectivity To The Domestic Relations Student: Utilizing Psychodrama To Explore Attorney Empathy Toward Improving Family Law Outcomes, Bruce L. Beverly

Bruce L. Beverly

The basic domestic relations law course is often taught by the casebook method, with little reference to actual underlying human drama. In order to produce effective advocates, it is necessary for student to be brought out of the sterile case recitation model and into a role where the student experiences, in a controlled and directed fashion, some of the hardships faced by the players in a family law case. This article proposes that, in line with new emphasis on experiential learning and alternate learning styles, one might employ a psychodramatic approach to teaching the domestic relations course, in order to …

Meeting The Challenges Of Adoption In An Internet Age, Mary Kate Kearney, Arrielle Millstein

Mary Kate Kearney

No abstract provided.

Handbook Of The Law Of Persons And Domestic Relations. By Joseph W. Madden, Robert C. Brown

Dr Robert Brown

No abstract provided.

Navigating Gender In Modern Intimate Partnership Law, Alicia Kelly

Alicia B. Kelly

With women edging up to become half the workforce, claims of women’s economic empowerment now abound. But the reality is that gender equality has not been mainstreamed. The truly eye-opening new data is how marginalized and partial many women’s attachment to the labor force continues to be. Simultaneously, another misleading narrative also circulates—that of separateness—of disconnected individualism. In the context of intimate partnership and feminist legal theory, this Article pushes back against these accounts and demonstrates their problematic link. Contrary to the storylines, many women’s lives in fact remain characterized by deep bonds with partners, children, and extended family, and …

Better Equity For Elders: Basing Couples' Economic Relations Law On Sharing And Caring, Alicia Kelly

Alicia B. Kelly

This essay considers how to achieve better equity in aging through laws governing couples' economic relations. Focusing on family law's contributions to economic vulnerabilities among older people, I critique contemporary law for its hyper-individualistic conception of intra-couple relationships and also for its too narrow and marriage-centric approach to regulating couples' collaborative economic activities. These deficits contribute to inequalities between men and women and between married and unmarried couples. Modern couple's law frequently disadvantages women by neglecting the value and impacts of sharing and caring behaviors within the family. This helps impoverish women across the life cycle, often acutely affecting older …

Homogenous Rules For Heterogeneous Families: The Standardization Of Family Law When There Is No Standard Family, Katharine K. Baker

Katharine K. Baker

At War With The Environment, David A. Wirth

David A. Wirth

In this Article, Professor Wirth reviews the book National Defense and the Environment by Stephen Dycus, a recognized expert in both environmental and national security law. The emphasis of the book is on containing and remediating the environmental excesses of the American defense-industrial complex, with a domestic policy focus. While Professor Wirth considers Dycus’ work an intellectually rewarding and refreshing new entry into the ongoing environment-as-security colloquy, he does not consider the book to be accessible to a general audience given the book’s fundamentally legalistic nature.

Consensual Amorous Relationships Between Faculty And Students: The Constitutional Right To Privacy, Elisabeth A. Keller

Elisabeth Keller

Surveys of college students in the United States revealed that a significant number of students thought they had been victims of some form of sexual harassment. Growing awareness of the magnitude, dimensions, and effects of sexual harassment at educational institutions and the potential for institutional liability have prompted educators to adopt policies to avert such problems. The policies typically prohibit sexual harassment of employees and students and alert the university community to the serious effects of sexual harassment and the potential for student exploitation. Some universities have gone beyond establishing regulations directed at widely litigated problems of sexual harassment and …

Emerging Models For Alternatives To Marriage, Sanford N. Katz

Sanford N. Katz

Perhaps one of the most important changes in family law in the past thirty years has been the inclusion of certain kinds of friendships in the range of relationships from which rights and responsibilities can flow. Domestic partnership laws, a phenomenon of the 1990s, may be seen as a natural development from the judicial recognition of contract cohabitation and the legislative and judicial response to same-sex couples who, unable to meet statutory requirements for marriage, have sought official recognition of their relationships. This essay discusses an aspect of certain kinds of domestic partnership laws-their formal requirements and the extent to …

Marriage As Partnership, Sanford N. Katz

Sanford N. Katz

In this essay honoring Professor Mary Ann Glendon, the author discusses the contract of partnerships concept of marriage as it applies to antenuptial agreements, cohabitation contracts, and property settlement agreements, the three contexts about which Professor Glendon has written in her books The New Family and the New Property (1981) and The Transformation of Family Law (1996).

New Directions For Family Law In The United States, Sanford N. Katz

Sanford N. Katz

This article provides a survey of one major development in family law in the United States that has occurred during the most recent past. This development is the change that has occurred in marriage-like relationships. The article begins with a discussion of contract cohabitation and the extent to which it reflected a change from traditional views of formal or informal marriage as the only legally acceptable model for adults who desired to live together. It shows how contract cohabitation laid the groundwork for the establishment of domestic partnership laws. These laws were first adopted by municipalities and then by states …

Preserving The Family Through Change For The Sake Of Future Generations, Sanford N. Katz

Sanford N. Katz

Within the last fifty years, a transformation has taken place in American law. Before then, family relationships, like parent-child relationship, were clearly defined by biology or adoption. Marriage was defined by gender. Marriage certificates and birth certificates evidenced one's legal status. The transformation that has occurred was the legal recognition that took reality into account that relationships can develop without formalities. No longer can it be said that either one is in a certain status or one is not. Marriage-like relationships have been recognized, like civil unions, as well as de facto parenthood. American law has now recognized that marriage …

Identifying Sperm And Egg Donors: Opening Pandora’S Box, Mary Kate Kearney

Mary Kate Kearney

No abstract provided.

Family Solidarity Versus Social Solidarity In The United States, Sanford N. Katz

Sanford N. Katz

No abstract provided.

Denying Choice Of Forum: An Interference By The Massachusetts Trial Court With Domestic Violence Victims' Rights, Margaret B. Drew, Marilu E. Gresens

Margaret B Drew

The article discusses the due process denials inherent in the Massachusetts scheme designed to defeat the victim's choice of forum for hearing on a civil protection order petition. The scheme would divert many protection orders to family court even though the statute in question permits filing and hearing of the petitions in district, superior and famiy courts. The diversion would be available whenever there is a related case filed in family court at the time that the petition for protection is filed. More alarmingly, the petition could be diverted to family court if a subsequent action was filed in the …

The Stories Of Marriage, Katharine K. Baker

Katharine K. Baker

Money Matters In Marriage: Unmasking Interdependence In Ongoing Spousal Economic Relations, Alicia B. Kelly

Alicia B. Kelly

This Article presents a rare exploration of the interactions among money, marriage and law while the relationship is ongoing. Using insights on the relational landscape from the social sciences as a lens, I examine the law’s regulation of spousal economic relations and its account of and potential impact within a functioning marriage. Building on my previous work, my claim is that the law governing money in marriage should be grounded on a distinctive and clarified model of partnership marriage that understands the relationship to be of equal persons who join forces to share the burdens and benefits of a shared …

Behavioral Economic Issues In American & Islamic Marriage & Divorce Law, Ryan M. Riegg

Ryan M. Riegg

In Good Times And In Debt: The Evolution Of Marital Agency And The Meaning Of Marriage, Marie T. Reilly

Marie T. Reilly

A married person sometimes acts solely for herself and at other times on behalf of her spouse. If she incurs debt solely for herself, then only she is liable to the creditor. If, however, she incurs debt both for herself and on behalf of her spouse, both are liable – the debtor directly and the spouse indirectly by imputed liability. Before married women’s property reform, imputed marital liability followed from marital status. As marriage changed to recognize the legal individuality of both spouses, so too did the scope of a spouse’s imputed liability for the debts of the other spouse. …

Finding Marriage Amidst A Sea Of Confusion: A Precursor To Considering The Public Purpose Of Marriage, Randy Lee

Randy Lee

No abstract provided.

“A Rose By Any Other Name Would Smell As Sweet,”But Would It Still Be Treasured: The Mislabeling And Misunderstanding Of Parents And Grandparents In American Policy, Randy Lee

Randy Lee

No abstract provided.

Achieving Batterer Accountability In The Child Protection System, Leigh Goodmark

Leigh S. Goodmark

No abstract provided.

Finding Marriage Amidst A Sea Of Confusion: A Precursor To Considering The Public Purposes Of Marriage, Randy Lee

Randy Lee