Family Law Commons^™

Resolving Family Conflicts, Jana Singer, Jane Murphy

Jana B. Singer

Over the past two decades, virtually all areas of family law have undergone major doctrinal and theoretical changes - from the definition of marriage, to the financial and parenting consequences of divorce, to the legal construction of parenthood. An equally important set of changes has transformed the resolution of family disputes. This 'paradigm shift' in family conflict resolution has reshaped the practice of family law and has fundamentally altered the way in which disputing families interact with the legal system. Moreover, the changes have important implications for the way that family law is understood and taught. This volume examines the …

Family Law: Cases, Text, Problems, 5th Edition, Ira Ellman, Paul Kurtz, Lois Weithorn, Brian Bix, Karen Czapanskiy, Maxine Eichner

Karen Czapanskiy

Family law is an interdisciplinary area, and the materials in this work reflect the numerous disciplines influencing this field of law. This book is policy-oriented, with non-legal social science featured in the extensive note materials to provide a rich and varied learning experience and a practice resource tool. Notes do more than call attention to difficult questions of legal doctrine and policy; they illuminate them.

The authors use a problem approach throughout, in addition to comprehensive case law sources. Problems provide an ideal mechanism for students to acquire the ability to apply legal rules to concrete fact patterns.

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 …

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 …

Children And Family Law: A Practitioner's Resource Guide, Jennifer Stevenson Prilliman

Jennifer S. Prilliman

No abstract provided.

Members Only: The Need For Reform In U.S. Intercountry Adoption Policy, Colin Joseph Troy

Seattle University Law Review

In the last five years, Americans have adopted nearly seventy thousand children from foreign countries. The trend of intercountry adoption, “the process by which a married couple or single individual of one country adopts a child from another country,” is representative of the new globalized world, where families are formed and dissolved beyond the bounds of national borders. Although intercountry adoption has enabled many adoptive parents to form loving families and provide caring living environments for countless children, intercountry adoption is not without its share of problems. Corruption and abuse, such as child trafficking, have in many cases marred the …

Book Review: The Best Interests Of Children – An Evidence Based Approach, By Paul Millar, Noel Semple

Law Publications

If custody and access disputes are a deck of cards, the trump suit is the best interests of the child. When separating parents litigate about how and with whom their child should live, findings about what’s best for the child are meant to sweep away the parents’ interests and rights-claims. This principle is uncontroversial, but applying it is difficult. What parenting arrangements are best for children, and how successful is the legal system in putting these arrangements in place?

Sociologist Paul Millar has responded with this slim volume, the goal of which is to “explain child custody outcomes in Canada …

Habitual Residence, Home State, And Cross-Border Custody Jurisdiction: Time For A Temporal Standard In International Family Law, Todd Matthew Heine

Todd Heine

This article addresses jurisdictional standards that arise in every cross-border child custody dispute between European Union Member States and the United States—habitual residence and home state jurisdiction. These jurisdictional standards face uncertainty in many cases. The article covers three areas of international family law. First, the article provides a history of family law jurisdiction in the United States and thoroughly reviews home state jurisdiction in United States domestic law. While domestic family lawyers know this standard, the standard’s rigidity and fragmented application among the states baffles many foreign family lawyers. Second, the article offers an overview of the remarkable emergence …

State Power, Religion, And Women's Rights: A Comparative Analysis Of Family Law, Mala Htun, S. Laurel Weldon

Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies

Examining cross-national variation in family law, we find that many countries have reformed to promote sex equality. Yet a significant group retains older laws that discriminate against women. These variations reflect the diverse institutional legacies of these societies, conforming closely-but not entirely-to inherited legal traditions: civil law, common law, and postsocialist countries are the most egalitarian, while countries applying religious law are the least. Yet change is possible, even in unlikely contexts. Political conjunctures that disarm religious, nationalist, and fundamentalist opponents can open windows of opportunity for liberalizing reform.

Human Rights and Legal Systems Across the Global South, Symposium, Indiana …

Exporting Subjects: Globalizing Family Law Progress Through International Human Rights, Cyra Akila Choudhury

Faculty Publications

This article examines the global export of domestic U.S. legal projects and strategies in the realm of family law and gender justice to South Asia. While such projects have undoubtedly achieved substantial gains for women in the U.S., there have also been costs. At a remove of two decades, scholars have now begun to theorize those costs and argue that feminism needs to reconsider its commitments to particular projects that have been held central to women’s emancipation. Yet much of these critiques have not reached the transnational women’s movements that are led by U.S. feminist activists and scholars. Relying on …

A Primer On The History And Proper Drafting Of Qualified Domestic-Relations Orders, Terrence Cain

Faculty Scholarship

The divorce rate in the United States is slightly more than one-half the marriage rate. Divorce is a fact of life in this country, and will likely be so for the foreseeable future. On August 23, 1984, the divorce lawyer’s job got more complicated when Congress created the Qualified Domestic Relations Order ("QDRO") as part of some significant amendments to ERISA. QDROs are necessary because before those 1984 ERISA amendments, a lot of divorced persons discovered that they could be deprived of their marital or community property interest in their former spouses' retirement plans. For most divorcing couples, the two …

The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly Of Employment Division V. Smith For Family Law, James G. Dwyer

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.