Law Commons^™

Taking Pierce Seriously: The Family, Religious Education, And Harm To Children, Richard W. Garnett

Journal Articles

Many States exempt religious parents from prosecution, or limit their exposure to criminal liability, when their failure to seek medical care for their sick or injured children is motivated by religious belief. This paper explores the question what, if anything, the debate about these exemptions says about the state's authority to override parents' decisions about education, particularly religious education. If we accept, for example, that the state may in some cases require medical treatment for a child, over her parents' objections, to avoid serious injury or death, should it follow that it may regulate, or even forbid, a child's religious …

Long-Term Outcomes Of An Abstinence-Based, Small-Group Pregnancy Prevention Program In New York City Schools, Lisa D. Lieberman, Heather Gray, Megan Wier, Renee Fiorentino, Patricia Maloney

Department of Public Health Scholarship and Creative Works

Context: Despite drops in U.S. teenage birthrates, questions continue to arise about how best to reduce the country's adolescent birthrate. School-based programs continue to be considered one of the best ways to reach adolescents at risk of early sexual activity.

Methods: A total of 312 students completed a pretest, a posttest and a follow-up one year after the posttest: 125 who had participated in a 3-4-month-long abstinence-based small-group intervention led by trained social workers, and 187 in a comparison group that received no special services.

Results: There were few significant differences between the intervention and comparison groups at posttest. At …

Unbending Gender: Why Family And Work Conflict And What To Do About It, Martha M. Ertman

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Case And Comment: Between The Baby And The Breast, S. I. Strong

Faculty Publications

IN Re C (A CHILD) (HIV Test) [1999] 2 F.L.R. 1004, a local authority applied for a specific issue order to test a four-month-old baby girl for HIV. The mother of the child first tested positive for HIV in 1990, but adopted a highly sceptical stance towards generally accepted theories about HIV and AIDS, and refused conventional therapy for herself, preferring to rely on a healthy lifestyle as a prophylactic. The case arose when the baby's physician became aware not only that the mother was breastfeeding the child (despite the risk of transmission of HIV), but that the parents refused …

Paradox Of Family Privacy, David D. Meyer

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Interview With Alan M. Lerner, Lake Srinivasan, Alan M. Lerner, Legal Oral History Project, University Of Pennsylvania Carey Law School

Legal Oral History Project

For transcript, click the Download button above. For video index, click the link below.

Alan M. Lerner (L '65) was a practice professor at the University of Pennsylvania Law School from 1993 until his death in 2010. He practiced and taught mainly in the areas of civil rights and family law.

Law Making For The Baby Making: An Interpretive Approach To The Determination Of Legal Parentage, Marsha Garrison

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Save The Marriage Before (Not After) The Ceremony: The Marriage Preparation Act - Can We Have A Public Response To A Private Problem, Lundy Langston

Journal Publications

Two individuals meet, engage in an intimate, not necessarily sexual, relationship and marry. The two join in a union with the promise to spend the remainder of their natural lives together. But forever is not forever. On a national level, over 50 percent of marriages end in divorce.' Perhaps marriage vows should include a statement about the inevitability of divorce. States' divorce laws vary, from faultbased, to no-fault, to a statutory period of separation. Some states recently made it easier for individuals to be granted a divorce. Reasons for making it easier to end marriages could have been related to …

The Legal Regulation Of Adult Personal Relationships: Evaluating Policy Objectives And Legal Options In Federal Legislation, Brenda Cossman, Bruce Ryder

Commissioned Reports, Studies and Public Policy Documents

Few would dispute that adult personal relationships characterized by caring and commitment ought to be recognized and supported by the state because of their fundamental importance to the well-being of individuals and communities. The law has long sought to identify these relationships by reference to ties of blood, marriage or adoption. Contemporary norms, however, value adult personal relationships by reference to their qualitative attributes rather than their formal legal status. This shift in normative assumptions has accompanied profound shifts in Canadians’ living arrangements over the course of the last thirty years. We have witnessed a decline in the marriage rate, …

Stalking: Cultural, Clinical, And Legal Considerations, Carol E. Jordan, Karen Quinn, Bradley O. Jordan, Celia R. Daileader

Office for Policy Studies on Violence Against Women Publications

Crimes of violence against women are unique in their treatment by our culture and our system of legal justice. Both culturally and statutorily, victims of crimes which have historically been perpetrated against women, such as rape, domestic violence, and stalking have received significant focus. This article highlights cultural considerations and provides a statutory and case law analysis.

Weighing The Domestic Violence Factor In Custody Cases: Tipping The Scales In Favor Of Protecting Victims And Their Children, Kim Susser

Scholarly Works

In 1996, the New York State Legislature attempted to afford additional protection to domestic violence victims and their children involved in custody disputes by amending New York's Domestic Relations Law and the Family Court Act to mandate consideration of domestic violence when determining the best interests of the child in custody and visitation cases. Four years later, it is evident that the amendment failed to change the behavior of the courts or overcome the entrenched attitudes of many judges, attorneys and forensic evaluators regarding domestic violence.

The first Part of this Article contains a brief overview of the case law …

Why Truth Is Not A Defense In Paternity Actions, 10 Tex. J. Women & L. 69 (2000), Diane S. Kaplan

UIC Law Open Access Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

The Kidnapping Of Edgardo Mortara: Contemporary Lessons In The Child Welfare Wars, Bruce A. Boyer, Steven Lubet

Faculty Publications & Other Works

No abstract provided.

Termination Of Older Youth From Foster Care: A Protocol For Illinois, Laurene Heybach, Stacey E. Platt

Faculty Publications & Other Works

No abstract provided.

Interstate Establishment, Enforcement, And Modification Of Child Support Orders, Patricia W. Moore

Faculty Articles

Intended to improve the collection of child support across state lines, the Uniform Interstate Family Support Act has now been in effect in all fifty states for approximately three years. This Article examines the history and operation of this statute and its companion federal statute, the Full Faith and Credit For Child Support Orders Act. Following UIFSA's structure, the Article details the provisions governing the establishment, enforcement, and modification of child support orders in the interstate context and explains which federally-promulgated forms to use in each situation. Analyzing the abundant case law already decided under these statutes, the article concludes …

Afterword And Response: What Digging Does And Does Not Do, Patricia D. White

Articles

No abstract provided.

Not In Front Of The Children: Prohibition On Child Custody As Civil Branding For Criminal Activity, Deborah Ahrens

Faculty Articles

This piece identifies and explores a trend in statutes and caselaw towards treating criminal behavior as a per se or presumptive bar to child custody, reading this development through the lens of the modern criminal sanctions literature.

Comparing Race And Sex Discrimination In Custody Cases, Katharine T. Bartlett

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

The Process Geography Of Law (As Approached Through Andalucian Gitano Family Law), Susan G. Drummond

Articles & Book Chapters

Comparative law and legal anthropology have for long theorized on the basis of a traditional geography which saw states, regions, locales and social fields as having durable boundaries containing stable and homogenous cultures. This idea of place is now undergoing a massive transformation in response to the effects of and theories about globalization. The emerging ‘process geography’ rejects these traditional ideas, arguing that they are not, and indeed have never been aspects of reality, which is better represented by an imagery of processes. However, it is argued here that globalization is not a synonym for homogenization, nor has place suddenly …

Evidence Issues In Domestic Violence Civil Cases, Jane C. Murphy, Jane H. Aiken

All Faculty Scholarship

New laws and policies aimed at protecting victims of domestic violence have been adopted across the country over the last twenty years.The legal approaches taken to protect battered women and control family violence have resulted in significant changes in family law. New laws include statutes permitting civil protection or restraining orders, and laws requiring that domestic violence be considered in custody and/or visitation decisions. Both of these types of statutory reforms can provide protection to adult victims of domestic violence and their children. Evaluating a parent's fitness by considering past acts of violence to other family members results in decisions …

On Children And Dual Nationality: Sabet And The Islamic Republic Of Iran, Nancy Amoury Combs

Faculty Publications

The Iran-United States Claims Tribunal's recent decision in Sabet and The Islamic Republic of Iran sheds new light on difficult issues concerning the dual nationality of minors. In particular, the case was the first in which the Tribunal determined minor dual national claimants to have a dominant and effective nationality different from that of either of their parents. Further, the Tribunal broke new ground in its analysis of 'the caveat,' an equitable doctrine that can bar the claims of dual nationals. This article applauds the Tribunal's advances in its caveat jurisprudence and develops a new approach that would further those …

Second-Parent Adoption, Patricia J. Falk

Law Faculty Articles and Essays

The topic of this article is second-parent adoption. I hope to accomplish four things in my discussion. First, I will define second-parent adoption and give some reasons that it is desirable for both parents and children. Second, I will summarize the state of the law in terms of legislative enactments and case law in the United States. Third, I will discuss the role of social science in second-parent adoption cases. Finally, I will discuss some of the implications of recognizing second-parent adoptions.

Second-Parent Adoption By Same-Sex Couples In Ohio: Unsettled And Unsettling Law, Susan J. Becker

Law Faculty Articles and Essays

Ohio law regarding second-parent adoptions remains unsettled. Section II of this article provides an overview of Ohio adoption law. Section III presents the case of In re Jane Doe, starting with the decision of the lesbian couple to jointly bring a child into this world, and continuing with the efforts of both mothers to obtain legal recognition for the de facto parent's status through adoption, and the legal strategies employed by the mothers' attorneys, also addressed are the court-appointed Guardian Ad Litem (GAL), the social science data supplied by the amicus curiae to help the court reach a fully informed …

Promoting The Best Interests Of Children Whose Parents Are Divorcing: The Next Steps For Arkansas, Kenneth S. Gallant

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

When Fathers' Rights Are Mothers' Duties: The Failure Of Equal Protection In Miller V. Albright, Kristin Collins

Faculty Scholarship

The history of coverture and the transmission of American citizenship brings an elementary point into focus: The allocation of parental rights is always correlated with the allocation of parental responsibility. This basic legal truism, and its numerous implications for citizenship law, suggests that the principal gender injustice caused by § 1409 is not its truncation of fathers' rights, but its creation and perpetuation of a legal regime in which mothers assume full responsibility for foreign-born nonmarital children. Once we recognize this gendered operation of § 1409, broader failures of equal protection analysis come into relief. First, while the jurisprudential understanding …

Why Lesbians And Gay Men Should Read Martha Fineman, Nancy Polikoff

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

No abstract provided.

The Challenge To Rural States Of Procedural Reform In High Conflict Custody Cases, Elizabeth Brandt

Articles

No abstract provided.

Couples: Marriage, Civil Union, And Domestic Partnership, David L. Chambers

Book Chapters

In this country, during the last decades of the twentieth century, thousands of lesbians married other women and thousands of gay men married other men. Many of these couples recited traditional vows in churches and synagogues. Others have pledged to each other in their own backyards in words that they wrote themselves. But not one of these thousands of solemn occasions was recognized as creating a legally valid marriage. In the United States, each state has its own statute defining who can marry, and as far as the states were concerned, these couples were playing dress up. One state has …

The Evolving Judicial Role In Child Custody Disputes: From Fault Finder To Conflict Manager To Differential Case Management, Andrew Schepard

Hofstra Law Faculty Scholarship

The judiciary's role in divorce related child custody disputes has been transformed in the latter half of the twentieth century in response to the changing characteristics of American families, changing perceptions of the needs of children, and an overwhelming case load increase. The transformation occurred in two distinct phases, and a third is currently in process.

In Phase I, from the late 1960s (the beginning of widespread "no fault" divorce) to 1980, the child custody court was a fault finder functioning through adversary procedure. The court's job was to identify a single custodial parent and assign that parent primary legal …

Internet Sexual Predators: Protecting Children In The Global Community, Madeleine M. Plasencia

Articles

The Internet, serving as the largest network of computers in the world, has provided the horizontal parallax over which all can participate in communication and transaction, education and entertainment4 It also serves a community of participants and beneficiaries whose goals are not always shared or legal. The rise of this advanced technology has led to a new "red light district."

Unlike the physical spaces available for the distribution of pornography and sexual favors for money, the Internet, with its lack of structure, has led to an unimaginable amount of pornography available for any on-line spectator.' Information necessary for consummation of …