Law Commons^™

Mutual Dependency In Child Welfare, Clare Huntington

Faculty Scholarship

The child welfare system is in need of fundamental reform. To the great detriment of parents and children, in the current system the state waits for a crisis in a family and then intervenes in a heavy-handed fashion. The state pays scant attention to the prevention of child abuse and neglect. This Article argues that the principal conceptual barrier to the adoption of a prevention-oriented approach to child welfare is the dominant conception of family autonomy, which venerates freedom from state control. This Article proposes a novel reconception of family autonomy that encourages engagement with the state, rather than simply …

Controlling Family Shareholders In Developing Countries: Anchoring Relational Exchange, Ronald J. Gilson

Faculty Scholarship

In recent years, corporate governance scholarship has begun to focus on the most common distribution of public corporation ownership: outside of the United States and the United Kingdom, publicly owned corporations often have a controlling shareholder. The presence of a controlling shareholder is especially prevalent in developing countries. In Asia, for example, some two-thirds of public corporations have one, most of whom represent family ownership. The law and finance literature, exemplified by a series of articles by Rafael La Porta, Florencio Lopez-de-Silanes, Andrei Shleifer, Robert Vishny and others, treats the prevalence of controlling shareholders as the result of bad law; …

A World Without Marriage, Elizabeth S. Scott

Faculty Scholarship

The legal status of marriage has become the focus of a great deal of controversy in recent years. Social and religious conservatives have voiced alarm at the decline of marriage in an era in which divorce rates are high and increasing numbers of people live in nonmarital families. For these advocates, social welfare rests on the survival (or revival) of traditional marriage. Meanwhile, critics from the left argue that marriage as the preferred and privileged family form will (and should) soon be a thing of the past. Some feminists, such as Martha Fineman and Nancy Polikoff, want to abolish legal …

Ensuring Effective Representation Of Parents In Dependency And Neglect Cases, Clare Huntington

Faculty Scholarship

Since 2005, the Colorado Supreme Court Respondent Parents' Counsel Task Force has been working to ensure the effective representation of parents in dependency and neglect proceedings. This article describes the work of the Task Force.

When Did Lawyers For Children Stop Reading Goldstein, Freud And Solnit? Lessons From The Twentieth Century On Best Interests And The Role Of The Child Advocate, Jane M. Spinak

Faculty Scholarship

Between 1973 and 1986, Joseph Goldstein, Anna Freud, and Albert Solnit published three influential but controversial books on the best interests of the child that had an enormous impact on state decisions to intervene in family life and direct the placement of children. During the same period, children in child welfare proceedings were increasingly represented by lawyers or guardians ad litem whose advocacy included understanding and interpreting the meaning of best interests. This article begins by tracing a conversation of sorts that occurs between the authors and other scholars and practitioners as their ideas begin to influence decision-making in child …

Some Reflections About Three Decades Of Working With Incarcerated Mothers, Philip Genty

Faculty Scholarship

Almost thirty years ago I was a second-year student in a law school clinic. I was making my first legal visit to a prison. My client, whom I will call "Dina," was meeting me to talk about some visitation issues with her young son. When she came into the visiting room she was poised and professional in demeanor. She began to explain that her son was being cared for by his paternal grandmother. The grandmother was unwilling to bring him to the prison to see her. As a result Dina had not seen her son for several months. Suddenly, and …

Changing Name Changing: Framing Rules And The Future Of Marital Names, Elizabeth F. Emens

Faculty Scholarship

What laws should govern spouses' names at marriage? If a man and a woman marry, should the woman's name change automatically? Or should the woman's name remain the same unless she goes through more or less complicated steps to change it? Contrary to convention, should the man's name change to the woman's? Should both their names be hyphenated? Many variations could be imagined.

The law of marital names has undergone a significant transformation over the past forty years. For about a hundred years of U.S. history, states required married women to take their husbands' names in order to engage in …

Developing Markets In Baby-Making: In The Matter Of Baby M, Carol Sanger

Faculty Scholarship

In this Essay, I want to explore the Baby M case from a different, less philosophical perspective. The question I pose is simply this: how did the Sterns and the Whiteheads find one another in the first place? After all, apart from their New Jersey location (and a shared fondness for Bruce Springsteen), the two couples had little in common. Mary Beth was a high school dropout; Betsy had a Ph.D. and M.D. from the University of Michigan. Rick was a Vietnam vet fighting an ongoing battle with unemployment and alcoholism; Bill led what close friends called "a quiet, industrious …

Framing Family Court Through The Lens Of Accountability, Jane M. Spinak

Faculty Scholarship

Abolish Family Court. Merge it. Restructure it. Give it more power; give it less. Whatever recommendations were made during the two-day conference, not a single participant said that the current Court functioned well. That's hardly surprising. Barely twenty-five years after the first juvenile court was created, some of its chief protagonists expressed alarm about the Court's functioning. Those concerns are eerily similar to some of the current critiques that surfaced at the conference: insufficient resources, inadequate preventive services to keep children out of court, an overwhelmed probation service, judges without ample understanding of the complexities of families' lives, intervening in …