Law Commons^™

Family Law Scholarship Goes To Court: Functional Parenthood And The Case Of Debra H. V. Janice R., Suzanne B. Goldberg, Harriet Antczak, Mark Musico

Faculty Scholarship

Family law literature, while diverse in its exploration of contemporary families, also offers important threads of consensus. These strong points of coherence, when brought together with relevant case law, can be a useful means of advancing the academic conversation as well as engaging directly with courts to shape the law's development.

In a field as complex as family law, myriad academic viewpoints on any given issue often make it difficult to imagine scholarly discussion having utility for courts. As we aim to show here, however, amicus briefs can be important vehicles for synthesizing the literature, highlighting basic points of consensus …

Repairing Family Law, Clare Huntington

Faculty Scholarship

Scholars in the burgeoning field of law and emotion have paid surprisingly little attention to family law. This gap is unfortunate because law and emotion has the potential to bring great insights to family law. This Article begins to fill this void — and inaugurate a larger debate about the central role of emotion in family law — by exploring the intriguing and significant consequences for the regulation of families that flow from a theory of intimacy first articulated by psychoanalytic theorist Melanie Klein. According to Klein, individuals love others, inevitably transgress against those they love out of hate and …

Family Law Cases As Law Reform Litigation: Unrecognized Parents And The Story Of Alison D. V. Virginia M., Suzanne B. Goldberg

Faculty Scholarship

Although the gap between law and lived experience comes as no surprise to most people, the divergence is especially striking – and disturbing – in the area of family law. Legal training quickly reveals that love is not a foundational element of family law, yet it can still be jarring to find that love has little, if any, bearing on the contours of the legal family. Love, after all, does not account for who can and cannot marry. Nor does the past love of an unmarried couple trigger the protections of divorce should the couple separate.

When children are involved, …