Law Commons^™

Adopting Social Media In Family And Adoption Law, Stacey B. Steinberg, Meredith Burgess, Karla Herrera

Utah Law Review

Social media has dramatically changed the landscape facing families brought together through adoption. Just as adoptive families thirty years ago could not have predicted the impact of DNA technology on postadoption family life, adoptive families are only now beginning to grasp the impact of social media connectivity on the lives of their growing children. This change is related both to social media’s impact on family life and to fundamental shifts in our understanding of privacy more generally. Understanding the legal rights of parents and children in these circumstances is a novel and underexplored area of family law, constitutional law, and …

If You Grant It, They Will Come: The History And Enduring Legal Legacy Of Migratory Divorce, Michael J. Higdon

Utah Law Review

Fifty years ago, California became the first state to enact no-fault divorce, making it easier than ever before for individuals to dissolve unsuccessful marriages. Soon, every state would follow suit, and over the years, much has been written about this national shift in the law of divorce. What has thus far escaped scrutiny, however, is one of the prime casualties of that switch—the phenomenon of migratory divorce. This failure is somewhat ironic given that, although no-fault divorce has existed for just over fifty years, migratory divorce played a prominent role in American legal history for well over a century. Migratory …

Achieving Equality Without A Constitution: Lessons From Israel For Queer Family Law, Laura T. Kessler

Utah Law Faculty Scholarship

How might the United States reconcile conflicts between equality and religious freedom in the realm of family law? To answer this question, this chapter considers recent developments in family (personal status) law in Israel. While Israel may at first blush appear to be the last place that feminists and queer theorists should look for solutions to modern conflicts between democratic and religious values, this chapter argues that the Israeli experience has much to offer critical family scholars working to develop pluralistic legal approaches to family regulation. Israel is a country with a diverse population and unique political and legal context …

Miscarriage Of Justice: Early Pregnancy Loss And The Limits Of U.S. Employment Law, Laura T. Kessler

Utah Law Faculty Scholarship

This Article explores judicial responses to miscarriage under federal employment law in the United States. Miscarriage is an incredibly common experience. Of confirmed pregnancies, about fifteen percent will end in miscarriage; almost half of all women who have given birth have suffered a miscarriage. Yet this experience slips through the cracks of every major federal employment law in the United States.

The Pregnancy Discrimination Act of 1978, for example, defines sex discrimination to include discrimination on the basis of pregnancy, childbirth, or related medical conditions. The Family and Medical Leave Act of 1993 requires covered employers to provide employees with …

The Institutional Mismatch Of State Civil Courts, Colleen Shanahan, Jessica Steinberg, Alyx Mark, Anna E. Carpenter

Utah Law Faculty Scholarship

State civil courts are central institutions in American democracy. Though designed for dispute resolution, these courts function as emergency rooms for social needs in the face of the failure of the legislative and executive branches to disrupt or mitigate inequality. We reconsider national case data to analyze the presence of social needs in state civil cases. We then use original data from courtroom observation and interviews to theorize how state civil courts grapple with the mismatch between the social needs people bring to these courts and their institutional design. This institutional mismatch leads to two roles of state civil courts …

Family Law By The Numbers: The Story That Casebooks Tell, Laura T. Kessler

Utah Law Faculty Scholarship

This Article presents the findings of a content analysis of 86 family law casebooks published in the United States from 1960 to 2019. Its purpose is to critically assess the discipline of family law with the aim of informing our understandings of family law’s history and exposing its ideological foundations and consequences. Although legal thinkers have written several intellectual histories of family law, this is the first quantitative look at the field.

The study finds that coverage of marriage and divorce in family law casebooks has decreased by almost half relative to other topics since the 1960s. In contrast, pages …

In Pursuit Of Economic Justice: The Political Economy Of Domestic Violence Laws And Policies, Deborah M. Weissman

Utah Law Review

Violence experienced within the family — perhaps the most intimate of all social arrangements — causes devastating consequences. Recent phenomena, including accounts of perpetrators of mass shootings with a history of domestic violence and the #MeToo movement, have called new attention to the costs and consequences of violence against women. Intimate violence wreaks havoc extending beyond the private spaces of the household, thereupon to lay bare the structural shortcomings of public institutions.

The act of domestic violence enters the public imagination principally as an offense of physical abuse. It is more complicated. In fact, intimate partner violence (IPV) is often …

Before Loving: The Lost Origins Of The Right To Marry, Michael Boucai

Utah Law Review

For almost two centuries of this nation’s history, the basic contours of the fundamental right to marry were fairly clear as a matter of natural, not constitutional, law. The right encompassed marriage’s essential characteristics: conjugality and contract, portability and permanence. This Article defines those four dimensions of the natural right to marry and describes their reflections and contradictions in positive law prior to Loving v. Virginia (1967). In that landmark case, the Supreme Court enforced a constitutional “freedom to marry” just when marriage’s definitive attributes were on the brink of legal collapse. Not only did wedlock proceed in Loving’s wake …

Reynolds V. United States, Rewritten, Laura T. Kessler

Utah Law Faculty Scholarship

In Reynolds v. United States, 98 U.S. 145 (1878), Chief Justice Morrison Waite, writing for a unanimous Supreme Court, upheld the federal Morrill Anti-Bigamy Act outlawing polygamy in the federal territories and providing criminal penalties for it. This is a re-writing of that opinion, presented in the form of a dissent, available in Feminist Judgments: Family Law Opinions Rewritten (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming 2020). Unlike the Court’s opinion, this dissent concludes that religious practice, as well as belief, is protected by the First Amendment. It therefore holds that a religious duty to engage in an unlawful practice may be a …

Criminalizing Battered Mothers, Courtney Cross

Utah Law Review

How a domestic violence survivor responds to the abuse she is experiencing depends on many factors. Some critical considerations include her access to resources, desire to stay in her relationship, and assessment of her own safety. Criminal and civil court systems place enormous pressure on survivors to separate from their abusive partners. Not only are survivors with children pressured to leave, they are punished when they stay. That punishment can come in any combination of diminished custody rights, limited parental rights, and incarceration. Yet a survivor who flees with her children is not immune to these same consequences: if she …

Find Out What It Means To Me: The Politics Of Respect And Dignity In Sexual Orientation Antidiscrimination, Jeremiah A. Ho

Utah Law Review

This Article considers the state of LGBTQ equality after the Supreme Court’s decision in Obergefell v. Hodges. Specifically, by examining this upsurge of social visibility for same-sex couples as both acceptance of sexual minorities and cultural assimilation, the Article finds that the marriage cases at the Supreme Court—Obergefell and United States v. Windsor—shifted the framing of gay rights from the politics of respect that appeared more than a decade ago in Lawrence v. Texas toward a politics of respectability. The Article traces this regression in Justice Kennedy’s own definition of dignity from Lawrence, where he approached the concept of dignity …

Decriminalizing Polygamy, Casey E. Faucon

Utah Law Review

Polygamous families are our national outlaws. Despite the expansion of sexual rights and marriage equality in the U.S., polygamy remains a crime. Challenging that stigma is the Brown family, who star in the reality TV show “Sister Wives” and who practice polygamous marriageas a tenet of their religion. The Browns filed suit against multiple Utah state actors in federal district court, challenging Utah’s polygamy statute as unconstitutional in violation of their Free Exercise of Religion, substantive Due Process, and Equal Protection rights. The district court agreed and decriminalized informal polygamy in Utah. On appeal, the Tenth Circuit reversed the district …

Same-Sex Marriage Litigation And Children's Right To Be Queer, Clifford Rosky

Utah Law Faculty Scholarship

This essay examines how lawyers and judges have framed the question of children’s queerness in litigation over samesex marriage. First, it argues that in United States v. Windsor and Obergefell v. Hodges, the US Supreme Court invoked the tropes of dignity, injury, and immutability to set the outer limits of sexual liberty for both children and adults. Next, the essay looks back to the early work of queer theorists, legal scholars, and lawyers to unearth a more promising vision of law’s relationship to children’s queerness. By juxtaposing how two judges approached the possibility of the gay child in Utah and …

Greed, Envy, And The Criminalization Of Insider Trading, John P. Anderson

Utah Law Review

In October 2011, a U.S. district court sentenced Raj Rajaratnam to eleven years in federal prison for insider trading. This is the longest sentence for insider trading in U.S. history, but it is significantly less than the nineteen to twenty-four-year term requested by the government. Such harsh prison terms (equal in some cases to those meted out for murder or rape) require sound justification in a liberal society. Yet jurists, politicians, and scholars have failed to offer a clear articulation of either the economic harm or the moral wrong committed by the insider trader.

This Article looks to fill this …

To Be Male: Homophobia, Sexism, And The Production Of “Masculine” Boys, Clifford Rosky

Utah Law Faculty Scholarship

This chapter is about the relationship between homophobia and sexism in family law. By conducting an empirical analysis of custody and visitation cases, it shows that stereotypes about the children of lesbian and gay parents are both sexist and homophobic. In some cases, the relationship between homophobia and sexism becomes especially obvious, when stereotypes explicitly conflate the sexual orientation, gender identity, and gender roles of children and parents. By looking more closely, however, we can find more subtle evidence of this relationship in a much wider range of cases, wherever stereotypes of the children of lesbian and gay parents appear. …

Unwed Putative Fathers: Beware Utah Adoption Law, Samuel C. Johnston

Utah OnLaw: The Utah Law Review Online Supplement

Utah’s adoption statute makes compliance unfairly difficult for unwed putative fathers. The difficulty is compounded by the possibility that predatory adoption agencies may be working with mothers to use Utah’s strict adoption laws to purposely deceive putative fathers who oppose adoption.

Utah lawmakers commendably want their state to be on the cutting edge of adoption law such that the interests of adoptees are served with speedy and efficient adoptions. But those lawmakers should also recognize that they can increase the legitimacy and perceived fairness of Utah laws by inserting new provisions into Utah’s adoption statute or tweaking existing requirements to …