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Bridging The Gap Between Intent And Status: A New Framework For Modern Parentage, Yehezkel Margalit
Bridging The Gap Between Intent And Status: A New Framework For Modern Parentage, Yehezkel Margalit
Hezi Margalit
The last few decades have witnessed dramatic changes in the conceptualization and methodologies of determining legal parentage in the U.S. and other countries in the western world. Through various sociological shifts, growing social openness and bio-medical innovations, the traditional definitions of family and parenthood have been dramatically transformed. This transformation has led to an acute and urgent need for legal and social frameworks to regulate the process of determining legal parentage. Moreover, instead of progressing in a piecemeal, ad-hoc manner, the framework for determining legal parentage should be comprehensive. Only a comprehensive solution will address the differing needs of today’s …
Institutionalized Silence: The Problem Of Child Voicelessness In Divorce Proceedings, Brandon Sadowsky
Institutionalized Silence: The Problem Of Child Voicelessness In Divorce Proceedings, Brandon Sadowsky
Brandon Sadowsky
In this paper, I present the current state of child representation in divorce proceedings. I argue that children should be represented in all divorce proceedings. I then consider the best interest and client-directed models of child representation and argue that each model is supported by important intuitions: paternalism and autonomy, respectively. I try to formulate a hybrid model that satisfies both of these intuitions.
Regulating The Family: The Impact Of Pro-Family Policy Making Assessments On Women And Non-Traditional Families, Robin S. Maril
Regulating The Family: The Impact Of Pro-Family Policy Making Assessments On Women And Non-Traditional Families, Robin S. Maril
Robin S. Maril
Beginning in the 1980s, pro-family advocates lobbied the Reagan administration to take a stronger, more direct role in enforcing traditional family norms through agency rulemaking. In 1986 the White House Working Group on the Family published a report entitled, The Family: Preserving America’s Future, detailing what its authors perceived to be the biggest threats to the “American household of persons related by blood, marriage or adoption – the traditional . . . family.” These threats included a lax sexual culture carried over from the 1960s, resulting in rising divorce rates, children born “out of wedlock,” and increased acceptance of “alternative …
Revisiting The Meaning Of Marriage: Immigration For Same-Sex Spouses In A Post-Windsor World, Scott Titshaw
Revisiting The Meaning Of Marriage: Immigration For Same-Sex Spouses In A Post-Windsor World, Scott Titshaw
Scott Titshaw
When the Supreme Court struck down Section 3 of DOMA in United States v. Windsor, it eliminated a categorical barrier to immigration for thousands of LGBT families. Yet Windsor was not an immigration case, and the Court’s opinion did not address at least three resulting immigration questions: What if a same-sex couple legally marries in one jurisdiction but resides in a state that does not recognize the marriage? What if the couple is in a legally-recognized “civil union” or “registered partnership”? Will children born to spouses or registered partners in same-sex couples be recognized as “born in wedlock” for immigration …
Questioning Child Support Enforcement For Poor Families, Leslie J. Harris
Questioning Child Support Enforcement For Poor Families, Leslie J. Harris
Leslie J. Harris
American law and culture have always assumed that providing for children economically is a private obligation, ordinarily belonging to the parents. The principal was given real teeth in 1975, when Congress enacted the federal-state child support enforcement program. The legislation's two related goals were to reduce childhood poverty and to reduce the welfare rolls. The goals were linked by the assumption that childhood poverty is largely attributable to the failure of absent parents (overwhelmingly fathers) to pay their fair share of child support, even though they are able to do so. Federal welfare policy originally assumed that custodial mothers would …
Ghosts In The Postmodern Family, Annette Appell
Ghosts In The Postmodern Family, Annette Appell
annette appell
As legal theory and doctrine respond to the range and complexity of biological and social connections that increasingly compose families, they evoke a bionormative nuclear family framework for lesbian and gay families, stepfamilies and families created with outsourced reproductive materials or labor. This Article questions this approach because it disregards the complex foundational roles of biological relationships in American jurisprudence and fails to appreciate the unique aspects of kinship in these postmodern families. Instead, this Article anchors the postmodern family law movement in the physical, social and economic conditions that affect the most disaffected among us: those who are socially, …
Sorry Ma'am, Your Baby Is An Alien: Outdated Immigration Rules And Assisted Reproductive Technology, Scott Titshaw
Sorry Ma'am, Your Baby Is An Alien: Outdated Immigration Rules And Assisted Reproductive Technology, Scott Titshaw
Scott Titshaw
The growing use of assisted reproductive technology (ART) and legal recognition of same-sex relationships are raising questions regarding the recognition of parent-child relationships. State and foreign family law have been wrestling with these issues for decades, but U.S. immigration law is lagging far behind. So far, guidance exists on only one ART related issue under the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA): whether a U.S. citizen transmits her citizenship to a child born abroad. Unfortunately, that guidance is contradictory. The U.S. Department of State (DOS) requires genetic kinship for citizenship transmission. The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals focuses on the parents’ …
Rights Of Inequality: Rawlsian Justice, Equal Opportunity, And The Status Of The Family, Justin Schwartz
Rights Of Inequality: Rawlsian Justice, Equal Opportunity, And The Status Of The Family, Justin Schwartz
Justin Schwartz
Is the family subject to principles of justice? In A Theory of Justice, John Rawls includes the (monogamous) family along with the market and the government as among the "basic institutions of society" to which principles of justice apply. Justice, he famously insists, is primary in politics as truth is in science: the only excuse for tolerating injustice is that no lesser injustice is possible. The point of the present paper is that Rawls doesn't actually mean this. When it comes to the family, and in particular its impact on fair equal opportunity (the first part of the the Difference …