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Full-Text Articles in Law
Adoption Ouroboros: Repeating The Cycle Of Adoption As Rescue, Malinda L. Seymore
Adoption Ouroboros: Repeating The Cycle Of Adoption As Rescue, Malinda L. Seymore
Faculty Scholarship
Ouroboros—the circular symbol of the snake eating its tail; an endless cycle. As the U.S. recently withdrew from Afghanistan in chaos and Russia invaded Ukraine, the attention of Americans turned, as it frequently has in times of international conflict, to the plight of children in need of rescue. For many Americans, rescue is synonymous with adoption. The history of international adoption began with rescues following America’s wars in Europe and Asia and continues today through other violent upheavals. International adoption is an ouroboros, repeating the pattern of adoption as a response to humanitarian crises. But as human and charitable as …
Originalism: Erasing Women From The Body Politic, Malinda L. Seymore
Originalism: Erasing Women From The Body Politic, Malinda L. Seymore
Faculty Scholarship
In Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health, the Court relied on originalism to excise women from the Constitution. Originalism is purposefully backward-looking. With cherry-picked history, the Court created a future that looks to the past: a past where unwed pregnancy is shameful and can be redeemed only by secret adoption. Yet the case has revealed originalism as a flawed method, harmed the legitimacy of the Court, and energized those supporting abortion rights.
Specialty Bar Associations And The Marketing Of Ethics: The Example Of The Academy Of Adoption Attorneys, Malinda L. Seymore
Specialty Bar Associations And The Marketing Of Ethics: The Example Of The Academy Of Adoption Attorneys, Malinda L. Seymore
Faculty Scholarship
In a world of lawyer jokes, memes of sleazy lawyers and the ubiquity of bad lawyers in television shows and movies, lawyers have reason to push back against negative public perceptions of lawyers’ ethics. This article examines the role of specialty bar associations, by using the example of the Academy of Adoption Attorneys, in marketing ethics to the public.
Specialty bar associations have been seen as sites of lawyer socialization and professionalism. Though there are thousands of specialty bar associations with aspirational ethical codes, the Academy of Adoption Attorneys is unusual among such associations in having a mandatory ethics code, …
Ethical Blind Spots In Adoption Lawyering, Malinda L. Seymore
Ethical Blind Spots In Adoption Lawyering, Malinda L. Seymore
Faculty Scholarship
Lawyers engaged in adoption work often call it “happy law,” and consider adoption – finding a child for yearning parents, finding parents for a needy child – an unmitigated good. That attitude can mask the fact that all adoption begins with loss. One family loses a child so that another family can gain one. A lawyer’s assurance that she is engaged in positive work can lead to ethical blind spots that ignore the complexities of adoption practice. And while the touchstone of adoption is the best interests of the child, the primacy in legal ethics of the interests of the …
Adopting Civil Damages: Wrongful Family Separation In Adoption, Malinda L. Seymore
Adopting Civil Damages: Wrongful Family Separation In Adoption, Malinda L. Seymore
Faculty Scholarship
The Trump Administration’s new immigration policy of family separation at the U.S./Mexico border rocked the summer of 2018. Yet family separation is the prerequisite to every legal adoption. The circumstances are different, of course. In legal adoption, the biological parents are provided with all the constitutional protections required in involuntary termination of parental rights, or they have voluntarily consented to family separation. But what happens when that family separation is wrongful, when the birth mother’s consent is not voluntary, or when the birth father’s wishes to parent are ignored? In theory, the child can be returned to the birth parents …
Grasping Fatherhood In Abortion And Adoption, Malinda L. Seymore
Grasping Fatherhood In Abortion And Adoption, Malinda L. Seymore
Faculty Scholarship
Biology makes a mother, but it does not make a father. While a mother is a legal parent by reason of her biological relationship with her child, a father is not a legal parent unless he takes affirmative steps to grasp fatherhood. Being married to the mother at the time of conception or at the time of birth is one of those affirmative steps. But if he is not married to the mother, he must do far more before he will be legally recognized as a father. Biology is often presented as a sufficient reason for this dichotomy--it is easy …
Reflections On Obergefell And The Family-Recognition Framework's Continuing Value, Suzanne B. Goldberg
Reflections On Obergefell And The Family-Recognition Framework's Continuing Value, Suzanne B. Goldberg
Faculty Scholarship
Unlike a typical law review essay, I offer reflections here based largely on my own past work in LGBT rights advocacy. Together with related scholarship, I rely on these experiences to argue that the 'family recognition" framework underlying earlier advocacy has value going forward, even after the Supreme Court's ruling in favor of nationwide marriage equality.
Openness In International Adoption, Malinda L. Seymore
Openness In International Adoption, Malinda L. Seymore
Faculty Scholarship
After a long history of secrecy in domestic adoption in the United States, there is a robust trend toward openness. That is, however, not the case with international adoption. The recent growth in international adoption has been spurred, at least in part, by the desire of adoptive parents to return to closed, confidential adoptions where the identity of the birth mother is secret and there is no ongoing contact with her. There is, however, an emergent interest in increased openness in international adoption, spurred by the success of domestic open adoptions, health concerns when an adoptee's genetic history is important, …
Adopting An International Convention On Surrogacy—A Lesson From Intercountry Adoption, Seema Mohapatra
Adopting An International Convention On Surrogacy—A Lesson From Intercountry Adoption, Seema Mohapatra
Faculty Scholarship
No abstract provided.
Adopting An International Convention On Surrogacy—A Lesson From Intercountry Adoption, Seema Mohapatra
Adopting An International Convention On Surrogacy—A Lesson From Intercountry Adoption, Seema Mohapatra
Faculty Scholarship
No abstract provided.
Adoption Law In The United States: A Pathfinder, Glen-Peter Ahlers Sr.
Adoption Law In The United States: A Pathfinder, Glen-Peter Ahlers Sr.
Faculty Scholarship
No abstract provided.
A Diversity Approach To Parenthood In Family Life And Family Law, Linda C. Mcclain
A Diversity Approach To Parenthood In Family Life And Family Law, Linda C. Mcclain
Faculty Scholarship
Extraordinary changes in patterns of family life and family law have dramatically altered the boundaries of parenthood and opened up numerous questions and debates. What is parenthood and why does it matter? How should society define, regulate, and support it? Is parenthood separable from marriage or couplehood when society seeks to foster childrens well-being? What is the better model of parenthood from the perspective of child outcomes? Intense disagreements over the definition and future of marriage often rest upon conflicting convictions about parenthood. What Is Parenthood? asks bold and direct questions about parenthood in contemporary society, and it brings together …
The Kids Aren't Alright: Every Child Should Have An Attorney In Child Welfare Proceedings In Florida, Michael J. Dale, Louis M. Reidenberg
The Kids Aren't Alright: Every Child Should Have An Attorney In Child Welfare Proceedings In Florida, Michael J. Dale, Louis M. Reidenberg
Faculty Scholarship
This article is a continuation of a discussion as to why, as a matter of Florida constitutional law, public policy, and professional ethics, Florida's children need independent attorneys from the inception of all dependency and termination of parental rights cases to their completion. It is based upon events which have occurred since the authors' last article on this topic in the Nova Law Review, including the Barahona case, the resolution by the American Bar Association (ABA) in August 2011 at its Annual Convention in Toronto adopting the ABA Model Act Governing the Representation of Children in Abuse, Neglect, and Dependency …
Foreword: Assisted Reproductive Technology And The Law, Mary P. Byrn
Foreword: Assisted Reproductive Technology And The Law, Mary P. Byrn
Faculty Scholarship
This foreword introduces Issue 2: Assisted Reproductive Technology and the Law of the 35th Volume of the William Mitchell Law Review. It begins by outlining the author's personal experience with ART, and contrasts her reasoning for using ART with the traditional need for ART. Finally, it lists some of the many legal questions yet to be conclusively answered.
Bringing Up Baby: Adoption, Marriage, And The Best Interests Of The Child, Robin Fretwell Wilson, W. Bradford Wilcox
Bringing Up Baby: Adoption, Marriage, And The Best Interests Of The Child, Robin Fretwell Wilson, W. Bradford Wilcox
Faculty Scholarship
In the piece, Professor Brad Wilcox and I ask who should care for children when their biological parents cannot? This is a question of potentially explosive dimensions under new definitions of legal parentage proposed in this volume of the WILLIAM & MARY BILL OF RIGHTS JOURNAL. This question is also important today for evaluating state adoption laws. A significant number of states bar consideration of a prospective adopter’s marital or non-marital status. We believe these laws miss an important opportunity to maximize the best interests of each child being placed. In this piece, we take an exclusively child-centered approach, drawing …
Placing The Adoptive Self, Carol Sanger
Placing The Adoptive Self, Carol Sanger
Faculty Scholarship
[A]doption law and practices are guided by enormous cultural changes in the composition and the meaning of family. As families become increasingly blended outside the context of adoption – with combinations of blood relatives, step-relatives, de facto relatives, and ex-relatives sitting down together for Thanksgiving dinner as a matter of course – birth families and adoptive families knowing one another may not seem so very strange or threatening at all. There will simply be an expectation across communities that ordinary families will be mixed and multiple. With that in mind, we should hesitate before establishing embeddedness as the source of …
Florida's Foster Care System Fails Its Children, Timothy L. Arcaro
Florida's Foster Care System Fails Its Children, Timothy L. Arcaro
Faculty Scholarship
This article will attempt to draw attention to the pervasive problem of child sexual abuse in foster care by identifying circumstances that contribute to sexual victimization. Hopefully the discussion will illuminate the plight of child victims of sexual abuse and generate discourse on a new paradigm of protection initiatives for foster children. Part I of the article will explain child protection proceedings and how children enter the foster care system. Part II will describe common characteristics of state foster care systems. Part III will discuss traditional notions of child sexual abuse and their illusory application in the context of sexual …
Adoption, Identity, And The Constitution: The Case For Opening Closed Records, Naomi R. Cahn, Jana B. Singer
Adoption, Identity, And The Constitution: The Case For Opening Closed Records, Naomi R. Cahn, Jana B. Singer
Faculty Scholarship
No abstract provided.
Foreword, Katharine B. Silbaugh
Foreword, Katharine B. Silbaugh
Faculty Scholarship
This special section of The Boston University Public Interest Law Journal addresses the issue of transracial adoptions. Few topics within family law generate as much controversy as the placement of Black or other minority and mixed race children for adoption with white families. Although transracial placement could in theory apply to the placement of white children with mixed race and Black families, in practice it has not. The predominant practice of matching adoptive children with adoptive parents of the same race has come under increasing scrutiny in recent years as many older and difficult to place minority children wait in …
Flesh Of My Flesh But Not My Heir: Unintended Disinheritance, Laura M. Padilla
Flesh Of My Flesh But Not My Heir: Unintended Disinheritance, Laura M. Padilla
Faculty Scholarship
This article briefly explains how the laws of intestacy and adoption work together, providing background information on second parent adoptions. It then describes why these laws are inadequate for same sex partners who adopt each others' children. It is impractical to cover statutes throughout the United States, and because I seek legal reform in California, this article focuses on California statutes, with occasional reference to the Uniform Probate Code. However, the problems caused by California's statutes also arise in other states with similar statutes. Therefore, the issues raised in this article, as well as the solutions proposed, are relevant in …