Law Commons^™

California Couples: Recognizing Diversity And Strengthening Fundamental Relationships, Joint Select Task Force On The Changing Family

California Joint Committees

No abstract provided.

Divorced From College?, Senate Office Of Research

California Senate

"Should courts be allowed to extend child support payments beyond age 18 in order to pay for college or other expenses?"

A Special Report to Senator Diane Watson.

Spruce Run News (Summer 1988), Spruce Run Staff

Maine Women's Publications - All

No abstract provided.

The Family Court: An Historical Survey, Merril Sobie

Elisabeth Haub School of Law Faculty Publications

The New York Family Court this year celebrates its twenty-fifth anniversary. Hailed as an "experimental" tribunal, designed to resolve society's most intractable problems, including family dissolution, delinquency and child neglect, the court has been perceived as a radical development which altered the then existing legal rules governing family affairs. The Family Court Act indeed incorporates several creative provisions. But the court's foundations were built upon solid jurisprudential underpinnings, principles which had evolved over the course of the preceding century. Establishment of the court was neither radical nor experimental; in reality, Family Court represents the latest increment in the development of …

An Analysis Of The California Child Support System, Assembly Human Services Committee, Joint Select Task Force On The Changing Family

California Joint Committees

No abstract provided.

Surrogate Parenting: What Should Legislatures Do?, Marsha Garrison

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Spruce Run News (Winter 1988), Spruce Run Staff

Maine Women's Publications - All

No abstract provided.

Family, Church And State: An Essay On Constitutionalism And Religious Authority, Carol Weisbrod

Faculty Articles and Papers

No abstract provided.

Comment, Contracting For Security: Paying Married Women What They've Earned, Katharine K. Baker

All Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Unsafe Havens: The Case For Constitutional Protection Of Foster Children From Abuse And Neglect, Michael B. Mushlin

Elisabeth Haub School of Law Faculty Publications

The six sections of this Article present the case for direct federal court involvement in aiding foster children who are at risk of abuse and neglect while in foster care. Section I discusses the extent of abuse and neglect in foster care as well as the structural causes of this maltreatment. It also explains the inevitable failure of the political branches of government to confront the problem. Section II describes the constitutional right to safety and surveys the judicial treatment of that right, including the lack of development of the right for children in foster care. Section III discusses differences …

A Dissent On Joint Custody, Jana B. Singer, William L. Reynolds

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Plemel As A Primer On Proving Paternity, David H. Kaye

Journal Articles

Although in the past courts only permitted genetic evidence in paternity suits to prove that an accused man was not the father, with the advent of new genetic tests, which easily can exclude ninety to nitey-five percent of the population in most cases, the supreme courts of Massachusetts, Oregon, and Utah have held that various genetic tests may be used to prove paternity. While a positive move, the admissibility of genetic proof of paternity raises serious questions as to the manner in which this evidence should be presented in court. In the interests of efficiency, some jurisdictions seem to dispense …

Defending Battered Women's Self-Defense Claims, Kit Kinports

Journal Articles

This Article contends that many battered women who kill their abusive spouses can legitimately raise the standard self-defense claim. No substantial extension of self-defense doctrine is required to justify the acquittal of battered women on self-defense grounds. Furthermore, no special "battered women defense" is necessary or even desirable in such cases.

Part I of this Article summarizes the results of psychological research studying abused women and battering relationships. It further explains the concept of the :battered woman syndrome" which describes the effects of sustained physical and psychological abuse by one's husband. Part II discusses the requirements of a successful self-defense …

Recent Developments In Family Law: Property Division At Dissolution, Mary Kay Kisthardt

Faculty Works

The law pertaining to the division of property at dissolution has undergone substantial change in recent years. This is due primarily to the adoption of principles of equitable distribution. These principles require the courts to define "marital" property and to develop guidelines to determine how and in what proportion such property is to be divided. This Article will survey some of the significant developments in Missouri in this important area of family law.

Fetal Abuse: Culpable Behavior By Pregnant Women Or Parental Immunity?, George P. Smith Ii

Scholarly Articles

The purpose of this essay is to demonstrate the pressing need of the law to take decisive action in imposing tort liability for willful and malicious conduct by drug addicted women during their pregnancy. Liability should be imposed notwithstanding the warnings from civil libertarians that the enforcement of such a policy would most assuredly give rise to "prenatal police patrols.'

Within The Best Interests Of The Child: The Factor Of Parental Status In Custody Disputes Arising From Surrogacy Contracts, Irma S. Russell

Faculty Works

No abstract provided.

Surrogacy And Adoption: A Case Of Incompatibility, Barbara L. Atwell

Elisabeth Haub School of Law Faculty Publications

This Article explores the public policy doctrine relating to contracts generally and examines specific public policies set forth in state adoption statutes. The Article concludes that surrogate parenting agreements are 1) incompatible with consent provisions of state adoption statutes, 2) inconsistent with state laws prohibiting baby-selling, and 3) inconsistent with state adoption provisions that provide for a thorough investigation of the adoptive parents in order to ensure that the adoption serves the child's best interests. Accordingly, this Article suggests that as state legislatures debate the best means of addressing the issue of surrogate parenting, they should recognize that surrogate parenting …

The Supreme Court And The New Family Law: Working Through The Pelech Trilogy, David G. Duff

All Faculty Publications

The trilogy of family law decisions, released by the Supreme Court of Canada on 4 June 1987, represents perhaps the most important statement of the past two decades by Canada's highest court on this rapidly changing area of law. Although decided under the repealed Divorce Act of 1968, judicial analyses of support and domestic contracts are likely to be little altered under the 1985 Act. Furthermore, that these cases reveal the Court's underlying philosophy of the new family law as a whole suggests a significance that transcends specific amendments to the Act. With respect to the outcome of each individual …

Privacy, Surrogacy, And The Baby M Case, Anita L. Allen

All Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Representing Children, Donald N. Duquette

Articles

The Child Protection Law, MCLA 722.630, and the Juvenile Court Rules, MCR 5.915 (B)(2), require the Juvenile Court to appoint an attorney for the child in child protection proceedings. Although the child protection law identifies some of the expectations of the child's counsel,t many questions remain. What does it mean to be a good child advocate in these cases? How does one identify the best interests of the children? What is the place of the child's wishes in identifying the goals of the advocate? Beyond the letter of the law, what ought to be the proper role of the child's …

The Case Of Baby M: Love’S Labor Lost, George P. Smith Ii

Scholarly Articles

No abstract provided.

Washington's New Quasi-Community Property Act: Protecting The Immigrant Spouse, Thomas R. Andrews

Articles

In 1986, Washington followed the lead of several other community property jurisdictions by adopting quasi-community property legislation. The act is designed to prevent a spouse who has onerously acquired property during marriage while the couple resided in a common law state from disinheriting his or her surviving spouse as to that property after moving to Washington. It has significant implications not only for married couples contemplating a move to Washington, but also for those who have moved to Washington from common law jurisdictions in the past. This article explains why the risk of disinheritance arises, describes the provisions of Washington's …

Baby M Reconsidered, Judith C. Areen

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Surrogate mothering depends on treating procreation, an activity traditionally viewed as an integral aspect of family life (and family law), as a service to be purchased in the marketplace and governed by the rules of contract law. Thus surrogacy forces us to confront the differences between two of our most fundamental institutions-the family and the market.

A Civil Liberties Analysis Of Surrogacy Arrangements, Lawrence O. Gostin

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

In this essay the author comes to the following conclusions based upon a civil liberties analysis. First, surrogacy arrangements cannot be prohibited or criminalized. Second, the state cannot ban the exchange of money for surrogacy services, provided the money is paid for conception, gestation, and birth. Money, however, cannot be paid on condition that the gestational mother waive her parental rights over the child. Third, contractual provisions that require the gestational mother to waive her parental rights or her rights to privacy and autonomy are void and unenforceable. Fourth, when the child is born, both the gestational mother and the …

Baby M And The Cassandra Problem, Girardeau A. Spann

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Part I of this essay outlines the facts of the Baby M case and traces the reasoning the New Jersey Supreme Court used to justify the legal conclusions that it reached.

Part II then identifies the three common analytical techniques or modes of argument on which the state supreme court relied in conducting its analysis and suggests that each is itself too dependent upon unprincipled policy preferences to have excluded such preferences from the decisionmaking process.

Finally, Part III suggests that no matter how strong an argument one might offer to demonstrate the systemic vulnerability of principle to preference, the …

The Federal Government And A Program Of 'Advance Maintenance' In The United States, David L. Chambers

Book Chapters

Israel and several European nations including Austria, Denmark, Sweden, and West Germany, have adopted programs of ''advance maintenance''-programs under which, in varying forms, the state advances to a custodial parent the child support owed by an absent parent and then seeks to reimburse itself by collecting from the absent parent. The programs differ widely-,on the maximum that the government will advance to any one family, on the number of years an order of advance payments can remain in effect, on the efforts, if any, that the custodial parent must have made to collect from the absent parent-but all have in …

State-Interest Analysis In Fourteenth-Amendment "Privacy" Law: An Essay On The Constitutionalization Of Social Issues, Carl E. Schneider

Articles

Asked to resolve a social issue, Americans today turn readily to rights and to the Constitution that is understood to embody them. Many "vice" issues have long been thought particularly apt for a rights analysis. A constitutional resolution of vice issues is therefore inevitably a possibility, and its wisdom is inevitably a question. In this essay, I want to address that question by investigating an area of the law that has been recently constitutionalized family law. Family law is an example worth studying because rights thinking has won a considerable prominence in it: The Constitution has been used to transform …

Rights Discourse And Neonatal Euthanasia, Carl E. Schneider

Articles

Hard cases, they say, make bad law. Hard cases, we know, can also make revealing law. Hard cases identify the problems we have not found a way of solving. They reveal ways the law's goals conflict. They force us to articulate our assumptions and to examine our modes of discourse and reasoning. If there was ever a hard case for the law, it is the question of whether, how, and by whom it should be decided to allow newborn children who are severely retarded mentally or severely damaged physically to die. For many years, the law has not had to …

Some Aspects Of Householding In The Medieval Icelandic Commonwealth, William I. Miller

Articles

There has been much, mostly inconclusive, discussion about how to define the household in a manner suitable for comparative purposes. Certain conventional criteria are not very useful in the Icelandic context, where it appears that a person could be attached to more than one household, where the laws suggest it was possible for more than one household to be resident in the same uncompartmentalised farmhouse; and where headship might often be shared. Definitions, for example, based on co residence or on commensalism do not jibe all that well with the pastoral transhumance practised by the Icelanders. Sheep were tended and …

Protecting The Parental Rights Of Incarcerated Mothers Whose Children Are In Foster Care: Proposed Changes To New York's Termination Of Parental Rights Law, Philip Genty

Faculty Scholarship

In the past decade, the number of female prisoners in New York state and city jails has risen dramatically. Currently, there are 1,890 women incarcerated in New York State prisons, and an additional 1,626 women confined in New York City jails. Approximately seventy- two percent of the women in state prisons are parents, and, according to one informal study, nearly sixty percent of the women in city prisons are single parents with minor children. While some of these women can make formal or informal child care arrangements with relatives or close friends, many others must turn to state-regulated foster care. …