Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®
- Institution
-
- University of Florida Levin College of Law (2)
- University of Georgia School of Law (2)
- American University Washington College of Law (1)
- Boston University School of Law (1)
- Columbia Law School (1)
-
- Florida International University College of Law (1)
- Georgetown University Law Center (1)
- Pace University (1)
- Penn State Law (1)
- St. John's University School of Law (1)
- University of Colorado Law School (1)
- University of Missouri School of Law (1)
- University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School (1)
- University of Windsor (1)
- Wayne State University (1)
Articles 1 - 17 of 17
Full-Text Articles in Law
’Til Death Do Us Part? What Every Legal Practitioner Should Know About Premarital Agreements: A Law Student’S Perspective, Lauren Ludvigsen
’Til Death Do Us Part? What Every Legal Practitioner Should Know About Premarital Agreements: A Law Student’S Perspective, Lauren Ludvigsen
Elisabeth Haub School of Law Student Publications
It is rare that a couple will enter into a marriage expecting to divorce each other. It may be the romance or the excitement of the impending nuptials, but couples do not include an expiration date on their marriage certificate. However, not all marriages last until “death do us part.” The United States Census Bureau conducted its first survey into marriages, divorces, and widowhood in America in 2009, finding that 9.2 of every 1,000 men and 9.7 of every 1,000 women over the age of fifteen reported being divorced. Despite these rates, research suggests that only one-fourth of Americans believe …
Mandatory Family Mediation And The Settlement Mission: A Feminist Critique, Noel Semple
Mandatory Family Mediation And The Settlement Mission: A Feminist Critique, Noel Semple
Law Publications
North American family law conflicts are very often brought to mediation, in which a neutral third party attempts to bring about a voluntary resolution of the spouses’ dispute. Family mediation has many enthusiastic supporters, and has in many jurisdictions been made a mandatory precursor to traditional litigation. However, it has also given rise to a potent feminist critique, which identifies power imbalance and domestic violence as sources of exploitation and unjust mediated outcomes. This article summarizes the feminist critique of family mediation, and assesses the efforts of contemporary mediation practice to respond to it. Even in the absence of formal …
Nature, Culture, And Social Engineering: Reflections On Evolution And Equality, Linda C. Mcclain
Nature, Culture, And Social Engineering: Reflections On Evolution And Equality, Linda C. Mcclain
Faculty Scholarship
This book chapter explores evolution and morality by considering the appeal to nature, and in particular to how evolution has shaped female and male brains differently, to explain evident sex differences and the persistence of sex inequality. It uses as illustrative the popularizing accounts of male and female brains found in Louann Brizendine, The Female Brain and The Male Brain, and the portrayal in such accounts of fundamental male and female differences in human mate selection and parenting. Drawing on the work of scientist and philosophers, the chapter critiques these accounts for engaging in an increasingly popular “neurosexism.” Such neurosexism …
Prison, Foster Care, And The Systemic Punishment Of Black Mothers, Dorothy E. Roberts
Prison, Foster Care, And The Systemic Punishment Of Black Mothers, Dorothy E. Roberts
All Faculty Scholarship
This article is part of a UCLA Law Review symposium, “Overpoliced and Underprotected: Women, Race, and Criminalization.” It analyzes how the U.S. prison and foster care systems work together to punish black mothers in a way that helps to preserve race, gender, and class inequalities in a neoliberal age. The intersection of these systems is only one example of many forms of overpolicing that overlap and converge in the lives of poor women of color. I examine the statistical overlap between the prison and foster care populations, the simultaneous explosion of both systems in recent decades, the injuries that each …
Why Obama’S Words Didn’T Go Far Enough, Sonja R. West, Dahlia Lithwick
Why Obama’S Words Didn’T Go Far Enough, Sonja R. West, Dahlia Lithwick
Popular Media
When President Obama announced his support of same-sex marriage, he talked broadly about “equality” and “fairness.” He spoke of “opposing discrimination against gays and lesbians” and making sure that nobody is treated as “less than full citizens when it comes to their legal rights.” It was a powerful moment—historic and emotional. In the Aaron Sorkin version, the orchestra would have soared at this point as the supporting cast members exchanged teary-eyed yet knowing nods.
But then President Obama described how these rights should be protected and the music stopped with a squawk. Same-sex marriage, he said, is not in fact …
Functional Parenting And Dysfunctional Abortion Policy: Reforming Parental Involvement Legislation, Maya Manian
Functional Parenting And Dysfunctional Abortion Policy: Reforming Parental Involvement Legislation, Maya Manian
Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals
Abortion-related parental involvement mandates raise important family law issues about the scope of parents’ power over their children’s intimate decisions. While there has been extensive scholarly attention paid to the problems with parental involvement laws, relatively little has been said about strategies for reforming these laws. This article suggests using insights from family law relating to functional parenthood and third party caregiving as a basis for crafting more capacious methods of ensuring adult guidance for teenage girls facing an unplanned pregnancy. Recent developments in family law bolster the case for reforming parental involvement legislation to allow teenagers to consult with …
Against The New Maternalism, Naomi Mezey, Cornelia T. Pillard
Against The New Maternalism, Naomi Mezey, Cornelia T. Pillard
Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works
The biggest challenge for sex equality in the 21st Century is to dismantle inequality between women and men’s family care responsibilities. American law has largely accomplished formal equality in parenting by doing away with explicit gender classifications, along with many of the assumptions that fostered them. In a dramatic change from the mid-20th Century, law relating to family, work, civic participation and their various intersections is now virtually all sex-neutral. As the Supreme Court’s 2003 decision in Nevada Department of Social Services v. Hibbs demonstrates, both Congress and the Court have accepted the feminist critique of sex roles and stereotyping …
Beyond Family Law, Sarah Abramowicz
Beyond Family Law, Sarah Abramowicz
Law Faculty Research Publications
Family law has traditionally been treated as an exceptional field, a marginalized and special case in which the usual rules of the legal canon do not apply. This Article argues that the current challenge to family-law exceptionalism has been largely one way, to the detriment of a central concern of family law: the protection of children and of the parent-child relationship. Family-law scholars have focused primarily on whether and how to import the tools and insights of other areas of law into the zone of family relations, while largely overlooking the possibility that the tools and insights of family law …
The Revolution In Family Law Dispute Resolution, John M. Lande
The Revolution In Family Law Dispute Resolution, John M. Lande
Faculty Publications
This article surveys a wide range of procedures that divorcing parties now use, including self-representation. Lawyers sometimes provide “unbundled” legal services to help parties who want to divide responsibilities for legal tasks between themselves and their lawyers. Parties often use mediation, arbitration, and private judging. Norms for lawyers’ professional roles have emphasized the importance of cooperation and some lawyers offer “planned early negotiation” processes such as Collaborative and Cooperative Law. Family courts engage in a wide range of activities beyond traditional litigation and adjudication. Many courts manage or mandate parent education and services related to domestic violence. Courts regularly appoint …
Intended Parents And The Problem Of Perspective, Dara Purvis
Intended Parents And The Problem Of Perspective, Dara Purvis
Journal Articles
When asked to identify the legal parents of a child, traditional family law principles look backwards in time, primarily to biology and to marriage. People using assisted reproductive technologies such as surrogacy, however, seek to manifest their intent to become parents with a forward-looking temporal perspective, before a child is conceived and born. Of the existing doctrines used to identify parentage – marital presumption, biology, functional theories, and intent – only intent facilitates a forward-looking perspective. Intent through time, however, is not treated consistently. A woman, for example, may donate an egg, and may place a baby up for adoption, …
Theorizing History: Separate Spheres, The Public/Private Binary And A New Analytic For Family Law History, Danaya C. Wright
Theorizing History: Separate Spheres, The Public/Private Binary And A New Analytic For Family Law History, Danaya C. Wright
UF Law Faculty Publications
There is an extensive scholarship on separate spheres, the public/private binary, and family history that reveals a nuanced understanding of the interconnections and constructedness of these metaphors and rubrics traditionally used in family law history. In exploring the current understandings and limitations of these subjects as analytics for doing my own history of English family law, I turn to Michelle Zimbalist Rosaldo’s critique that we limit our subjects and reinforce power differentials when we use a lens of difference in our scholarship. I first explore the lessons learned about the enduring nature of separate spheres and the power imbalances of …
Between Tradition And Progress: A Comparative Perspective On Polygamy In The United Satates And India, Cyra Akila Choudhury
Between Tradition And Progress: A Comparative Perspective On Polygamy In The United Satates And India, Cyra Akila Choudhury
Faculty Publications
Both the United States and India have had longstanding experiences with polygamy and its regulation. In the United States, the dominant Protestant majority has sought to abolish Mormon practices of polygamy through criminalization. Moreover, the public policy exception has been used to deny recognition of plural marriages conducted legally elsewhere. India’s approach to polygamy regulation and criminalization has been both similar to and different from that of the United States. With a sizable Muslim minority and a legal framework that recognizes religious law as family law, India recognizes polygamy in the Muslim minority community. However, it has criminalized it in …
The Role Of Equipoise In Family Law, Deborah Cantrell
The Role Of Equipoise In Family Law, Deborah Cantrell
Publications
Scholars reviewing family law over the last twenty years have described the field as having undergone a revolution. While true, both scholars and front-line family law advocates have failed to invent a satisfying end to the revolution. This Article takes up that challenge and offers a novel way forward, It identifies two translation challenges that have prevented the revolution from reaching its end. The first challenge is translating reform so that its benefits accrue equally across all kinds of participants--rich and poor, those with lawyers and those without. The second challenge is translating theory into on-the-ground practices useful to family …
The Lawmaking Family, Noa Ben-Asher
The Lawmaking Family, Noa Ben-Asher
Faculty Publications
Increasingly there are conflicts over families trying to “opt out” of various legal structures, especially public school education. Examples of opting-out conflicts include a father seeking to exempt his son from health education classes; a mother seeking to exempt her daughter from mandatory education about the perils of female sexuality; and a vegetarian student wishing to opt out of in-class frog dissection. The Article shows that, perhaps paradoxically, the right to direct the upbringing of children was more robust before it was constitutionalized by the Supreme Court in Meyer v. Nebraska (1923) and Pierce v. Society of Sisters (1925). In …
Legal Regulation Of Twenty-First-Century Families, Marsha Garrison, Elizabeth S. Scott
Legal Regulation Of Twenty-First-Century Families, Marsha Garrison, Elizabeth S. Scott
Faculty Scholarship
This post includes the table of contents, introduction and our comment as the editors of an interdisciplinary volume that explores the implications for law and policy of changes in marriage and family over the past half century. The volume includes chapters by leading social science researchers and family law scholars whose work focuses on these matters. The book captures the complexity of debates about the regulation of marriage and families and the best policy paths forward, through contributions by authors with widely varying perspectives. But it also aims to inform these debates by situating them in a framework grounded in …
Accounting For Time: A Relative-Interest Approach To The Division Of Equity In Hybrid-Property Homes Upon Divorce, Lisa Milot
Scholarly Works
Even in these troubling economic times, homes are the most valuable asset many Americans own. In many instances, these homes were purchased prior to marriage, with later mortgage payments made after the homebuyer married. On divorce, courts must divide the value of such a “hybrid-property” home into “separate” and “marital” shares prior to distributing it between the divorcing spouses.
Many courts have developed formulas for this purpose, with a goal of providing a “proportionate and fair return” on both the separate and marital investments in the home. Each of the formulas, though, ignores the timing of the investments, both in …
Owning Laura Silsby’S Shame: How The Haitian Child Trafficking Scheme Embodies The Western Disregard For The Integrity Of Poor Families, Shani M. King
Owning Laura Silsby’S Shame: How The Haitian Child Trafficking Scheme Embodies The Western Disregard For The Integrity Of Poor Families, Shani M. King
UF Law Faculty Publications
Using the Laura Silsby Haitian adoption case as a window into child placement schemes that affect poor families, this Article proceeds in four parts. Part I tells the story of the Silsby case and shows how the idea of rescuing poor Haitian children became the narrative that ultimately excused Silsby’s decision to move Haitian children who were not orphans across the border to the Dominican Republic. Part II describes the development of intercountry adoption (ICA) as a means of “saving” poor children and explains how the strength of this rescue narrative feeds illicit child trafficking schemes. Part II also explores …