Law Commons^™

Whatever Your Thoughts On Marriage, Gay Divorce Is A Concern, Nathan B. Oman

Popular Media

No abstract provided.

Why We Should Raise The Marriage Age, Vivian E. Hamilton

Popular Media

No abstract provided.

Wimmer Wins Flp Annual Exclusions, Wendy G. Gerzog

All Faculty Scholarship

In Wimmer, the Tax Court held that the income stream from a taxpayer’s gifts of family limited partnership interests was eligible for the annual exclusion. By comparing the income interest in the partnership’s dividend paying marketable securities to the income interest in a trust, the court made Wimmer a winner. But does the opinion logically lead to that conclusion?

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 …

Permanency Puzzle, Cynthia Godsoe

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Fostering Climate Change Education In The Central Great Plains: A Public Engagement Approach, Lisa M. Pytlikzillig, Timothy Steffensmeier, Amber Campbell Hibbs, Ben Champion, Eric Hunt, John A. Harrington, Jr., Jacqueline D. Spears, Natalie Umphlett, Tarik Abdel-Monem, Roger Bruning, Daniel Kahl

Lisa PytlikZillig Publications

Despite its increasing importance for sustainability, building widespread competency in the basic principles of climate literacy among the United States general public is a great challenge. This article describes the methods and results of a public engagement approach to planning climate change education in the Central Great Plains of the United States. Our approach incorporated contextual and lay expertise approaches to public engagement with a focus on supporting the self-determination of the specific stakeholder groups–rural producers, educators, and community members. An integration of results from the focus groups reveal that our approach was received positively and elicited a number of …

A Name Of One’S Own: The Spousal Permission Requirement And The Persistence Of Patriarchy, Beth D. Cohen

Faculty Scholarship

This Article addresses a discrete but inequitable issue in the area of name-change law. As the law currently operates in Massachusetts, the process by which a married person, usually a woman, can seek a legal name change requires signed permission—the written assent of a spouse. In the absence of such signed permission or spousal consent, a married person seeking a name change is required to serve his or her spouse by certified mail, as an adversary, in what is otherwise typically a nonadversarial administrative legal process. This requirement of spousal notification and consent, although gender neutral on its face, has …

[Including But Not Limited To] Violence Against Women, Giovanna Shay

Faculty Scholarship

This Article highlights three developments in criminal justice in 2012 that marked the move toward more gender-inclusive anti-violence movements: the FBI’s adoption of a gender-neutral definition of rape; the debate regarding the reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA); and the promulgation of new Department of Justice (DOJ) regulations under the Prison Rape Elimination Act of 2003 (PREA). These recent developments reveal a growing movement towards more gender-inclusive conceptions of rape and intimate partner violence. The change to a more gender-inclusive approach will have many implications for criminal justice policy and institutions. One critical project is to ensure that …

Family Law Equality At A Crossroads, David D. Meyer

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Parsing Parenthood, Cynthia Godsoe

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

New Thinking On Commercial Surrogacy, Richard Storrow

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Reflections On Vawa's Strange Bedfellows: The Partnership Between The Battered Immigrant Women's Movement And Law Enforcement, Alizabeth Newman

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Nature, Nurture, Narrative, Law: The Wellesley Case, Oliver Twist, And The Victorian Anxiety About Parentage, Sarah Abramowicz

Studio for Law and Culture

Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist heralded the popularity in Victorian England of a new type of novel, the novel of child development, that traced the experience of displaced child protagonists as they found their place in the world by working out their relationships with a series of parents and parent-figures. At the same time, the newly prominent field of English child custody law began to articulate why and how parentage matters for a developing child. An examination of one of the first highly publicized English custody disputes, Wellesley v. Beaufort, brings out some of the concerns about parentage at work …

An Incomplete Revolution: Reexaming The Law, History, And Politics Of Marital Property, Mary Ziegler

Scholarly Publications

Did the divorce revolution betray the interests of American women? While there has been considerable disagreement about the impact of divorce reform on women’s standard of living, many agree that judicial practices involving the division of marital property and the allocation of alimony have systematically disadvantaged women. Most often, in the courts and the academy, commentators see these practices as evidence of the need for family law reform.

These conclusions rely on a shared account of the history of divorce reform. According to this account, the transformation of divorce law in the 1970s and 1980s was a “silent revolution,” a …

Trust And Intention To Comply With A Water Allocation Decision: The Moderating Roles Of Knowledge And Consistency, Joseph A. Hamm, Lisa M. Pytlikzillig, Mitch Herian, Alan Tomkins, Hannah Dietrich, Sarah Michaels

Lisa PytlikZillig Publications

Regulating water resources is a critically important yet increasingly complex component of the interaction between ecology and society. Many argue that effective water regulation relies heavily upon the compliance of water users. The relevant literature suggests that, rather than relying on external motivators for individual compliance, e.g., punishments and rewards, it is preferable to focus on internal motivators, including trust in others. Although prior scholarship has resulted in contemporary institutional efforts to increase public trust, these efforts are hindered by a lack of evidence regarding the specific situations in which trust, in its various forms, most effectively increases compliance. We …

Heuristics, Cognitive Biases, And Accountability: Decision-Making In Dependency Court, Matthew I. Fraidin

Journal Articles

On tens of thousands of occasions each year, state court judges wrongly separate children from their families and place them in foster care. And while a child is in foster care, judges are called on to render hundreds of decisions affecting every aspect of the child’s life. This Article uses insights from social psychology research to analyze the environment of dependency court and to recommend changes that will improve decisions. Research indicates that decision makers aware at the time they make a decision that they will be called upon later to explain it may engage in a systematic, deliberate decision-making …

Fathers, Divorce, And Child Custody, Matthew M. Stevenson, Sanford L. Braver, Ira M. Ellman, Ashley M. Votruba

Department of Psychology: Faculty Publications

A great many fathers will have their fathering eliminated, disrupted, or vastly changed because they become divorced from the child’s mother. In fact, between 40% and 50% of marriages end in divorce (Cherlin, 2010). Although the divorce rate (measured as divorces per 1,000 people) is high by the standards prior to the late 1960s, it has actually fallen more than 30% since its peak in 1980. The decline in divorce rates in recent years has, however, been concentrated among the college-educated portion of the population; divorce rates among the less well educated may have even increased (Cherlin, 2010). But for …

Understanding Duties And Conflicts Of Interest--A Guide For The Honorable Agent, Linda S. Whitton

Law Faculty Publications

This article examines the importance of understanding agent duties and conflicts of interest, both for drafting a power of attorney that meets a principal’s objectives and for providing guidance to the agent who will act under its authority. Professor Whitton suggests that current custom and practice with respect to powers of attorney often overlooks the need to adjust agent duties to accommodate the principal’s expectations, thus resulting in inadvertent conflicts between the duty to do what the principal expects and default duties of loyalty. The article offers practical guidelines for identifying and reconciling these conflicts, as well as best practices …

Engendering A Clinic: Lessons Learned From A Domestic Violence Clinical Course In Qatar, Stephen A. Rosenbaum, Mary Pat Treuthart

Publications

Domestic violence, a serious problem around the world, remains a hidden concern among the Islamic Gulf States. Yet signs indicate the situation is changing. A team of American lawyers and professors, responding to student initiative and the Qatari development strategy, recently initiated Qatar’s first law school clinic, focusing exclusively on domestic violence. By highlighting the students’ experience, this article outlines the issues involved and the problems that were encountered, and resolved, during the development of this clinic. The students first studied the issue of domestic violence, then made presentations to the larger community to raise awareness of the topic. Subsequent …

Save Our Children: Overcoming The Narrative That Gays And Lesbians Are Harmful To Children, Anthony S. Niedwiecki

Publications

This paper focuses on how gay rights activists had no real choice but to use the court system to advance marriage rights for same-sex couples because they were unable to use the political process to effectively rebut the claim that gays and lesbian were harmful to children. Part I begins with an overview of the ways in which the initiative process has been used to limit gay rights and prevent marriage equality. It then details how, in contrast to the political process, courts have been more receptive to advancing marriage rights for same-sex couples. Part II details Walter Fisher's narrative …

It's [Not] A Black Thing: The Black/Gay Split Over Same-Sex Marriage - A Critical [Race] Perspective, Adele M. Morrison

Law Faculty Research Publications

No abstract provided.

Transgender People, Intimate Partner Abuse, And The Legal System, Leigh S. Goodmark

Faculty Scholarship

The unique experiences of transgender persons subjected to abuse have not been the focus of legal scholarship; instead, the experiences of transgender people are often subsumed in the broader discourse around domestic violence in the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) community. This dearth of legal scholarship is not surprising given how little research of any kind exists on how transgender people experience intimate partner abuse. This is the first law review article to concentrate specifically on intimate partner abuse and the transgender community. The Article begins by discussing the difficulties of engaging in scholarship around this topic, noting the …

The Future Of Family, Max D. Siegel

Student Articles and Papers

The State organizes society into families, implicating and often ignoring various liberty and equality interests while fortifying a “traditional” family structure comprised of one man, one woman, and their mutually and exclusively conceived offspring. This structure has historically benefited the heterosexual elite within the United States, but modern advancements for sexual minorities suggest a new standard for State recognition of family. Queer liberation will erase the traditional family by rewriting its legal and social dimensions, resulting in laws and policies that track more closely with familial bonds outside a heteronormative, man-woman binary. This Article explores the ramifications of enhanced queer …

Filial Support Laws In The Modern Era: Domestic And International Comparison Of Enforcement Practices For Laws Requiring Adult Children To Support Indigent Parents, Katherine C. Pearson

Journal Articles

Family responsibility and support laws have a long but mixed history. When first enacted, policy makers used such laws to declare an official policy that family members should support each other, rather than draw upon public resources. This article tracks modern developments with filial support laws that purport to obligate adult children to financially assist their parents, if indigent or needy. The author diagrams filial support laws that have survived in the 21st Century and compares core components in the United States (including Puerto Rico) and post-Soviet Union Ukraine. While the laws are often similar in wording and declared intent, …

Promoting The General Welfare: Legal Reform To Lift Women And Children In The United States Out Of Poverty, Jill C. Engle

Journal Articles

American women and children have been poor in exponentially greater numbers than men for decades. The problem has historic, institutional roots which provide a backdrop for this article’s introduction. English and early U.S. legal systems mandated a lesser economic status for women. Despite numerous legal changes aimed at combating the financial disadvantage of American women and children, the problem is worsening. American female workers, many in low-paying job sectors, earn roughly twenty percent less than their male counterparts. Nearly forty percent of single mothers and their children subsist below the poverty level. The recession exacerbated this problem, mostly because unemployment …

Sexual Orientation Of Fatherhood, Dara Purvis

Journal Articles

In this Article, I examine how same-sex fathers affect the perception of heterosexual caretaking fathers - and by extension, could affect the perception of heterosexual non-caretaking mothers. I conclude that gay stay-at-home fathers offer a provocative opportunity to broaden societal views of men and caregiving more generally, and argue that greater recognition of parents who counteract gender stereotypes - even where the recognition might arguably lessen women's rights in family law - ultimately helps women as well as children and nontraditional parents. Part I discusses fathers, particularly stay-at-home fathers, the practical problems fathers face combining work and caregiving responsibilities, and …

Save Our Children: Overcoming The Narrative That Gays And Lesbians Are Harmful To Children, 21 Duke J. Gender L. & Pol'y 125 (2013), Anthony Niedwiecki

UIC Law Open Access Faculty Scholarship

This paper focuses on how gay rights activists had no real choice but to use the court system to advance marriage rights for same-sex couples because they were unable to use the political process to effectively rebut the claim that gays and lesbians were harmful to children. Part I begins with an overview of the ways in which the initiative process has been used to limit gay rights and prevent marriage equality. It then details how, in contrast to the political process, courts have been more receptive to advancing marriage rights for same-sex couples. Part II details Walter Fisher's narrative …

Terminating Parental Rights Through A Backdoor In The Virginia Code, Dale Margolin Cecka

Law Faculty Publications

This article explores deficits in the statute, in light of constitutional law, other Virginia adoption and termination of parental rights statutes, and other states' codes and jurisprudence. Part II describes the history and practice of the statute. Part III describes the flaws of the statute, including Fourteenth Amendment violations and inherent conflicts of interest. Part IV calls for the revision of section 1202(H) based on recent precedent in which the Supreme Court of Virginia recognized the sanctity of the parent-child relationship and the state's interest in preserving it.

Parents With Mental Disabilities: The Legal Landscape, Dale Margolin Cecka

Law Faculty Publications

The ADA, coupled with federal and state child welfare laws, provides broad brush strokes for advocates of parents with mental disabilities and their children. To effectuate parents’ rights, child welfare professionals must work with the parents themselves, as well as with other state departments, to form service plans that are tailored for the success of each individual family.

The Aaml Child Custody Evaluation Standards: Bridging Two Worlds, Child Custody Evaluation Standards, Sacha M. Coupet

Faculty Publications & Other Works

No abstract provided.