Law Commons^™

Hollingsworth V. Perry, Brief For Foreign And Comparative Law Experts Harold Hongju Koh Et. Al. As Amici Curiae Supporting Respondents, Harold Hongju Koh, Sarah H. Cleveland, Laurence R. Helfer, Ryan Goodman

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Family Lawyering: Past, Present, And Future, John M. Lande, Forrest S. Mosten

Faculty Publications

In the past fifty years, divorce law has turned upside down. Marriage is not assumed to be a lifelong commitment. Fault generally is not legally relevant. Gender equality is a fundamental principle. Today, courts regularly handle a much broader range of issues, including disputes about issues such as domestic violence; parental relocation; religious upbringing; payment for children's college education; grandparent and stepparent visitation rights; rights of same-sex and unmarried couples; alienation of parents and children; and the role of e-mail, the Internet, and cybersex in divorce.

Family law practice inevitably evolved in response to these social and legal changes. This …

Summary Of In Re A.B., 128 Nev. Adv. Op. 70, Timothy A. Wiseman

Nevada Supreme Court Summaries

The court considered how a dependency master’s finding of facts and recommendations should be reviewed by the juvenile dependency judge.

Parsing Parenthood, Cynthia Godsoe

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Federal Family Policy And Family Values From Clinton To Obama, 1992-2012 And Beyond, Linda C. Mcclain

Faculty Scholarship

This Article traces the evolution of federal family law and policy from 1992-2012 and beyond by considering the legacy of Clintonism, the “Third Way” political philosophy developed by William Jefferson Clinton and the Democratic Leadership Council. Present day economic inequality is spurring reflection on the role of government and on the meaning and form of progressive politics. Clintonism’s centrist, progressive approach linked governmental provision of opportunity to personal responsibility (“working hard and playing by the rules”) and appealed to values of family, community, faith, liberty, and inclusion. By linking family values to family policies, Clintonism’s New Covenant successfully challenged the …

Surrender And Subordination: Birth Mothers And Adoption Law Reform, Elizabeth Samuels

All Faculty Scholarship

For more than 30 years adoption law reform advocates have been seeking to restore for adult adoptees the right to access their original birth certificates, a right that was lost in all but two states between the late 1930s and 1990. The advocates have faced strong opposition and have succeeded only in recent years and only in eight states. Among the most vigorous advocates for access are “birth mothers” who surrendered their children during a time it was believed that adoption would relieve unmarried women of shame and restore them to a respectable life. The birth mother advocates say that …

Filing Status And Today's Families, Erik Baines

Law Student Publications

Section I of this comment considers the early income tax code, its focus on individual filing, and how early decisions of the Supreme Court of the United States led Congress to adopt optional joint filing for married couples. Section II analyzes the joint return, tax norms, and arguments of proponents and opponents of the joint return. Section III analyzes structural issues raised by a return to an individual filing system, as well as why an individual filing system is superior to a joint filing system given the changes in American society. It also discusses a proposal to resolve an inequity …

Book Review: Fifty Years In Family Law: Essays For Stephen Cretney (Rebecca Probert & Chris Barton Eds. 2012), Nancy E. Dowd

UF Law Faculty Publications

This collection honors the life and work of Stephen Cretney, the preeminent British scholar of family law. For those wanting an entry point into British family law, this is a wonderful volume. For those who know it well and admire the work of Stephen Cretney, as well as the work of this preeminent group of scholars, it will also be of much value as a remarkable group of essays. As an example of life's work that we all might hope to achieve, in many manifestations, but with dedication to the common good, it is a model to which we all …

Alone And Unrepresented: A Call To Congress To Provide Counsel For Unaccompanied Minors, Shani M. King

UF Law Faculty Publications

The legal rights of children who enter a country without their parents or other guardians, including the right to legal representation in immigration proceedings, differ vastly across the globe. This Article is the first to show that unaccompanied minors lie at the nexus of international and regional human rights standards governing the treatment of immigrants, children, and civil counsel and to show how the development of human rights standards in these three areas underscores the importance of and the need for counsel for unaccompanied minors. Part I illustrates why unaccompanied minors in the United States need legal representation by focusing …

Prostitution 3.0?, Scott R. Peppet

Publications

This Article presents an entirely novel approach to prostitution reform focused on incremental market improvement facilitated by information law and policy. Empirical evidence from the economics and sociology of sex work shows that new, Internet-enabled, indoor forms of prostitution may be healthier, less violent, and more rewarding than traditional street prostitution. This Article argues that these existing "Prostitution 2.0" innovations have not yet improved sex markets sufficiently to warrant legalization. It suggests that creating a new "Prostitution 3.0" that solves the remaining problems of disease, violence, and coercion in prostitution markets is possible, but would require removing legal barriers to …

Neofeminism, Aya Gruber

Publications

Today it is prosaic to say that "feminism is dead." Far from being moribund, feminist legal theory is breaking from its somewhat dogmatic past and forging ahead with new vigor. Many modern feminist legal scholars seek innovative ways to better the legal, social, and economic status of women while simultaneously questioning some of the more troubling moves of second-wave feminism, such as the tendency to essentialize the woman's experience, the turn to authoritarian state policies, and the characterization of women as pure objects or agents. These "neofeminists" prioritize women's issues but maintain a strong commitment to distributive justice and recognize …

Re-Problematizing Anger In Domestic Violence Advocacy, Deborah Cantrell

Publications

Feminist advocacy commits wholeheartedly to a woman’s autonomous choices about how to respond to domestic violence, prioritizing a woman’s own lived experiences and her own assessments of her needs and goals over other supposedly “objective” assessments. Feminists robustly privilege individual choices of women in part as a way of revealing anti-woman bias in the dominant, patriarchal legal system as well to reject male constructions of feminine behavior. In feminist domestic violence advocacy, scholars and advocates have argued that a woman’s autonomous choices include capacious choices about the kinds of emotions that a woman might express about being subjected to abuse. …

The New Baby Mama Drama: Equal Rights To Compensation For Birth Mothers Of Adopted Infants As Granted To Egg Donors And Surrogates, Jenny Beecroft

Student Works

No abstract provided.

Raising Hope For Children In Foster Care: An Argument In Favor Of Expanding The Pool Of Qualified Applicants, Tapia Mateo

Student Works

No abstract provided.

The Effect Of Pre-Legal Recognition Cohabitation On Alimony And Equitable Distribution In Same-Sex Dissolution Cases, Alison J. Miller

Student Works

No abstract provided.

Multicultural Issues In Family Law: An Annotated Bibliography, Nancy Levit

Faculty Works

This bibliography covers law review articles published, for the most part, after 2009. Articles for which the title is self-explanatory or that concern only a single case, state, or statute are cited, but not annotated.

The Exit Myth: Family Law, Gender Roles, And Changing Attitudes Toward Female Victims Of Domestic Violence, Carolyn B. Ramsey

Publications

This Article presents a hypothesis suggesting how and why the criminal justice response to domestic violence changed, over the course of the twentieth century, from sympathy for abused women and a surprising degree of state intervention in intimate relationships to the apathy and discrimination that the battered women' movement exposed. The riddle of declining public sympathy for female victims of intimate-partner violence can only be solved by looking beyond the criminal law to the social and legal changes that created the Exit Myth.

While the situation that gave rise to the battered women's movement in the 1970s is often presumed …

Three Strikes, Yet They Keep On Swinging: Athletes And Domestic Violence, Victoria Lucido

Student Works

No abstract provided.

Reasonable Efforts And Parent-Child Reunification, Raymond C. O'Brien

Scholarly Articles

Among the increasing number of federal statutes impacting family law two continue to impact child permanency and parental rights. First, the Adoption Assistance and Child Welfare Act of 1980 mandates that state courts find that the state child welfare agency made reasonable efforts to reunite a dependent child with his or her parents prior to termination of parental rights. The child is dependent because a state court held that there was sufficient clear and convincing evidence to remove the child from the parents’ home. Often that evidence results from parental poverty, mental or physical disability, or the parents are undereducated …

Attorney Responsibility And Client Incapacity, Raymond C. O'Brien

Scholarly Articles

This Article suggests what an attorney should consider when representing a client suspected by the attorney of having diminished capacity, anticipating diminished capacity, or a client anticipating a response to the legal dilemmas posed by aging. So too, this Article suggests what an attorney should consider when retained by the family members of an allegedly incapacitate person. After providing demographics regarding aging, this Article will specifically address the attorney-client relationship in the context of the Model Rules of the American Bar Association. Next, this Article will integrate the attorney's responsibility regarding the proper execution of a Last Will and Testament, …

Registering Relationships, Erez Aloni

All Faculty Publications

Despite the dramatic changes in family structure in the past decades — including the unprecedented and skyrocketing number of families who live in non-marital arrangements — marriage and marriage-mimic institutions remain the only legal options for the recognition of relationships. This regulatory regime leaves millions of Americans without the means to establish and protect relationship rights. The article suggests that the legal issues arising from non-marital relationships would be best addressed if more options for legal recognition of such relationships were offered. Accordingly, this article presents the primary principles of a registration-based marriage alternative, founded on contract: “registered contractual relationships.” …

Grandma In The White House: Legal Support For Intergenerational Caregiving, Jessica Dixon Weaver

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

Marian Robinson’s status as the live-in First Grandmother is an example of a growing trend in the United States - the multigenerational family. The 2010 United States Census Data reflects that the number of households with multiple generations living under one roof has increased by 25% this decade. Mrs. Robinson also reflects another new development in American families: grandparents helping their adult children with caregiving. More than 70% of grandparents are taking care of their grandkids on a regular basis, and 13% are primary caretakers. Many grandparents treat their role as caregiver like a profession, and they sacrifice jobs, residences, …

Revisiting Mary Ann Glendon: Abortion, Divorce, Dependency, And Rights Talk In Western Law, Margaret F. Brinig, Linda C. Mcclain

Journal Articles

This essay revisits Mary Ann Glendon’s comparative law study, Abortion and Divorce in Western Law and her subsequent book, Rights Talk: The Impoverishment of Political Discourse. Glendon’s comparative study actually included a third topic: “forms of dependency which are connected with pregnancy, marriage, and child raising.” The topic of dependency has obvious relevance to consideration of intergenerational obligations and the interplay between family responsibility and societal responsibility for addressing dependency needs. A central claim Glendon made in both books is that the U.S. legal tradition is “libertarian,” views individuals as “lone rights bearers,” and exalts the “right to be …

Domestic Violence Does Not Discriminate By Color Or Race: Examining Domestic Violence Comparatively In The Jewish And Latino Communities, Victoria Gonchar

Student Works

No abstract provided.

Staging The Family, Clare Huntington

Faculty Scholarship

For many critical aspects of family life, all the world truly is a stage. When a parent scolds a child on the playground, all eyes turn to watch and judge. When an executive’s wife hosts a work party, the guests are witness to traditional gender roles. And when two fathers attend a back-to-school night for their child, other parents take note of this relatively new family configuration. Family is popularly considered intimate and personal, but in reality much of family life is lived in the public eye.

These performances of family and familial roles do not simply communicate messages to …

Child Welfare Cases Involving Parents With Disabilities, Joshua Kay

Articles

Many families include at least one parent with a disability. These parents become involved in the child welfare system more frequently than nondisabled parents, and their child protection cases are more likely to end in termination of parental rights. Parents with cognitive and/or psychiatric disabilities are particularly at risk of child welfare involvement. Cases involving parents with disabilities present special challenges and opportunities in child protection litigation, and strong advocacy is needed to ensure that these parents’ needs are met by the child welfare system and their rights are fully protected. With appropriate services, many parents with disabilities can provide …

Marriage Rights And The Good Life: A Sociological Theory Of Marriage And Constitutional Law, Ari Ezra Waldman

Articles & Chapters

This is the first in a series of three Articles investigating the underappreciated role that the social theory of Emile Durkheim plays in the quest for the freedom to marry for gay Americans. To that end, this Article begins the discussion by examining the Durkheimian legal arguments that go unnoticed in equal protection and due process claims against marriage discrimination. This Article challenges two assumptions: first, that the most effective legal argument for marriage rights is a purely liberal one, and second, that the substance and rhetoric of liberal toleration cannot exist symbiotically in the marriage discrimination debate with a …

The Incoherence Of Marital Benefits, Robin West

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

En route to finding the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) an unconstitutional violation of the Fifth Amendment's Equal Protection Clause, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals in Windsor v. United States gave short shrift to one of Congress's primary arguments in defense of the Act: that the federal government has a compelling interest in limiting federal marriage benefits to opposite-sex couples because traditional marriage has the laudable purpose-or function-of channeling the heterosexual sex that creates children into a way of life that provides the optimal environment for the rearing of those children. In other words, DOMA aims to minimize irresponsible …