Law Commons^™

Religiously-Motivated Medical Neglect: A Response To Professors Levin, Jacobs, And Arora, Doriane Lambelet Coleman

Faculty Scholarship

This Response to Professors Levin, Jacobs, and Arora’s article To Accommodate or Not to Accommodate: (When) Should the State Regulate Religion to Protect the Rights of Children and Third Parties? focuses on their claim that the law governing religious exemptions to medical neglect is messy, unprincipled, and in need of reform, including because it violates the Establishment Clause. I disagree with this assessment and provide support for my position. Specifically, I summarize and assess the current state of this law and its foundation in the perennial tussle between parental rights and state authority to make decisions for and about the …

Rwu Law: The Magazine Of Roger Williams University School Of Law (Issue 9) (2016), Roger Williams University School Of Law

RWU Law

No abstract provided.

Detoxing The Child Welfare System, Allison E. Korn

Faculty Scholarship

This Article considers the varying reasons why drug policies informing child welfare interventions are not evolving as part of the drug policy reform movement, which has successfully advocated for initiatives that decrease mass incarceration, end mandatory minimums, and decriminalize or legalize marijuana use and possession. Many existing child welfare laws and policies that address parental drug use rely on the premise that prenatal exposure to a controlled substance causes inevitable harm to a child. Furthermore, they presume that any amount of drug use by a parent places a child in imminent danger, or is indicative of future risk of harm. …

Representing Children And Youth, Donald N. Duquette, Ann M. Haralambie

Book Chapters

The role of the child's attorney is unique in American jurisprudence and not yet clearly defined by law or tradition. There is an emerging consensus, however, that children in dependency cases should have lawyers and those lawyers should be as active and as involved in their cases as are lawyers for any other party in any other litigation. Although state law and policy makers differ as to what voice the child should have in determining the direction and goals of the litigation, that is, whether the child's lawyer should represent the best interests of the child as determined by the …

Schofield V. State, 132 Nev. Adv. Op. 26 (Apr. 21, 2016), Kristian Kaskla

Nevada Supreme Court Summaries

The Court determined that (1) Nevada’s first-degree kidnapping statute NRS 200.310(1)'s "intent to keep" language is ambiguous; (2) NRS 200.310(1) requires proof that the accused intended to keep the minor for a protracted period of time or permanently; and (3) reversal is warranted because there is insufficient evidence to support appellant's first-degree kidnapping conviction under the proper legal standard.

Griffith V. Gonzales-Alpizar, 132 Nev. Adv. Op. 38 (May 26, 2016), Michael Hua

Nevada Supreme Court Summaries

The Court held that under NRS 125.040, a district court has the power to grant attorney fees pendente lite for appeals in divorce actions.

Genetic Essentialism In Family Law, Jennifer S. Hendricks

Publications

No abstract provided.

Result Inequality In Family Law, Margaret Brinig

Journal Articles

To the extent that family law is governed by statute, all families are treated as though they are the same. This is of course consistent with the equal protection guarantees of the US Constitution as well as those of the states. However, in our pluralistic society, all families are not alike. At birth, some children are born to wealthy, married parents who will always put the children’s interests first and will never engage in domestic violence. Many laws benefit these children, while, according to some academics, they either further disadvantage other children or at best ignore their needs.

This presentation …

Zero-Tolerance Comes To International Law, Aya Gruber

Publications

No abstract provided.

Resurrecting Islam Or Cementing Social Hierarchy?: Reexamining The Codification Of 'Islamic' Personal Status Law, Haider Ala Hamoudi

Articles

There is a regrettable tendency to equate social conservatism with religious adherence. Nowhere does this occur more than in the Muslim world, where conservatives are closely associated with adherence to shari’a. The more unyielding the conservative, the “stricter” the supposed adherence to shari’a, or, alternatively, the more “literal” the version of shari’a adhered to.

While almost any social conservative movement in the Muslim world or otherwise professes adherence to religious doctrine as being the core of its ideological commitment, and while there are important ways in which Muslim social conservatives insist on adherence to religious rules in their most traditional …

Legal Recognition Of Same-Sex Relationships: New Possibilities For Research On The Role Of Marriage Law In Household Labor Allocation, Deborah A. Widiss

Articles by Maurer Faculty

Research comparing the relative significance of economic exchange theories and gender norms on parents’ division of income-producing and domestic responsibilities often fails to consider sufficiently the role that marriage may play. This article shows that, in the United States, numerous aspects of state and federal law relating to marriage encourage spouses to specialize in distinct breadwinning and caretaking roles. Same-sex marriage offers new opportunities to assess the importance of marriage in household labor allocation decisions while controlling for gender. For any data gathered before June 2015, however, it may be distorting to characterize same-sex couples as simply “married” or “un-married”; …

Planned Parenthood: Adult Adoption And The Right Of Adoptees To Inherit, Richard C. Ausness

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

This Article is concerned with the effect of adult adoptions on the inheritance rights (in the broad sense of that term) of adult adoptees. The Article contends many adult adoption statutes assume the existence of a parent-child relationship in which the adopter is the “parent” and the adoptee is a “child” even though this is not true of all adult adoption cases. In addition, legislatures and courts frequently fail to differentiate between “quasi-familial” adoptions and “strategic” adoptions, particularly where inheritance rights are concerned.

Easy Come, Easy Go: The Plight Of Children Who Spend Less Than 30 Days In Foster Care, Vivek Sankaran, Christopher Church

Articles

This article explores the plight of “short stayers” and argues that juvenile courts are failing to use two tools—the federal reasonable efforts requirement and the early appointment of parents’ counsel—to prevent the unnecessary entry of children into foster care. The article also argues that states should give parents and children the right to an expedited appeal of removal decisions to ensure removal standards are properly applied. Finally, this article argues that the federal government must acknowledge the problem of short stayers by utilizing data related to children who may unnecessarily enter foster care in the Child and Family Services Review, …

The Elimination Of Child "Custody" Litigation: Using Business Branding Techniques To Transform Social Behavior, Elena Langan

Scholarly Works

The promise of a less contentious divorce is a value proposition that most, if not all, would embrace. With the current trend in custody litigation that has resulted in nomenclature changes and revisions in custody standards, efforts to achieve that brand promise could benefit from implementation of business branding principles. In order to shift the focus away from 'winning custody' to a paradigm that promotes co-parenting and eschew labels, all of the participants in custody disputes, including lawyers and judges, but most importantly parents, must view the changes as providing a favorable benefit.

Rebranding concepts that focus on promoting an …

Bridging The Justice Gap In Family Law: Repurposing Federal Iv-D Funding To Expand Community-Based Legal And Social Services For Parents, Stacy Brustin, Lisa Vollendorf Martin

Scholarly Articles

Parents in family court overwhelmingly proceed pro se; however, in child support courtrooms, government attorneys representing the state child support agency frequently play a pivotal role. These attorneys represent the state’s ostensible interests in ensuring that children are financially supported and in preventing welfare dependence; they do not represent individual parents. The outcomes of child support proceedings have profound, long-term constitutional and financial implications for parents, yet litigants rarely understand their rights or the role of the government.

Originally, the goal of state child support enforcement efforts was to recapture the costs of welfare expenditures. In 1990, two-thirds of cases …

The Puzzle Of Family Law Pluralism, Erez Aloni

All Faculty Publications

Family law is succumbing to pluralism. Scholars have celebrated this trend as a desirable outcome of the struggle for marriage equality. And a pluralistic family law seems to offer distinct benefits: more regimes than just marriage, and greater room for choice within each regime (manifest by more types of legally enforceable intrafamilial contracts). This Article exposes counterintuitive facts that lead to a surprising conclusion: the legal changes that scholars tout as increasing pluralism eviscerate the substance of the choices families are permitted to make.

The policies that appear to extend choice within each regime, in fact, mask what I call …

Meyer, Pierce, And The History Of The Entire Human Race: Barbarism, Social Progress, And (The Fall And Rise Of) Parental Rights, Jeffrey Shulman

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Long before the Supreme Court’s seminal parenting cases took a due process Lochnerian turn, American courts had been working to fashion family law doctrine on the premise that parents are only entrusted with custody of the child, and then only as long as they meet their fiduciary duty to take proper care of the child. With its progressive, anti-patriarchal orientation, this jurisprudence was in part a creature of its time, reflecting the evolutionary biases of the emerging fields of sociology, anthropology, and legal ethnohistory. In short, the courts embraced the new, “scientific” view that social “progress” entails the decline and, …

Religion And Child Custody, Margaret Brinig

Journal Articles

This piece draws upon divorce pleadings and other records to show how indications of religion (or disaffiliation) that appear in custody agreements and orders (called “parenting plans” in both states studied) affect the course of the proceedings and legal activities over the five years following divorce filing. Some of the apparent findings are normative, but most are merely descriptive and some may be correlative rather than caused by the indicated concern about religion. While parenting plans are accepted by courts only when they are in the best interests of the child (at least in theory), the child’s independent religious needs …

Compassion Fatigue: Caveat Caregiver?, Jennifer Baum

Faculty Publications

(Excerpt)

Most of us are familiar with the stereotype of the burned out lawyer who drags herself to work in the morning, makes cynical comments throughout the day, no longer provides her best service to her clients, and goes home bored and uninspired. You may wonder why someone so uncaring ever became a child advocate in the first place, or how she lost her spark. And you know this could never happen to you. Right?

Wrong, according to a panel of experts convened by the ABA Section of Litigation’s Children’s Rights Litigation Committee in a teleconference examining the phenomenon recently …

Homelessness And Legal Advocacy, Legal Clinic Program

Course Descriptions and Information

This clinic offers a comprehensive set of legal services focused on assisting and empowering low income individuals in their interaction with the legal system. Students explore the facets of homelessness and the role of legal advocacy in addressing its causes and alleviating its consequences.

Guardian Ad Litem, Legal Clinic Program

Course Descriptions and Information

GUARDIAN AD LITEM (GAL): This clinic focuses on legal advocacy on behalf of children, while providing students with a strong foundation in lawyering skills and values. This clinic addresses constitutional, statutory, and common laws impacting children, the legal interests of parents, and the government and the law’s evolving conception of children’s rights.

Nonmarital Families And The Legal System's Institutional Failures, Clare Huntington

Faculty Scholarship

As along-time critic of family law, I find it odd to be singing the system's praises. And yet I am. Sort of. In this issue of the Family Law Quarterly, which addresses cohabitation and nonmarital families, I want to focus on what happens when relationships end. For all its shortcomings, family law provides an institution to help divorcing couples restructure their families following the end of relationships. For nonmarital families, not so much. Unmarried parents theoretically can go to court when they separate, but most do not. Thus., as a practical matter, the legal system leaves unmarried parents without an …

Lgbt Law Notes, Arthur S. Leonard

Other Publications

No abstract provided.

Child Welfare Appellate Advocacy, Vivek Sankaran

Book Chapters

The appellate system serves important functions in child welfare cases. It ensures that the relationship between a child and his or her parent is not unjustly terminated. It forces juvenile courts and child welfare agencies to strictly follow statutes, court rules, and agency policies. And it preserves public faith in the system by serving as an independent check to correct mistakes that occur.

But the appellate system is only as good as the advocates who appear before it. This chapter is intended to be a resource for those advocates, both those who have practiced child welfare law for many years …

Representing Parents In Child Welfare Cases, Vivek Sankaran

Book Chapters

A parent's constitutional right to raise his or her child is one of the most venerated liberty interests safeguarded by the Constitution. The law presumes parents to be fit, and it establishes that they do not need to be model parents to retain custody of their children. If the state seeks to interfere with the parent-child relationship, the Constitution mandates: (I) that the state prove parental unfitness, a standard defined by state laws, and (2) that the state follow certain procedures protecting the due process rights of parents. The constitutional framework for child welfare cases is premised upon the belief …

Mental Health Evaluations In Child Welfare Settings, Joshua B. Kay

Book Chapters

This chapter will focus mainly on parenting capacity evaluations performed by psychologists, as these evaluations tend to be the most legally fraught type of assessment in a child protection proceeding. Often, assessments of parenting capacity inform important, difficult, and potentially contentious questions in the case, including whether to remove a child from a parent's custody or maintain a child in foster care; the frequency and conditions of parent-child visitation; recommended interventions to address parenting deficiencies or problems in the parent-child relationship; and whether and when termination of parental rights should be considered. Despite their central role in providing information that …

Differential Response: Misrepresentation Of Cps Investigation And Case Fact Finding, Frank E. Vandervort, Ronald C. Hughes

Articles

Traditionally, a host of necessary case fact-finding responsibilities and activities has been used by public Child Protective Services (CPS) agencies to ensure that they can achieve mandates to protect children from maltreatment as well as to strengthen and preserve the families of atrisk children. The primary CPS case fact-finding activities include risk assessment, investigation (both CPS and forensic), and family assessment. Information collected while engaged in any one of these three activities will often be relevant and important to the others. However, each case fact-finding activity also requires specific inquiry to elicit information that is essential to achieve its distinct …

Marriage Equality And Marital Supremacy, Serena Mayeri

All Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

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.

On Family Law Localism: A Comment On Sean Hannon Williams's Sex In The City, Richard Briffault

Faculty Scholarship

In his Article “Sex in the City,” Professor Sean Hannon Williams addresses the problems of enormous trial court discretion and concomitant unpredictable and inconsistent decisions found in divorce cases by proposing that local governments adopt nonbinding “rules of thumb” that would guide judges in exercising that discretion with respect to issues such as child custody, property division, and income support. He contends that this proposal would fit within the existing legal framework of state-local relations and would advance the goals of both family law reform and local empowerment with respect to family issues. Specifically, he urges that local legislative action …