Law Commons^™

Racial Myopia In [Family] Law, Jessica Dixon Weaver

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

Racial Myopia in [Family] Law presents a critique of Family Law for the One-Hundred-Year Life, an Article that claims that age myopia within family law fails older adults and prevents them from creating legal bonds with other adults outside the traditional marital model. This Response posits that racial myopia is a common yet complex phenomenon in almost every area of law, and it presents most often by centering whiteness as the default standard while failing to account for race and its impact on the law. Race—as well as the scholarship that incorporates race into normative family structure and identity—must be …

Parens Patriae After The Pandemic, Meredith Johnson Harbach

Law Faculty Publications

The COVID-19 pandemic prompted extraordinary state action to protect American children. Acting in its longstanding role as parens patriae, the state stepped in to protect children and their families from the ravages of the pandemic as well as from the dramatic upheaval it precipitated. This Article will evaluate the state’s pandemic response vis-à-vis children and their families, mining the experience for lessons learned and possible ways forward. Specifically, this project will argue that the state’s pandemic response represented a departure from the state’s conventional approach to parens patriae. Conventional practice prior to the pandemic was characterized by a state model …

The Pro Bono Collaborative Project Spotlight: Can You Help? December 2020, Roger Williams University School Of Law

Pro Bono Collaborative Staff Publications

No abstract provided.

Compassion: The Necessary Foundation To Reunify Families Involved In The Foster Care System, Katherine Markey, Vivek Sankaran

Articles

Compassion plays a critical role in ensuring that stakeholders can engage with, and support parents trying to reunify with kids in the foster care system. This Article will explore the compassion crisis in foster care, will present the research documenting the impact of compassion on engaging families, and will identify key steps stakeholders can take to incorporate compassion into their work.

Rwu Law News: The Newsletter Of Roger Williams University School Of Law 06-2020, Roger Williams University School Of Law, Michael M. Bowden, Katie Mulvaney

Life of the Law School (1993- )

No abstract provided.

A Cure Worse Than The Disease? The Impact Of Removal On Children And Their Families, Vivek Sankaran, Christopher Church, Monique Mitchell

Articles

Removing children from their parents is child welfare's most drastic intervention. Research clearly establishes the profound and irreparable damage family separation can inflict on children and their parents. To ensure that this intervention is only used when necessary, a complex web of state and federal constitutional principles, statutes, administrative regulations, judicial decisions, and agency policies govern the removal decision. Central to these authorities is the presumption that a healthy and robust child welfare system keeps families together, protects children from harm, and centers on the needs of children and their parents. Yet, research and practice-supported by administrative data-paint a different …

Champions For Justice & Public Interest Auction 2019, Roger Williams University School Of Law

School of Law Public Interest Auction

No abstract provided.

The Pro Bono Collaborative Project Spotlight: Rwu Law Alums Providing Pro Bono Through The Pbc (September 20, 2018), Roger Williams University School Of Law

Pro Bono Collaborative Staff Publications

No abstract provided.

My Name Is Not 'Respondent Mother': The Need For Procedural Justice In Child Welfare Cases, Vivek S. Sankaran

Articles

You are a parent whose children are in foster care. Your court hearing is today, after which you hope your children will return home. Upon leaving the bus, you wait in line to enter the court. At the metal detectors you’re told you can’t bring your cell phone inside. With no storage options, you hide your phone in the bushes, hoping it will be there when you return.

The Pro Bono Collaborative Project Spotlight 12-20-2017, Roger Williams University School Of Law

Pro Bono Collaborative Staff Publications

No abstract provided.

Family Reunification And The Security State, Kerry Abrams

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

The Pro Bono Collaborative: Celebrating 10 Years Of Pro Bono Partnerships, Roger Williams University School Of Law

Pro Bono Collaborative Staff Publications

No abstract provided.

Distinguishing Households From Families, Katharine B. Silbaugh

Faculty Scholarship

The study of the relationship between all families, whether marital or non-marital, and households, is underdeveloped, despite extensive study of the mismatch between family law, which is still focused on marriage and parenthood, and family practices. Often, in an effort to update the discourse, discussions of non-marital families seem to deploy households or living arrangements as a substitute classification in the place of the old marital family. This Article argues that we need to resist the tendency to substitute the idea of “household” when the boundaries of legal family fail us, because households are not necessarily familial, and because core …

Afterword: Reimagining Family Defense, Matthew I. Fraidin

Journal Articles

No abstract provided.

The Intersection Of Family Law And Education Law, Debra Chopp

Articles

It is well-established that parents have a fundamental liberty interest in directing the education of their children. As family law practitioners know, however, parents do not always agree with each other on matters pertaining to their child's education. Where education issues arise in family law cases, it is important for members of the family law bar to have familiarity with education laws so that they may properly advise their clients. This article will identify and briefly discuss common intersections of family law and education law.

Immigration's Family Values, Kerry Abrams, R. Kent Piacenti

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

What Makes The Family Special?, Kerry Abrams

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Disabled Kids And Their Moms: Caregivers And Horizontal Equity, Karen S. Czapanskiy

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Surviving Castle Rock: The Human Rights Of Domestic Violence, Max D. Siegel

Student Articles and Papers

In 2005, the Supreme Court of the United States decided Town of Castle Rock v. Gonzales and held that Jessica Gonzales did not have a constitutional right to police enforcement of a restraining order. The decision highlighted the Court’s reluctance to recognize citizens’ affirmative rights, fortifying a deeply ingrained conceptualization of the Constitution of the United States as a “Negative Constitution” that creates a government with restraints on its actions and extremely limited obligations to its citizens. In August 2011, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights released a report publicizing its finding that by failing to take affirmative measures to …

Renegotiating The Social Contract, Jennifer S. Hendricks

Publications

This review of The Supportive State: Families, Government and America’s Political Ideals highlights Maxine Eichner’s important theoretical contributions to both liberal political theory and feminist theory, applauding her success in reforming liberalism to account for dependency, vulnerability, and families. The review then considers some implications of Eichner’s proposals and their likely reception among feminists. It concludes that The Supportive State is a sound and inspiring response to recent calls that feminist theory move from being strictly a school of criticism to developing a theory of governance.

Changing The Narrative Of Child Welfare, Matthew I. Fraidin

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

In child welfare, the difference we can make as lawyers for parents, children, and the state, and as judges, is to prevent children from entering foster care unnecessarily. And we can end a child’s stay in foster care as quickly as possible. To do that, we have to fight against a powerful narrative of child welfare and against the accepted “top-down” paradigm of legal services.

In this essay, Professor Fraidin suggests that we can achieve our goals of limiting entries to foster care and speeding exits from it by looking for the strengths of the people involved in our cases, …

Legislating After Janice M.: The Constitutionality Of Recognizing De Facto Parenthood In Maryland, Rachel Simmonsen

Student Articles and Papers

No abstract provided.

Purple Haze (Book Review), Clare Huntington

Faculty Scholarship

This is a review of Red Families v Blue Families: Legal Polarization and the Creation of Culture. By Naomi Cahn & June Carbone. New York: Oxford University Press. 2010

The Indian Child Welfare Act., Frank Vandervort

Book Chapters

Few child welfare lawyers routinely confront the application of the Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA or "the Act"). When the statute applies, however, it is crucial that its provisions be strictly followed. There are at least three reasons why counsel should attempt to ensure that ICWA's provisions are carefully applied. First, ICWA's provisions are jurisdictional. Failure to abide by its requirements invalidates the proceeding from its inception. Indeed, any party or the court may invoke ICWA at any time in the proceeding, including for the first time on appeal. Second, unlike most federal child welfare legislation which provides funding streams …

Legal Strategies To Address Child Support Obligations For Nonresident Fathers In The Child Welfare System, Daniel L. Hatcher

All Faculty Scholarship

The legal and practical issues surrounding child support obligations have enormous impact on families in the child welfare system. Unfortunately, these issues are often ignored, overlooked, or misunderstood. A much-needed effort to engage nonresident fathers in the child welfare system is underway, but those efforts will often be derailed if child support is not properly addressed. This article sheds light on the legal and policy concerns regarding child support enforcement in child protection cases and provides legal strategies for advocates to address those concerns. While primarily aimed at advocates for nonresident fathers, this article should also benefit advocates for custodial …

Protocol For Attorneys Representing Parents In Child Protective Proceedings, Frank E. Vandervort, Vivek S. Sankaran

Other Publications

This protocol is intended to guide attorneys through the strategic decisions they will need to make while representing parents in child protective cases. The protocol does not provide a comprehensive action-step checklist. Parents’ attorneys can find that kind of guidance in other resources, including the “How-To-Kit: Representing Parents in Child Protective Proceedings” by the Institute of Continuing Legal Education; “Guidelines for Achieving Permanency in Child Protection Proceedings” by Children’s Charter of the Courts of Michigan; and the American Bar Association’s “Standards of Practice for Attorneys Representing Parents in Abuse and Neglect Cases.”1 For its part, this protocol delves more substantively …

Legal Status And Effect On Children, Margaret F. Brinig, Steven L. Nock

Journal Articles

One of the haunting claims of each poor, unmarried mother in Edin and Kefalas' Promises I Can Keep is that at least she can guarantee she will love her child, even though she cannot promise to make a lifelong commitment to a mate. That love, each young mother says, will be a sustaining gift both to her and the child. Similarly, in work done by sociologists McLanahan and Garfinkel to counteract the claim that it was not single parenting that made children's prospects dim, but poverty, sociologists have found that many of the bad effects of single parenting go away …

Valuing All Families: An Introduction To The 2008 Santa Clara Law Review Symposium, Nancy Polikoff

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

The family has changed over time, as has the law concerning families and relationships. Thank goodness. Until recent decades, the law punished nonmarital sex, delineated separate spheres for men and women, and restricted the grounds for ending marriage. The sexual revolution, feminism, and the demand for divorce were the social phenomena that facilitated these changes. Today we take for granted that marriage is not the right dividing line for the rights and obligations of parents. We now must revise our laws to protect the economic security and emotional peace of mind of the full variety of today's families and relationships.

Adoption, Elizabeth Samuels

All Faculty Scholarship

In historical terms, the legal institution of adoption in the United Slates is relatively new. It was between the mid-1800s and the 1920s that the states began to pass laws providing for the adoption of children. Before then children had been adopted informally and in some instances by individual legislative acts, or they had come to live with other families under indenture contracts or as a result of legislation authorizing charitable organizations to place children. Under these new adoption statutes, initially the court records of adoptions were not subject to confidentiality, and adopted children were not issued new birth certificates. …

Standing In Babylon, Looking Toward Zion, Katherine R. Kruse

Scholarly Works

This article defends the triumph of vision at the 2006 UNLV Conference on Representing Children in Families by examining the interrelationship between idealism and realism in the definition of lawyers' roles and the importance of idealized visions to the process of reforming dysfunctional systems. This article suggests that the vision of lawyering for children sketched in the UNLV Recommendations--though based in idealism--is both deeply realistic and ultimately practical. This article thus affirms the choice of the group of idealists who stood together for a few days in modern-day Babylon to keep their eyes trained on the vision of Zion as …