Law Commons^™

Law School News: Rwu Law Alumnae Will Address Ginsburg Legacy, Workplace Gender Equity 03-11-2021, Roger Williams University School Of Law

Life of the Law School (1993- )

No abstract provided.

In Defense Of Empiricism In Family Law, Elizabeth S. Scott

Faculty Scholarship

It is fitting to include an essay defending the application of empirical research to family law and policy in a symposium honoring the scholarly career of Peg Brinig, who is probably the leading empiricist working in family law. While such a defense might seem unnecessary, given the expanding role of behavioral, social, and biological research in shaping the regulation of children and families, prominent scholars recently have raised concerns about the trend toward reliance on empirical science in this field. A part of the criticism is directed at the quality of the science itself and at the lack of sophistication …

Gender In The Context Of Same-Sex Divorce And Relationship Dissolution, Suzanne A. Kim, Edward Stein

Faculty Articles

This article identifies ways that judges, lawyers, researchers, and policy makers may attend to the role of gender and gender dynamics facing same-sex couples upon divorce or other relationship dissolution. When same-sex couples marry, the legal system and society at large may project conceptions of gender onto same-sex couples, often in a manner that conflicts with couples’ intentions and practices. Gender and gender dynamics may affect the bases for dissolution, the financial aspects of dissolution, and the determination of child custody. The article also suggests directions for future research on the impact of gender on the dissolution of same-sex relationships.

Outliving Love: Marital Estrangement In An African Insurance Market, Casey Golomski

Anthropology

Marital estrangement and formal divorce are vital conjunctures for married women’s kinship relations and life course, where a horizon of future possibilities are revalued and negotiated at the interstices of custom, law, and social and ritual obligations. In this article, after delineating the forms of customary and civil marriage and the possibilities for divorce or estrangement from each, I describe how some married women in Swaziland and South Africa mediate this complex social field for their children and families through pensions and continuing to pay for their partners’ insurance coverage. This was not solely out of avarice to reap future …

A Proposal To Withhold Divorce Decrees On Grounds Of Equity, J. David Bleich

Faculty Articles

Throughout the medieval period, marriage was acknowledged by temporal rulers to be a religious matter governed by the ecclesiastic law of the Church which, to be sure, incorporated many principles of Roman law. Subsequent to the Reformation, the rulers of many European countries became disposed to regard marriage as a civil act, to withdraw marriage from the control of the church and to entrust it entirely to the state. The Napoleonic Code was the first example of a legal system that treated marriage as a purely civil act. The Napoleonic Code did not deny the religious element present in marriage …

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 …

A Tale Of Two Families -- Red Families V. Blue Families: Legal Polarization And The Creation Of Culture By Naomi Cahn & June Carbone, Rachel Rebouché

UF Law Faculty Publications

In their thought-provoking book, Red Families v. Blue Families: Legal Polarization and the Creation of Culture, Naomi Cahn and June Carbone examine conflicting views on family formation in the "culture war." Mirroring the electoral maps of 2004 and 2008, the authors contend that regional differences between Republican and Democrat voters correspond to deeply held beliefs about family values. The "blue" family paradigm is essentially liberal: It stresses individual equality, tolerance of diverse lifestyles, and a role for government in helping people achieve educational and economic success. "Red" families are conservative. They value tradition, as expressed in religious beliefs or longstanding …

Civil Rites: The Gay Marriage Controversy In Historical Perspective, Joanna L. Grossman

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

This short essay, written for a volume that celebrates and reflects on Lawrence M. Friedman’s work in legal history and legal culture, explores the modern controversy about same-sex marriage through a historical lens. The legalization of same-sex marriage by five states, and the express condemnation of it by more than forty others, has reintroduced the age-old problem of non-uniform marriage laws and the complicated interactions that follow. This modern story - a challenge to traditional marriage, a divisive moral debate, and the emergence of strong oppositional forces that are stuck, at least temporarily, but perhaps indefinitely, in a kind of …

Engines Of Inequality: Class, Race, And Family Structure, Amy L. Wax

All Faculty Scholarship

The past 30 years have witnessed a dramatic divergence in family structure by social class, income, education, and race. This article reviews the data on these trends, explores their significance, and assesses social scientists’ recent attempts to explain them. The article concludes that society-wide changes in economic conditions or social expectations cannot account for these patterns. Rather, for reasons that are poorly understood, cultural disparities have emerged by class and race in attitudes and behaviors surrounding family, sexuality, and reproduction. These disparities will likely fuel social and economic inequality and contribute to disparities in children’s life prospects for decades to …

Gender And Nation-Building: Family Law As Legal Architecture Symposium - Nation Building: A Legal Architecture: Articles And Essays, Tracy E. Higgins, Rachel P. Fink

Faculty Scholarship

Although the discipline of family law in the western legal tradition transcends the public/private law boundary in many ways, it is the argument of this Essay that family law, in the private law sense of defining the rights and obligations of members of a family, forms an important part of the legal architecture of nation-building in at least three ways. First, access to the resources of the nation-state devolves through biologically and culturally gendered national boundaries, both reflecting and reinforcing the differential status of men and women in the sphere of the family. Second, the social institution of the family …

The Recently Revised Marriage Law Of China: The Promise And The Reality, Charles J. Ogletree Jr., Rangita De Silva De Alwis

All Faculty Scholarship

In April 2001, the Standing Committee of the Ninth National People's Congress (NPC), China's highest legislative body, passed the long-debated and much awaited amendments to the Marriage Law on the closing day of its twenty-first session. As stated by one PRC commentator, "In the 50 years since the founding of the New China, there has not been any law that has caused such a widespread concern for ordinary people."'

Even though the recent revisions to the marriage laws have been hailed as some of the most significant and positive changes in family law in China, thus far no empirical evaluation …

Family Law In The Age Of Distrust, Carl E. Scheider

Articles

I have been invited to examine the relationship between American culture and American family law at the end of the century. No doubt I was foolish to accept the invitation, since the topic can hardly be sketched, much less discussed, within the compass of even a lengthy article. On the other hand, that happy fault forces me to accept the luxury of writing a speculative essay and of eschewing the footnotes that are the misery (and majesty) of the academic lawyer. But even thus set free I am still enchained. Family law is shaped by more cultural forces than I …

25 Divorce Attorneys And 40 Clients In Two Not So Big But Not So Small Cities In Massachusetts And California: An Appreciation, David L. Chambers

Reviews

Jane is meeting with her lawyer Peter. She has been complaining bitterly about a restraining order obtained ex parte by the lawyer for her husband Norb. The order bars her from entering the home that she still owns jointly with Norb and that Norb has continued to live in. She moved out voluntarily, as a gesture of good will, a short while before only to have her husband's lawyer run to court and secure the order she abhors. Readers first met Jane back in 1986 when Austin Sarat and William Felstiner published the first article growing out of their massive …

Fathers, The Welfare System, And The Virtues And Perils Of Child-Support Enforcement, David L. Chambers

Articles

For half a century, Aid to Families with Dependent Children ("AFDC")' -the program of federally supported cash assistance to low-income families with children-has been oddly conceived. Congress has chosen to make assistance available almost solely to low-income single-parent families, not all low-income parents with children. At first many of the eligible single parents were women whose husbands had died. Over time, a growing majority were women who had been married to their children's father but who had separated or divorced. Today, to an ever increasing extent, they are women who were never married to the fathers of their children.2

Marriage, Morals, And The Law: No-Fault Divorce And Moral Discourse, Carl E. Schneider

Articles

In this Essay, I want to reflect on no fault-divorce and the social attitudes that underlie it. In particular, I want to consider that reform in light of an article I wrote some years ago entitled Moral Discourse and the Transformation of American Family Law. There I argued that in recent years the language of American family law has changed notably: today family law issues are decreasingly discussed in the language of morality. In other words, legal institutions have decreasingly talked about those issues in moral terms. Rather, they have tended to avoid handling some moral issues altogether-often by …

The Channelling Function In Family Law, Carl E. Schneider

Articles

On an occasion such as this, we are called to step back from our daily work to seek what Justice Holmes called a "liberal view" of our subject. Today, I propose to do so by exploring a function of family law that I believe is basic, that underlies much of family law, that resonates with the deepest purposes of culture but that is rarely addressed expressly-namely, what I call the "channelling function." As I will soon explain at length, in the channelling function the law recruits, builds, shapes, sustains; and promotes social institutions. My exploration of this topic will have …

The Multiple-Marriage Society And Spousal Rights Under The Revised Uniform Probate Code, Lawrence W. Waggoner

Articles

Nearly everyone knows about the transformation of the American family that has taken place over the last couple of decades. The changes, from the latter half of the 1970s into the present, comprise one of the great events of our age. Articles on one aspect or another of the phenomenon frequent the popular press, and a special edition of Newsweek was recently devoted to the topic.' The traditional "Leave It To Beaver" family no longer prevails in American society. To be sure, families consisting of a wage-earning husband, a homemaking and child-rearing wife, and their two joint children still exist. …

Commentary: Meeting The Financial Needs Of Children, David L. Chambers

Articles

Those who drafted the equitable distribution statutes adopted in New York and elsewhere wanted to help assure women and children an acceptable level of financial well-being after divorce. Marsha Garrison has shown that divorcing couples rarely possess enough resources to attain financial well-being even when they live together as a couple, let alone when they live in two separate households. She has also shown that, even in the cases of couples with substantial assets, the broad and general language of the equitable distribution statute did not lead (and could not have been expected to lead) to consistent distributions that assured …

Spousal Probate Rights In A Multiple-Marriage Society, Lawrence W. Waggoner

Other Publications

Nearly everyone knows about the transformation of the American family that has taken place over the last couple of decades. The changes comprise one of the great events of our age-from the latter half of the 1970's into the present. Articles on one aspect or another of the phenomenon frequent the popular press, and a special edition of Newsweek was recently devoted to the topic. The traditional "Leave It To Beaver" family no longer prevails in American marriage behavior. To be sure, the wage-earning husband, the homemaking and child-rearing wife, and their two joint children-this type of family still exists. …

Jewish Divorce: Judicial Misconceptions And Possible Means Of Civil Enforcement, J. David Bleich

Faculty Articles

No abstract provided.

The Coming Curtailment Of Compulsory Child Support, David L. Chambers

Articles

Absent parents ought to contribute to the support of their minor children and states can appropriately invoke the force of law to compel them to do so. Stated so generally, even absent parents behind in their payments would probably agree. Since so many others agree as well, and since the numbers of single-parent children have mushroomed, systems of governmentally compelled support in this country have grown enormously. By the early part of the next century, if current laws remain in force and current population trends continue, most of America's children on any given day will be entitled to support from …

Men Who Know They Are Watched: Some Benefits And Costs Of Jailing For Nonpayment Of Support, David L. Chambers

Articles

Suppose that by some mysterious process the police in your town received each Monday a list of all the robberies and burglaries committed during the preceding week and the names of the persons who committed them. Suppose further that the list itself was admissible in evidence at trial and generally led to conviction. And suppose finally that persons considering committing offenses knew that the police had such a list and used it, relentlessly tracking down the miscreants named on it. Under such circumstances, one would probably expect that many potential offenders in the town with the magical list would resist …

Divorce Laws And The Increase Of Divorce, Evans Holbrook

Articles

Along with the condemnation of the divorce evil has gone a very general disposition to condemn our divorce laws as being responsible for the evil. The committee on resolutions of the Congress on Uniform Divorce Laws in its report to the Congress at its adjourned session in Philadelphia, November 13, 1906, speaks of the "many evils engendered by the lax and unphilosophic system prevailing in many of the states."3 On this phase of the question also our late president gave his views in his special message to Congress on January 30, 1905, in the following words: "There is a wide-spread …