Law Commons^™

Family Unity Revisited: Divorce, Separation, And Death In Immigration Law, Albertina Antognini

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

Families are integral to immigration law and policy, and family-based immigration accounts for the majority of legal entry into the United States. Legislative, judicial, and scholarly discussions that address immigration law's family-based categories rely nearly exclusively on the principle of family unification, which has long been a cornerstone policy of immigration law. Yet the family-based provisions of immigration law do more than unify intact families; understanding families as dynamic entities that experience change reveals an immigration system that acknowledges a flexible family structure in determining status.

The principal aim of this Article is to present a more complete description of …

Counsel For The Divorce, Rebecca Aviel

Sturm College of Law: Faculty Scholarship

This article challenges the legal profession's foundational assumption that legal services must be delivered in an adversarial posture, with lawyers compelled to engage in robust partisan advocacy on behalf of their clients' individualized interests. This narrow conception of the lawyer's role is particularly inapt in family law because many divorcing spouses actually seek joint counsel, understanding that they have profound shared interests in minimizing transaction costs, maximizing the value of the marital estate, and reducing the hostility and animosity that are so harmful to children. Couples who wish to advance these interests by retaining joint counsel are poorly served by …

The Creeping Federalization Of Wealth-Transfer Law, Lawrence W. Waggoner

Articles

This article appears in a symposium issue published by the Vanderbilt Law Review on The Role of Federal Law in Private Wealth Transfer. Federal authorities have little experience in making law that governs wealth transfers, because that function is traditionally within the province of state law. Although state wealth-transfer law has undergone significant modernization over the last few decades, all three branches of the federal government—legislative, judicial, and executive—have increasingly gone their own way. Lack of experience and, in many cases, lack of knowledge on the part of federal authorities have not dissuaded them from undermining well-considered state law. The …

Bargaining In The Shadow Of The Best-Interests Standard: The Close Connection Between Substance And Process In Resolving Divorce-Related Parenting Disputes, Jana B. Singer

Faculty Scholarship

This essay, written for a Symposium celebrating the child custody scholarship of Professor Robert Mnookin, examines the close connection between changes in substantive child custody doctrine and changes in custody dispute resolution processes over the past 30 years. Part I of the article explores how the widespread adoption of an unmediated “best interest of the child” standard, and the ensuing rejection of the sole custody paradigm, precipitated a shift from adversarial to non-adversarial resolution of divorce-related parenting disputes. Part II of the essay reverses the direction of the analytic lens and considers how the shift from adversarial to non-adversarial dispute …

Tax Consequences Of Distributing Equity Compensation Rights In Divorce, Gregg Polsky, Jeffrey D. Fisher, Zachry R. Potter

Scholarly Works

This article discusses the federal tax issues arising from the equitable distribution of compensatory stock options and restricted stock in divorce. While the tax consequences of distributing vested options and shares are clear, the treatment of unvested rights is muddled. This article explains the state of the law and provides practical advice to divorce lawyers who confront these issues.

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 …