Law Commons^™

We All Need Somebody To Lean On: Using The Law To Nurture Our Children, Beginning With Third-Party Visitation, John A. Pappalardo, Cassidy Allison, Samantha A. Mumola

Pace Law Review

Perhaps one of the single most important aspects of a healthy childhood is emotional support from healthy caregivers. As it stands, New York’s visitation law prohibits third-party caregivers from stepping in and providing children with this important psychological and emotional need by automatically denying them standing to seek visitation in court. In New York, third-party standing for visitation is denied solely on a procedural basis, irrespective of the child’s personal familial situation, namely whether their parents are completely

unavailable. Specifically, when a child’s parents become unavailable due to death, incarceration or otherwise, and such child becomes a ward of the …

The Devil You Don’T Know: Implicit Bias Keeps Women In Their Place, Michele N. Struffolino

Pace Law Review

While men’s claims of gender bias in the family law system are acknowledged, this article focuses on how bias, whether implicit or explicit under the guise of unconscious attitudes or behavior, continues to place women at a systemic disadvantage. Although implicit bias also impacts outcomes in child abuse and neglect actions involving the state, the focus of this article is the impact of implicit bias in actions between women and men in the family courts, in particular those issues involved in the dissolution of the relationship and the family unit. First, the emergence of implicit social cognition theory will be …

An Empirical Study Of Property Divisions At Divorce, Margaret Ryznar

Pace Law Review

Much has been written about family law and how to fairly divide property between divorcing spouses. Without a good understanding of what courts are doing in the field, however, there is no baseline for theoretical frameworks. This Article fills the void by analyzing all divorce cases involving children that were filed in one county over several months. The resulting empirical data has implications for the meaning of fairness in divorce, the role of judicial discretion, and the incentives for contracting by couples. This Article also examines the underlying law in order to explore the correlation between the family law code …