Law Commons^™

Buying Time For Survivors Of Domestic Violence: A Proposal For Implementing An Exception To Welfare Time Limits, Jennifer Mason Mcaward

Journal Articles

With the passage of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 (Personal Responsibility Act), states have unprecedented discretion in fashioning their social welfare programs.

This Note examines the Personal Responsibility Act, focusing specifically on the statutory language and history of the sixty-month time limit on receipt of benefits and the two optional exceptions states may enact. This examination reveals that the Act contemplates that states have both the power and the support of Congress and the Department of Health and Human Services to implement exceptions for the benefit of survivors of domestic violence.

Given that states may …

Joint Custody: Bonding And Monitoring Theories, Margaret F. Brinig, F. H. Buckley

Journal Articles

Symposium: Law and the New American Family Held at Indiana University School of Law - Bloomington Apr. 4, 1997

The Supreme Court's Impact On Marriage, 1967-90, Margaret F. Brinig

Journal Articles

In the twenty years following Loving, the Supreme Court decided a number of cases dealing with the family. Although the Court reasoned that it was protecting marriage and extending such protection to other forms of families, the perverse effect of these decisions was to weaken the most traditional family type of all, the nuclear family. Adults, and particularly pregnant women and unwed fathers, triumphed in this move towards autonomy and rights. The vanquished included those who depended upon the family for love and sustenance: minor children, elderly adults, and longtime homemakers.

This paper discusses these cases from a family law …

No-Fault Laws And At-Fault People, Margaret F. Brinig, F. H. Buckley

Journal Articles

Absent transaction costs, the Coase Theorem suggests that divorce reform would work no change in the frequency of divorce but perhaps would alter the distribution of marital wealth. However, divorce does involve substantial process costs, which no-fault lowered. This paper explores the question of what happened to state divorce rates because of the legal changes wrought by the family law revolution that began in the 1970s, isolating the effect of the legal variable from other demographic and social factors that might also explain the variation in divorce rates across states and across time.