Law Commons^™

Getting Blood From Stones: Results And Policy Implications Of An Empirical Investigation Of Child Support Practice In St. Joseph County, Indiana Paternity Actions, Margaret F. Brinig, Marsha Garrison

Journal Articles

Today, there is consensus that the current system of calculating and enforcing support obligations does not work well for disadvantaged families, most of which are nonmarital. Nonmarital children are less likely to have support orders established than marital children, and they are much less likely to experience full payment.

In this paper, we report data on parenting time, child support calculation, and enforcement actions in a population of nonmarital children for whom paternity actions were brought, in 2008 or 2010, in St. Joseph County, Indiana. The computerized, court-based record system we utilized to collect data gave us access to information …

Plemel As A Primer On Proving Paternity, David H. Kaye

Journal Articles

Although in the past courts only permitted genetic evidence in paternity suits to prove that an accused man was not the father, with the advent of new genetic tests, which easily can exclude ninety to nitey-five percent of the population in most cases, the supreme courts of Massachusetts, Oregon, and Utah have held that various genetic tests may be used to prove paternity. While a positive move, the admissibility of genetic proof of paternity raises serious questions as to the manner in which this evidence should be presented in court. In the interests of efficiency, some jurisdictions seem to dispense …

Probabilities And Proof: Can Hla And Blood Group Testing Prove Paternity?, David H. Kaye, Ira Mark Ellman

Journal Articles

Advancing medical technology has produced tests which offer the opportunity to resolve paternity disputes with more accuracy than unaided traditional evidentiary techniques are likely to obtain. Because the biology underlying the statistical evidence in paternity cases offers a wealth of previously unavailable information which is certain to revolutionize the adjudication of paternity suits, but it is important that the courts not become so mesmerized by these new sources of evidence that they neglect to subject them to traditional principles of evidence applicable to all testimony. Additionally, for some time scholars have disagreed on the proper application of a probability formula …