Law Commons^™

Whatever Your Thoughts On Marriage, Gay Divorce Is A Concern, Nathan B. Oman

Nathan B. Oman

No abstract provided.

For Richer Or Poorer, 'Til Decree Do Us Part - A Spouse's Entitlement To Division Of Pension Funds And Professional Degrees As Marital Property, Linda A. Malone

Linda A. Malone

No abstract provided.

The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly Of Employment Division V. Smith For Family Law, James G. Dwyer

James G. Dwyer

No abstract provided.

Misused Concepts And Misguided Questions: Fundamental Confusions In Family Law Debates, James G. Dwyer

James G. Dwyer

No abstract provided.

Diagnosing Liberal Resistance To Needed Child Welfare Reforms, James G. Dwyer

James G. Dwyer

No abstract provided.

Children's Interests In A Family Context - A Cautionary Note, James G. Dwyer

James G. Dwyer

No abstract provided.

Why We Should Raise The Marriage Age, Vivian E. Hamilton

Vivian E. Hamilton

No abstract provided.

Principles Of U.S. Family Law, Vivian E. Hamilton

Vivian E. Hamilton

What explains U.S. family law? What are the origins of the current chaos and controversy in the field, the home of some of the most vituperative debates in public policy? To answer these questions, this Article identifies and examines family law's foundational principles. It undertakes a conceptual analysis of the legal practices that govern families. This analysis has yet to be done, and its absence hamstrings constructive thought on our family law. The Article develops a typology that conceptualizes U.S. family law and exposes its underlying principles. First, it identifies the significant elements, or rules, of family law. Second, it …

Expressing Community Values Through Family Law Adjudication, Vivian E. Hamilton

Vivian E. Hamilton

No abstract provided.

A Constitutional Right To Home Instruction?, Neal Devins

Neal E. Devins

No abstract provided.

הורות משפטית מן הדין ומן הצדק - Legal Parenthood - Law And Justice, Yehezkel Margalit

Hezi Margalit

Paternity Un(Certainty): How The Law Surrounding Paternity Challenges Negatively Impacts Family Relationships And Women's Sexuality, Susan Ayres

Susan Ayres

It is popularly believed that false paternity rates are 10-30%, and that thousands of unsuspecting men are supporting children who are not theirs. These reported rates of false paternity have become urban legend, demonizing women as over-sexualized partners who shouldn’t be trusted. This in turn has influenced laws regarding paternity, which have evolved to allow men to dis-establish paternity years after a child’s birth, even when there has been an adjudication or acknowledgment of paternity. This article argues that society should be cautious about elevating science as the highest consideration in truth claims about paternity. It examines the incoherent and …

Book Review: The Best Interests Of Children – An Evidence Based Approach, By Paul Millar, Noel Semple

Noel Semple

If custody and access disputes are a deck of cards, the trump suit is the best interests of the child. When separating parents litigate about how and with whom their child should live, findings about what’s best for the child are meant to sweep away the parents’ interests and rights-claims. This principle is uncontroversial, but applying it is difficult. What parenting arrangements are best for children, and how successful is the legal system in putting these arrangements in place?

Sociologist Paul Millar has responded with this slim volume, the goal of which is to “explain child custody outcomes in Canada …

From Baby M To Baby M(Anji): Regulating International Surrogacy Agreements, Yehezkel Margalit

Hezi Margalit

In 1985, when Kim Cotton became Britain’s first commercial surrogate mother, Europe was exposed to the issue of surrogacy for the first time on a large scale. Three years later, in 1988, the famous case of Baby M drew the attention of the American public to surrogacy as well. These two cases implicated fundamental ethical and legal issues regarding domestic surrogacy and triggered a fierce debate about motherhood, child-bearing, and the relationship between procreation, science and commerce. These two cases exemplified the debate regarding domestic surrogacy - a debate that has now been raging for decades. Contrary to the well-known …

Federal Visions Of Private Family Support, Laura A. Rosenbury

Laura A. Rosenbury

This Article offers a new perspective on the relationship between family and federalism by analyzing why the government — whether state or federal — recognizes family at all. The Article examines the current balance between state and federal authority over family by reviewing the Supreme Court’s recent decisions in Astrue v. Capato, upholding the Social Security Administration’s deference to states’ intestacy laws when distributing benefits to posthumously conceived children, and United States v. Windsor, in which the Court struck down a provision of the federal Defense of Marriage Act. Although each decision affirmed the states’ primary role in defining family …

Rights And Realities, Laura A. Rosenbury

Laura A. Rosenbury

The author responds to Melissa Murray's article, The Networked Family: Reframing the Legal Understanding of Caregiving and Caregivers, 94 Va. L. Rev. 385 (2008).

Two Ways To End A Marriage: Divorce Or Death, Laura A. Rosenbury

Laura A. Rosenbury

Default rules governing property distribution at divorce and death are often identified as one of the primary benefits of marriage. This Article examines these default rules in all fifty states, exposing the ways property distribution differs depending on whether the marriage ends by divorce or death. The result is often counter-intuitive: in most states, a spouse is likely to receive more property if her marriage ends by divorce than if the marriage lasts until "death do us part." This difference can be explained in part by the choices of feminist activists over the past thirty-five years: feminists played a large …

Friends With Benefits, Laura A. Rosenbury

Laura A. Rosenbury

Family law has long been intensely interested in certain adult intimate relationships, namely marriage and marriage-like relationships, and silent about other adult intimate relationships, namely friendship. This Article examines the effects of that focus, illustrating how it frustrates one of the goals embraced by most family law scholars over the past forty years: the achievement of gender equality, within the family and without. Part I examines the current scope of family law doctrine and scholarship, highlighting the ways that the home is still the organizing structure for family. Despite calls for increased legal recognition of diverse families, few scholars have …

The Pope's Rich Bag Of Diversity For Families, John G. Culhane

John G. Culhane

No abstract provided.

The Hague Convention And Domestic Violence: Proposals For Balancing The Policies Of Discouraging Child Abduction And Protecting Children From Domestic Violence, Shani M. King

Shani M. King

The Hague Convention on the Civil Aspects of International Child Abduction (the Convention) was enacted in response to a pattern of parental abduction across international borders to thwart or preempt custody arrangements in one country and seek a more advantageous setting for litigating custody issues in another. Consequently, the Convention was designed to discourage the abduction of children across international borders and to encourage respect for custody and access arrangements in countries from which children were abducted. To implement the Convention, the United States enacted the International Child Abduction Remedies Act (ICARA) on April 29, 1988. Much has been written …

Law, Culture, And Family: The Transformative Power Of Culture And The Limits Of Law, Nancy E. Dowd

Nancy Dowd

Law inevitably is involved in the resolution of cultural conflicts. Nonintervention acts as powerfully as intervention; in either case, law is a powerful actor in its role as a part of cultural dialogue, as well as in its role as a coercive force. Law is never neutral in my view. If it “stays out” of a situation, then it is complicit in the status quo or in permitting the conflict to be resolved without legal intervention, which may weight the outcome in a particular direction. If law “comes in,” it similarly “sides” with a particular position because, in part, our …

Book Review: Fifty Years In Family Law: Essays For Stephen Cretney (Rebecca Probert & Chris Barton Eds. 2012), Nancy E. Dowd

Nancy Dowd

This collection honors the life and work of Stephen Cretney, the preeminent British scholar of family law. For those wanting an entry point into British family law, this is a wonderful volume. For those who know it well and admire the work of Stephen Cretney, as well as the work of this preeminent group of scholars, it will also be of much value as a remarkable group of essays. As an example of life's work that we all might hope to achieve, in many manifestations, but with dedication to the common good, it is a model to which we all …

Arkansas Mini-Rfra Is Bad Policy, Danielle Weatherby

Danielle Weatherby

"Well-Behaved Women Don't Make History": Rethinking English Family, Law, And History, Danaya C. Wright

Danaya C. Wright

In 1857 Parliament finally succumbed to public and political pressure and passed a bill creating a domestic relations court: the Court for Divorce and Matrimonial Causes. This new court for the first time in common-law history, combined the following jurisdictions: the ecclesiastical court's jurisdiction over marital validity and separation; the Chancery court's jurisdiction over child custody and equitable estates; the common-law court's jurisdiction over property; and Parliament's jurisdiction over divorce and marital settlements. Wives were given the legal right to seek a divorce or judicial separation in a court of law, receive custody of the children of the marriage, and …

Collapsing Liberalism's Public/Private Divide: Voldemort's War On The Family, Danaya C. Wright

Danaya C. Wright

As a legal scholar setting out to explore themes of law in Harry Potter, I am acutely aware of the absence of family law conflicts in these different family structures and relationships. Rowling's obvious fascination with different family structures and her relatively strong sense of an isolated, private sphere that is free of state intervention seems in keeping with traditional liberal values of the public/private divide. Yet her rejection of state interference in the private sphere of the family does not correspond to an autonomous state that is focused on the public sphere. Where liberalism separates the private world of …

The Family Law Canon In A (Post?) Racial Era, Shani M. King

Shani M. King

While the debate about a post-racial society rages, our justice system continues to operate in a way that is race-conscious. It seems as though most of the discussion about race and the justice system concerns criminal justice, juvenile justice, education, and immigration. But race consciousness also impacts family law. Nonetheless, the family law canon does not scrutinize race-based disparities in laws, procedures, and outcomes, and that omission feeds a mistaken notion of a race-blind or a post-racial society. One consequence of this omission is that it obscures race-based decision making by legislatures, judges, legal reform organizations, legal scholars, lawyers, and …

Alone And Unrepresented: A Call To Congress To Provide Counsel For Unaccompanied Minors, Shani M. King

Shani M. King

The legal rights of children who enter a country without their parents or other guardians, including the right to legal representation in immigration proceedings, differ vastly across the globe. This Article is the first to show that unaccompanied minors lie at the nexus of international and regional human rights standards governing the treatment of immigrants, children, and civil counsel and to show how the development of human rights standards in these three areas underscores the importance of and the need for counsel for unaccompanied minors. Part I illustrates why unaccompanied minors in the United States need legal representation by focusing …

Challenging Monohumanism: An Argument For Changing The Way We Think About Intercountry Adoption, Shani M. King

Shani M. King

The Convention on the Rights of the Child' (CRC) provides a legal framework that establishes a child's right to be raised in the context of her family and her culture. We regularly violate this most fundamental right of children because we fail to come to terms with our imperialist orientation toward the world. This failure has been caused, in part, by how we have constructed our way of thinking about intercountry adoption. We now have a conception of intercountry adoption that I refer to in this Article as MonoHumanism. In the context of intercountry adoption, MonoHumanism means that children are …

Asking The Family Question, Berta E. Hernández-Truyol

Berta E. Hernández-Truyol

Today, the international community is taking strides to address the needs/concerns of the family and to develop norms regarding its protection. However, principles of international law that address issues regarding the family are relatively new. Moreover, to date, these principles have primarily focused on certain specific rights, such as children's rights, women's rights, and child labor rights, rather than incorporating family well-being as a central aim of all international law and relations. This essay proposes a fundamental shift in the approach to international policy and law-making, as well as the engagement of international relations, to include a family-sensitive, culturally inclusive, …

Multiple Parents/Multiple Fathers, Nancy E. Dowd

Nancy Dowd

Multiple parents, especially multiple fathers, are a social reality but not a legal category. The assumption that every child has, or should have, two, but only two, parents remains a core operating assumption of family law. Yet at the same time, our knowledge of the existence of multiple fathers, whether birthfathers, stepfathers, psychological fathers or other categories, has found some reflection in cases that have granted some relational rights to fathers who do not fill the single place allotted for "legal father." In this Article, Professor Dowd proposes that it is time to think not if, but how, to recognize …