Family Law Commons^™

Marriage Equality Comes To The Fourth Circuit, Carl Tobias

Washington and Lee Law Review

Marriage equality has come to America. Throughout 2014, several federal appellate courts and numerous district court judges across the United States invalidated state constitutional or statutory proscriptions on same-sex marriage. Therefore, it was not surprising that Eastern District of Virginia Judge Arenda Wright Allen held that Virginia’s bans were unconstitutional in February. The United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit affirmed her opinion that July. North Carolina, South Carolina, and West Virginia District Judges rejected these jurisdictions’ prohibitions during autumn, and the Supreme Court approved marriage equality the next year. Because marriage equality in the Fourth Circuit presents …

The Spousal Support Advisory Guidelines, Soft Law, And The Procedural Rule Of Law, Jodi Lazare

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

The Spousal Support Advisory Guidelines facilitate discretionary spousal support determinations under the Divorce Act. Non-binding in nature, they are expected to restore some transparency to an uncertain and unpredictable remedy and to benefit dependent spouses who might previously have been deterred from claiming support. They may thus be seen as an important tool for advancing economic justice at family breakdown and promoting substantive economic gender equality. Several Canadian appellate courts have enthusiastically endorsed them. Others object to their application, grounding their resistance in their unofficial and non-binding character. This paper responds to that objection, based on the constitutional separation of …

The Constitutionalization Of Fatherhood, Dara Purvis

Faculty Scholarship

Beginning in the 1970s, the Supreme Court heard a series of challenges to family law statutes brought by unwed biological fathers, questioning the constitutionality of laws that treated unwed fathers differently than unwed mothers. The Court’s opinions created a starkly different constitutional status for unwed fathers than for unwed mothers, demanding additional actions and relationships before an unwed father was considered a constitutional father. Although state parentage statutes have progressed beyond their 1970s incarnations, the doctrine created in those family law cases continues to have impact far beyond family law. Transmission of citizenship in the context of immigration law and …

Reynolds V. United States, Rewritten, Laura T. Kessler

Utah Law Faculty Scholarship

In Reynolds v. United States, 98 U.S. 145 (1878), Chief Justice Morrison Waite, writing for a unanimous Supreme Court, upheld the federal Morrill Anti-Bigamy Act outlawing polygamy in the federal territories and providing criminal penalties for it. This is a re-writing of that opinion, presented in the form of a dissent, available in Feminist Judgments: Family Law Opinions Rewritten (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming 2020). Unlike the Court’s opinion, this dissent concludes that religious practice, as well as belief, is protected by the First Amendment. It therefore holds that a religious duty to engage in an unlawful practice may be a …

Divorce, Domicile, And The Constitution, Mark Strasser

Kentucky Law Journal

No abstract provided.

In Defense Of Hearth And [Foster] Home: Determining The Constitutionality Of State Regulation Of Firearm Storage In Foster Homes, Joseph G. Duchane

Washington and Lee Law Review

No abstract provided.

We Are All Farkhunda: An Examination Of The Treatment Of Women Within Afghanistan's Formal Legal System, Ashley Lenderman

Indiana Journal of Constitutional Design

In this paper, I will examine three cases of violence against women that went through the Afghan formal legal system: the case of Farkhunda, the Paghman district gang rape case, and the case of Sahar Gul. In the first Part, I will discuss the formal legal system framework on which the cases are based. In the second Part, I will discuss the cases in detail. In the third Part, I will describe neo-liberal, reformist, and neo-fundamentalist approaches to interpretation of Islamic law, and I will then draw out pieces of the decisions from the three cases that closely match these …

Law By Non-Lawyers: The Limit To Limited License Legal Technicians Increasing Access To Justice, Rebecca M. Donaldson

Seattle University Law Review

For the first time in the American legal profession, non-lawyers can openly, independently, ethically, and legally engage in activities recognized by bar associations as the practice of law. In 2012, the Washington Supreme Court passed Admission and Practice Rule 28 (APR 28), establishing the profession’s first paraprofessional licensing scheme that allows non-lawyers to give legal advice. The process authorizes qualified non-lawyers to provide legal advice without the supervision of a lawyer. Washington’s Supreme Court intends for Limited License Legal Technicians, or “LLLTs” as they are known, to increase access to justice by responding to the unmet civil legal needs of …

An Illiberal Union, Sonu Bedi

William & Mary Bill of Rights Journal

This Article breaks new ground by applying the philosophical framework of liberal neutrality (most famously articulated by John Rawls) to the United States Supreme Court’s jurisprudence on marriage. At first blush, the Court’s decision in Obergefell v. Hodges—the culmination of marriage rights—seems to affirm a central principle of liberalism, namely equal access to marriage regardless of sexual orientation. Gays and lesbians can finally take part in an institution that celebrates the union of two committed individuals. But perversely, in its attempt to expand access to marriage, the Court has simultaneously entrenched values that are antithetical to the basic tenants …

Fear Of A Multiracial Planet: Loving'S Children And The Genocide Of The White Race, Reginald Oh

Law Faculty Articles and Essays

Fifty years after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Loving v. Virginia that prohibitions against interracial marriages were unconstitutional, strong cultural opposition to interracial couples, marriages, and families continues to exist. Illustrative of this opposition is the controversy over an Old Navy clothing store advertisement posted on Twitter in spring 2016. The advertisement depicted an African American woman and a white man together with a presumably mixed-race child. The white man is carrying the boy on his back. It is a clear depiction of an interracial family. Although seemingly innocuous, this advertisement sparked a flood of comments expressing open hostility …

The School To Deportation Pipeline, Laila L. Hlass

Georgia State University Law Review

The United States immigration regime has a long and sordid history of explicit racism, including limiting citizenship to free whites, excluding Chinese immigrants, deporting massive numbers of Mexican immigrants and U.S. citizens of Mexican ancestry, and implementing a national quotas system preferencing Western Europeans. More subtle bias has seeped into the system through the convergence of the criminal and immigration law regimes.

Immigration enforcement has seen a rise in mass immigrant detention and deportation, bolstered by provocative language casting immigrants as undeserving undesirables: criminals, gang members, and terrorists. Immigrant children, particularly black and Latino boys, are increasingly finding themselves in …

From Marriage Equality To Amazon: Marek Bute, Rwu Class Of 2005 (May 2018), Roger Williams University School Of Law

Life of the Law School (1993- )

No abstract provided.

Enemy And Ally: Religion In Loving V. Virginia And Beyond, Leora F. Eisenstadt

Fordham Law Review

Throughout the Loving case, religion appeared both overtly and subtly to endorse or lend credibility to the arguments against racial mixing. This use of religion is unsurprising given that supporters of slavery, white supremacy, and segregation have, for decades, turned to religion to justify their ideologies. Although these views are no longer mainstream, they have recently appeared again in arguments against same-sex marriage and gay and transgender rights generally. What is remarkable in the Loving case, however, is an alternate use of religion, not to justify white supremacy and segregation but instead to highlight the irrationality of its supporters’ claims. …

The Loving Story: Using A Documentary To Reconsider The Status Of An Iconic Interracial Married Couple, Regina Austin

Fordham Law Review

This Essay reconsiders or reaffirms the Lovings’ status as civil rights icons by drawing on source material provided by the documentary The Loving Story. This nonfiction treatment of the couple and their lawsuit reveals their complexity as individuals and as a couple, the social relationships that made them desperate to live together and raise their children in Virginia, and the oppression they suffered at the hands of state actors motivated by a virulent white supremacy to make the Lovings’ desire to make a home for themselves in the state impossible. Part I briefly describes the Lovings’ struggle against Virginia’s Racial …

Loving’S Legacy: Decriminalization And The Regulation Of Sex And Sexuality, Melissa Murray

Fordham Law Review

2017 marked the fiftieth anniversary of Loving v. Virginia, the landmark Supreme Court decision that invalidated bans on miscegenation and interracial marriages. In the years since Loving was decided, it remains a subject of intense scholarly debate and attention. The conventional wisdom suggests that the Court’s decision in Loving was hugely transformative— decriminalizing interracial marriages and relationships and removing the most pernicious legal barriers to such couplings. But other developments suggest otherwise. If we shift our lens from marriages to other areas of the law—child custody cases, for example—Loving’s legacy seems less rosy. In the years preceding and following Loving, …

Prejudice, Constitutional Moral Progress, And Being “On The Right Side Of History”: Reflections On Loving V. Virginia At Fifty, Linda C. Mcclain

Fordham Law Review

Looking back at the record in Loving, this Article shows the role played by narratives of constitutional moral progress, in which the Lovings and their amici indicted Virginia’s antimiscegenation law as an “odious” relic of slavery and a present-day reflection of racial prejudice. In response, Virginia sought to distance such laws from prejudice and white supremacy by appealing to “the most recent” social science that identified problems posed by “intermarriage,” particularly for children. Such work also rejected the idea that intermarriage was a path toward progress and freedom from prejudice. This Article concludes by briefly examining the appeal to Loving …

Maine's "Act To Protect Traditional Marriage And Prohibit Same-Sex Marriages": Questions Of Constitutionality Under State And Federal Law, Jennifer B. Wriggins

Maine Law Review

In 1997, Maine's Legislature passed “An Act to Protect Traditional Marriage and Prohibit Same-Sex Marriages” (Act). The summary attached to the bill states that the bill “prohibits persons of the same sex from contracting marriage.” The bill was the verbatim text of an initiative petition. Civil marriage in Maine and other states is regulated by state statute, and marriage regulation is generally considered to be within the state's police power. However, the state's power to regulate marriage is subject to constitutional limitations. I maintain that “heightened scrutiny” should be applied to the Act because the Act creates a gender-based classification, …

The Rights Of Marriage: Obergefell, Din, And The Future Of Constitutional Family Law, Kerry Abrams

Cornell Law Review

In the summer of 2015 the United States Supreme Court handed down two groundbreaking constitutional family law decisions. One decision became famous overnight Obergefell v. Hodges declared that same-sex couples have the constitutional right to marry. The other, Kerry v. Din, went largely overlooked. That later case concerned not the right to marry but the rights of marriage. In particular, it asked whether a person has a constitutional liberty interest in living with his or her spouse. This case is suddenly of paramount importance: executive orders targeting particular groups of immigrants implicate directly this right to family reunification.

This Article …

Surrogate Mothers, Gestational Carriers, And A Pragmatic Adaptation Of The Uniform Parentage Act Of 2000, John C. Sheldon

Maine Law Review

Recent medical advances that permit human conception without intercourse, in combination with sociological changes in our country, dramatically enlarge the population of adults who can produce or raise children. The legal price for this broadening of opportunity, however, is a diminishment of certainty: We are no longer sure whom we should identify as a child's parents. These are important questions, of course, because ready answers will quickly dampen disputes about custody and will immediately establish support obligations and the children's eligibility for health insurance, for inheritance, for Workers' Compensation benefits, and for Social Security survivor benefits. But as important as …

Loving Retroactivity, Charles W. "Rocky" Rhodes

Florida State University Law Review

Pending actions across the nation highlight the ongoing struggle between adjudicative retroactivity and marital equality. The Supreme Court's constitutional decisions overruling prior precedents or applying new legal rules to the parties retroactively govern all pending and future adjudicative proceedings on direct review, even if the underlying operative events occurred under a prior legal framework. But this understanding of the temporal boundaries of legal change is being challenged after the Supreme Court's holding in Obergefell v. Hodges that laws excluding same-sex couples from civil marriage on the same terms and conditions as opposite-sex couples are invalid. The retroactive application of Obergefell …

After Sex, Courtney Megan Cahill

Scholarly Publications

No abstract provided.

Loving Lessons: White Supremacy, Loving V. Virginia, And Disproportionality In The Child Welfare System, Leah A. Hill

Fordham Law Review

Part I of this Article introduces a brief discussion of the history of antimiscegenation laws and, specifically, their prevalence in the Commonwealth of Virginia during the 1950s. Next, Part II sets forth a short commentary about the Lovings’ triumph over antimiscegenation. Part III then details the Lovings’ judicial hurdles against the state, which argued that its antimiscegenation laws were enacted, in part, to prevent child abuse and thus served legitimate state interests. Part IV argues that the remnants of the white supremacist ideology at the center of Loving appear in our modern child welfare system, which has long been plagued …

The "Primary Purpose" Of Children's Advocacy Centers: How Ohio V. Clark Revolutionized Children's Hearsay, Andrew Lentz

Roger Williams University Law Review

No abstract provided.

The First Queer Right, Scott Skinner-Thompson

Publications

Current legal disputes may lead one to believe that the greatest threat to LGBTQ rights is the First Amendment’s protections for speech, association, and religion, which are currently being mustered to challenge LGBTQ anti-discrimination protections. But underappreciated today is the role of free speech and free association in advancing the well-being of LGBTQ individuals, as explained in Professor Carlos Ball’s important new book, The First Amendment and LGBT Equality: A Contentious History. In many ways the First Amendment’s protections for free expression and association operated as what I label “the first queer right.”

Decades before the Supreme Court would …

Why New York Should Legalize Surrogacy: A Comparison Of Surrogacy Legislation In Other States With Current Proposed Surrogacy Legislation In New York, Briana R. Iannacci

Touro Law Review

No abstract provided.

Undocumented Citizens Of The United States: The Repercussions Of Denying Birth Certificates, Anna L. Lichtenberger

St. Mary's Law Journal

Abstract forthcoming

Unequal Protection: Examining The Judiciary’S Treatment Of Unwed Fathers, Brett Potash

Touro Law Review

No abstract provided.

Chained Against Her Will: What A Get Means For Women Under Jewish Law, Michelle Kariyeva

Touro Law Review

No abstract provided.

The Rights Of Marriage: Obergefell, Din, And The Future Of Constitutional Family Law, Kerry Abrams

Faculty Scholarship

In the summer of 2015 the United States Supreme Court handed down two groundbreaking constitutional family law decisions. One decision became famous overnight Obergefell v. Hodges declared that same-sex couples have the constitutional right to marry. The other, Kerry v. Din, went largely overlooked. That later case concerned not the right to marry but the rights of marriage. In particular, it asked whether a person has a constitutional liberty interest in living with his or her spouse. This case is suddenly of paramount importance: executive orders targeting particular groups of immigrants implicate directly this right to family reunification.

This Article …

Marriage Equality Comes To The Fourth Circuit, Carl W. Tobias

Law Faculty Publications

Marriage equality has come to America. Throughout 2014, several federal appellate courts and numerous district court judges across the United States invalidated state constitutional or statutory proscriptions on same-sex marriage. Therefore, it was not surprising that Eastern District of Virginia Judge Arenda Wright Allen held that Virginia’s bans were unconstitutional in February. The United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit affirmed her opinion that July. North Carolina, South Carolina, and West Virginia District Judges rejected these jurisdictions’ prohibitions during autumn, and the Supreme Court approved marriage equality the next year. Because marriage equality in the Fourth Circuit presents …