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Full-Text Articles in Family Law

On The Duties And Rights Of Parents, Carl E. Schneider May 1995

On The Duties And Rights Of Parents, Carl E. Schneider

Articles

The law of the family is the law of the absurd. Law is a system of rules administered institutionally, and thus it must treat people categorically. When law regulates economic life, it finds people at arguably their most schematic, motivated-perhaps-by a relatively unitary conception of their interest pursued in relatively rational ways. But in family life, people are at their least schematic and at their most frustratingly human, various, idiosyncratic, irrational, and perverse, and the law's efforts to affect them are thus often quixotic. In Parents as Fiduciaries, 1 Professor Scott and Dean Scott strikingly and boldly deploy the …


Children's Task Force Reports, Donald N. Duquette, Cd Stephens Jan 1995

Children's Task Force Reports, Donald N. Duquette, Cd Stephens

Articles

When the public thinks of children and the law, high-visibility cases like Baby Jessica and Baby Richard come to mind. The human drama of a small child caught up in a titanic custody struggle attracts unrelenting media attention and triggers cries for law reform. Yet for every Baby Jessica and Baby Richard, thousands of children pass through our courts with little public attention but with consequences to them just as momentous and life altering as those cases featured on the national news shows. In 1991 State Bar of Michigan leadership began to ask whether our profession and Michigan's courts are …


Fathers, The Welfare System, And The Virtues And Perils Of Child-Support Enforcement, David L. Chambers Jan 1995

Fathers, The Welfare System, And The Virtues And Perils Of Child-Support Enforcement, David L. Chambers

Articles

For half a century, Aid to Families with Dependent Children ("AFDC")' -the program of federally supported cash assistance to low-income families with children-has been oddly conceived. Congress has chosen to make assistance available almost solely to low-income single-parent families, not all low-income parents with children. At first many of the eligible single parents were women whose husbands had died. Over time, a growing majority were women who had been married to their children's father but who had separated or divorced. Today, to an ever increasing extent, they are women who were never married to the fathers of their children.2


Imagining Children's Rights, Suellyn Scarnecchia Jan 1995

Imagining Children's Rights, Suellyn Scarnecchia

Articles

Today, I will tell you some stories about real, live children, whose futures have been determined by our legal system. To speak of children's rights hypothetically, raises images of children suing to go live with their rich uncle or suing to demand a Nintendo system from their parents. I hope that by bringing you stories of the legal system's treatment of real children, you will have a better understanding of what I mean by children's rights and why they must be recognized. Although children's rights have been recognized in limited ways in the areas of free speech, criminal law and …


A Child's Right To Protection From Transfer Trauma In A Contested Adoption Case, Suellyn Scarnecchia Jan 1995

A Child's Right To Protection From Transfer Trauma In A Contested Adoption Case, Suellyn Scarnecchia

Articles

On August 2, 1993, I arrived at the home of Jan, Robby, and Jessica DeBoer' a few hours before the transfer. At 2:00 P.M. I would carry Jessica out of her home and deliver her to the parents who had won the case,2 her biological mother and father. This task probably would have been easier had I not spent eight days in the trial court listening to the experts explain that this transfer from one set of parents to another would harm Jessica.3 It would have been easier had I not recently obtained affidavits from other experts to persuade the …


Marriage, Morals, And The Law: No-Fault Divorce And Moral Discourse, Carl E. Schneider Apr 1994

Marriage, Morals, And The Law: No-Fault Divorce And Moral Discourse, Carl E. Schneider

Articles

In this Essay, I want to reflect on no fault-divorce and the social attitudes that underlie it. In particular, I want to consider that reform in light of an article I wrote some years ago entitled Moral Discourse and the Transformation of American Family Law. There I argued that in recent years the language of American family law has changed notably: today family law issues are decreasingly discussed in the language of morality. In other words, legal institutions have decreasingly talked about those issues in moral terms. Rather, they have tended to avoid handling some moral issues altogether-often by …


Family Law And The Pursuit Of Intimacy, Monique C. Lillard Jan 1994

Family Law And The Pursuit Of Intimacy, Monique C. Lillard

Articles

No abstract provided.


Treatment Of Community Contributions To Mortgage Payments (Including Principal And Interest On Separate Property), Elizabeth Brandt Jan 1994

Treatment Of Community Contributions To Mortgage Payments (Including Principal And Interest On Separate Property), Elizabeth Brandt

Articles

No abstract provided.


If Anybody Asks You Who I Am: An Outsider's Story Of The Duty To Establish Paternity, Lisa Kelly Jan 1994

If Anybody Asks You Who I Am: An Outsider's Story Of The Duty To Establish Paternity, Lisa Kelly

Articles

This story is fictional but true. There is no one particular Minerva Copeland, James Walker, or Judge Jennings. Lake Village and Helena also are intended to be fictional places. I chose a format using endnotes instead of footnotes in an effort not to disrupt the flow of the narrative. The endnotes, however, are an integral part of this article and serve to provide the reader with the background necessary to understand the legal and social context in which this piece operates.


The Tension Between Rules And Discretion In Family Law: A Report And Reflection, Carl E. Schneider Jun 1993

The Tension Between Rules And Discretion In Family Law: A Report And Reflection, Carl E. Schneider

Articles

The history of law is many things. But one of them is the story of an unremitting struggle between rules and discretion. The tension between these two approaches to legal problems continues to pervade and perplex the law today. Perhaps nowhere is that tension more pronounced and more troubling than in family law. It is probably impossible to practice family law without wrestling with the imponderable choice between rules and discretion. Consider, for example, how many areas of family law are now being fought over in-just those terms. For decades we have lived with an abundantly discretionary way of resolving …


Income From Separate Property: Towards A Theoretical Foundation, Thomas R. Andrews Jan 1993

Income From Separate Property: Towards A Theoretical Foundation, Thomas R. Andrews

Articles

This article addresses an important area of historical disagreement among the community property states: the characterization of the rents, issues, and profits ("income") from separate property brought into or acquired during marriage. Of the nine community property states, five characterize the income derived from separate property as separate property. The other four states characterize such income as community property. Although there have been scattered discussions of this issue throughout the community property case law and literature over the years, I have searched the literature in vain for a comprehensive treatment of the question. Certainly there has not been one in …


In A World Not Their Own: The Adoption Of Black Children, Zanita E. Fenton Jan 1993

In A World Not Their Own: The Adoption Of Black Children, Zanita E. Fenton

Articles

No abstract provided.


State-Interest Analysis And The Channelling Function In Family Law, Carl E. Schneider Sep 1992

State-Interest Analysis And The Channelling Function In Family Law, Carl E. Schneider

Articles

I want to develop some themes I advanced in my article entitled State-Interest Analysis in Fourteenth Amendment "Privacy" Law: An Essay on the Constitutionalization of Social issues. In that article I noted that while courts and commentators have lavished effort on the fundamental-rights side of privacy law, they have scanted the state-interest side, thereby producing crucial weaknesses in that law. I felt that state~interest discussions in privacy cases often seemed to me unsatisfying. This is an attempt to see why. A major difficulty is that states tend to advance and courts tend to accept quite narrow specifications of a statute's …


Bioethics And The Family: The Cautionary View From Family Law, Carl E. Schneider Jul 1992

Bioethics And The Family: The Cautionary View From Family Law, Carl E. Schneider

Articles

For many years, the field of bioethics has been specially concerned with how the authority to make medical decisions should be allocated between doctor and patient. Today the patient's power-indeed, the patient's right-is widely acknowledged, at least in principle. But this development can hardly be the last word in our thinking about how medical decisions should be made. For one thing, sometimes patients cannot speak for themselves. For another, patients· make medical decisions in contexts that significantly include more participants than just the patient and doctor. Now, as this conference demonstrates, bioethics is beginning to ask what role the patient's …


The Channelling Function In Family Law, Carl E. Schneider Apr 1992

The Channelling Function In Family Law, Carl E. Schneider

Articles

On an occasion such as this, we are called to step back from our daily work to seek what Justice Holmes called a "liberal view" of our subject. Today, I propose to do so by exploring a function of family law that I believe is basic, that underlies much of family law, that resonates with the deepest purposes of culture but that is rarely addressed expressly-namely, what I call the "channelling function." As I will soon explain at length, in the channelling function the law recruits, builds, shapes, sustains; and promotes social institutions. My exploration of this topic will have …


Child Protection Legal Process: Comparing The United States And Great Britain, Donald N. Duquette Jan 1992

Child Protection Legal Process: Comparing The United States And Great Britain, Donald N. Duquette

Articles

The legal response to child maltreatment-or the risk of child maltreatment-varies greatly from society to society and has been little studied, in part because of the idiosyncrasies of community values, social organization, history and legal traditions.2 Cross-country comparison of child abuse and neglect is especially difficult because the ambiguity of social standards and the imprecision of terms used makes it difficult to define the specific behavior one is studying. Even though child maltreatment is widely prohibited, the definition of what actually constitutes child abuse and neglect is not clear within a particular country, much less uniform from one society to …


Marital Property Rights In Transition, Lawrence W. Waggoner Jan 1992

Marital Property Rights In Transition, Lawrence W. Waggoner

Articles

The subject of "marital property rights" is very timely because those rights are in a state of transition. The term "marital property rights" covers a vast multitude of rights or interests conferred by law on persons who occupy the status of spouse. This lecture is divided into four discrete, yet related segments. The first segment addresses how the law allocates original ownership between spouses in a marriage. The second segment turns to the intestate share of the surviving spouse. This is not a topic that high-powered estate planners get involved in very much because intestate estates are usually fairly small. …


Introduction: The Bounds Of Advocacy, Robert H. Aronson Jan 1992

Introduction: The Bounds Of Advocacy, Robert H. Aronson

Articles

I was asked, as Reporter for the American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers' Bounds of Advocacy, to provide an Introduction to the substantive issues discussed by members of the Committee in succeeding articles. This article will therefore "set the stage" by indicating the need for the Bounds of Advocacy, the charge to the Committee, the process by which the Standards and Comments were drafted, re-drafted, and then re-drafted again, and the appropriate scope, purpose and use of the Standards and Comments.


Tales Of Two Cities: Aids And The Legal Recognition Of Domestic Partnerships In San Francisco And New York, David L. Chambers Jan 1992

Tales Of Two Cities: Aids And The Legal Recognition Of Domestic Partnerships In San Francisco And New York, David L. Chambers

Articles

Here are two stories. They are of the quite different ways that domestic partnerships of lesbian and gay couples have come to be recognized, for some purposes, in San Francisco and New York City. I tell the stories for their own sake, but with a particular focus on the role that AIDS played in the political process in each city.


Spousal Rights In Our Multiple-Marriage Society: The Revised Uniform Probate Code, Lawrence W. Waggoner Jan 1992

Spousal Rights In Our Multiple-Marriage Society: The Revised Uniform Probate Code, Lawrence W. Waggoner

Articles

The transformation of the American family constitutes one of the great phenomenons of the past two decades. The traditional Leave It to Beaver family no longer prevails in American society. To be sure, families consisting of the wage-earning husband, the homemaking and child-rearing wife, and their two joint children still exist. But divorce rates are astonishingly high and remarriage abounds. In fact, there is an increasing prevalence in the population of marriages that are more likely to end in divorce than others-marriages in which one or both partners were divorced before and marriages of couples who cohabited prior to marriage.


Identifying The Best Interests Of The Child In Protection Proceedings: Nine Guidelines For The Child Advocate., Donald N. Duquette Jan 1992

Identifying The Best Interests Of The Child In Protection Proceedings: Nine Guidelines For The Child Advocate., Donald N. Duquette

Articles

Increasingly, judges appoint court appointed special advocates (CASAs) to represent children in child abuse and neglect proceedings. Like lawyers, CASAs are charged with looking out for the "best interests" of the child. Unfortunately, although the phrase "best interests" sounds noble, it provides little practical guidance for the child advocate.


Introduction To The First Annual Review Of Community Property Law, Elizabeth Brandt Jan 1991

Introduction To The First Annual Review Of Community Property Law, Elizabeth Brandt

Articles

No abstract provided.


Community Income, Federal Income Taxation And Divorce, John A. Miller Jan 1991

Community Income, Federal Income Taxation And Divorce, John A. Miller

Articles

No abstract provided.


Rethinking Alimony: Marital Decisions And Moral Discourse, Carl E. Schneider Jan 1991

Rethinking Alimony: Marital Decisions And Moral Discourse, Carl E. Schneider

Articles

The riddle of alimony is why one former spouse should have to support the other when no-fault divorce seems to establish the principle that marriage need not be for life and when governmental regulation of intimate relationships is conventionally condemned. Perhaps the most intelligent and probing recent attempt to solve that riddle is Ira Ellman's The Theory of Alimony. In this article, I have two purposes. The first is to ask some questions about Professor Ellman's admirable inquiry into this intricate and intractable problem. These questions are not intended to disprove "the theory." Professor Ellman has, at the least, identified …


Commentary: Meeting The Financial Needs Of Children, David L. Chambers Jan 1991

Commentary: Meeting The Financial Needs Of Children, David L. Chambers

Articles

Those who drafted the equitable distribution statutes adopted in New York and elsewhere wanted to help assure women and children an acceptable level of financial well-being after divorce. Marsha Garrison has shown that divorcing couples rarely possess enough resources to attain financial well-being even when they live together as a couple, let alone when they live in two separate households. She has also shown that, even in the cases of couples with substantial assets, the broad and general language of the equitable distribution statute did not lead (and could not have been expected to lead) to consistent distributions that assured …


Ex Proprio Vigore, James J. White Jan 1991

Ex Proprio Vigore, James J. White

Articles

The National Conference of the Commissioners on Uniform State Laws (NCCUSL) is a legislature in every way but one. It drafts uniform acts, debates them, passes them, and promulgates them, but that passage and promulgation do not make these uniform acts law over any citizen of any state. These acts become the law of the various states only ex proprio vigore - only if their own vitality influences the legislators of the various states to pass them.


Federal Income Taxation And Community Property Law: The Case For Divorce, John A. Miller Jan 1990

Federal Income Taxation And Community Property Law: The Case For Divorce, John A. Miller

Articles

No abstract provided.


Community-Property Treatment Of The Increase In Value Of A Separately Owned Business, Elizabeth Brandt Jan 1990

Community-Property Treatment Of The Increase In Value Of A Separately Owned Business, Elizabeth Brandt

Articles

No abstract provided.


Surrogate Motherhood From The Perspective Of Family Law, Carl E. Schneider Jan 1990

Surrogate Motherhood From The Perspective Of Family Law, Carl E. Schneider

Articles

One of the things that I find most puzzling about the question of surrogate motherhood is how easily many people answer it. One of the things that I have most admired about today's comments is their tone of constraint and their sense of complexity. I myself am sympathetic to the argument that the unhappiness of infertile couples is profound and that surrogacy contracts offer them the hope of an equally profound happiness. And I am prepared to believe that many surrogate mothers perform their part of the bargain without grief and even with gratification. Yet these benefits of surrogacy are …


Washington's New Quasi-Community Property Act: Protecting The Immigrant Spouse, Thomas R. Andrews Jan 1988

Washington's New Quasi-Community Property Act: Protecting The Immigrant Spouse, Thomas R. Andrews

Articles

In 1986, Washington followed the lead of several other community property jurisdictions by adopting quasi-community property legislation. The act is designed to prevent a spouse who has onerously acquired property during marriage while the couple resided in a common law state from disinheriting his or her surviving spouse as to that property after moving to Washington. It has significant implications not only for married couples contemplating a move to Washington, but also for those who have moved to Washington from common law jurisdictions in the past. This article explains why the risk of disinheritance arises, describes the provisions of Washington's …