Family Law Commons^™

Foreword: Children And Constitutions In The Anthropocene Era, Catherine Smith

Washington and Lee Law Review

In Spring 2025, the Washington and Lee Law Review held its Lara D. Gass Symposium, Children and Constitutions in the Anthropocene Era. It consisted of a keynote address by Julia Olson, Co-Executive Director and Chief Legal Counsel of Our Children’s Trust, and three panels: “Children, Climate Change, and State Constitutions”; “The U.S. Constitutions and the Meaning of ‘We the [Young] People’”; and “Youth-Powered Litigation and Global Constitutionalism.” The heavily attended Symposium was a tour-de-force in the field of children’s rights.

As climate chaos mounts, young people around the world are pressing courts to reconceptualize the meaning of liberty, equality, and …

The Fiction Of Equitable Distribution: Military Divorce, Disability, And The “Dire Plight” Of The Former Military Spouse, Zoe Speas

Washington and Lee Law Review

Division of retired pay is one of the most emotionally fraught elements of military divorce. For the servicemember, retired pay compensates decades of service to his country. For the civilian spouse, it remunerates the same decades of domestic labor that enabled such service. Federal restrictions on division of military retirement have spawned confusion and litigation for more than thirty years. Today, former spouses remain extremely vulnerable to this unique and “dire plight.”

In civilian divorce, state courts apply state law to fairly distribute marital assets. Military retirement and disability benefits, however, fall within the scope of the Uniformed Services Former …

The “Dire Plight” Contextualized: Comment On “The Fiction Of Equitable Distribution: Military Divorce, Disability, And The ‘Dire Plight’ Of The Former Military Spouse” By Zoe Speas, Catlin Meade

Washington and Lee Law Review

For forty years, military spouses have sacrificed their economic security and personal well-being to support their servicemember spouse’s military career, only to be thrust into a “dire plight” if their marriage ends in a community property state. The legislative policy that put them in this untenable position has not served federal interests: the military currently faces a recruiting crisis and military spouses’ economic security has not improved since the USFSPA. It is time for Congress and the DoD to reexamine the incentives and benefits provided to servicemembers and their families. Congress and the Court must end the USFSPA’s groundless, inequitable, …

Supporting Healthy Futures: Capitalizing On Medicaid’S Epsdt Medical Necessity Standard, Teressa Colhoun

Washington and Lee Law Review

Youth mental health is in crisis. Children report increased rates of suicidal ideology, depression, and anxiety. Diagnosis rates soar. Pediatric mental health care remains difficult to access. When services are accessible, they are costly—often sending families into medical debt.

This Note discusses Medicaid’s Early and Periodic Screening, Diagnostic, and Treatment (“EPSDT”) benefit. Specifically, it studies the EPSDT benefit’s creation, structure, and administration. This Note focuses on the context in which the EPSDT benefit operates, particularly how health care financing models impact benefit administration. It suggests that the EPSDT benefit has the capacity to address crucial gaps in pediatric mental health …

Letting The Kids Run Wild: Free-Range Parenting And The (De)Regulation Of Child Protective Services, Fenja R. Schick-Malone

Washington and Lee Law Review

Families in the United States suffer from a removal epidemic. The child welfare framework allows unnecessary and harmful intervention into family and parenting matters, traditionally left to the discretion of the parent. Many states allow Child Protective Services (“CPS”) to investigate, intervene, and permanently separate a child from their parents for innocuous activities such as letting the child play outside unattended. This especially affects low-income and minority families.

To prevent CPS from unnecessarily intervening in a family’s decision to let their children engage in independent, unsupervised activities, Utah passed a “free-range” parenting act (“Act”) in 2018. The Act explicitly excludes …

Comment: Protecting Childhood Independence And The Families Who Embrace It, David Pimentel

Washington and Lee Law Review

The legal problem of how to give parents flexibility and how to give children independence cuts to the core of some of our most sacred values: (1) how we raise our kids in this society, (2) the degree to which parents are free to raise their children as they see fit, and (3) the extent to which the state gets to substitute its own judgment for that of parents. Incursions into the family, and disruptions of family security and integrity, should be the exception rather than the rule. Schick-Malone joins a small group of legal scholars who are not content …

The Impact Of Insulating Immigration Courts From Judicial Review On America’S New Generation Of Families, Christian Sanchez Leon

Washington and Lee Law Review

This Note could be read as another Note addressing Congress’s power to strip jurisdiction from Article III courts. Yet, when this power is exercised in the immigration context, its impact extends far beyond the realm of checks and balances. Instead, this Note is about the insulation of the Board of Immigration Appeals (“BIA”) and its unfettered ability to create, interpret, and adjudicate its own laws. Not allowing courts to review BIA decisions leaves mixed-status families vulnerable to the harsh consequences of inherently arbitrary decisions made by executive officers.

These practices go against the established common law principles of family unity. …

Inadequate Protection: Examining The Due Process Rights Of Individuals In Child Abuse And Neglect Registries, Amanda S. Sen, Stephanie K. Glaberson, Aubrey Rose

Washington and Lee Law Review

This Article seeks to advance due process protections for people included in state child abuse and neglect registries. Between states, there are differences in the types of cases included in the state registry and the process required to be placed on or removed from the registry. To obtain judicial due process review, a plaintiff must demonstrate that a protected liberty or property interest is at stake. When federal courts have evaluated the individual liberty interest(s) implicated by placement on state child abuse and neglect registries, they have so far only found such an interest when the plaintiff’s employment opportunities were …

Kids, Not Commodities: Proposing A More Protective Interpretation Of The Child Sex Trafficking Statute For Victims And Defendants, Kimberly Blasey

Washington and Lee Law Review

This Note addresses how courts should interpret the “reasonable opportunity to observe” standard when assessing evidence. In other words, what quantum of evidence is, and should be, sufficient to prove a defendant had a “reasonable opportunity to observe” a sex trafficking victim? Would a singular brief encounter with an older-appearing prostitute satisfy the standard? If so, would the mere fact that the “prostitute” was actually a minor be the only evidence needed to obtain a conviction? Or would the defendant’s intention and attempt to order services from an adult prostitute shed light on the reasonableness of his observation opportunity? Moreover, …

Adopting Civil Damages: Wrongful Family Separation In Adoption, Malinda L. Seymore

Washington and Lee Law Review

The Trump Administration’s new immigration policy of family separation at the U.S./Mexico border rocked the summer of 2018. Yet family separation is the prerequisite to every legal adoption. The circumstances are different, of course. In legal adoption, the biological parents are provided with all the constitutional protections required in involuntary termination of parental rights, or they have voluntarily consented to family separation. But what happens when that family separation is wrongful, when the birth mother’s consent is not voluntary, or when the birth father’s wishes to parent are ignored? In theory, the child can be returned to the birth parents …

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 …

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.

Administrative Chaos: Responding To Child Refugees—U.S. Immigration Process In Crisis, Lenni B. Benson

Washington and Lee Law Review

No abstract provided.

Roe'S Effects On Family Law, Lynne Marie Kohm

Washington and Lee Law Review

No abstract provided.

Cohabitation And The Restatement (Third) Of Restitution & Unjust Enrichment, Candace Saari Kovacic-Fleischer

Washington and Lee Law Review

The Restatement (Third) of Restitution & Unjust Enrichment clarified and modernized a field that had become muddled since the publication of the Restatement (First) in 1937. One area of modernization relates to the changes in law towards women, particularly changes in law toward female cohabitants. Published in 2011, the Restatement (Third) added a new Section 28, which rejected the view that it would be immoral for one cohabitant to bring suit against the other, and relaxed the restriction on recovery in unjust enrichment for “gratuitous” contributions. This Article reviews societal and legal changes for women since 1937 and notes that, …

The Problem Of Parental Relocation: Closing The Loophole In The Law Of International Child Abduction, Maryl Sattler

Washington and Lee Law Review

No abstract provided.

Married Against Their Will? Toward A Pluralist Regulation Of Spousal Relationships, Shahar Lifshitz

Washington and Lee Law Review

This Article addresses the regulation of the relationships between unmarried cohabitants. It challenges the conventional divide between conservative and liberal approaches. On one hand, moral condemnation of nonmarital conjugal relationships and public policy in favor of marriage lead conservatives to reject the application of marriage Law to cohabitating partners. On the other hand, based on principles such as freedom, tolerance, and equality, liberals tend to equate the mutual legal commitments of cohabitants with those ofmarriedpartners. I break with conventional analysis by offering a novel liberal model that separates between the mutual obligations of cohabitants and married partners. The proposed model …

Virtual Parentalism, Joshua A.T. Fairfield

Washington and Lee Law Review

Parents, not Laws, ultimately protect children both online and offline. If legislation places adults at legal risk because of the presence of children in virtual worlds, adults will exit those worlds, and children will be isolated into separate spaces. This will not improve safety for children. Instead, this Article suggests that Congress enact measures that encourage filtering technology and parental tools that will both protect children in virtual worlds, and protectfree speech online.

Wrongs Committed During A Marriage: The Child That No Area Of The Law Wants To Adoptt, Michelle L. Evans

Washington and Lee Law Review

No abstract provided.

Altruism And Intermediation In The Market For Babies, Kimberly D. Krawiec

Washington and Lee Law Review

Central to every legal system is the principle that certain items are offlimits to commercial exchange. In theory, babies are one such sacred object. This supposed ban on baby selling has been lamented by those who view commercial markets as the most efficient means of allocating resources, and defended by those who contend that commercial markets in parental rights commodify human beings, compromise individual dignity, or jeopardize fundamental values. However, the supposed and much-discussed baby selling ban does not, and is not intended to, eliminate commercial transactions in children. Instead, it is an asymmetric legal restriction that limits the ability …

Beyond The Bounds Of Decency: Why Fault Continues To Matter To (Some) Wronged Spouses, Robin Fretwell Wilson

Washington and Lee Law Review

No abstract provided.

A Comment On Wrongs Committed During A Marriage: The Child That No Area Of The Law Wants To Adopt, By Michelle L. Evans, Robert E. Shepherd

Washington and Lee Law Review

No abstract provided.

Is The Family A Federal Question?, Meredith Johnson Harbach

Washington and Lee Law Review

There has long been conflict over the relationship between the states and the federal system vis-i-vis the family. The traditional account of domestic relations describes family Law as the exclusive domain of the states, andfederal courts have credited this account in the "domestic relations exception." Although scholars have analyzed and critiqued the exception's applicability to diversity jurisdiction, the intersection offederal question jurisdiction and this exception remains largely unexplored. This Article describes and critiques, on both instrumental and deeper normative terms, federal courts' willingness to expand the "domestic relations exception" to include federal question cases. The Article proceeds in three parts. …

The Unintended Tax Advantages Of Gay Marriage, Theodore P. Seto

Washington and Lee Law Review

The Internal Revenue Code (the Code) contains numerous special rules applicable to the income taxation of persons related by marriage, birth, adoption, or ownership. This Article suggests a new approach to their analysis. Many basic tax rules assume that taxpayers are self-interested and unaffiliated. Where this assumption is incorrect, the Code makes adjustments to its otherwise applicable rules. Most of the resulting related-party antiavoidance rules apply only in the context of specified formal relationships-marriage, parent/child, or owner/business. The Article tests this thesis by comparing the income tax treatment of heterosexual married couples with that of gay couples in committed long-term …

The Overlooked Costs Of Religious Deference, Robin Fretwell Wilson

Washington and Lee Law Review

Citing the Qur'an, a German divorce court judge this year denied a fast track divorce to a Muslim woman who had been the victim of domestic violence and death threats from her husband. The judge rejected her application because the husband's exercise of his "right to castigate does not fulfill the hardship criteria" for an expedited divorce. The decision, which sparked a firestorm of controversy, comes at an important time in the movement to embrace pluralistic understandings of family relationships. Scholars and policymakers around the world are advancing various schemes for sharing state control over domestic disputes with religious groups-ranging …

Marital Property In California And Indonesia: Community Property And Harta Bersama, Mark E. Cammack

Washington and Lee Law Review

One of the more notable features of Indonesian Islamic law is its recognition of the concept of jointly owned marital property. The Indonesian doctrine of joint marital property bears a striking similarity to the community property system in California. In both systems the marital estate consists of property acquired during the marriage through the efforts of either of the spouses. Both systems distinguish marital property from separate property and both define separate property as all property owned by either spouse prior to the marriage or acquired by gift or inheritance afterwards. Apart from their doctrinal similarity, Indonesian Islamic marital property …

"Big Love"'?* The Recognition Of Customary Marriages In South Africa, Penelope E. Andrews

Washington and Lee Law Review

This Comment contextualizes the issue of polygamous marriages within the South African constitutional paradigm, one committed unequivocally to the principle of equality. This Comment analyzes how South African law, European in origin, had to incorporate the laws and institutions of indigenous communities within the national legal framework, as part of the overall transformative legal project underway in the country since 1994. By focusing on the Recognition of Customary Marriages Act, this Comment examines such incorporation, while questioning its effect on the overall project of constitutionalism, human rights, and equality

Lessons From Islamic Polygamy: A Case For Expanding The American Concept Of Surviving Spouse So As To Include De Facto Polygamous Spouses, Michele Alexandre

Washington and Lee Law Review

While polygamy is illegal in the United States, forms of it are still practiced either overtly, pursuant to religious traditions, or covertly, by the maintenance of two or more family units. As a result, any claims, disputes, or abuses that arise in the context of de facto polygamous unions remain irremediable. My focus, in this Article, is not to advocate that polygamy should be legally recognized. Nor is it my purpose to debate the viability or morality of polygamy. Instead, I am concerned with affording legal remedies for vulnerable individuals living and operating in de facto polygamous unions. In light …

Justice And Equality In Muslim Family Laws: Challenges, Possibilities, And Strategies For Reform', Zainah Anwar, Jana S. Rumminger

Washington and Lee Law Review

One of the subtle but most pervasive areas of discrimination against women in the Muslim world today is the inequality that occurs within the context of the family. Throughout Muslim countries and contexts, Muslim women are speaking out about such discrimination and are fighting for reform of family laws to promote justice and equality within the family. This Article outlines key discriminatory provisions within Malaysia's Islamic Family Law (Federal Territories) Act of 1984 and the efforts being made by Muslim women in Malaysia to advocate for comprehensive reform of Malaysian Muslim family laws. This effort includes developing an understanding of …

Moroccan Women In Europe: Bargaining For Autonomy, Marie-Claire Foblets

Washington and Lee Law Review

This Article explores the path of possibilities offered in the case of Moroccans-in particular women-residing in (continental) Europe to determine, up to a point, the legal regime that will apply to their family life. The vast majority of Moroccans currently living in Europe have retained their original nationality, often combining it with that of the country of habitual residence. Adhesion to Islam often explains the attachment to the family law, which is a religious law, of the country of origin. Family reunifications in many cases mean enduring "rootedness" in the normative system of the country of origin. With mobility rendered …