Family Law Commons^™

Ireland's Divorce Bill: Traditional Irish And International Norms Of Equality And Bodily Integrity At Issue In A Domestic Abuse Context, Anthony T. Barnes

Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law

On November 24, 1995, the Irish population voted to ease Ireland's constitutional ban on divorce by means of a constitutional amendment. The new amendment and the bill that effectuates it give Irish citizens a limited legal right to end their marriages for the first time in Ireland's history. The limits surrounding Irish divorce consist of a significant waiting period, a living-apart requirement, and a slant toward mediation.

This Note explores the predicaments of abused spouses and the unique risks that Ireland's divorce limitations pose to spousal abuse victims seeking to end their marriages. This Note argues that the limitations of …

Kentucky Law Survey: Family Law, Louise Everett Graham

Kentucky Law Journal

No abstract provided.

No-Fault Laws And At-Fault People, Margaret F. Brinig, F. H. Buckley

Journal Articles

Absent transaction costs, the Coase Theorem suggests that divorce reform would work no change in the frequency of divorce but perhaps would alter the distribution of marital wealth. However, divorce does involve substantial process costs, which no-fault lowered. This paper explores the question of what happened to state divorce rates because of the legal changes wrought by the family law revolution that began in the 1970s, isolating the effect of the legal variable from other demographic and social factors that might also explain the variation in divorce rates across states and across time.

Divorce And Domicile: Time To Sever The Knot, Rhonda Wasserman

William & Mary Law Review

No abstract provided.

Legal Narratives, Theraputic Narratives: The Invisibility And Omnipresence Of Race And Gender, Leslie G. Espinoza

Michigan Law Review

My first introduction to Denise Gray was through a form. The intake sheet was dated October 17, 1994. The legal problem was straightforward. My introduction to Denise Gray would come much later. I am a clinical law professor. The clinic, Boston College Legal Assistance Bureau, is known as "LAB." I teach students law by supervising them as they represent, usually for the first time, a real person with real problems.

Property Distribution Physics: The Talisman Of Time And Middle Class Law, Margaret F. Brinig

Journal Articles

Should the young professional's spouse get some share in a newly acquired career while the young military officer's will not? Does the division between alimony and property make any sense, given no-fault divorce? Is reimbursement for lost career opportunities plus a share in the couple's tangible property fair compensation for a divorcing spouse? Such difficult questions frame this piece, which will also—and I believe necessarily—digress into the nature of marriage, the duties of parenting, and modern divorce philosophy.

Tax Issues In Divorce, Marjorie A. O'Connell

William & Mary Annual Tax Conference

No abstract provided.

Avocats Et Divorce Aux Etats-Unis: La Transformation Des Pratiques Professionnelles, Lynn M. Mather, Craig A. Mcewen, Richard J. Maiman

Journal Articles

Les transformations sociales et les évolutions juridiques qui sont intervenues aux États-Unis depuis les années 60 ont eu de multiples effets sur le travail des avocats en matière de divorce. Le présent article analyse ces transformations en s'appuyant sur des entretiens avec des avocats et sur l'analyse de l'activité des tribunaux dans les États du Maine et du New Hampshire. Il souligne notamment l'importance que revêt l'accroissement du nombre des divorces parmi les couples ayant des ressources moyennes ou faibles. Il décrit aussi la féminisation rapide du barreau, une tendance qui se trouve particulièrement accentuée en ce qui concerne les …

The Road Less Taken: Annulment At The Turn Of The Century, Chris Guthrie, Joanna Grossman

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

It is hardly surprising that certain legal institutions--adoption, wills, and guardianship--have lasted through the centuries. Each meets a different, seemingly timeless need: providing parenting for orphans or abandoned children, distributing property at death, and dealing with legal incapacity, respectively. Similarly, divorce, though it appeared somewhat later, took hold and persisted for an obvious reason-the increasing demand for a legally sanctioned way to terminate broken marriages. The endurance of annulment, however, particularly in the face of increasingly liberalized divorce laws, defies easy explanation. The existence of annulment prior to the mid-nineteenth century is easily explained. Until 1857, England was a "divorceless …

Innocent Spouses, Reasonable Women And Divorce: The Gap Between Reality And The Internal Revenue Code, Stephen A. Zorn

Michigan Journal of Gender & Law

This Article asks whether the "reasonable woman" should become the standard for women seeking relief from tax liabilities under the innocent spouse provision of the I.R.C. and whether an even more specific standard should be adopted for women who are also going through divorce or are in similar situations.

The Law And The Stability Of Marriage: The Family As A Social Institution, Carl E. Schneider

Book Chapters

Samuel Johnson once wrote, "It is so far from being natural for a man and woman to live in a state of marriage that we find all the motives which they have for remaining in that connection, and the restraints which civilized society imposes to prevent separation, are hardly sufficient to keep them together." In this chapter I shall pursue Dr. Johnson's provocative suggestion by asking what restraints (if any) society might impose through law on couples to join them in marriage in the first place and to keep them in it after they have married.

But why might society …

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

Marriage And Divorce: Legal Foundations, Azizah Y. Al-Hibri

Law Faculty Publications

This unique reference is a comprehensive encyclopedia dedicated to the institutions, religion, politics, and culture in Muslim societies throughout the world. Placing particular emphasis on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, The Oxford Encyclopedia of the Modern Islamic World contains over 750 articles in four volumes on Muslims in the Arab heartland as well as South and Southeast Asia, Europe, and the Americas.

An invaluable resource, the Encyclopedia offers extensive comparative and systematic analyses of Islamic beliefs, institutions, movements, practices, and peoples on an international scale. The alphabetically arranged articles range from brief 500-word essays to major interpretive and synthetic treatment …

Does Mediation Systematically Disadvantage Women?, Margaret F. Brinig

Journal Articles

When state legislatures enabled spouses to obtain divorces without proving fault, one of the real achievements was lower transaction costs. Although the benefit of lower transaction costs for divorce is not completely noncontroversial, the relaxed proof requirements mean that lawyers do not necessarily have to be involved in divorce proceedings. The vast majority of marriage dissolutions involve written agreements between the parties. No-fault divorce also energized the divorce mediation movement.

Mediation is the least intrusive form of third-party involvement in a dispute. Whereas a judge or arbitrator imposes an outcome on the disputants, the mediator assists the parties in reaching …

Divorce, Custody, Gender, And The Limits Of Law: On Dividing The Child, Lee E. Teitelbaum

Michigan Law Review

A Review of Dividing the Child: Social and Legal Dilemmas of Custody by Elanor E. Maccoby and Robert H. Mnookin

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 …

Alimony And Efficiency: The Gendered Costs And Benefits Of Economic Justification For Alimony, Jana B. Singer

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

War And P.E.A.C.E.: A Preliminary Report And A Model Statute On An Interdisciplinary Educational Program For Divorcing And Separating Parents, Andrew Schepard

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

This Article is a report on P.E.A.C.E. (Parent Education and Custody Effectiveness), an interdisciplinary attempt to create a parent education program in New York. P.E.A.C.E. is an educational program that provides information to parents on three topics: the legal process for determining custody and child support; the effects of divorce and separation on adults; and the effects of divorce and separation on children, and how parents can help children cope with this difficult transition. P.E.A.C.E. is education-nothing more. It is not mediation or therapy. Parents do not talk to each other directly during P.E.A.C.E. sessions and the program makes no …

The Adversarial And Mediation Processes: An Exploration Of Outcomes In Child Custody Disputes, Cheryl Barakey

Sociology & Criminal Justice Theses & Dissertations

In recent years, the Juvenile and Domestic Relations Courts have seen increases in child custody disputes. This increase has caused many jurisdictions to seek alternatives to the traditional adversarial process. Mediation has attracted the most attention. Several jurisdictions such as Norfolk, Virginia, the one used in this study, now refer parents to mediation before the court will hear the case.

Unlike previous studies where divorce mediation was researched with child custody being one of the factors, this study examines the differences in the outcomes of the mediation and litigation processes used to solve only child custody disputes. The outcomes examined …

Divorce Obligations And Bankruptcy Discharge: Rethinking The Support/Property Distinction, Jana B. Singer

Faculty Scholarship

The Bankruptcy Code currently divides divorce-related obligations into two categories: awards or agreements in the nature of support are non-dischargeable; obligations arising from property divisions can be discharged in the same manner as ordinary commercial debts. Because recent developments in family law have undermined the support/property distinction and because privately negotiated divorce agreements often fail to distinguish between payments intended to serve as support and those intended to distribute property, the Code's reliance on this classification often leads to confusion and hardship for divorce obligees. In addition, because of the rise of equitable distribution as the dominant method of allocating …

Starting Down The Road To Reform: Kentucky's New Long-Arm Statute For Family Obligations, Louise Everett Graham

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

Kentucky has long needed a comprehensive family law provision for its long-arm statute. Before the general long-arm statute was amended by the 1992 General Assembly, it addressed only a narrow class of paternity cases among its specific jurisdictional provisions, ignoring the need for long-arm jurisdiction in other domestic relations cases. A second long-arm statute provided jurisdiction over some nonresidents to establish or enforce child support obligations. In the contexts of divorce and child support, Kentucky's failure to claim constitutionally available jurisdiction deprived Kentucky residents of important protection.

Recent amendments to Kentucky statutes fill previous gaps and expand Kentucky's jurisdiction in …

Starting Down The Road To Reform: Kentucky's New Long-Arm Statute For Family Obligations, Louise Everett Graham

Kentucky Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Trading At Divorce: Preferences, Legal Rules And Transactions Costs, Margaret F. Brinig, Michael V. Alexeev

Journal Articles

For almost ten years, legal commentators have been aware of the possibility of applying economic bargaining principles to the problems of negotiations at the time of divorce. Although some cases and journal articles have mentioned the Mnookin and Komhauser article suggesting that custodial time and financial assets might be exchanged, attempts to apply the analysis have been confined to description. No one has attempted an empirical study to see if there really are trade-offs between custodial time and marital assets at the time of divorce, and there has been no formal model describing the process.

Furthermore, there has been no …

Burns V. Burns, 91-Ap-21 (Blkft. Tr. Ct. App., Sep. 27, 1992), Blackfeet Appellate Court

Court Decisions

• Petitioner is Lorraine Burns and she applied to the Blackfeet Court of Appeals for an issuance of a Writ of Supervisory Control requiring the Tribal Court to enforce all of its prior orders directing that Robert Burns, Respondent, be arrested for failure to pay her any of the sums due to her from the Decree of Dissolution and Stipulation with Regard to Division of Property. 

• Respondent was served, but did not respond.  

• The Appeals Court had already, twice, affirmed that Respondent be arrested for his failure to comply with the Decree of Dissolution and Stipulation. By a motion dated March …

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Religion And Child Custody, Carl E. Schneider

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

In this Essay, I want to reflect on some problems at the intersection of religion, law, and the family. Specifically, I will explore the ways courts may consider a parent's religiously motivated behavior in making decisions about the custody of children. More precisely still, I will ask two questions. First, may a court refuse to award custody because of a parent's religiously motivated behavior in a dispute between a natural mother and a natural father? Second, when should a court agree to resolve a dispute between divorced parents over the religious upbringing of their children? These are topics of quiet …

Divorce Reform And The Legacy Of Gender, Milton C. Regan Jr.

Michigan Law Review

A Review of The Illusion of Equality: The Rhetoric and Reality of Divorce Reform by Martha Albertson Fineman

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 …

Mandatory Planning For Divorce, Jeffrey E. Stake

Vanderbilt Law Review

My daughter Laura will reach the median age of first marriage in about seventeen years.' Alison, her little sister, follows three years be hind. There is a good chance they both will marry. What are the odds that those marriages will work out well? Less than I would like. The strong statistical possibility of divorce is hard to ignore and the prospects upon divorce are not rosy. The economic repercussions of divorce for Laura and Alison could be grim, likely worse than those for their brother Christopher if he were to divorce.' What hope have I that this gloomy situation …

The Plight Of The Agunah: A Study In Halacha, Contract, And The First Amendment, Irving Breitowitz

Maryland Law Review

No abstract provided.

Louisiana Family Law, Christopher L. Blakesley

Scholarly Works

No abstract provided.