Family Law Commons^™

Two Dads Are Better Than One: The Supreme Court Of Virginia's Decision In L.F. V. Breit And Why Virginia's Assisted Conception Statute Should Allow Gay Couples To Legally Parent A Child Together, Lauren Maxey

University of Richmond Law Review

This comment examines whether gay men can have a child through a surrogacy arrangement in Virginia and whether gay men can retain parental rights through surrogacy contracts under the Virginia Assisted Conception Act. The Virginia laws affect gay males and gay females equally, but this comment addresses the issues arising with same-sex couples in the context of gay dads. Part II provides a background of surrogacy and specifically discusses surrogacy in relation to same-sex couples. Part III provides a general background of adoption and the establishment of parentage rights. Part IV describes the Assisted Conception Act,the legislative history of the …

Common And Uncommon Families In The American Constitutional Order, Linda C. Mcclain

Faculty Scholarship

This essay reviews Professor Mark E. Brandon’s aptly named book, States of Union: Family and Change in the American Constitutional Order, which challenges the familiar story that the U.S. constitutional and political order have rested upon a particular, unchanging form of family – monogamous, heterosexual, permanent, and reproductive – and on the family values generated by that family form. That story also maintains that such family form and the legal norms that sustained it remained relatively undisturbed for centuries until the dramatic transformation spurred in part, beginning the 1960s, by the U.S. Supreme Court’s constitutionalizing of family and marriage through, …

Family Law, Sharon K. Lieblich

University of Richmond Law Review

No abstract provided.

From Citizenship To Custody: Unwed Fathers Abroad And At Home, Albertina Antognini

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

The sex-based distinctions of the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) have been remarkably resilient in the face of numerous equal protection challenges. In Miller v. Albright, Nguyen v. INS, and most recently United States v. Flores-Villar — collectively the "citizenship transmission cases" — the Supreme Court has upheld the constitutionality of the INA’s provisions that require unwed fathers, but not unwed mothers, to take a series of affirmative steps in order to transmit citizenship to their children born abroad.

The conventional account of these citizenship transmission cases is that the Court upholds sex-based distinctions that would otherwise fail …

The Future Of Family, Max D. Siegel

Student Articles and Papers

The State organizes society into families, implicating and often ignoring various liberty and equality interests while fortifying a “traditional” family structure comprised of one man, one woman, and their mutually and exclusively conceived offspring. This structure has historically benefited the heterosexual elite within the United States, but modern advancements for sexual minorities suggest a new standard for State recognition of family. Queer liberation will erase the traditional family by rewriting its legal and social dimensions, resulting in laws and policies that track more closely with familial bonds outside a heteronormative, man-woman binary. This Article explores the ramifications of enhanced queer …

Filial Support Laws In The Modern Era: Domestic And International Comparison Of Enforcement Practices For Laws Requiring Adult Children To Support Indigent Parents, Katherine C. Pearson

Faculty Scholarship

Family responsibility and support laws have a long but mixed history. When first enacted, policy makers used such laws to declare an official policy that family members should support each other, rather than draw upon public resources. This article tracks modern developments with filial support laws that purport to obligate adult children to financially assist their parents, if indigent or needy. The author diagrams filial support laws that have survived in the 21st Century and compares core components in the United States (including Puerto Rico) and post-Soviet Union Ukraine. While the laws are often similar in wording and declared intent, …

The Exit Myth: Family Law, Gender Roles, And Changing Attitudes Toward Female Victims Of Domestic Violence, Carolyn B. Ramsey

Publications

This Article presents a hypothesis suggesting how and why the criminal justice response to domestic violence changed, over the course of the twentieth century, from sympathy for abused women and a surprising degree of state intervention in intimate relationships to the apathy and discrimination that the battered women' movement exposed. The riddle of declining public sympathy for female victims of intimate-partner violence can only be solved by looking beyond the criminal law to the social and legal changes that created the Exit Myth.

While the situation that gave rise to the battered women's movement in the 1970s is often presumed …

Marriage Pluralism, Family Law Jurisdiction, And Sex Equality In The United States, Linda C. Mcclain

Faculty Scholarship

In many regions of the world, rights guaranteed under the civil law, including rights to gender equality within marriage and rights in the distribution of family property and child custody upon divorce, are in conflict with the principles of religious law. Women's rights issues are often at the heart of these tensions, which present pressing challenges for theorists, lawyers, and policymakers. This anthology brings together leading scholars and activists doing innovative work in Jewish law, Muslim law, Christian law, and African customary law. Using examples drawn from a variety of nations and religions, they interrogate the utility of recent theoretical …

Singing Songs In A Strange Land: The Plight Of Haitian Children In The Space Of International Adoption., Glenys P. Spence

The Scholar: St. Mary's Law Review on Race and Social Justice

The best interests of children are not served by severing the familial bonds contemplated by international adoption law. Nonetheless, because of the high costs of the international adoption process, efforts to adopt their Haitian orphan relatives are ignored. In attempts to guarantee the “best interests of the child” are met, the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) and the Hague Convention on the Protection of Children Co-Operative Respect of Intercountry Adoptions (Adoption Convention) were created as the two governing bodies of international adoption law. Global South countries, including Haiti, however, have not ratified the Adoption Convention. …

The Best Interest Of The Child And The Law , Christian Reichel Van Deusen

Pepperdine Law Review

No abstract provided.

Negotiating The "Labor Of Love": How Resources, Time, And Gender Shape Parenting Agreements, Marlena Studer

Pepperdine Law Review

No abstract provided.

Law Firms As Defendants: Family Responsibilities Discrimination In Legal Workplaces, Joan C. Williams, Stephanie Bornstein, Diana Reddy, Betsy A. Williams

Pepperdine Law Review

No abstract provided.

Supporting Children, Balancing Lives, Katharine K. Baker

Pepperdine Law Review

This paper examines how U.S. child support policy validates traditional divisions of labor and thereby hinders individual attempts to achieve an acceptable work/family balance. It argues that by using the household as the relevant unit of measurement for child support purposes, family law doctrine legitimates the specialization contracts that arise within households. These specialization contracts, used most extensively in wealthy, elite households, undermine attempts to distribute caretaking and provider roles more equally between parents. The article suggest that by dispensing with the household as the relevant unit of measurement and treating all parents individually, each with a responsibility to caretake …

A Tale Of Three Families: Historical Households, Earned Belonging, And Natural Connections, Allison Anna Tait

Law Faculty Publications

The work of this Article is to present a new and synthetic reading of cases about wives, illegitimate children, and unwed fathers that follows these three logics, revealing how they weave together and why earned belonging provides the strongest support for Ginsburg's original vision of an equalized household.

The Future Of Family Caregiving: The Value Of Work-Family Strategies That Benefit Both Care Consumers And Paid Care Workers, Peggie R. Smith

Scholarship@WashULaw

When higher-income women “opt in” for full-time employment, they are in a position to contract out some share of their responsibilities in the home to lower-income women who then provide these services. This traditional model of redistributing care work frequently presumes that only child care responsibilities are at stake. However, the aging of the population has increasingly focused attention on workers’ needs for help caring for elderly family members. Indeed, care giving for the elderly may equal, if not surpass, child care as the work-family concern of the twenty-first century. Because elder care, similar to child care, is heavily gendered, …

Family Law, Ronald R. Tweel, Elizabeth P. Coughter, Jason P. Seiden

University of Richmond Law Review

No abstract provided.

Gimme Shelter, Robert Leckey

Dalhousie Law Journal

Highlighting the family home's significance as shelter this paper challenges the prevailing view of the demands of the equality guarantee in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms regarding unmarried cohabitants. In Nova Scotia (Attorney General) v. Walsh, the Supreme Court of Canada rejected the claim that it was discriminatory to restrict rules dividing matrimonial property to married couples. By contrast, on many views it is discriminatory to exclude cohabitants from a support obligation. Scholars and judges assume that Walsh upholds all statutory rules regarding married spouses and their property, including measures protecting the family home as shelter But Walsh …

International Adoption: A Way Forward, Elizabeth Bartholet

NYLS Law Review

No abstract provided.

Finding Home In The World: A Deontological Theory Of The Right To Be Adopted, Paulo Barrozo

NYLS Law Review

No abstract provided.

Domestic Violence And State Intervention In The American West And Australia, 1860-1930, Carolyn B. Ramsey

Publications

This Article calls into question stereotypical assumptions about the presumed lack of state intervention in the family and the patriarchal violence of Anglo-American frontier societies in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. By analyzing previously unexamined cases of domestic assault and homicide in the American West and Australia, Professor Ramsey reveals a sustained (but largely ineffectual) effort to civilize men by punishing violence against women. Husbands in both the American West and Australia were routinely arrested or summoned to court for beating their wives in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Judges, police officers, journalists, and others expressed dismay …

A Diva Defends Herself: Gender And Domestic Violence In An Early Twentieth-Century Headline Trial, Carolyn B. Ramsey

Publications

This short article was presented as part of a symposium on headline criminal trials, organized by St. Louis University School of Law in honor of Lawrence Friedman. It describes and analyzes the self-defense acquittal of opera singer Mae Talbot in Nevada in 1910 on charges of murdering her abusive husband. Based on extensive research into archival trial records and newspaper reports, the article discusses how the press, the court, and trial lawyers on both sides depicted the killing and Mae’s possible defenses. Without discounting the sensationalism and entertainment value, to a scandal-hungry public, of stories about violent marriages, I contend …

Same-Sex Marriage, Same-Sex Cohabitation, And Same-Sex Families Around The World: Why ‘Same’ Is So Different?, Macarena Saez

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

This paper briefly explains the situation of same sex couples in countries that have opened marriage to individuals of the same sex, offers a summary and analysis of the status of same sex unions in several countries that have not opened marriage to same sex couples, and provides a comparative analysis of the most recurrent arguments used in the processes of recognition and denial of same sex unions in the countries reviewed.

Forty years ago, same sex couples were not legally accepted in any country. In the last thirty years, however, around 20% of the world has granted some rights …

Child, Family, State, And Gender Equality In Religious Stances And Human Rights Instruments: A Preliminary Comparison, Linda C. Mcclain

Faculty Scholarship

The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) recently began its third decade. Why has the United States still not ratified the CRC, celebrated as the most widely ratified international human rights treaty in history? Once again, this question is on the table: Congressional resolutions that President Obama should not transmit the CRC to the Senate for advice and consent rapidly followed intimations that the Obama Administration had some qualms about the U.S. keeping company only with Somalia in not ratifying it. Some scholars contend that enlisting the unique resources of religions would help to ground a culture …

Editor's Note

Washington and Lee Journal of Civil Rights and Social Justice

No abstract provided.

The Children's Rights Amendment And Family Law, Fergus Ryan

Other resources

This blog entry is part of a carnival blog posted to http://humanrightsinireland.wordpress.com/ It addresses the provisions of the proposed constitutional amendment on children's rights, as formulated by the Joint Oireachtas Committee on the Constitutional Amendment on Children, published in February 2010. This brief comment analyses the proposal, with particular reference to its potential impact on children in non-traditional family units.

Pregnant Man?: A Conversation, Darren Rosenblum, Noa Ben-Asher, Mary Anne Case, Elizabeth Emens, Berta E. Hernández-Truyol, Vivian M. Gutierrez, Lisa C. Ikemoto, Angela Onwuachi-Willig, Jacob Willig-Onwuachi, Kimberly Mutcherson, Peter Siegelman, Beth Jones

Faculty Publications

(Excerpt)

I'm a law professor who works on gender, sexuality, and culture in the international and comparative context. That's my head working. In "real" life, my partner, Howard, and I have been engaged in having a baby together for several years, a project that came to fruition with the birth of our daughter Melina. Of course, such a project evokes intensely complex feelings and thoughts. Beyond a simple transposition of the personal onto the political, I feel so fortunate to have engaged in myriad conversations with a variety of friends and colleagues who think much more carefully about the family …

A Look Back And A Look Forward: Legislative And Regulatory Highlights For 2008 And 2009 And A Discussion Of Juvenile Transfer, Andrew K. Block

University of Richmond Law Review

No abstract provided.

The State As Batterer: Learning From Family Law To Address American's Family-Like Racial Dysfunction, Angela Mae Kupenda

Journal Articles

The women's movement for equality bootstrapped to the movement for equality for Blacks. Now the reverse can happen. This Article uses family law and the plight of some battered women, as a lens to address analogous racial conflicts in the broader American family.

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

Law Faculty Publications

A six-volume work, this set constitutes a major revision and massive expansion of the 1995 Oxford Encyclopedia of the Modern Islamic World. In addition to covering Islamic societies in the modern world from the eighteenth century to the present, as the earlier four-volume set did, it will add a depth of historical background going back to the pre- Islamic era. The new reference also covers the full geographical extent of Islam by focusing not only on the countries in which Islam is dominant, but also on regions in which Muslims live as minorities, such as Europe and the Americas.

Practical Insights From An Empirical Study Of Cooperative Lawyers In Wisconsin, John M. Lande

Faculty Publications

This article reports on a study of members of the Divorce Cooperation Institute (DCI), a group of Wisconsin lawyers who use a "Cooperative" process to provide a constructive and efficient negotiation process in divorce cases. The study involved in-depth telephone interviews and several surveys of DCI members. Although DCI members use this process only in divorce cases, it can be readily adapted for other types of cases.DCI's approach generally involves an explicit process agreement at the outset, based on principles of: (1) acting civilly, (2) responding promptly to reasonable requests for information, (3) disclosing all relevant financial information, (4) obtaining …