Family Law Commons^™

A Feminist Critique Of Quebec V. A.: Evaluating The Supreme Court's Divided Opinion On Section 15 And Common Law Support Obligations, Natasha Mukhtar

Canadian Journal of Family Law

A case comment on Quebec v. A. In Quebec v. A., the Supreme Court of Canada tackled a Charter challenge to the Civil Code of Quebec. The claimant, A., alleged that the legislation violated her section 15 equality rights by discriminating on the basis of marital status in excluding common law couples from spousal support and division of property upon separation. The Court delivered a lengthy, controversial, and divided decision with three lines of dissent. Ultimately, the exclusion was upheld. Quebec continued to exclude common law couples from the division of property and remained the sole province to …

Book Review: Autonomous Motherhood? A Socio-Legal Study Of Choice And Constraint By Susan B. Boyd, Dorothy E. Chunn, Fiona Kelly, And Wanda Wiegers, Brenda Cossman

Canadian Journal of Family Law

No abstract provided.

Is It Time To Tell? Abolishing Donor Anonymity In Canada, Fiona Kelly

Canadian Journal of Family Law

Over the past two decades, a growing number of donor conceived people have spoken out about the impact of donor anonymity on their health and wellbeing. A significant number of legislatures have responded to these concerns by introducing laws that prospectively (and in one case, retrospectively) abolish donor anonymity. This article considers the increasing pressure on Canadian provinces to end anonymity and introduce registers which enable donor conceived people to access their donor’s identifying information. While the article does not endorse the genetic essentialism that is often a feature of advocacy in the field, it does argue that there are …

Townshend V. Townshend & Buttar V. Buttar: Gifts, Exclusions, And Intentions, Jonathan Robinson

Canadian Journal of Family Law

This comment looks at two fairly recent decisions by the Ontario Court of Appeal, Townshend v Townshend (2012 ONCA 868) and Buttar v Buttar (2013 ONCA 617) with respect to the courts' handling of the exclusion of gifts under section 4(2) of Ontario's Family Law Act (RSO 1990, c F.3). In Ontario, gifts made by third parties outside the marriage to one spouse may be excluded from the calculation of a spouse's Net Family Property (NFP). Property may cease to be excludable if it is not kept separate or if it is used to the benefit of the family. In …

Book Review: A Parent-Partner Status For American Family Law By Merle H. Weiner, Frances E. Chapman

Canadian Journal of Family Law

No abstract provided.

Chickens And Eggs: Does Custody Move Support, Or Vise-Versa?, Margaret F. Brinig

Journal Articles

Most, if not all, of the theoretical work on child support presupposes that it becomes an issue only when couples separate, that is, that the flow moves between custody and child support and that the duty to make monetary payments is typically owed by the noncustodial parent. (I realize, of course, that there can be issues regarding the identity of the payor and that there are criminal and civil actions possible when parents refuse or neglect to provide support to dependent children.) Some empirical work confirms the relationship between the two. For example, Judith Seltzer, Weiss and Willis, and Brinig …

In The Shadow Of A Myth: Bargaining For Same-Sex Divorce, Noa Ben-Asher

Elisabeth Haub School of Law Faculty Publications

This Article explores a relatively new phenomenon in family law: same-sex divorce. The Article's central claim is that parties to the first wave of same-sex divorces are not effectively bargaining against the backdrop of legal dissolution rules that would govern in the absence of an agreement. In other words, to use Robert Mnookin and Lewis Kornhauser's terminology, they are not "bargaining in the shadow of the law." Instead, the Article argues, many same-sex couples today bargain in the shadow of a myth that same-sex couples are egalitarian—that there are no vulnerable parties or power differentials in same-sex divorce.

The Article …

Sharenting: Children's Privacy In The Age Of Social Media, Stacey B. Steinberg

UF Law Faculty Publications

Through sharenting, or online sharing about parenting, parents now shape their children’s digital identity long before these young people open their first email. The disclosures parents make online are sure to follow their children into adulthood. Indeed, social media and blogging have dramatically changed the landscape facing today’s children as they come of age.

Children have an interest in privacy. Yet a parent’s right to control the upbringing of his or her children and a parent’s right to free speech may trump this interest. When parents share information about their children online, they do so without their children’s consent. These …

John Moore Jr.: Moore V City Of East Cleveland And Children's Constitutional Arguments, Nancy E. Dowd

UF Law Faculty Publications

At the heart of Moore v City of East Cleveland is 7 year old John Moore Jr. How would we tell the story of Moore from his perspective, and how might the case have been constructed if his rights and constitutional harms were asserted? The ordinary act of registering John for school was the apparent trigger for efforts to exclude him from school, by mandating his removal from his grandmother’s house, after an earlier effort to deny his entry into school had failed. In this essay I first tell the story of the case from John’s perspective and then construct …

Indigenizing Equality, M. Alexander Pearl, Kyle Velte

Faculty Articles

Notwithstanding the significant victories of the LGBT civil rights movement over the past 20 years, culminating in the declaration of full marriage equality in Obergefell v. Hodges, anti-LGBT sentiment generally, and anti-marriage-equality sentiment in particular, continue to run deep. One pocket of resistance is in some tribal communities. While Obergefell unequivocally resolved the problem of the “patchwork quilt” of marriage equality among the states, the problem of gaps in marriage equality among Tribal Nations has left the problem of the “patchwork quilt” intact. This article answers the question: What is the effect of federal marriage equality on the modern expression …

Rural Women And Developments In The Undue Burden Analysis: The Effect Of Whole Woman's Health V. Hellerstedt, Hannah Haksgaard

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Doing More For Children With Less: Multidisciplinary Representation Of Poor Children In Family Court And Probate Court, Robert N. Jacobs, Christina Riehl

Loyola of Los Angeles Law Review

Family court and probate court are Barmecide feasts for too many children, especially poor children with special needs. “Multidisciplinary representation” of children enables the courts to address needs and risks that cannot be resolved by fine-tuning a custody schedule, frequently at little or no additional cost to the taxpayers. Since most children cannot identify the salient issues in their cases and do not have standing in family court or probate court much less lawyers to represent them, it becomes the court’s responsibility in every case to identify the issues most relevant to children’s interests and decide whether multidisciplinary representation is …

The Rules Of Maternity, Dara Purvis

Faculty Scholarship

A diverse body of laws and regulations speaking to reproductive rights, healthcare, criminal punishment of drug use, termination of parental rights, and more creates the rules of maternity. These rules are guidance provided both obliquely and explicitly by the law's coercive power telling women both how to and who should mother. Rule one begins in pregnancy, with the message that "your body is your child's vessel." During pregnancy, women are counselled that doctor knows best. After the child's birth, the mother remains responsible for the people who enter a child's life, leading to rule 3: "mothers must always protect." …

Theorizing The Immigrant Child: The Case Of Married Minors, Medha D. Makhlouf

Faculty Scholarly Works

No abstract provided.

The Law Of Nonmarriage, Albertina Antognini

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

The meaning of marriage, and how it regulates intimate relationships, has been at the forefront of recent scholarly and public debates. Yet despite the attention paid to marriage—especially in the wake of Obergefell v. Hodges—a record number of people are not marrying. Legal scholarship has mostly neglected how the law regulates these nonmarital relationships. This Article begins to fill the gap. It does so by examining how courts distribute property at the end of a relationship that was nonmarital at some point. This inquiry provides a descriptive account to a poorly understood and largely under-theorized area of the law. …

Judge Lawrence W. Kaplan And His Court Cases In Family Division, Court Of Common Pleas Of Allegheny County (1980-1990), Joel Fishman

Law Faculty Publications

In the last issue of the Pennsylvania Family Lawyer, I compiled a list of family law cases decided by Judge R. Stanton Wettick, Jr. for the decade of the 1980s when the Divorce Code was first introduced into the Commonwealth. The local court was a leader in deciding cases that set forth many of the principles that the appellate courts adopted as new law developed. In this article, I present the cases of Judge Lawrence Kaplan who served his entire judicial career in the Allegheny Court of Common Pleas from June 30, 1978 until his retirement on Augst 12, 1998 …

Efforts To Combat Child Trafficking In The Us: Victims And Victim-Witnesses, Katherine Kaufka Walts

Faculty Publications & Other Works

No abstract provided.

Traditional Problems: How Tribal Same-Sex Marriage Bans Threaten Tribal Sovereignty, Marcia Zug

Mitchell Hamline Law Review

No abstract provided.

Close To Zero: The Reliance On Minimum Blood Quantum Requirements To Eliminate Tribal Citizenship In The Allotment Acts And The Post-Adoptive Couple Challenges To The Constitutionality Of Icwa, Abi Fain, Mary Kathryn Nagle

Mitchell Hamline Law Review

No abstract provided.

In The Shadow Of A Myth: Bargaining For Same-Sex Divorce, Noa Ben-Asher

Faculty Publications

This Article explores a relatively new phenomenon in family law: same-sex divorce. The Article’s central claim is that parties to the first wave of same-sex divorces are not effectively bargaining against the backdrop of legal dissolution rules that would govern in the absence of an agreement. In other words, to use Robert Mnookin and Lewis Kornhauser’s terminology, they are not “bargaining in the shadow of the law.” Instead, the Article argues, many same-sex couples today bargain in the shadow of a myth that same-sex couples are egalitarian—that there are no vulnerable parties or power differentials in same-sex divorce.

The Article …

2016 Survey Of Rhode Island Law: Cases And Public Laws Of Note

Roger Williams University Law Review

No abstract provided.

Child Support Collections To Offset Out Of Home Placement Costs: A Study Of Cost Effectiveness, Trish Skophammer

School of Business Student Theses and Dissertations

Families experiencing out-of-home placement (OHP) are in crisis. The fact that a child has been removed from the home means the family has become involved with the child welfare or juvenile justice system. Families that experience OHP are disproportionately poor, and the reasons for OHP often stem from poverty. Because OHP is expensive, and society values parental responsibility, federal and state laws require that parents be referred to the child support system to help offset the cost of OHP through child support collections. This study explores practices around OHP cases in the child support system and adds to the small …

Redrawing The Boundaries Of Relational Crime, Cynthia Godsoe

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

In Defense Of The Family: An Argument For Maintaining The Parental Rights Of Incarcerated Women In Texas, Erica D. Benites

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

Abstract Forthcoming

Fathers And Feminism: The Case Against Genetic Entitlement, Jennifer S. Hendricks

Publications

This Article makes the case against a nascent consensus among feminist and other progressive scholars about men's parental rights. Most progressive proposals to reform parentage law focus on making it easier for men to assert parental rights, especially when they are not married to the mother of the child. These proposals may seek, for example, to require the state to make more extensive efforts to locate biological fathers, to require pregnant women to notify men of their impending paternity, or to require new mothers to give biological fathers access to infants.

These proposals disregard the mother's existing parental rights and …

The Law Of Attorney Fees In Family Law Cases, Robert G. Spector, Carolyn S. Thompson

Oklahoma Law Review

No abstract provided.

Rights Of Incarcerated Parents, Angélica Cházaro

Chapters in Books

This chapter discusses the childcare and custody rights of incarcerated parents. According to the U.S. Department of Justice, an estimated 809,800 state and federal prisoners were parents to children under the age of eighteen in 2007. There are approximately 1,706,600 children under the age of eighteen who have a parent in prison.

As a parent in prison, you may fear that your child will not be cared for, that you will lose your child, or that your relationship with your child will suffer while you are incarcerated. This Chapter focuses on New York state law and describes how the law …

The Intersection Of Contract Law, Reproductive Technology, And The Market: Families In The Age Of Art, Deborah Zalesne

University of Richmond Law Review

No abstract provided.

Who Is Parent And Who Is Child In Same-Sex Family? - Legislative And Judicial Issues For Lgbt Families Post-Separation, Part Ii: The U.S. Perspective, Mary Kay Kisthardt, Richard A. Roane

Faculty Works

No abstract provided.

The Law Of Attorney Fees In Family Law Cases, Robert G. Spector, Carolyn S. Thompson

Faculty Articles

No abstract provided.