Family Law Commons^™

Family Lawyering: Past, Present, And Future, John M. Lande, Forrest S. Mosten

Faculty Publications

In the past fifty years, divorce law has turned upside down. Marriage is not assumed to be a lifelong commitment. Fault generally is not legally relevant. Gender equality is a fundamental principle. Today, courts regularly handle a much broader range of issues, including disputes about issues such as domestic violence; parental relocation; religious upbringing; payment for children's college education; grandparent and stepparent visitation rights; rights of same-sex and unmarried couples; alienation of parents and children; and the role of e-mail, the Internet, and cybersex in divorce.

Family law practice inevitably evolved in response to these social and legal changes. This …

40th Anniversary Of Roe V. Wade: Reflections Past, Present And Future, Linda L. Schlueter

Faculty Articles

This Article addresses the historical developments leading to the Roe decision, reviews the cases that continue to challenge the Court's holding in Roe, and makes recommendations to protect women and minors as long as Roe remains in effect. Part II reflects the historical legal foundations that protected life and the shift in emphasis to a liberty interest that led to the Roe decision. Part III analyzes the factual and legal background of Roe v. Wade, and its companion case of Doe v. Bolton, reveals their basis in lies and deception, and exposes that the Supreme Court's underlying assumptions that are …

The New Baby Mama Drama: Equal Rights To Compensation For Birth Mothers Of Adopted Infants As Granted To Egg Donors And Surrogates, Jenny Beecroft

Student Works

No abstract provided.

Book Review: Fifty Years In Family Law: Essays For Stephen Cretney (Rebecca Probert & Chris Barton Eds. 2012), Nancy E. Dowd

UF Law Faculty Publications

This collection honors the life and work of Stephen Cretney, the preeminent British scholar of family law. For those wanting an entry point into British family law, this is a wonderful volume. For those who know it well and admire the work of Stephen Cretney, as well as the work of this preeminent group of scholars, it will also be of much value as a remarkable group of essays. As an example of life's work that we all might hope to achieve, in many manifestations, but with dedication to the common good, it is a model to which we all …

Alone And Unrepresented: A Call To Congress To Provide Counsel For Unaccompanied Minors, Shani M. King

UF Law Faculty Publications

The legal rights of children who enter a country without their parents or other guardians, including the right to legal representation in immigration proceedings, differ vastly across the globe. This Article is the first to show that unaccompanied minors lie at the nexus of international and regional human rights standards governing the treatment of immigrants, children, and civil counsel and to show how the development of human rights standards in these three areas underscores the importance of and the need for counsel for unaccompanied minors. Part I illustrates why unaccompanied minors in the United States need legal representation by focusing …

Screening For Intimate Partner Violence In Mediation, Kelly Browe Olson

Law Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

A Dilemma Of Doctrinal Design: Rights, Identity And The Work-Family Conflict, Lauren Sudeall Lucas

Faculty Publications By Year

This symposium article suggests that with regard to the work-family conflict, we may have exhausted doctrine’s potential in setting a constitutional foundation for women to be treated as equals in the workplace and requiring that they not be discriminated against in the event that they decide to start a family. For purposes of this piece, those accomplishments constitute the first phase or “first generation” of progress. This article is concerned with how doctrine relates to “second generation” issues arising from the work-family conflict: how to balance work and family once some initial level of equality has been achieved; how to …

Family Law: Husband And Wife, Joseph W. Mcknight, Shanin Turner Brevig

SMU Law Review

No abstract provided.

Fostering Climate Change Education In The Central Great Plains: A Public Engagement Approach, Lisa M. Pytlikzillig, Timothy Steffensmeier, Amber Campbell Hibbs, Ben Champion, Eric Hunt, John A. Harrington, Jr., Jacqueline D. Spears, Natalie Umphlett, Tarik Abdel-Monem, Roger Bruning, Daniel Kahl

Lisa PytlikZillig Publications

Despite its increasing importance for sustainability, building widespread competency in the basic principles of climate literacy among the United States general public is a great challenge. This article describes the methods and results of a public engagement approach to planning climate change education in the Central Great Plains of the United States. Our approach incorporated contextual and lay expertise approaches to public engagement with a focus on supporting the self-determination of the specific stakeholder groups–rural producers, educators, and community members. An integration of results from the focus groups reveal that our approach was received positively and elicited a number of …

Community Mediation Of Parenting Disputes Between Estranged Parents, Madhawa Palihapitiya, Kaila Obstfeld Eisenkraft

Massachusetts Office of Public Collaboration Publications

Community mediation, characterized by free or low cost mediation services delivered primarily by volunteer mediators, aims to provide effective dispute resolution services to a broad spectrum of the population, particularly to underserved and low-income populations. The present study seeks to determine whether community mediation fulfills this goal with respect to divorce/separation-related parenting disputes while concomitantly testing the legitimacy of concerns about the quality of mediation services offered according to a community mediation model. Thus, the effectiveness of community mediation in resolving these disputes is measured through indicators reported by mediation participants, such as the population served, mediation results and party …

It's [Not] A Black Thing: The Black/Gay Split Over Same-Sex Marriage - A Critical [Race] Perspective, Adele M. Morrison

Law Faculty Research Publications

No abstract provided.

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, …

A Supreme Court Ruling That's About Way More Than Preemption, Nancy Polikoff

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

No abstract provided.

Fathers, Divorce, And Child Custody, Matthew M. Stevenson, Sanford L. Braver, Ira M. Ellman, Ashley M. Votruba

Department of Psychology: Faculty Publications

A great many fathers will have their fathering eliminated, disrupted, or vastly changed because they become divorced from the child’s mother. In fact, between 40% and 50% of marriages end in divorce (Cherlin, 2010). Although the divorce rate (measured as divorces per 1,000 people) is high by the standards prior to the late 1960s, it has actually fallen more than 30% since its peak in 1980. The decline in divorce rates in recent years has, however, been concentrated among the college-educated portion of the population; divorce rates among the less well educated may have even increased (Cherlin, 2010). But for …

United States V. Windsor And The Role Of State Law In Defining Rights Claims, Ernest A. Young

Faculty Scholarship

The Supreme Court’s recent decision in United States v. Windsor is best understood from a Legal Process perspective. Windsor struck down Section 3 of the federal Defense of Marriage Act (“DOMA”), which defined marriage as exclusively between a man and a woman for purposes of federal law. Much early commentary, including Professor Neomi Rao’s essay in these pages, has found Justice Kennedy’s opinion for the Court to be “muddled” and unclear as to its actual rationale. But the trouble with Windsor is not that the opinion is muddled or vague; the rationale is actually quite evident on the face of …

The Aaml Child Custody Evaluation Standards: Bridging Two Worlds, Child Custody Evaluation Standards, Sacha M. Coupet

Faculty Publications & Other Works

No abstract provided.

What Price Liberty: The Search For Equality For Kinship-Caregiving Families, Sacha M. Coupet

Faculty Publications & Other Works

No abstract provided.

Undocumented Children And Families In America: An Interdisciplinary Exploration Of Challenges And Emerging Opportunities, Diane C. Geraghty

Faculty Publications & Other Works

No abstract provided.

Theorizing From Particularity: Perpetrators And Intersectional Theory On Domestic Violence, Elizabeth L. Macdowell

Scholarly Works

The role of identity-based stereotypes about perpetrators in domestic violence cases has not received much attention in legal scholarship, which has instead focused on the identities of victims. However, stereotypes governing who is a recognizable victim (e.g., that victims are white, middle-class, passive, and dependent women in heterosexual relationships) cannot by themselves explain why nonconforming victims are sometimes successful in family court cases and other, more “perfect” victims are not. Drawing on intersectionality theory, which studies the ways experiences are shaped by the interaction of multiple identity categories, I argue that understanding this phenomenon requires a relational analysis that examines …

The Incoherence Of Marital Benefits, Robin West

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

En route to finding the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) an unconstitutional violation of the Fifth Amendment's Equal Protection Clause, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals in Windsor v. United States gave short shrift to one of Congress's primary arguments in defense of the Act: that the federal government has a compelling interest in limiting federal marriage benefits to opposite-sex couples because traditional marriage has the laudable purpose-or function-of channeling the heterosexual sex that creates children into a way of life that provides the optimal environment for the rearing of those children. In other words, DOMA aims to minimize irresponsible …

Parents With Mental Disabilities: The Legal Landscape, Dale Margolin Cecka

Law Faculty Publications

The ADA, coupled with federal and state child welfare laws, provides broad brush strokes for advocates of parents with mental disabilities and their children. To effectuate parents’ rights, child welfare professionals must work with the parents themselves, as well as with other state departments, to form service plans that are tailored for the success of each individual family.

Filing Status And Today's Families, Erik Baines

Law Student Publications

Section I of this comment considers the early income tax code, its focus on individual filing, and how early decisions of the Supreme Court of the United States led Congress to adopt optional joint filing for married couples. Section II analyzes the joint return, tax norms, and arguments of proponents and opponents of the joint return. Section III analyzes structural issues raised by a return to an individual filing system, as well as why an individual filing system is superior to a joint filing system given the changes in American society. It also discusses a proposal to resolve an inequity …

Permanency Puzzle, Cynthia Godsoe

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Parsing Parenthood, Cynthia Godsoe

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Surrogacy And Insurance: The Call For Statutory Reform In Ohio, Sasha M. Swoveland

Journal of Law and Health

This Note examines the practice of excluding maternity services for surrogate mothers under insurance plans that cover maternity services. This Note also introduces two different surrogate arrangements and illustrates the different familial situations that may necessitate the use of a surrogate. Part II defines surrogacy and offers a general overview of the surrogacy process. Part III demonstrates that surrogates need insurance for pregnancy related services. It also argues that the exclusion of coverage for surrogates is pregnancy discrimination. Part IV explains why current legal remedies are insufficient to make surrogates whole. Part V analyzes the state of surrogacy examining Ohio …

Free To A Good Home: America's Unregulated Online Market For Adopted Children, Kathryn Huber

Public Interest Law Reporter

No abstract provided.

Keeping Families Together? The Façade Of The I-601a Provisional Unlawful Presence Waiver, Natalie Tepeli

Public Interest Law Reporter

No abstract provided.

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 …

Multicultural Issues In Family Law: An Annotated Bibliography, Nancy Levit

Faculty Works

This bibliography covers law review articles published, for the most part, after 2009. Articles for which the title is self-explanatory or that concern only a single case, state, or statute are cited, but not annotated.

Rumors Of The Sharia Threat Are Greatly Exaggerated: What American Judges Really Do With Islamic Family Law In Their Courtrooms, Asifa Quraishi-Landes

NYLS Law Review

No abstract provided.