Family Law Commons^™

Asset Protection Through The Use Of Premarital Agreements, Robert T. Rose

CMC Senior Theses

The number of multi-million dollar divorce settlements has been increasing rapidly in the last decade. Although Donald Trump's divorce from his first wife, Ivana, wherein $25 million was awarded to the former spouse, may have seemed like a significant sum in 1992, this amount appears quite minuscule today.1 In December of 2011, Mel Gibson's soon to be ex-wife Robyn Moore received $425 million in the couples' divorce settlement.2 In March of 2012, Frank McCourt was forced to sell his professional franchise, the Los Angeles Dodgers, in bankruptcy during his divorce proceedings with Jamie McCourt.3 It seems as if every month …

Between Tradition And Progress: A Comparative Perspective On Polygamy In The United States And India, Cyra Akila Choudhury

University of Colorado Law Review

Both the United States and India have had longstanding experiences with polygamy and its regulation. In the United States, the dominant Protestant majority has sought to abolish Mormon practices of polygamy through criminalization. Moreover, a public policy exception has been used to deny recognition of plural marriages conducted legally elsewhere. India's approach to polygamy regulation and criminalization has been both similar to and different from that of the United States. With a sizable Muslim minority and a legal framework that recognizes religious law as family law, India recognizes polygamy in the Muslim minority community. However, it has criminalized it in …

Counting From One: Replacing The Marital Presumption With A Presumption Of Sole Parentage, Julie Shapiro

Faculty Articles

No abstract provided.

Who Owns The Soul Of The Child?: An Essay On Religious Parenting Rights And The Enfranchisement Of The Child, Jeffrey Shulman

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

At common law, and (for most of the nation's history) under state statutory regimes, the authority of the parent to direct the child's upbringing was a matter of duty, not right, and chief among parental obligations was the duty to provide the child with a suitable education. It has long been a legal commonplace that at common law the parent had a "sacred right" to the custody of his or her child, that the parent's right to control the upbringing of the child was almost absolute. But this reading of the law is sorely anachronistic, less history than advocacy on …

My Daddy's Name Is Donor: Evaluating Sperm Donation Anonymity And Regulation, Mark Ballantyne

Richmond Public Interest Law Review

In Part I, this comment explores the debate on anonymous sperm donation and the current law in the United States. Part II surveys new developments in the regulation of sperm donation internationally and domestically. Part III reviews "My Daddy's Name is Donor" and how its findings relate to the anonymity debate. Part IV concludes with suggestions regarding the national registry and future regulation of sperm donation in the United States.

Virtual Adultery: No Physical Harm, No Foul?, Kathryn Pfeiffer

Law Student Publications

New forms of social media and virtual communication are changing the ways in which we meet new people and develop meaningful relationships. In today's world, you can skype a long-distance significant other or join an Internet chat room to find others who share a similar interest. While, in many ways, the Internet has facilitated our ability to interact with others unencumbered by geographical location or time zone, its unfettered reach has proved to be problematic for one relationship in particular-the marital unit. Studies show that more marriages are ending because of "virtual infidelity," the term used to describe nonphysical behavior …

Reforming The Safe Haven In Ohio: Protecting The Rights Of Mothers Through Anonymity, Brittany Neal

Journal of Law and Health

This Note discusses the conflict between the statewide safe haven law and the Ohio juvenile rules regarding procedure. It purports that to protect the rights of new mothers and retain the essential element of anonymity, Ohio’s Juvenile Rule 1(C) needs to be amended to maintain the state’s current safe haven law. Therefore, because of the statewide threat Ohio courts place on Ohio’s safe haven law, Juvenile Rule 1(C) needs to explicitly provide for an additional exception in cases of child relinquishment. Section II of this Note discusses the beginning of state safe haven legislation and what the laws are attempting …

I Do. Is That Okay With You?: A Look At How Most States Are Circumventing The Full Faith And Credit Clause And Equal Protection Clause To Not Recognize Legal Same-Sex Marriages From Other States And Its Effect On Society, Rebecca Hameroff

Florida A & M University Law Review

Due to statutes, bans, and the Federal Defense of Marriage Act, states do not have to recognize legal same-sex marriages from sister states that recognize same-sex marriage. This paper examines the denial of the fundamental right to marriage for same-sex couples, the violation of the Full Faith and Credit Clause of Article IV, Section 1 of the United States Constitution and Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment of the United States Constitution by not recognizing same-sex marriages legally performed in other states. It starts by looking at the impact these practices have on same-sex couples and the toll it …

Children's Interests: An Annotated Bibliography, 2010-12, Nancy Levit

Faculty Works

This bibliography covers law review articles published, for the most part, after 2008. Articles for which the title is self-explanatory or that concern only a single case, state, or statute are cited, but not annotated.

Spoliation In Child Welfare: Perspectives And Solutions, Dale Margolin

Richmond Journal of Law and the Public Interest

This article examines the potential effects of failing to preserve or produce evidence in the child welfare tort context. Section Two provides an overview of the record-keeping policies and practices in child protective systems throughout the country. It also describes the toll that civil litigation has taken on these systems because of negligent care of children. Section Three explains spoliation and its civil and criminal ramifications in other contexts. Section Four analyzes the effects that missing records have on child welfare torts. Section Five discusses best practices for attorneys and courts in addressing spoliation in child welfare tort litigation. Section …

Of Wife And The Domestic Servant In The Arab World, Lama Abu-Odeh

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The author asserts to avoid common misunderstandings on the relevance of Sharia to modern women in the Arab World that a) Shari’s relevance to the lives of modern women in the Arab World has been largely confined to the area of family law, b) in the modern nation state Sharia has been codified, i.e., certain rules derived from Islamic jurisprudence on the family have been selected and passed as laws, each nation state having its own unique combination of such rules, c) the courts and the judges who adjudicate disputes on family law are either secular courts/judges, or judges trained …

The Lawmaking Family, Noa Ben-Asher

Faculty Publications

Increasingly there are conflicts over families trying to “opt out” of various legal structures, especially public school education. Examples of opting-out conflicts include a father seeking to exempt his son from health education classes; a mother seeking to exempt her daughter from mandatory education about the perils of female sexuality; and a vegetarian student wishing to opt out of in-class frog dissection. The Article shows that, perhaps paradoxically, the right to direct the upbringing of children was more robust before it was constitutionalized by the Supreme Court in Meyer v. Nebraska (1923) and Pierce v. Society of Sisters (1925). In …

Unsex Mothering: Towards A New Culture Of Parenting, Darren Rosenblum

Faculty Publications

(Excerpt)

I was, until recently, a pregnant man. I explored some of the issues that arose along my path to parenthood in a recent essay titled Pregnant Man?: A Conversation. My husband and I began the process of having a child several years ago when we hired a surrogacy agency that works primarily with gay male couples. After a complex process, we are now raising our daughter.

As a parent, I confront a far more sexed area of life than I have ever encountered before. Everyone congratulates my partner and me on being “fathers,” even though within our home we …

Five Mistakes For New Child-Welfare Lawyers To Avoid, Jennifer Baum

Faculty Publications

(Excerpt)

You’ve graduated, passed the bar, and started your first legal job working with children and families. Perhaps you work for an institutional provider of legal services for children or as a prosecutor of dependency cases, or perhaps you are defending such cases. Perhaps, still, you are in private practice, and this is your first pro bono experience working on a family or juvenile court matter. Whatever your role, your job is the same: to represent your client and seek as favorable an outcome as possible.

But you are new—you don’t know the ropes or who the players are, you …

Introduction: Jessica Lenahan (Gonzales) V. United States: Implementation, Litigation, And Mobilization Strategies, Caroline Bettinger-López

Articles

No abstract provided.

Using Community Based Participatory Research To Study The Relationship Between Sources And Types Of Funding And Mental Health Outcomes For Children Served By The Child Welfare System In Ohio, Susan Vivian Mangold, Catherine Cerulli, Gregory Kapcar, Crystal Ward Allen, Kim Kaukeinen, Hua He

Journal Articles

No abstract provided.

Accounting For Time: A Relative-Interest Approach To The Division Of Equity In Hybrid-Property Homes Upon Divorce, Lisa Milot

Scholarly Works

Even in these troubling economic times, homes are the most valuable asset many Americans own. In many instances, these homes were purchased prior to marriage, with later mortgage payments made after the homebuyer married. On divorce, courts must divide the value of such a “hybrid-property” home into “separate” and “marital” shares prior to distributing it between the divorcing spouses.

Many courts have developed formulas for this purpose, with a goal of providing a “proportionate and fair return” on both the separate and marital investments in the home. Each of the formulas, though, ignores the timing of the investments, both in …

Explaining Abuse Of The Disabled Child, Margaret F. Brinig

Journal Articles

This article discusses abuse of disabled children in terms of two competing theories for why it may occur. The evolutionary biology theory has been discussed in the legal literature as well as in biological and social science pieces. The author contrasts this theory with a novel one, mimetic desire, which may be less familiar in legal circles, but which, he believes, better explains the abuse of Attention Deficit Hyperactive Disorder children and offers more hope for preventing abuse without disrupting intact families. While the evolutionary biology explanations for child abuse may be helpful and important, more territory can be covered …

Symposium: Radical Nemesis: Re-Envisioning Ivan Illich's Theories On Social Institutions Foreword, Jennifer L. Levi

Faculty Scholarship

The eight articles in this Symposium issue reflect the divergent topics that Ivan Illich managed to reflect upon in his life’s works. The topics include discussion of prisons, education, family law structures, privatization of welfare services and its impact on labor consciousness, media, and the rule of law.

The Symposium was a daylong conference of ideas that invited the engagement of those who joined. The students of Illich and students of students of Illich shared with those of us who had not studied at his side, his passion for ideas, his insights, and his invitation for anyone with or without …

Comparative Pragmatism, Rachel Rebouché

Maryland Law Review

No abstract provided.

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, …

When The Child’S Best Interest Calls For It: Post-Adoption Contact By Court Order In Maryland, Kristina V. Foehrkolb

Maryland Law Review

No abstract provided.

Public Input For City Budgeting Using E-Input, Face-To-Face Discussions, And Random Sample Surveys: The Willingness Of An American Community To Increase Taxes, Alan Tomkins, Rick D. Hoppe, Mitch Herian, Lisa M. Pytlikzillig, Tarik Abdel-Monem, Nancy Shank

Lisa PytlikZillig Publications

Regular public input into a city's budget is frequently associated with municipal budgeting in Brazilian cities, successes in public engagement that have been emulated around the world. American communities are adopting the practice to varying degrees. This paper will report on a five-year old public input program that is taking place in Lincoln, Nebraska, the capital city of a politically conservative state in the U.S. We discuss the processes we use to engage the public about the City's budget. The process includes regular online input as well as face-to-face, deliberative discussions. On occasions, random sample surveys also have been used. …

Child Representation In America: Progress Report From The National Quality Improvement Center, Donald N. Duquette, Julian Darwall

Articles

Few dispute that children in the child welfare system need effective representation. In October 2009, the U.S. Children's Bureau named the University of Michigan Law School the National Quality Improvement Center on the Representation of Children in the Child Welfare System (QIC-ChildRep). The QIC-ChildRep is a five-year, multimillion dollar project, charged with gathering, developing, and communicating knowledge on child representation. In addition, the QIC-ChildRep is tasked with promoting a consensus on the role of the child's legal representative and providing one of the first random assignment experimental design research projects on the legal representation of children.

Psychological Evaluation Of Parenting Capacity In Child Welfare Proceedings, Katherine L. Rosenblum, Joshua B. Kay

Articles

In the child welfare context, courts, attorneys, and child protection agencies often turn to psychologists to evaluate parenting capacity. As evaluators in child protection cases, psychologists may be asked to evaluate different parties for different purposes, acting as agents of the court, the child protection agency, or directly retained by the parents or the lawyer guardian ad litem. In this article we focus specifically on psychological evaluations addressing issues pertaining to parenting capacity (in contrast to, for example, assessments that focus solely on child psychological well-being or developmental status). These types of assessments may help to inform dispositional decisions, including …

How (Not) To Talk About Abortion, Meredith J. Harbach

Law Faculty Publications

In this essay, I aim to have a conversation about how we converse- how we talk-about abortion and related issues. In the process, I want to consider how we might come together to discover issues of shared commitment and values and transform the existing abortion debate. I begin with a review of some of the more notable abortion-related rhetoric during the 2012 Virginia General Assembly, and contrast that rhetoric with the discourse in my classroom. I then consider whether and how we might move forward together toward a more meaningful and productive dialogue on these issues.

The New Illegitimacy: Tying Parentage To Marital Status For Lesbian Co-Parents, Joanna L. Grossman

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

Should a child be allowed two legal parents only if born into a marriage? For children of heterosexual parents, the answer, today, is definitively "no." Constitutional protection for parental rights does not permit the ties between an unwed father and his child to be severed simply because he is not married to the child's mother. But the answer is often different for the child of a lesbian mother. In a recent opinion, Debra H. v. Janice R., the New York Court of Appeals ruled that a lesbian co-parent- a woman who had participated in the conception, birth, and early rearing …

Creating New Stories, Creating New Lives: Applying Narrative Therapy To Survivors Of Human Sex Trafficking, Paige Espinosa

McNair Poster Presentations

The effects of trauma experienced by survivors of sexual human trafficking has been an under-researched topic in the psycho­logical community. This study will review the current literature on the psychological and emotional implications associated with human sex trafficking, and analyze the components of narrative therapy and its previous application in treating domestic abuse trauma. This paper will explore the viability of narrative therapy as a method to treat the complicated traumas and stress developed as a victim of sexual trafficking. The ultimate goal of this literature analysis is to propose a study that utilizes narrative therapy as an approach that …

Ozzie & Harriet Are Perfect Candidates To Adopt, But Ozzie & Harry Are Barred: Boseman V. Jarrell & The Effects Of Prohibition On Second Parent Adoptions, Amanda Von Schmid

Student Works

No abstract provided.

Balancing The Adoptive Triangle: The Need To Protect Biological Parents’ Privacy Rights, Adrienne Fleming

Student Works

No abstract provided.