Family Law Commons^™

Family Constitutions: A Case Study Of Ten Families--Problems, Issues And Concerns, Maria Teresa L. Galura, Ricardo H. Mercado, Joseph Sedfrey S. Santiago

Marketing and Law Faculty Publications

This paper looks at ten family constitutions crafted with the assistance of the Family Business Development Center (FBDC) within a span of at least two years. The families, all Filipinos, are in different industries, reside in various cities, and are in various stages of managerial transition between generations. The ten constitutions are analyzed from different relational and business angles, including governance structure, family communication, succession and retirement plan, professionalizing the business, strategic planning, ownership contract and business protocol. The paper proposes to undertake a comparative study of family constitutions in five ASEAN countries.

Is The Family A Federal Question?, Meredith Johnson Harbach

Washington and Lee Law Review

There has long been conflict over the relationship between the states and the federal system vis-i-vis the family. The traditional account of domestic relations describes family Law as the exclusive domain of the states, andfederal courts have credited this account in the "domestic relations exception." Although scholars have analyzed and critiqued the exception's applicability to diversity jurisdiction, the intersection offederal question jurisdiction and this exception remains largely unexplored. This Article describes and critiques, on both instrumental and deeper normative terms, federal courts' willingness to expand the "domestic relations exception" to include federal question cases. The Article proceeds in three parts. …

Adopting A New Approach To Medical Information For Adoptees, Jessica Marie Yoke

Richmond Public Interest Law Review

Some estimates indicate that at least six million adoptees lived in the United States in 1997. "After factoring in birth parents and adoptive parents for each adoptee, the number of persons directly affected by the adoption process grows to over [twenty-four million] persons." States conducted many of these adoptions privately, particularly those that did not occur recently, so the parties remain anonymous to one another. Thus, an enormous number of Americans are now struggling in a system built on antiquated law that is not very useful, and in fact might be harmful. This Comment proposes a solution to this overlooked …

Helping Parents Tell Their Children About Separation And Divorce: Social Science Frameworks And The Lawyer's Counseling Responsibility, Joan B. Kelly, Mary Kay Kisthardt

Faculty Works

No abstract provided.

The Gendered Nature Of Domestic Violence: Statistical Data For Lawyers Considering Equal Protection Analysis, Molly Dragiewicz, Yvonne F. Lindgren

Faculty Works

In Woods v. Horton, the California’s Third District Court of Appeal in Sacramento ruled that a state Health and Safety Code section funding domestic violence shelter services specifically for battered women and their children violated equal protection. Using the strict scrutiny standard of review, the court held that under the state’s Equal Protection Clause, women and men are “similarly situated” with regard to domestic violence and, therefore, the language in the code should be revised to make state funding for domestic violence shelter services under that code gender-neutral. Woods is the first successful legal decision for the anti-feminist “fathers’ rights” …

New York Recognition Of A Legal Status For Same-Sex Couples: A Rapidly Developing Story, Arthur S. Leonard

NYLS Law Review

No abstract provided.

Clients Aging Out Of Care, Dale Margolin Cecka

Law Faculty Publications

Youth aging out of foster care face an arduous road. Lawyers for foster youth must help to assure their safe and stable exit from the system and a comfortable transition into the next stage of their lives. Lawyers cannot rely on social service agencies and caseworkers to handle the myriad of issues that youth encounter, and many require court orders or other legal measures.

New Options For Child Support Payments, Sue K. Varon, Jennifer Varon

Richmond Journal of Law and the Public Interest

Non-custodial parents pay child support in a variety of ways. Divorced parents should be provided with all possible options for making these payments. Some new options have emerged both in the public and private sectors.

Adopting A New Approach To Medical Information For Adoptees, Jessica Marie Yoke

Richmond Journal of Law and the Public Interest

Some estimates indicate that at least six million adoptees lived in the United States in 1997. "After factoring in birth parents and adoptive parents for each adoptee, the number of persons directly affected by the adoption process grows to over [twenty-four million] persons." States conducted many of these adoptions privately, particularly those that did not occur recently, so the parties remain anonymous to one another. Thus, an enormous number of Americans are now struggling in a system built on antiquated law that is not very useful, and in fact might be harmful. This Comment proposes a solution to this overlooked …

The Family Law Doctrine Of Equivalence, Amy L. Wax

Michigan Law Review

Students of patent law learn the doctrine of equivalents. According to the doctrine, a patent protects an invention that does "the same work in substantially the same way, and accomplish[ es] substantially the same result," as the device described in the patent, even if it differs "'in name, form, or shape." In her new book, Nancy Polikoff has fashioned something like a parallel doctrine for families. Let's call it (with a slight play on words) the family law Doctrine of Equivalence. In today's world, according to Polikoff, a broad set of relationships now plays the same role as marriage and …

Using The Fourteenth Amendment To Protect The Integrity Of Kinship Foster Families, Jennifer Baum, Teresa J. Grogan

Faculty Publications

(Excerpt)

As children’s advocates, we know well the value of an extended family to a dependency case. Living with a family member is often considered by children removed from their parents to be the “second best.” Such arrangements are often more comforting, less socially stigmatizing, and more capable at facilitating children’s normal daily routines, including school, medical care, and religious training, than stranger foster care. The social and psychological benefits of kinship care are well documented. One recent retrospective study concluded that children in kinship foster care have fewer behavioral problems three years after placement than do children who were …

Follow The Money: Federal, State, And Local Funding Strategies For Child Welfare Services And The Impact Of Local Levies On Adoptions In Ohio, Susan V. Mangold, Catherine Cerulli

Journal Articles

No abstract provided.

Emotional State And Localized Norms: A Reply, Clare Huntington

Faculty Scholarship

This piece is a response to Emory Law professor Martha Albertson Fineman's comments on Professor Huntington's Article "Familial Norms and Morality, 59 Emory L.J 1103 (2010).

Janice M. V. Margaret K.: Eliminating Same-Sex Parents’ Rights To Raise Their Children By Eliminating The De Facto Parent Doctrine, Emily R. Lipps

Maryland Law Review

No abstract provided.

A Mother Should Not Have To Adopt Her Own Child: Parentage Laws For Children Of Lesbian Couples In The Twenty-First Century, Nancy Polikoff

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

No abstract provided.

Joint And Shared Parenting: Valuing All Families And All Children In The Adoption Process With An Expanded Notion Of Family , Cynthia R. Mabry

American University Journal of Gender, Social Policy & the Law

No abstract provided.

The One-Size-Fits-All Family, Margaret F. Brinig, Steven L. Nock

Journal Articles

Family policy and the law based on it assume universals. That is, if marriage improves the welfare of the majority of couples and their children, it is worth pushing as a policy initiative. Further, laws will be written (or kept on the books) that privilege marriage over other family forms. Similarly, research that tells us that divorce harms children except following the relatively small number of highly conflicted marriages, spawns efforts to preserve troubled marriages or even to roll back liberal or relatively inexpensive divorce laws. With yet another example, since adopted children mostly do better than children left either …

Child Protection -- What Ought To Be, Donald N. Duquette

Articles

America's child protection system should not only protect our children, it should protect our liberty. Several recent cases, and perhaps others in your jurisdiction, highlight a general tension in America's child protection system between child protection and family integrity.

Protecting A Parent's Right To Counsel In Child Welfare Cases, Vivek Sankaran

Articles

A national consensus is emerging that zealous leagal representation for parents is crucial to ensure that the child welfare system produces just outcomes for children. Parents' lawyers protect important constitutional rights, prevent the unnecessary entry of children into foster care and guide parents through a complex system.

When Child Protective Services Comes Knocking, Vivek Sankaran

Articles

A child protective services (CPS) worker knocks on the door of your client, a 36-year-old mother involved in a contentious child custody case. The worker reveals only that she received an anonymous phone call alleging that your client physically abused her son and now she must investigate those allegations under state law. The worker demands to enter the house, interview the children, and inspect the premises. She threatens that a lack of cooperation may result in the filing of a court petition and the possible removal of the child. Your panicked client calls with a plethora of questions: Can CPS …

Is The Family A Federal Question?, Meredith Johnson Harbach

Law Faculty Publications

There has long been conflict over the relationship between the states and the federal system vis-i-vis the family. The traditional account of domestic relations describes family law as the exclusive domain of the states, and federal courts have credited this account in the "domestic relations exception." Although scholars have analyzed and critiqued the exception's applicability to diversity jurisdiction, the intersection of federal question jurisdiction and this exception remains largely unexplored. This Article describes and critiques, on both instrumental and deeper normative terms, federal courts' willingness to expand the "domestic relations exception" to include federal question cases. The Article proceeds in …

Marriage Equality For Same-Sex Couples: Where We Are And Where We Are Going, Jennifer Levi

Faculty Scholarship

The legal landscape for same-sex couples seeking to marry has shifted dramatically over the last five years. On October 10, 2008, the Connecticut Supreme Court became the third state high court to rule that its state constitution could not sustain a statutory framework that excludes same-sex couples from marrying, following the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court on November 18, 2003, and the California Supreme Court on May 15, 2008. Same-sex couples throughout the country have gotten married in Connecticut, Massachusetts, California, and in other countries throughout the world that provide full marriage equality, including in Canada. The Author discusses the developments …

In Family Law, Love's Got A Lot To Do With It: A Response To Philip Shaver, Terry A. Maroney

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

In a contribution to this Symposium on Law and Emotion: Re-Envisioning Family Law, Phillip Shaver and his co-authors succinctly encapsulate contemporary psychological theory on interpersonal attachment -- primarily parent-child attachment and its role in creating lifelong attachment patterns -- and seek to outline the relevance of such research for both social policy and law. This Comment demonstrates that many areas of family law already seek to cultivate and reward attachment. But attachment is not and cannot be the sole-or even, perhaps, the most important-factor driving most legal determinations. Recognizing the importance of secure attachment does not answer difficult questions about …

Protecting Well-Being While Pursuing Justice, Barbara Sturgis

Center on Children, Families, and the Law: Faculty Publications

The second and third chapters in this section draw attention to circumstances in which concerns regarding the ability of the criminal justice process to achieve just outcomes intersect with concerns regarding the potential effects of that process on the psychological well-being of various participants. These chapters by Bruce Winick, Jodi Quas, and Bradley McAuliff can reasonably be understood as complimentary in the following sense. Winick’s chapter endorses a substantive legal standard and a proposed procedure for applying that standard that raises a series of questions regarding the manner in which that procedure, and the participants in that procedure, will be …

Managing Performance [In Child Welfare Supervision], Megan E. Paul, Michelle Graef, Erika J. Robinson, Kristin Saathoff

Center on Children, Families, and the Law: Faculty Publications

One of the primary roles of a supervisor is to manage worker performance. Performance management is the "continuous process of identifying, measuring, and developing the performance of individuals and teams and aligning performance with the strategic goals of the organization" (Aguinis, 2007, p. 2). Supervisors must regularly assess current performance levels and take steps to improve performance in a way that is congruent with agency goals. The ultimate goal is to achieve agency objectives through individual and team performance.

To effectively manage performance, supervisors must know what the performance expectations are for workers and clearly communicate these expectations to workers. …

Social Factoring The Numbers With Assisted Reproduction, Bridget J. Crawford, Lolita Buckner Inniss

Publications

In early 2009 the airwaves came alive with sensational stories about Nadya Suleman, the California mother who gave birth to octuplets conceived via assisted reproductive technology. Nadya Suleman and her octuplets are vehicles through which Americans express their anxiety about race, class and gender. Expressions of concern for the health of children, the mother's well-being, the future of reproductive medicine or the financial drain on taxpayers barely conceal deep impulses towards racism, sexism and classism. It is true that the public has had a longstanding fascination with multiple births and with large families. This is evidenced by a long history …

Book Review, Richard B. Collins

Publications

No abstract provided.

First Parents: Reconceptualizing Newborn Adoption, James G. Dwyer

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Constitutional Birthright: The State, Parentage, And The Rights Of Newborn Persons, James G. Dwyer

Faculty Publications

State parentage laws, dictating who a newborn child's first legal parents will be, have been the subject of constitutional challenges in several U.S. Supreme Court and many lower court decisions. All of those decisions, however, have focused on constitutional rights of adults (especially unwed biological fathers) who wish to become, or to avoid becoming, legal parents. Neither courts nor legal scholars have considered whether the children have any constitutional rights that constrain legislatures and courts in deciding which adults will be their legal parents. If a state enacted a parentage law that said, for example, that any child born to …

One Step Forward, Two Giant Steps Back: How The "Existing Indian Family" Exception (Re)Imposes Anglo American Legal Values On American Indian Tribes To The Detriment Of Culltural Autonomy, Suzianne D. Painter-Thorne

American Indian Law Review

This article describes the profound changes to American Indian kinship and social structures caused when European and Anglo American legal norms were imposed on American Indian tribes without respect for Indian culture or values. Although these sovereign nations were entitled to self-determination, they were for centuries subjected to laws crafted without their input or representation. This article takes the position that law should come from within a culture to ensure that it reflects that culture's values and permits it to flourish in its own way. When law is imposed by outsiders, it becomes a means of colonization, forcing one group …