Family Law Commons^™

Imagining Children's Rights, Suellyn Scarnecchia

Articles

Today, I will tell you some stories about real, live children, whose futures have been determined by our legal system. To speak of children's rights hypothetically, raises images of children suing to go live with their rich uncle or suing to demand a Nintendo system from their parents. I hope that by bringing you stories of the legal system's treatment of real children, you will have a better understanding of what I mean by children's rights and why they must be recognized. Although children's rights have been recognized in limited ways in the areas of free speech, criminal law and …

A Child's Right To Protection From Transfer Trauma In A Contested Adoption Case, Suellyn Scarnecchia

Articles

On August 2, 1993, I arrived at the home of Jan, Robby, and Jessica DeBoer' a few hours before the transfer. At 2:00 P.M. I would carry Jessica out of her home and deliver her to the parents who had won the case,2 her biological mother and father. This task probably would have been easier had I not spent eight days in the trial court listening to the experts explain that this transfer from one set of parents to another would harm Jessica.3 It would have been easier had I not recently obtained affidavits from other experts to persuade the …

Myths And Moms: Images Of Women And Termination Of Parental Rights, Odeana R. Neal

All Faculty Scholarship

For most of us, the word "mother" evokes a myriad of often conflicting images and emotions, expectations and disappointments, and gratitude and blame. What a mother is - our own mothers and the class of people who are mothers - means much more than that a woman has given birth. We expect mothers to provide their children with all the love, caring, nurturing, and emotional fulfillment that we perceive those children need and desire; we expect her to be all things that we want her to be when we need her to be them. A woman who can fulfill the …

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

Law Faculty Publications

This unique reference is a comprehensive encyclopedia dedicated to the institutions, religion, politics, and culture in Muslim societies throughout the world. Placing particular emphasis on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, The Oxford Encyclopedia of the Modern Islamic World contains over 750 articles in four volumes on Muslims in the Arab heartland as well as South and Southeast Asia, Europe, and the Americas.

An invaluable resource, the Encyclopedia offers extensive comparative and systematic analyses of Islamic beliefs, institutions, movements, practices, and peoples on an international scale. The alphabetically arranged articles range from brief 500-word essays to major interpretive and synthetic treatment …

Combining Class Action Litigation And Social Science Research: A Case Study In Helping Homeless Women With Children, Lynee Soine, Mary Ann Burg

American University Journal of Gender, Social Policy & the Law

No abstract provided.

If Anybody Ask You Who I Am: An Outsider's Story Of The Duty To Establish Paternity, Lisa Kelly

American University Journal of Gender, Social Policy & the Law

No abstract provided.

Pillow Talk, Richard Hyland

American University Journal of Gender, Social Policy & the Law

No abstract provided.

Children's Task Force Reports, Donald N. Duquette, Cd Stephens

Articles

When the public thinks of children and the law, high-visibility cases like Baby Jessica and Baby Richard come to mind. The human drama of a small child caught up in a titanic custody struggle attracts unrelenting media attention and triggers cries for law reform. Yet for every Baby Jessica and Baby Richard, thousands of children pass through our courts with little public attention but with consequences to them just as momentous and life altering as those cases featured on the national news shows. In 1991 State Bar of Michigan leadership began to ask whether our profession and Michigan's courts are …

Reflections On A Case (Of Motherhood), Jane M. Spinak

Faculty Scholarship

She surveyed my office for signs of conspiracy. We had had two or three telephone conversations that had conveyed my ambivalence about representing her. A former colleague had urged her to call the clinic for help but I was reluctant to accept her case for the clinic: we rarely represented foster parents and the procedural complexity of the case convinced me that I would be unable to assign students to represent this client so late in the semester. I was resigned, however, to help her find a lawyer, both because a former colleague had sent her and because the snippets …

Parents As Fiduciaries, Elizabeth S. Scott, Robert E. Scott

Faculty Scholarship

Traditionally, the law has deferred to the rights of biological parents in regulating the parent-child relationship. More recently, as the emphasis of legal regulation has shifted to protecting children's interests, critics have targeted the traditional focus on parents' rights as impeding the goal of promoting children's welfare. Some contemporary scholars argue instead for a "child-centered perspective," in contrast to the current regime under which biological parents continue to have important legal interests in their relationship with their children. The underlying assumption of this claim is that the rights of parents and the interests of children often are conflicting, and that …

A Maternalistic Approach To Surrogacy: Comment On Richard Epstein's Surrogacy: The Case For Full Contractual Enforcement, Margaret F. Brinig

Journal Articles

Many of the other participants in this Symposium have written extensively about surrogacy. Not only have they contributed to the debate, in some instances they have framed it. In some respects, therefore, I merely thank all of them and chime in. Unlike my fellow panelists, however, I do not think surrogacy merits an enthusiastic, positive response.

In this Comment, I propose to restate objections to specifically enforceable surrogacy contracts from a family-law perspective as well as from the philosophical or psychological roots of family law. I will then reexamine the problems of surrogacy from a contractarian, law-and-economics perspective, showing how …

The Adverse Testimony Privilege, Inalienable Entitlements, And The "Internal Stance": A Response To Professor Regan, Susan H. Williams

Articles by Maurer Faculty

No abstract provided.

Balancing Acts: Crisis, Change, And Continuity In American Family Law, 1890-1990, Michael Grossberg

Articles by Maurer Faculty

No abstract provided.

Domestic Relations, Barry B. Mcgough

Mercer Law Review

Of the forty-six cases decided during the survey year, fifteen are digested in this Article. Two custody cases are of special importance, one dealing with application of federal law and the other with joint custody. The remaining cases address smaller points across a familiar judicial landscape. This Article also highlights amendments to the child support guidelines.

Munchausen Syndrome By Proxy: Broadening The Scope Of Child Abuse, Michael T. Flannery

Law Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Proving The Validity Of Marriage, Peter N. Swisher

Law Faculty Publications

The importance of proving the validity of a marriage is not limited to the practice of family and has far-reaching social, legal, and economic implications in other areas of the law as well. For example, wrongful death statutes in Virginia limit recovery of a statutory beneficiary to the legal spouse rather than the de facto spouse. Other areas of the law including intestate succession and probate law, real property law, Social Security benefits, worker's compensation statutes, insurance benefits, and spousal support rights are likewise directly affected by the validity of a marriage.

Thus, a Virginia practitioner, during the course of …

Abating The Feminization Of Poverty: Changing The Rules Governing Post - Decree Modification Of Child Support Obligations, J. Thomas Oldham

BYU Law Review

No abstract provided.

Public Access: Fortifying The Electronic Soapbox, Jason Roberts

Federal Communications Law Journal

Public access, viewed as the voice on cable for those outside the mainstream, has recently been criticized as nothing more than an unregulated channel for objectionable hate speech and indecent programming. When Congress passed the Cable Television Consumer Protection and Competition Act of 1992, cable operators found themselves in the conflicting role of being liable for indecent and obscene programming on public access, while at the same time unable to exercise any editorial control over access content. All sides are now waiting to see if the Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit will strike down these access rules as …

"Mother," "Parent," And Bias, A. Jasmine Rassam

Indiana Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Bottoms V. Bottoms: A Comment, Douglas A. Steinberg

William & Mary Journal of Race, Gender, and Social Justice

No abstract provided.

Providing Justice For Children In Disputed Adoptions: A Feminist Perspective, Meghan S. Skelton

William & Mary Journal of Race, Gender, and Social Justice

No abstract provided.

In Re Marriage Of Mcdole: Modifying Child Custody By Ignoring Statutory Grounds, Virginia A. Petersen

Washington Law Review

In In re Marriage of McDole, the Washington Supreme Court upheld the modification of a parenting plan that changed the primary residential parent. By relying in part on the mother's interference with visitation, the court not only undermined the important policy underlying the modification statute of maximizing finality in custody determinations, but it also failed to read the modification statute as a whole. The court also inappropriately relied on the mother's move out of the state and continued conflict between the parents. The court further failed to explicitly explain the legal bases for its decision, providing little guidance for future …

Joint Custody As Norm: Solomon Revisited, Alison Harvison Young

Osgoode Hall Law Journal

Most jurisdictions in Canada and the United States have, to a greater or lesser extent, endorsed the notion of joint custody in recent years. The author suggests that-the move toward joint custody has resulted from a combination of two major factors: the notion of parental equality and the application of the best interests of the child test. The growing prominence of equal parental rights has created a strong temptation to approach custody as a Solomonic exercise in dividing the children equally between those with equal rights over them. The indeterminacy of the best interests test may readily encourage custody determinations …

Legal Protection For Victims Of Domestic Violence: A Guide For The Treating Physician, Jane C. Murphy

All Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

A Rejoinder, Larry I. Palmer

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Secondhand Smoke As An Issue In Child Custody/Visitation Disputes, Jeffrey L. Hall

West Virginia Law Review

No abstract provided.

Batterers Beware: West Virginia Responds To Domestic Violence With The Probable Cause Warrantless Arrest Statute, Toni L. Harvey

West Virginia Law Review

No abstract provided.

Defining Marriage And The Family, Herbert W. Titus

William & Mary Bill of Rights Journal

No abstract provided.

Keynote Address To The Symposiuml Defining Families: Gays, Lesbians, And The Meaning Of Family, Beatrice Dohrn

William & Mary Bill of Rights Journal

No abstract provided.

Gay And Lesbian Families: Judicial Assumptions, Scientific Realities, David K. Flaks

William & Mary Bill of Rights Journal

No abstract provided.