Family Law Commons^™

Characteristics Of Attorneys Representing Children In Child Welfare Cases, Britany Orlebeke, Andrew Zinn, Xiaomeng Zhou, Donald N. Duquette

Articles

Every day in state and local courts throughout the United States, judges are called upon to decide who should have the responsibility for the immediate and long-term care of neglected and abused children. Federal recognition of the right to independent advocacy for children subject to these proceedings originates with the 1974 Federal Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act (CAPTA). As a condition of receiving federal funds for child abuse prevention services through CAPTA, states must provide for the appointment of an appropriately trained guardian ad litem (GAL) for every child whose case results in a judicial proceeding. A guardian ad …

For Men Only: A Gap In The Rules Allows Sex Discrimination To Avoid Ethical Challenge, Michelle N. Struffolino

American University Journal of Gender, Social Policy & the Law

The billboard states: “Divorce: Men Only.” The reaction is one of confusion. Something just does not seem right. Isn’t this discrimination? Is the system willing to allow this message because the need to protect men’s rights in divorce outweighs the systemic and societal harms associated with the message?

Although this article focuses on the ethical issues associated with firms that exclude women from the pool of potential divorce clients, the existence of women only law firms is acknowledged. The analysis of the ethical issues raised by these gender specific firms is somewhat the same regardless of what gender is excluded. …

The Political Economy And Legal Regulation Of Transnational Commercial Surrogate, Cyra Akila Choudhury

Faculty Publications

This Article breaks new ground by closely reading the emerging ethnographic accounts of surrogacy to establish that current feminist frames are incomplete. It incorporates the political economy of surrogacy, the economic relationship of surrogacy to the Indian state, and the political economy of surrogates’ families, which have all been missing from the current dialogue. The Article concludes that the benefits of surrogate labor outweigh its disadvantages and develops a new framework — of surrogacy as labor — that will, for the first time, protect the surrogate as worker.Surrogacy, as a fairly open regulatory field, provides feminists with a unique opportunity …

From Contract To Status: Collaboration And The Evolution Of Novel Family Relationships, Elizabeth S. Scott, Robert E. Scott

Faculty Scholarship

The past decade has witnessed dramatic changes in public atti- tudes about and legal status for same-sex couples who wish to marry. These changes demonstrate that the legal conception of the family is no longer limited to traditional marriage. They also raise the possibility that other relationships – cohabiting couples and their children, voluntary kin groups, multigenerational groups, and polygamists – might gain legal recognition as families. This Article probes the challenges faced by aspiring families and the means by which they could attain their goal. It builds on the premise that the state remains committed to social-welfare criteria for …

Taxing Compensatory Stock Rights Transferred In Divorce, Gregg Polsky, Kathleen Delaney Thomas

Scholarly Works

Stock-based compensation has become increasingly prevalent in recent years. As a result, many high net worth divorces now result in the transfer of compensatory stock rights from the employee spouse to the nonemployee spouse as part of the marital settlement. Despite this growing trend, the tax consequences of these transfers have not yet been explored fully. This Article endeavors to fill this void and explain both the planning opportunities and potential pitfalls in transferring compensatory stock rights in divorce. These transfers can shift ordinary income from a high-bracket spouse to a lower-bracket spouse, creating a tax surplus that enlarges the …

Book Review: Casting Of The Canon: Family Law Reimagined,, Jill Elaine Hasday, Laurie S. Kohn

Child and Family Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Mother, May I? No, You May Not! Parental Consent Requirements For Students To Participate In Student-Led Clubs At Public Schools, Kelly Sherrill Linkous Esq., J.D., Ph.D.

Child and Family Law Journal

No abstract provided.

The Legisprudence Of Florida's Alimony Reform: Why Draconic Family Law Continues To Prevail In A Modern Society, Joseph P. Formoso

Child and Family Law Journal

No abstract provided.

The Incipient Stages Of A Nation Recognizing Same-Sex Marriages And The Battles Their Children Face, Gina I. Thomas

Child and Family Law Journal

No abstract provided.

The New Permanency, Joshua Gupta-Kagan

Faculty Scholarship

Permanency is a pillar of child welfare law; children generally do better with legally permanent caretakers than in temporary foster care. Historically, when foster children cannot reunify with their parents, states have sought to terminate parental rights and find adoptive families. But recent legal reforms have created a continuum of permanency options, many of which permit ongoing legal relationships with biological parents and do not require termination of biological parents’ rights. Research has demonstrated that such options are as lasting as adoption, and can help more children leave foster care to legally permanent caretakers. This continuum promises to empower families …

Non-Exclusive Adoption And Child Welfare, Joshua Gupta-Kagan

Faculty Scholarship

This Article proposes that child welfare law permit the non-exclusive adoption of foster children who cannot reunify with their parents — that is, adoption by foster parents without severing children’s legal relationships with their biological parents. Present law imposes a choice: extended family members or other foster parents may adopt foster children exclusively — and terminate the legal relationship between the child and biological parents — or they may become guardians — which preserves parent–child relationships but denies foster parents the legal title of “parent,” even when they are long-term primary caretakers.

Non-exclusive adoption would respect the lived reality of …

Postmarital Family Law: A Legal Structure For Nonmarital Families, Clare Huntington

Faculty Scholarship

Family law is based on marriage, but family life increasingly is not. The American family is undergoing a seismic shift, with marriage rates steadily declining and more than four in ten children now born to unmarried parents. Children of unmarried parents fall far behind children of married parents on a variety of metrics, contributing to stark inequality among children. Poverty and related factors explain much of this differential, but new sociological evidence highlights family structure — particularly friction and dislocation between unmarried parents after their relationship ends — as a crucial part of the problem. As the trend toward nonmarital …

Children's Health In A Legal Framework, Elizabeth S. Scott, Clare Huntington

Faculty Scholarship

The interdisciplinary periodical Future of Children has dedicated an issue to children’s health policy. This contribution to the issue maps the legal landscape influencing policy choices. The authors demonstrate that in the U.S. legal system, parents have robust rights, grounded in the Constitution, to make decisions concerning their children’s health and medical treatment. Following from its commitment to parental rights, the system typically assumes the interests of parents and children are aligned, even when that assumption seems questionable. Thus, for example, parents who would limit their children’s access to health care on the basis of the parents’ religious belief have …

Obergefell'S Conservatism: Reifying Familial Fronts, Clare Huntington

Faculty Scholarship

I am delighted with the result in Obergefell v. Hodges, but I am unhappy with the Court’s reasoning. In lieu of a straightforward, and far more defensible, decision based purely on the Equal Protection Clause, Justice Kennedy’s reliance on the Due Process Clause is deeply problematic.

A substantive due process analysis required the Court to define marriage and explain its social importance. This meant the Court had to choose between competing images — social fronts — of marriage. If it had used an equal protection analysis, the Court would not have had to decide whether marriage is traditional or …

Confronting Totalitarianism At Home: The Roots Of European Privacy Protections, Hannah Bloch-Wehba

Faculty Scholarship

In the last several years, a consensus has developed that a wide gulf exists between European and American privacy law, although division still exists on whether European law is “more protective” or simply “home to different intuitive sensibilities” than American law. Existing research on the development of European privacy law has focused on two areas: nineteenth-century traditions of honor and dueling, which gave rise to a concept of privacy linked to dignity, and the totalitarian dictatorships of the twentieth century, in reaction to which privacy protected liberty. This Article offers a contrasting view by showing that European privacy law in …

Robotic Marriage And The Law, Mark Goldfeder, Yosef Razin

Scholarly Works

The United States, and the world at large, is in the midst of a family law revolution that will fundamentally change our very conception of family. Ethical challenges to age-old ideas have prompted people to ask foundational questions, such as how and why our most important personal relationships evolved. In a world where same-sex marriage has been legalized, it is only natural to wonder who marriage may include in the future. This essay explores the question of whether a human and a robot could ever legally marry in the United States. Through a thought experiment, it examines the legal and …

Surrogates In Quebec: The Good, The Bad And The Foreigner, Régine Tremblay

All Faculty Publications

The regime for the formal establishment of parent-child relationships in the province of Quebec was substantially modified in 2002 in order to achieve equality. Reforms to filiation – the legal bond connecting child and mother or child and father – in Quebec provided means for same-sex couples to adopt, for lesbian couples to conceive using donated sperm and clarified the filiation of children born of assisted procreation. This ‘successful’ reform in terms of equality left untouched an existing rule justified by women’s equality, namely, what the civil law calls the absolute nullity of surrogacy agreements. Surrogacy raises questions about what …

Sans Foi, Ni Loi. Appearances Of Conjugality And Lawless Love, Régine Tremblay

All Faculty Publications

This chapter deals with paradigm shifts in the legal regulation of adult intimate relationships. It includes the shifts from a unique conjugality to the multiplication of conjugalities, from marriage until death do us part to multiple subsequent unions, and from mimicking marriage by necessity to mimicking marriage by choice. Such changes open the floor for questions about the relevance of regulating adult intimate relationships today, or at the very least, about the compulsion to conceive of this kind of relationship as the cornerstone of Canadian family law. As such, it questions shifts in latent elements of the regulation of conjugality …

Family Court, Queens County, In The Matter Of Joseph G., Annette Thompson

Touro Law Review

No abstract provided.

Lawrence V. Texas: The Decision And Its Implications For The Future, Martin A. Schwartz

Touro Law Review

No abstract provided.