Family Law Commons^™

Conscientious Objection To Creating Same-Sex Unions: An International Analysis, Bruce Macdougall, Elsje Bonthuys, Kenneth Mck. Norrie, Marjolein Van Den Brink

All Faculty Publications

In jurisdictions that recognize same-sex marriages and unions, the question arises as to the extent to which civic officials who normally preside at such unions can refuse such participation for religious reasons. This paper examines this issue in the context of four jurisdictions: Scotland, Canada, the Netherlands and South Africa. What is striking is how different is the process of reaching a resolution in each jurisdiction, though the actual result might be the same. This difference arises because of the jurisdiction-specific reasons why same-sex marriages and unions are recognized, how they are recognized, the status of the officers who preside …

Hospital Visitation: The Forgotten Gay Rights Struggle, 45 J. Marshall L. Rev. 939 (2012), Meredith Fileff

UIC Law Review

No abstract provided.

Against The New Maternalism, Naomi Mezey, Cornelia T. L. Pillard

Michigan Journal of Gender & Law

Parenting is a major preoccupation in law and culture. As a result of efforts of the American women's movement over the past forty years, the legal parent is, for the first time in history, sex-neutral. Our law has abandoned restrictions on women's education, employment, and civic participation that sprang from and reinforced beliefs about the primacy of motherhood as women's best destiny. On the flip side, U.S. law now also generally rejects formal constraints on men's family roles by requiring sex-neutrality of laws regulating custody, adoption, alimony, spousal benefits, and the like. The official de-linking of presumptive parenting roles from …

Civil Marriage: Threat To Democracy, Jessica Knouse

Michigan Journal of Gender & Law

This Article argues that civil marriage and democracy are inherently incompatible, whether assessed from a transcultural perspective that reduces them to their most universal aspects or a culturally situated perspective that accounts for their uniquely American elaborations. Across virtually all cultures, civil marriage privileges sexual partners by offering them exclusive access to highly desirable government benefits, while democracy presupposes liberty and equality. When governments privilege sexual partners, they effectively deprive their citizens of liberty by encouraging them to enter sexual partnerships rather than selfdetermining based on their own preferences; they effectively deprive their citizens of equality by establishing insidious status …

The Devil Comes To Kansas: A Story Of Free Love, Sexual Privacy, And The Law, Charles J. Reid Jr.

Michigan Journal of Gender & Law

On Sunday, September 19, 1886, Moses Harman, the editor of the radical newspaper Lucifer the Light-Bearer, presided over an inherently contradictory event-a free-love marriage ceremony between his associate editor, the thirty-seven-year-old Edwin Walker, and Moses' own daughter, the sixteen-year-old Lillian. The case that the two Harmans and Walker wished to present aimed to transform marriage from a public to a private relationship and from a permanent and exclusive one to a temporary one that permitted potentially many partners. State v. Walker and its parties have received some scholarly notice, but the truly radical quality of the arguments Moses, Edwin, and …

Displaced Mothers, Absent And Unnatural Fathers: Lgbt Transracial Adoption, Kim H. Pearson

Michigan Journal of Gender & Law

While some might believe that Black versus gay discourse only surfaces in highly politicized settings like the military and marriage, it holds sway in the area of LGBT transracial adoption. LGBT transracial adoptions are a relatively small percentage of all adoptions, which include private adoptions, LGBT second-parent adoptions, and step-parent adoptions, but they are an important site for interrogating the Black versus gay discourse because adoption and custody decisions often address parent-child transmission. When claims intersect, as they do in a case where a White LGBT foster parent and a Black maternal grandmother dispute the adoption of a Black child, …

Separation, Deportation, Termination, Marcia A. Yablon-Zug

Faculty Publications

There is a growing practice of separating immigrant children from their deportable parents. Parental fitness is no longer the standard with regard to undocumented immigrant parents. Increasingly, fit undocumented parents must convince courts and welfare agencies that continuing or resuming parental custody is in their child’s best interest. This requirement is unique to immigrant parents and can have a disastrous impact on their ability to retain custody of their children. Best interest decisions are highly subjective and courts and agencies increasingly base their custody determinations on subjective criteria such as negative perceptions regarding undocumented immigrants and their countries of origin, …

Criminal Child Neglect And The Free Range Kid: Is Overprotective Parenting The New Standard Of Care?, David Pimentel

Articles

No abstract provided.

Best Outcomes For Indian Children, Loa L. Porter, Patina Park Zink, Angela R. Gebhardt, Mark Ells, Michelle Graef

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

The Wisconsin Department of Children and Families and the Midwest Child Welfare Implementation Center are collaborating with Wisconsin's tribes and county child welfare agencies to improve outcomes for Indian children by systemically implementing the Wisconsin Indian Child Welfare Act (WICWA).This groundbreaking coUaboration wiU increase practitioners' understanding ofthe requirements of WICWA and the need for those requirements, enhance communication and coordination between all stakeholders responsible for the welfare of Indian children in Wisconsin; it is designed to effect the systemic integration of the philosophical underpinnings of WICWA.

In December 2009, Governor James Doyle signed the Wisconsin Indian Child Welfare Act, signaling …

Changing The Narrative Of Child Welfare, Matthew I. Fraidin

Journal Articles

No abstract provided.

Fifty Years Of Family Law Practice The Evolving Role Of The Family Law Attorney, Barbara Glesner Fines

Faculty Works

No abstract provided.

Psychological Parentage, Troxel, And The Best Interests Of The Child, Rebecca L. Scharf

Scholarly Works

No abstract provided.

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 …

Book Review: Families And The Law: Cases And Commentary By Mary Jane Mossman, Susan Boyd

Canadian Journal of Family Law

No abstract provided.

Elder Exploitation Through Predatory Marriage, Dorota Miler

Canadian Journal of Family Law

The paper exposes a pattern of exploitation wherein financially motivated caregivers manipulate elders into marrying them to access and, subsequently, to inherit their estate. The article presents, analyzes and defines a case of predatory marriage. Further, it critically considers suggestions proposed by Canadian scholars and provides an alternative remedy, developed through comparative study of Canadian, Californian and German law. Through the paper, the author intends to inspire further, fruitful debate.

Autonomous Motherhood And The Law: Exploring The Narratives Of Canada’S Single Mothers By Choice, Fiona Kelly

Canadian Journal of Family Law

In the past three decades, single mothers by choice (SMCs) have emerged as a new and rapidly growing component of Canada's single mother population. SMCs are women who choose to have a child, usually via some form of assisted conception, with the intention that they be their child's sole parent. While SMCs are part of an increasing number of non-normative family configurations in Canada, they pose some unique social and legal questions. However, unlike some other non-normative families, such as lesbian and gay families, SMCs have received very little academic attention and almost none pertaining to the role of law …

Book Review: Not The Marrying Kind: A Feminist Critique Of Same-Sex Marriage By Nicola Barker, Gillian Calder

Canadian Journal of Family Law

No abstract provided.

A Tale Of Three Families: Historical Households, Earned Belonging, And Natural Connections, Allison Anna Tait

Law Faculty Publications

The work of this Article is to present a new and synthetic reading of cases about wives, illegitimate children, and unwed fathers that follows these three logics, revealing how they weave together and why earned belonging provides the strongest support for Ginsburg's original vision of an equalized household.

Legal Regulation Of Twenty-First-Century Families, Marsha Garrison, Elizabeth S. Scott

Faculty Scholarship

This post includes the table of contents, introduction and our comment as the editors of an interdisciplinary volume that explores the implications for law and policy of changes in marriage and family over the past half century. The volume includes chapters by leading social science researchers and family law scholars whose work focuses on these matters. The book captures the complexity of debates about the regulation of marriage and families and the best policy paths forward, through contributions by authors with widely varying perspectives. But it also aims to inform these debates by situating them in a framework grounded in …

The Curious Relationship Of Marriage And Freedom, Katherine M. Franke

Faculty Scholarship

Marriage is surely at a crossroad, as the chapters in this volume so richly attest. In fact, marriage may be at more than one crossroad, some pointing toward new, uncharted terrain, others amounting to intersections we have visited before. My principal interest in exploring this dynamic moment in the evolution of the institution of marriage is to better understand why and how today's marriage equality movement for same-sex couples might benefit from lessons learned by African Americans when they too were allowed to marry for the first time in the immediate post–Civil War era. I find it curious that the …