Family Law Commons^™

Building Resilience In Foster Children: The Role Of The Child's Advocate, Frank E. Vandervort, James Henry, Mark A. Sloane

Articles

This Article provides an introduction to, and brief overview of trauma, its impact upon foster children, and steps children's advocates" can take to lessen or ameliorate the impact of trauma upon their clients. This Article begins in Part 11 by defining relevant terms. Part III addresses the prevalence of trauma among children entering the child welfare system. Part IV considers the neurodevelopmental (i.e., the developing brain) impact of trauma on children and will explore how that trauma may manifest emotionally and behaviorally. With this foundation in place, Part V discusses the need for a comprehensive trauma assessment including a thorough …

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 …

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.

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 …

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 …

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 …

Renegotiating The Social Contract, Jennifer S. Hendricks

Publications

This review of The Supportive State: Families, Government and America’s Political Ideals highlights Maxine Eichner’s important theoretical contributions to both liberal political theory and feminist theory, applauding her success in reforming liberalism to account for dependency, vulnerability, and families. The review then considers some implications of Eichner’s proposals and their likely reception among feminists. It concludes that The Supportive State is a sound and inspiring response to recent calls that feminist theory move from being strictly a school of criticism to developing a theory of governance.

The Role Of Equipoise In Family Law, Deborah Cantrell

Publications

Scholars reviewing family law over the last twenty years have described the field as having undergone a revolution. While true, both scholars and front-line family law advocates have failed to invent a satisfying end to the revolution. This Article takes up that challenge and offers a novel way forward, It identifies two translation challenges that have prevented the revolution from reaching its end. The first challenge is translating reform so that its benefits accrue equally across all kinds of participants--rich and poor, those with lawyers and those without. The second challenge is translating theory into on-the-ground practices useful to family …

Child Support Guidelines And Divorce Incentives, Margaret F. Brinig, Douglas W. Allen

Journal Articles

A child support guideline is a formula used to calculate support payments based on a few family characteristics. Guidelines began replacing court awarded support payments in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and were eventually mandated by the federal government in 1988. Two fundamentally different types of guidelines are used: percentage of obligor income, and income shares models. This paper explores the incentives to divorce under the two schemes, and uses the NLSY data set to test the key predictions. We find that percentage of obligor income models are destabilizing for some families with high incomes. This may explain why …

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

Kentucky Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Love's Labor's Lost: Marry For Love, Copyright Work Made-For-Hire, And Alienate At Your Leisure, Llewellyn Joseph Gibbons

Kentucky Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Don't Forget Dad: Addressing Women's Poverty By Rethinking Forced And Outdated Child Support Policies, Daniel L. Hatcher

All Faculty Scholarship

In the dialogues regarding reducing poverty among women, especially mothers, the inextricably linked issues surrounding low-income men must be simultaneously considered. In social policy addressing women’s poverty, poor fathers have too often been considered primarily as an enemy to be pursued rather than a fellow victim of poverty’s wrath, and potential partner towards the cure. We want someone to blame, and many assume that poor single mothers are best served by always being encouraged — and even forced — to pursue the noncustodial fathers for financial support through adversarial means. Mothers applying for public assistance are forced to sue the …

Shadow Works And Shadow Markets: How Privatization Of Welfare Services Produces An Alternative Market, Bridgette Baldwin

Faculty Scholarship

The Author attempts to fuse Ivan Illich’s misplaced ideas of gender roles with how privatization of welfare services has legitimized a shadow economy and work through mandated community service jobs. The Article provides a historical perspective of how social services were handled, leading to the current cost/benefit legacy of welfare privatization utilized by the Wisconsin Works program (W-2). Wisconsin’s program requires women recipients to engage in volunteer work, creating a subsidized labor force for private agencies based on the presumption that work, even meaningless and menial tasks, establishes job-readiness for women on welfare. The Author suggests that we need to …