Family Law Commons^™

Pregnant Workers Fairness Acts: Advancing A Progressive Policy In Both Red And Blue America, Deborah Widiss

Articles by Maurer Faculty

Pregnant workers often need small changes—such as permission to sit on a stool or to avoid heavy lifting—to stay on the job safely through a pregnancy. In the past decade, twenty-five states have passed laws that guarantee pregnant employees a right to reasonable accommodations at work. Despite the stark partisan divide in contemporary America, the laws have passed in both Republican- and Democratic-controlled states. This Essay offers the first detailed case study of this remarkably effective campaign, and it shows how it laid the groundwork for analogous federal legislation, passed in December 2022, that ensures workers across the country will …

Mandatory Child Custody Mediation: A Call On California To Protect Domestic Violence Survivors, Anne M. Sidwell

University of San Francisco Law Review

No abstract provided.

Disrupting Carceral Logic In Family Policing, Cynthia Godsoe

Michigan Law Review

A Review of Torn Apart: How the Child Welfare System Destroys Black Families and How Abolition Can Build a Safer World, By Dorothy Roberts.

Corporate Governance And Gender Equality: A Study Of Comply-Or-Explain Disclosure Regulation, Aaron A. Dhir, Sarah Kaplan, Maria Arabella Robles

Seattle University Law Review

In 2020, the Nasdaq Stock Market filed a proposal with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission seeking permission to adopt a board diversity-related disclosure requirement for its listed companies. In 2021, the SEC approved the proposal, thus entrenching Nasdaq’s position as the most significant stock exchange to date to mandate listing rules that reflect the intention of diversifying corporate boardrooms. Nasdaq’s movement into the diversity space is not the first attempt to address homogeneous boards in the U.S. In 2009, the SEC adopted a rule requiring publicly traded firms to report on whether they consider diversity in identifying director nominees. …

Judicial Ethics And The Eradication Of Racism, Dontay Proctor-Mills

Seattle University Law Review

In 2020, the Washington Supreme Court entrusted the legal community with working to eradicate racism from its legal system. Soon after, Washington’s Commission on Judicial Conduct (hereinafter the Commission) received a complaint about a bus ad for North Seattle College featuring King County Superior Court Judge David Keenan. Along with a photo of Judge Keenan’s face, the ad included the following language: “A Superior Court Judge, David Keenan got into law in part to advocate for marginalized communities. David’s changing the world. He started at North.” The Commission admonished Judge Keenan for violating the Code of Judicial Conduct, in part …

Table Of Contents, Seattle University Law Review

Seattle University Law Review

Table of Contents

Why Corporate Boards Should Include Lgbtq+ People, Jeremy Mcclane, Darren Rosenblum

Seattle University Law Review

Corporate boardrooms sit at the heart of most of society’s most consequential decisions but fall far short of the diversity of our society. The current movement toward board diversification aims to remedy the underrepresentation of marginalized groups on corporate boards. More recently, some efforts have included LGBTQ+ people, even though the basis for their inclusion on corporate boards remains largely unstated. This Article examines both the normative and instrumental bases for LGBTQ+ inclusion in board diversity initiatives, articulating unspoken assumptions and linking LGBTQ+ people to the broader inclusion effort. In so doing, it begins to surface the unique issues LGBTQ+ …

Out Of Bounds?: Abortion, Choice Of Law, And A Modest Role For Congress, Susan Frelich Appleton

Scholarship@WashULaw

This invited contribution to a symposium on the multiple intersections of family law and constitutional law grapples with the emerging problems of jurisdictional competition and choice of law in interstate abortion situations in the wake of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization—as abortion-hostile states seek to impose restrictions beyond their borders and welcoming states seek to become havens for abortion patients, regardless of their domicile. Grounded in a conflict-of-laws perspective, the essay lays out the interstate abortion chaos invited by Dobbs and the threat to our federal system that it presents, given Congress’s failure to codify a national right to …

Reflections On “Personal Responsibility” After Covid And Dobbs: Doubling Down On Privacy, Susan Frelich Appleton, Laura A. Rosenbury

Scholarship@WashULaw

This essay uses lenses of gender, race, marriage, and work to trace understandings of “personal responsibility” in laws, policies, and conversations about public support in the United States over three time periods: (I) the pre-COVID era, from the beginning of the American “welfare state” through the start of the Trump administration; (II) the pandemic years; and (III) the present post-pandemic period. We sought to explore the possibility that COVID and the assistance programs it inspired might have reshaped the notion of personal responsibility and unsettled assumptions about privacy and dependency. In fact, a mixed picture emerges. On the one hand, …

Are Parents More Than Money? Proposing Reform Of North Carolina's Wage Imputation Doctrine In Child Support Cases, Scott Daubenspeck

Campbell Law Review

North Carolina's child support regime exists as a composite of three sources of law: statutes, case law, and the North Carolina Child Support Guidelines. These sources have not evolved in tandem to produce a coherent synthesis of policy rationales. One aspect of the law that implicates conflicting policy goals is the use of a parent's potential income instead of their actual income at the time oftrial (a practice often referred to as "wage imputation'). The Guidelines are a synthesis ofstatutes and case law predicated on the "income shares" model, the ostensible goal of which is to provide children with the …

The History Of The Pennsylvania Rules Of Domestic Relations, Pennsylvania Rules Of Civil Procedure §§1900- 1959 (1980-2022), Joel Fishman, Hailey E. Maurer

Law Faculty Publications

The adoption of the Pennsylvania Divorce Code on April 2, 1980, P.L. 63, Act 1980-26 was the second major change of the Divorce Law since 1785. “The Divorce Law,” May 2, 1929 P.L. 1237, 23 P.S. § 63 authorized local rules. The new 1980 act created three major features not found in the earlier act: no-fault divorce, alimony, and equitable distribution of property. For an early discussion of the new Code, see Lynne Z. Gold-Bikin and Jack A. Rounick, The New Pennsylvania Divorce Code, 25 Vill. L. Rev. 617 (1980), at https://digitalcommons.law.villanova.edu/vlr/ vol25/iss4/2. The results of the statutory law resulted …

The Empty Promise Of The Fourth Amendment In The Family Regulation System, Anna Arons

Faculty Publications

Each year, state agents search the homes of hundreds of thousands of families across the United States under the auspices of the family regulation system. Through these searches—required elements of investigations into allegations of child maltreatment in virtually every jurisdiction—state agents invade the home, the most protected space in Fourth Amendment jurisprudence. Accordingly, federal courts agree that the Fourth Amendment’s warrant requirement applies to family regulation home searches. But almost universally, the abstract recognition of Fourth Amendment protections runs up against a concrete expectation on the ground that state actors should have easy and expansive access to families’ homes. Legislatures …

Four Essential Tips For New Attorneys Working With Children And Families, Jennifer Baum

Faculty Publications

(Excerpt)

Congratulations! You’ve 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 on behalf of parents and guardians. Or maybe you are in private practice, and this is your first pro bono experience working on a family, immigration, 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, or new to this area of the …

The Ali Principles Of The Law Of Family Dissolution: Addressing Inequality Through Functional Regulation, Linda C. Mcclain, Douglas Nejamie

Faculty Scholarship

As part of a volume commemorating the American Law Institute on its centennial, this Essay reflects on the ALI Principles of the Law of Family Dissolution. We show how the Principles’ drafters intervened in cutting-edge issues at a time of flux in family law in ways that elaborated a progressive agenda that would continue to gain traction in the years after the Principles’ publication in 2000. Beginning from the assumption that family law should reflect how people actually live, the drafters developed a functional, rather than formal, approach to legal regulation. Such an approach, they believed, could vindicate commitments to …

Just And Equitable, But Not Practicable: The Problems Of A Loosely Factored Spousal Support Framework In Oregon And Potential Solutions, Aime Lee Ohlmann

Lewis & Clark Law Review

Spousal support in Oregon, as in many states, is based upon a loosely factored framework that allows wide judicial discretion and limited predictability for practitioners. This makes routine settlement of the issue of spousal support challenging and increases litigation. Many states and organizations have developed frameworks for spousal support “calculators” or “formulas” that provide more predictable and consistent results for families and practitioners and better meets the established goals of spousal support. This Note explores the problems of a loosely factored framework, what solutions exist in other states, and what solutions may be implemented in Oregon.

The New Orleans Transformation: Foster Care As A Rare, Time-Limited Intervention, Josh Gupta-Kagan, Christopher Church, Melissa Carter, Vivek Sankaran, Andrew Barclay

Lewis & Clark Law Review

This Article offers an initial evaluation of one reformed child protection system—New Orleans, Louisiana—and describes how a system that dramatically reduces the number of children in foster care might look. This system shows how a major metropolitan area can shrink its daily population of children in foster care to the low double digits, which would correspond to a reduction of the national daily foster care population by about 360,000. This reduction was mostly due to sending children home—usually to the homes from which they were removed—within days or weeks of removal, raising questions about the necessity of the original removal. …

Parens Patriae After The Pandemic, Meredith Johnson Harbach

Law Faculty Publications

The COVID-19 pandemic prompted extraordinary state action to protect American children. Acting in its longstanding role as parens patriae, the state stepped in to protect children and their families from the ravages of the pandemic as well as from the dramatic upheaval it precipitated. This Article will evaluate the state’s pandemic response vis-à-vis children and their families, mining the experience for lessons learned and possible ways forward. Specifically, this project will argue that the state’s pandemic response represented a departure from the state’s conventional approach to parens patriae. Conventional practice prior to the pandemic was characterized by a state model …

Lacera V. Department Of Children, Youth, And Families, 272 A.3d 1064 (R.I. 2022), Hilary L. Levey Friedman

Roger Williams University Law Review

No abstract provided.

In Re Lucas D., 272 A.3d 109 (R.I. 2022), Kat L. Mccorkle

Roger Williams University Law Review

No abstract provided.

In Re Mandy M., 239 A.3d 1152, 1155 (R.I. 2020), Jacklyn Henry

Roger Williams University Law Review

No abstract provided.