Family Law Commons^™

Introduction: Family Court Review Special Issue Dynamic Pedagogy In The Family And Juvenile Law Classroom: Experiential And In-Class Exercises, Meredith Johnson Harbach

Law Faculty Publications

Over the last number of years, the legal academy has placed increasing emphasis on the need to diversify teaching methods, and in particular, has focused on expanding in-class, experiential teaching methods. Educational research confirms that learning experientially has multiple benefits for adult learners, including better retention of material, the ability to explore a more diverse range of representation contexts, the development and use of a broader range of analytical skills, and an emphasis professional collaboration and growth.1Consistent with this evolution of the scholarship on teaching and learning in law school, ABA Standard 303(a)(3) requires all students to complete“ one or …

State V. Michaud, 251 A.3d 9 (Ri 2021)., Blair Robinson

Roger Williams University Law Review

No abstract provided.

Andrade V. Andrade, 252 A.3d 755 (R.I. 2021), Samantha M. Darocha

Roger Williams University Law Review

No abstract provided.

Decurtis V. Visconti, Boren & Campbell Ltd., 252 A.3d 765 (R.I. 2021), Alexus Bonilla

Roger Williams University Law Review

No abstract provided.

2021 Surveys Of Rhode Island Law

Roger Williams University Law Review

No abstract provided.

Calculating “Income” For Domestic Support Obligations In The Wake Of The Covid-19 Pandemic, Kimberly S. Krieg, Stephanie L. Tang

Oklahoma Law Review

No abstract provided.

Dobbs V. Jackson Women’S Health And The Post-Roe Landscape, Yvonne F. Lindgren

Faculty Works

This Article examines some of the important takeaways of the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health decision and the likely reverberations it will have on other areas of law and reproductive healthcare more broadly. The Article proceeds in three parts. Part I examines the majority, concurring, and dissenting opinions to consider what they reveal about the new standard of review for abortion, the shift in power among the members of the Court itself, as well as what the opinion signals might come next. Part II explores the future of abortion in a post-Roe landscape as the abortion rights movement moves from …

How To Bring Your Kids Up Queer: Family Law Realism, Then And Now, Kris Franklin, Noa Ben-Asher

Articles & Chapters

This essay, in honor of Paula Ettelbrick’s vast contributions to family law, examines a new site of conflict - the legal treatment of transgender children and youth - for which Ettelbrick’s work, alongside Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s seminal essay, How to Bring Your Kids up Gay (1991) are fundamental. We apply what we believe to be Ettelbrick’s emphasis on having legal structures recognize the reality and lives of queer people – what we call “family law realism” – to the current social and legal struggles that are unfortunately being fought upon the bodies of transgender identified children and youth. We recommend …

How To Bring Your Kids Up Queer: Family Law Realism, Then And Now, Kris Franklin, Noa Ben-Asher

Faculty Publications

(Excerpt)

Paula Ettelbrick fought for us.

As a pragmatic and radical litigator, Ettelbrick spent years trying to use a frequently uncomprehending and often outright hostile court system to protect LGBTQ+ Americans. While her work took her into the many areas of law that touched queer lives, a special focus and passion of her advocacy was reserved for queer families.

Paula also tried to warn us.

In the absence of legal recognition for the families we construct, queer lives are rendered not just invisible but virtually nonexistent; we become legal strangers to our loved ones in ways that violently obliterate our …

An Unintended Abolition: Family Regulation During The Covid-19 Crisis, Anna Arons

Faculty Publications

In a typical year, New York City’s vast family regulation system, fueled by an army of mandated reporters, investigates tens of thousands of reports of child neglect and abuse, policing almost exclusively poor Black and Latinx families even as the government provides those families extremely limited support. When the City shut down in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, this system shrunk in almost every conceivable way as mandated reporters retreated, caseworkers adopted less intrusive investigatory tactics, and family courts constrained their operations. The number of reports fell, the number of cases filed in court fell, and the number of …

The Institutions Of Family Law, Clare Huntington

Faculty Scholarship

Family law scholarship is thriving, with scholars using varied methodologies to analyze intimate partner violence, cohabitation, child maltreatment, juvenile misconduct, and child custody, to name but a few areas of study. Despite the richness of this discourse, however, most family law scholars ignore a key tool deployed in virtually every other legal-academic domain: institutional analysis.

This methodology, which plays a foundational role in legal scholarship, focuses on four basic questions. Scholars often begin empirically, identifying the specific legal, social, and economic institutions that shape an area of legal regulation. Beyond descriptive accounts, scholars analyze how authority is and should be …

The Restatement Of The Law, Children And The Law: A Blueprint For Reforming The Child Welfare System, Clare Huntington

Faculty Scholarship

As part of the special issue on the foster care system, this essay challenges the assumption that all the children who are in foster care should be in foster care. The essay first describes the familiar—and still persuasive—argument that foster care does not serve the interests of most children and families. It then brings a new lens to bear on this argument by describing the work of the American Law Institute's Restatement of the Law, Children and the Law, which provides a blueprint for shrinking the child welfare system and promoting child well-being.

Fringe Inheriting: Probate Avoidance At Both Ends Of The Wealth Spectrum, Allison Anna Tait

Law Faculty Publications

The principal system in the United States for transferring wealth from one generation to the next - the probate system - is a historically and steadfastly public one. Probate is a set of public processes and a court system created to situate and facilitate wealth transfer, giving legal imprimatur to the distribution of family money. Nevertheless, while the probate system may be the central and most conventional system for transferring wealth, not all families and individuals avail themselves of the system. The broad swath of families who avail themselves of the services and certain benefits of the probate system are, …

Debt Governance, Wealth Management, And The Uneven Burdens Of Child Support, Allison Anna Tait

Law Faculty Publications

Child support is a ubiquitous kind of debt, common to all income and wealth levels, with data showing that approximately 30% of the U.S. adult population has either been subject to paying child support or has received it. Across this field of child support debt, however, unpaid obligations look different for everyone, and in particular the experiences around child support debt diverge radically for low-income populations and high-wealth ones. On the low-income end of the spectrum, child support debt is a sophisticated and adaptive governance technology that disciplines and penalizes those living in or near poverty. Being in child support …

Judicial Workbook On Bill C-92 — An Act Respecting First Nations, Inuit And Métis Children, Youth And Families, Hadley Friedland, Naiomi Metallic, Koren Lightning-Earle

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

Objective: Based on the purpose, history, textual wording and relevant interpretative principles, these are the approaches to the provisions of the Act that we believe will best achieve its purpose, which Canada has identified as “to protect and ensure the well-being of Indigenous children, families and communities by promoting culturally sensitive child welfare services, with the goal of putting an end to the overrepresentation of Indigenous children in child and family services systems."

A Gender-Based Approach To Historical Child Support: Comment On Colucci V Colucci, Jodi Lazare, Kelsey Warr

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

In June 2021 the Supreme Court of Canada (the “Court”) released Colucci v Colucci, its second decision in twelve months dealing with the complex subject of historical (commonly referred to as retroactive) child support. The case worked a significant shift in the law, arguably the first major revision to the law since the Court’s initial consideration of historical child support in DBS, in 2006. This comment suggests that Colucci represents a new understanding of the way that claims for historical child support should be considered in Canadian family law. The comment argues that in changing the applicable framework, …

The Boundaries Of Multi-Parentage, Jessica Feinberg

Faculty Publications

Multi-parentage has arrived. In recent years, a growing number of courts and legislatures have recognized that a child may have more than two legal parents. A number of significant societal, medical, and legal developments have contributed to the trend toward multi-parentage recognition. The traditional family structure of a married different-sex couple and their biological children currently represents only a minority of U.S. families. Stepparents, non-marital partners of legal parents, and extended family members often play a significant role in children’s lives, and it has become increasingly common for same-sex couples to welcome children into their families. In addition, advancements in …

A Quiet Revolution: How Judicial Discipline Essentially Eliminated Foster Care And Nearly Went Unnoticed., Melissa Carter, Christopher Church, Vivek Sankaran

Articles

This Article argues that juvenile court judges can safely reduce the number of children entering foster care by faithfully and rigorously applying the law. Judges often fail to perform this core functon when a state child welfare agency separates a child from their family. Judges must perform their role as impartial gatekeeper despite the temptation to be "omnipotent moral busybodies".

The Most Dangerous Branch Of Science? Reining In Rogue Research And Reckless Experimentation In Social Services, James G. Dwyer

Faculty Publications

Most people are unaware how much public policy is either lacking in any empirical-research support or driven by bad research. Political actors motivated by ideology or donor/constituent demands propose new government practices—in areas ranging from policing to funding of treatments for gender dysphoria in youth to welfare-qualification rules—that will greatly impact people’s lives, and if anyone asks what basis they have for thinking the impact will be good, they can readily find some study to support their case. Especially when powerless populations are put at risk, neither the legislative process nor peer review in the publication process provides a real …

Comment: Without Effective Lawyers, Do More Determinate Legal Standards Really Matter?, Vivek S. Sankaran

Articles

In Confronting Indeterminacy and Bias in Child Protection Law, Professor Josh Gupta-Kagan wisely proposes that the child protection system needs more precise legal standards, not just to limit unnecessary state intrusion in the lives of families, but to also define the scope of that intrusion if it must occur. But as I read his piece, a question repeatedly ran through my mind - will the changes he proposes have any impact if parents in the child protection system continue to have ineffective lawyers representing them?