Law and Society Commons^™

Remembering Professor Judith Mosoff, Isabel Grant, Susan B. Boyd

Canadian Journal of Family Law

No abstract provided.

The Vanishing Body Of Disability Law: Power And The Making Of The Impaired Subject, Jonas-Sébastien Beaudry

Canadian Journal of Family Law

The influence of disability studies on legal scholarship is most visible in the social model, which claims that people are not disabled because of their bodily impairments, but by society in its refusal to accommodate their impairments.

However, a modest but growing discourse within disability studies argues that the notion of impairment, in addition to disability, is socially constructed. This article aims to bring this problematized conception of impairment, informed by Michel Foucault’s conception of power, into contact with legal scholarship. Judith Mosoff’s sensibility about the role of impairments in the legal treatment of disabled people illustrates this critical outlook, …

Crazy Women And Hysterical Mothers: The Gendered Use Of Mental-Health Labels In Custody Disputes, Suzanne Zaccour

Canadian Journal of Family Law

This research studies the use of gendered mental-health labels, such as “crazy,” “hysterical,” “insane,” and “emotionally unstable,” in Canadian custody cases decided between 2000 and 2016. Building on Judith Mosoff’s work on gender and mental health stigma in custody proceedings, it maps how these “pop-psychology” labels impact custody litigation. This investigation reveals that mental-health labels serve to discredit the mother, attack her parenting abilities, and distract from her allegations of violence by the father. The article also explores fathers’, mental health experts’, and judges’ roles in framing the mother’s credibility and parental capacity with regard to her alleged mental instability. …

Are You My Mother? Parentage In A Nonconjugal Family, Natasha Bakht, Lynda M. Collins

Canadian Journal of Family Law

No abstract provided.

Young People As Humans In Family Court Processes: A Child Rights Approach To Legal Representation, Donna J. Martinson, Caterina E. Tempesta

Canadian Journal of Family Law

The authors, a retired British Columbia Supreme Court judge and a senior member of Ontario’s Office of the Children’s Lawyer, address the important issue of legal representation for children. They are co-chairs of the Steering Committee which guided the development of the Canadian Bar Association’s new and comprehensive Child Rights Toolkit. As such, they are well-placed to discuss how a child rights approach, as required by the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child to which Canada is a ratifying party, supports legal representation for children who find themselves caught in contentious family law proceedings before the courts.

Quebec's Filiation Regime, The Roy Report'S Recommendations, And The 'Interest Of The Child', Régine Tremblay

Canadian Journal of Family Law

This article describes Quebec’s filiation regime and explains some of the Roy Report’s recommendations to reform parent-child relationships in Quebec. While this report is unlikely to lead to legislative change, it represents an important insight into issues animating family law in Quebec today. The Roy Report anchors filiation and family law to the ‘interest of the child’, a notion likely different from the best interests of the child in common law. The article offers some critical and comparative analysis of current and proposed rules. It makes this lesser known area of Quebec civil law accessible in English and to common …

Prestation Compensatoire Et Union De Fait En Droit Québécois : Étude Critique Du Discours Judiciaire, Laurence Saint-Pierre Harvey

Canadian Journal of Family Law

This paper analyzes a policy recommendation suggesting the compensatory allowance, a mechanism in Quebec matrimonial law, to be the solution of the cohabitation “problem.” The study draws on queer theory to analyze the discourse found in the compensatory allowance case law. The judicial discourse is polarized into two binary categories: spouse taking advantage / spouse being taken advantage of, normal contributions / abnormal contributions. This analysis sheds light on two defining traits of the compensatory allowance. First, as elaborated by judgments, it expresses gendered, heteronormative, and traditional ideas of spousal identity and roles. Second, it is difficult to conceive of …

(Some) Mothers Know Best: A Case Comment On Mm V Tb And The Plight Of Indigenous Mothers In Child Welfare And Adoption Proceedings, Catherine Wang

Canadian Journal of Family Law

Over time, courts have come to acknowledge the significance of Indigenous identity when deciding custody disputes, but they continue to struggle with how much consideration should be given to the broader history involved, which can leave Indigenous mothers particularly disadvantaged in family law proceedings. Not only do Indigenous mothers have to contend with the law’s general assumptions and expectations about mothers, they also have to endure the courts’ often limited ability to situate mothers’ individual actions in the wider context of structural barriers erected by government and societal forces. A close examination of the recent British Columbia Court of Appeal …

The "Family"—And "Families" In Law: A Review Of Archana Parashar And Franscesca Dominello, The Family In Law, Mary Jane Mossman

Canadian Journal of Family Law

No abstract provided.

The Ballad Of Harry James Tompkins, Brian L. Frye

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

At about 2:30 a.m. on Friday, July 27, 1934, William Colwell of Hughestown, Pennsylvania was awakened by two young men banging on his front door. When he went downstairs, they told him that someone had been run over by a train. Colwell looked out his side window. In the moonlight, he saw someone lying on the ground near the railroad tracks. He went back upstairs and told his wife that there had been an accident. She told him “not to go out, that them fellows was crazy,” but he dressed and went out to help anyway. Colwell's house was at …

Confronting Governmental Impunity And Immunity "From Below", Lawrence G. Albrecht

Valparaiso University Law Review

No abstract provided.

Assessing The Real Risk Of Sexually Violent Predators: Doctor Padilla's Dangerous Data, Tamara Rice Lave, Franklin E. Zimring

Articles

This Article uses internal memoranda and emails to describe the efforts of the California Department of Mental Health to suppress a serious and well-designed study that showed just 6.5% of untreated sexually violent predators were arrested for a new sex crime within 4.8 years of release from a locked mental facility. The Article begins by historically situating sexually violent predator laws and then explains the constitutionally critical role that prospective sexual dangerousness plays in justifying these laws. The Article next explains how the U.S. Supreme Court and the highest state courts have allowed these laws to exist without requiring any …

When Impunity And Corruption Embrace: How The Past Becomes The Future In The Struggle Against Torture And Genocide, Elizabeth M. Iglesias

Articles

In this article, Professor Elizabeth Iglesias takes up the challenge of overcoming impunity for atrocity crimes as a problem of structural corruption. Beginning with the 2013 trial and conviction of Guatemalan leader Efrain Rios Montt for crimes against humanity and genocide in the courts of his own country, the article turns to the scandal surrounding United States' President Donald Trump's repeated threats to fire the special counsel investigating allegations that he and his campaign colluded with foreign nationals to steal the 2016 presidential election and the scandal surrounding the nomination and confirmation of Gina Haspel as the first woman to …

Unforeseen Land Uses: The Effect Of Marijuana Legalization On Land Conservation Programs, Jessica Owley

Articles

This Article explores the tension between land conservation and marijuana cultivation in the context of legalization. The legalization of marijuana has the potential to shift the locations of marijuana cultivation. Where cultivation need no longer be surreptitious and clandestine, growers may begin to explore sanctioned growing sites and methods. Thus, the shift to legalization may be accompanied by environmental and landuse implications. Investigating commercial-scale marijuana cultivation, this Article details how, in some ways, legalization can reduce environmental impacts of marijuana cultivation while also examining tricky issues regarding tensions between protected lands and marijuana cultivation. If we treat cultivation of marijuana …

Protecting Florida's Marine Life With Conservation Drones, Daniel Grammes

St. Thomas Law Review

This comment analyzes drones under current Fourth Amendment jurisprudence and focuses on the issues contributing to unsustainable fisheries in Florida. Part II explains the basic concept of drones and discusses privacy issues through the Fourth Amendment as well as Florida marine patrol statutes that are relevant to an analysis of drone technology. Part III highlights that Florida's fisheries are at an unsustainable level because there are not enough Florida marine patrol officers and the simplicity of disposing illegally harvested wildlife into the ocean. Part IV suggests that Florida adopt legislation authorizing a drone enforcement program for marine patrol. Part V …

Lawyers Serving Gods, Visible And Invisible, Jonathan R. Cohen

UF Law Faculty Publications

A critique of the American legal profession can be framed through the metaphor of idolatry, specifically the proclivity of lawyers to serve visible rather than invisible interests in their work. This proclivity has ramifications ranging from broad matters like lawyers' responses to deeply embedded social injustices to specific matters such as the excessive focus on pecuniary interests in ordinary legal representation and the high level of dissatisfaction that many lawyers experience in their careers. Using as a lens biblical teaching concerning idolatry, this article begins by describing "visible" as opposed to "invisible" interests in the context of legal practice. It …

Public Defense Litigation: An Overview, Lauren Sudeall Lucas

Faculty Publications By Year

No abstract provided.

Indefinite Detention, Colonialism, And Settler Prerogative In The United States, Natsu Taylor Saito

Faculty Publications By Year

The primacy accorded individual civil and political rights is often touted as one of the United States' greatest achievements. However, mass incarcerations of indefinite duration have occurred consistently throughout U.S. history and have primarily targeted people of color. The dominant narrative insists that the United States is a political democracy and portrays each instance of indefinite detention in exceptionalist terms. This essay argues that the historical patterns of indefinite detention are better explained by recognizing the United States as a settler colonial state whose claimed prerogative to expand its territorial reach and contain/control populations over which it exercises jurisdiction inevitably …

Legal Deserts: A Multi-State Perspective On Rural Access To Justice, Lisa R. Pruitt, Amanda L. Kool, Lauren Sudeall, Michele Statz, Danielle M. Conway, Hannah Haksgaard

Faculty Publications By Year

Rural America faces an increasingly dire access-to-justice crisis, which serves to exacerbate the already disproportionate share of social problems afflicting rural areas. One critical aspect of the crisis is the dearth of information and research regarding the extent of the problem and its impacts. This Article begins to fill that gap by providing surveys of rural access to justice in six geographically, demographically, and economically varied states: California, Georgia, Maine, Minnesota, South Dakota, and Wisconsin. In addition to providing insights about the distinct rural challenges confronting each of these states, the legal resources available, and existing policy responses, the Article …

Justice Beyond Dispute, Mary Anne Franks

Articles

No abstract provided.