19 chapters
have results for Family Law Stories
Introduction 15 results (showing 5 best matches)
- Family Law may seem to some exciting enough as is, without the need for background stories to liven things up. After all, our cases already have real people with tangled emotions, grudges, and desires. But family stories are different from family law stories. The twelve stories here show the complex and sometimes unexpected connections between the personal choices and relationships we most care about and the authority of law to frame and govern them. The essays make us realize that there is always more than meets the eye and always another aspect to consider, whether historical, procedural, political, or factual. I am sure that other authors or future authors—including law students of today—would find different stories to tell, even about some of these very cases. We look forward to reading these stories too.
- Family Law Armageddon: The Story of Morgan v. Foretich
- In telling the story of T , Canadian law professor Brenda Cossman takes a look deep in the heart of Texas. The question posed in provides much to think about with regard to the complicated role of emotion in family law, Professor Cossman further suggests that the decision, while characterized as family law, may have had more to do with securing a narrower rule for tort liability in non-familial cases.
- The next three cases concern constraints on the authority of families to define themselves or to act as families. The first is the near-iconic 1977 case of . Mrs. Moore had violated an East Cleveland zoning ordinance by having grandchildren from two different sons (that is, children who were first cousins) live with her at the same time. The City restricted the degrees of affinity permitted within a residential household as part of its efforts to maintain East Cleveland as an attractive place for middle class black families. Relying on substantive due process, the Supreme Court struck down the ordinance, proudly noting that “[o]urs is by no means a tradition limited to respect for the bonds uniting the members of the nuclear family.” Peggy Davis unsettles and complicates the story of
- biological mother forbade her former partner Alison any visitation with their son. The New York Court of Appeals held that because Alison did not come within the statutory definition of parent, she lacked standing even to seek visitation. Suzanne Goldberg argues that the real story in is the legal inability of one mother to engage in the ordinary sort of “tell it to the trial judge” storytelling that plays such an important role in family law disputes. Professor Goldberg presents the case not from the point of view of the parties, about whom we know very little (not even their surnames), but from the perspective of Alison’s lawyers, who were faced with strategic and tactical conundrums at each phase of the litigation.
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Chapter 8. Litigating Law Reform: Unrecognized Parents and the Story of Alison D. v. Virginia M. 78 results (showing 5 best matches)
- This chapter presents the story of on three levels. The first is the personal story of the parties to the case—or at least the little we can glean from published opinions and other published accounts; the remainder is under seal, as is traditional with family law cases in New York. The second tells of lawyering for social change within the confines of family law and examines the strategies pursued by the lawyers to present Alison’s family life within a legal framework that refused to allow her story to be told. The third takes the long view, looking both at the many legal changes in the nearly two decades since the case was decided and at the decision’s continued force despite those changes. At each of these levels, the story also attends to the core conceptual question posed by for the enterprise of family law: How closely should family law correspond to the reality of families’ lives?
- Consequently, the central question that Alison and her lawyers faced over fifteen years ago remains in place today—how to persuade courts to recognize family relationships that are visible in their surrounding communities but that remain unseen by the law? The very question highlights the discomfiting paradox that arises in cases like Alison’s. For most parents, story telling is run-of-the-mill family court fare. For non-legal parents, like Alison, the chance to tell the story is itself a victory.
- We now turn to the stories of . As we do, keep in mind that, unlike most of the other cases addressed in a “law stories” volume, this case is largely about the law’s to allow Alison to tell her story and about the challenges posed by that refusal for the lawyers handling her case.
- habeas statute that governed visitation. Associate (later Chief) Judge Judith S. Kaye asked, for example, “How would we not be fundamentally redefining the term parent throughout the statutory law and the case law of the State of New York?” biological parents subject to suits from family friends, babysitters, or anyone else who had befriended the child. Ettelbrick responded by trying, yet again, to tell Alison’s story, reminding the Court that Alison was not a transient interloper in someone else’s family, but rather had actively planned, with Virginia, to bring a child into the world. The story met with a tough audience. As
- briefs also add to any litigation, including this one, in ways that go beyond their explication of the relevant law or social science. Through narratives of people whose lives are affected by the issue before the court, they can illuminate the real-life consequences of a case and counter the abstract focus on doctrine that sometimes takes hold at the appellate level. Abortion rights advocates, for example, have used this type of story-telling brief to bring forward the stories of women who have been harmed by restrictions on access to abortion. , the Gay and Lesbian Parents Coalition International took up this task. The brief told the actual stories of several families to show that when same-sex couples have children together, they, like heterosexual couples, do not consider one partner the “real” parent and the other partner just a supporting actor, as Virginia had characterized Alison’s role in Andrew’s life.
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Chapter 11. The Story of Twyman v. Twyman: Politics, Tort Reform, and Emotional Distress in a Texas Divorce 40 results (showing 5 best matches)
- The emerging law and emotions literature encourages us to more directly interrogate the place of outrage in the law. Aside from questions about drawing the line between extreme outrage and more common everyday versions, there is a threshold question of whether outrage is an emotion that the law should “recognize, dignify, and incorporate.” There is also a more specific and thorny question: What is the place, if any, for outrage in divorce? What about emotions often implicated in divorce, such as sorrow, despair, and fury? Should these emotions of divorce be actionable or in some other way included in the law of divorce? Even if they are not independently actionable as a tort, highlights the extent to which family law disputes are often animated by emotional distress. Sheila Twyman’s story is part of an under-told—yet all too well known—story of the raw emotions of family law. She was mad as hell. While we have no access to her inner psyche, she can be fairly read as demanding some...
- can be seen as part of the evolution of the legal regulation of marital relationships from the days of coverture and interspousal tort immunity to the recognition of the full legal personhood of both spouses and their ability to sue one another in tort. It can also be told as a story of an angry wife who was, again to quote the Dixie Chicks, “not ready to back down.” Sheila Twyman wanted her husband’s egregious conduct to be taken into account; she wanted fault to be part of the divorce equation and she wanted him to pay for what he had done. Thus can be told as a story about the role of fault and emotion in family law: how family law has tried to eradicate fault and emotion from divorce, and how plaintiffs find ways to bring them back in.
- One could tell a story about as a debate over the unique role of emotions in family breakdown, and whether these emotions should be actionable. Yet, such a focus risks obscuring the way in which this case is more about tort law than family law. Notwithstanding the emotional distress that animated Sheila Twyman, each of the rulings of the judges of the Texas Supreme Court revolves around the axis of limiting or expanding tort liability. Rather than addressing the unique vulnerabilities and obligations of family members on the breakdown of their relationship, is a case loaded with potential family law meaning—including the role of fault, marital misconduct and emotion on divorce—it is a case that was in fact decided in decidedly non-family law terms.
- forcefully reminds us of the need to look beneath the surface of family law cases to explore the possibility that other, non-family law dynamics may actually be at play. Family law scholars have a tendency to see the legal regulation of the family through the prism of exceptionalism; as all about the unique challenges of regulating deeply intimate, emotional, and private relationships. But this perspective may at times obscure the existence or influence of other political agendas and ideologies. Whether Twyman is seen as an instrumental deployment of family law for non-familial purposes, or a more inadvertent capture by political discourses, or something in between, the case signals the need to look beyond our tendency to see family law exclusively in family law terms.
- . Characterizing the story of the evolution of family law from fault to failure risks overstating the extent to which fault has been expunged from divorce proceedings. As Ira Ellman has pointed out, the categories of fault and no-fault do not adequately capture the range of ways in which marital misconduct is (or is not) taken into account in family law. While many states have adopted a pure no-fault regime, others allow marital misconduct to be taken into account, either in did—and still does—raise important issues of the significance of misconduct in divorce proceedings. But, at least in the context of Texas, it was less a question of fault’s return than a determination about its location and possible migration from the law of family property and support to the law of tort.
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Chapter 6. The Story of the Holyfield Twins: Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians v. Holyfield 56 results (showing 5 best matches)
- Professor of Law, Seton Hall University School of Law. I am deeply grateful to Joan Holyfield for sharing her family’s story with me and allowing me to share it with others. A longer version of this article appears in Volume 17 of the Columbia Journal of Gender & Law (forthcoming 2008).
- story gets curiouser and curiouser. Recall that the Choctaw Tribe claimed that the Mississippi Chancery Court had not only erred on domicile, but had also disregarded ICWA’s placement preferences—the child’s extended family, other tribal members, or other Indian families—before placing the twins with a non-Indian family.
- In that case, the Mississippi Chancery Court would have had jurisdiction over the Holyfield’s adoption petition. However, it would not have been able to grant the adoption unless there were no members of the twins’ extended family, other Choctaw tribal members, or other Indian families, willing to adopt them. Because Jennie had already asked extended family members and other Choctaw tribal members to adopt the twins without success, the court might have found that ICWA’s first two orders of preference had been satisfied. However, the Chancery Court would still have needed evidence that there were no “other Indian families” interested in adopting the twins before it could allow the Holyfields (a non-Indian family under the Mississippi Choctaw definition) to adopt them.
- (i) The request of the biological parents or the child when the child is of sufficient age. (ii) The extraordinary physical or emotional needs of the child as established by testimony of a qualified expert witness. (iii) The unavailability of suitable families for placement after a diligent search has been completed for families meeting the preference criteria.
- The rationale underlying this judicially created “existing Indian family” exception is that ICWA’s purpose of promoting “the stability and security of Indian tribes and families”
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Chapter 7. Family Law Armageddon: The Story of Morgan v. Foretich 37 results (showing 5 best matches)
- Family Law Armageddon: The Story of
- note 90, at 22 (quoting a New Zealand family law attorney).
- The initial trial court orders regarding Hilary Foretich’s custody were consistent with this case law, although they illustrate the difficulties intrinsic to a custody dispute over a very young child. Morgan’s pregnancy had prompted the marriage, and she and Foretich parted before the birth. Thus, they faced shared parenting of an infant based on a limited relationship with each other that provided little basis for mutual confidence or trust. Not surprisingly, each sought custody. Morgan, in
- In hindsight, given the heightened concern about child sexual abuse and the changes in custody law that maximized judicial discretion, an The Family and Law Program at the University of Michigan Medical School found that sex abuse claims were made in 30 percent of the most complex custody cases with which it was involved.
- Elizabeth Morgan, The Making of a Woman Surgeon (1980); Solo Practice: A Woman Surgeon’s Story (1982). In 1988 she published a third book related to her profession, The Complete Book of Cosmetic Surgery: A Candid Guide for Men, Women and Teens (1988).
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Family Law Stories 10 results (showing 5 best matches)
- FAMILY LAW STORIES
- Chapter 7: Family Law Armageddon: The Story of Morgan v. Foretich
- Chapter 5: Constructing the Modern American Family: The Stories of Troxel v. Granville
- Chapter 8: Litigating Law Reform: Unrecognized Parents and the Story of Alison D. v. Virginia M.
- Chapter 2: The Story of Goodridge v. Department of Public Health: The Bumpy Road to Marriage for Same-Sex Couples
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Chapter 5. Constructing the Modern American Family: The Stories of Troxel v. Granville 39 results (showing 5 best matches)
- The opinion accomplishes this normalizing of the Troxel–Wynn family not only by carefully crafting its narrative tale, but also by situating the Troxel–Wynn story sociologically. “The demographic changes of the past century,” observes, “make it difficult to speak of an average American family. The composition of families varies greatly from household to household.” In today’s world, in other words, there is no single “normal family”; difference is now normal. Indeed, O’Connor argues, the proliferation of state laws like the Washington law allowing nonparents to seek visitation likely reflects “these changing realities of the American family.”
- At another level, though, the story of is about how courts treat families’ stories. In this respect, the case is about the interactions between individuals’ lived experiences and impersonal adjudicatory bodies. From this perspective, the story of is the tale of how the Wynns and the Troxels prompted the Supreme Court, in a plurality opinion by Justice O’Connor, to construct a peculiarly modern legal model of the typical American family—one that, in contrast to an older strand of Supreme Court jurisprudence, normalizes conflict and rupture as unexceptional. This essay will tell these two stories of
- , though, tells a very different story, one that subtly recognizes that family structures are far more complicated and yet nonetheless worthy of constitutional protection. Of course, unlike the biological father in enshrines within the Supreme Court’s jurisprudence the recognition that the stories of real families are messy—full of conflict, separation, and melding—and that those families still deserve to be protected by the Constitution.
- , the Troxels and Wynns are just part of this modern reality. Within this context, Tommie was entitled to make decisions about what was in her girls’ best interest within their web of familial relations. Gone from the foreground of O’Connor’s opinion, then, are the nonmarital sex, the suicide, the family fighting, the Fleetwoods, the nuclear family of eight children circulating in and out of their varied, respective parents’ households with their combined twelve grandparents. Instead, the story of becomes the story of a “mere disagreement” between a mother and a superior court judge about how important music and cousins were to the best interests of two little girls. And, with little fuss, O’Connor protects the rights of that mother to make decisions for the family that she forged in the crucible of multiple relationships and multiple divorces. In so doing, she brings the modern family within the protections of the Constitution.
- Constructing the Modern American Family: The Stories of
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Contributors 14 results (showing 5 best matches)
- is the John S.R. Shad Professor of Lawyering and Ethics at New York University School of Law. She is also Director of the Lawyering Program, a widely acclaimed course of experiential learning for first year students. Professor Davis joined the N.Y.U. law faculty in 1983, after having served for three years as a Judge of the Family Court of the State of New York and having engaged, during the preceding ten years, in the practice and administration of law. Her scholarly work has been influential in the areas of child welfare, constitutional rights of family liberty, and interdisciplinary analysis of legal pedagogy and process. Her 1997 book,
- is the Fritz Duda Family Chair in Law at Norte Dame Law School. She received her B.A. in History from Duke University, a J.D. from Seton Hall University, and an M.A. and Ph.D. in Economics from George Mason University where she was on the law faculty for over twenty years. She also taught for seven years at the University of Iowa. Professor Brinig is the author of two casebooks (in Family Law and Quantitative Methods for Lawyers), and has written scores of articles with co-authors in law, economics, sociology, medicine, and public health. She teaches family law and related courses, contracts, and law and economics. Her primary research and writing field is the law and economics of family and she is especially interested in empirical answers to questions addressed by law. These interests came together in her book
- is the Dorothy Kliks Fones Professor of Law at the University of Oregon, where she teaches Family Law and other courses and directs the Oregon Child Advocacy Project, which provides education and assistance to attorneys advocating for the interests of children. She has written law review articles about the child welfare system, nontraditional families, family support duties, and property rights at divorce and is the co-author of textbooks on Family Law and Children and the Law which are widely used throughout the U.S. She is an elected member of the American Law Institute.
- is the Edward A. Smith/Missouri Chair of Law, the Constitution and Society at the University of Missouri–Kansas City. She is the author of
- is Professor of Law and Willard Pedrick Distinguished Research Scholar at Arizona State University, and an affiliate faculty member of the Center for Child and Youth Policy at the University of California at Berkeley. He served as Chief Reporter for the Principles of the Law of Family Dissolution, a major study published by the American Law Institute, and is the senior author of a leading family law text. His current projects include an empirical investigation into how people make judgments about the level of child support payments they believe the law should require an absent parent to pay.
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Chapter 2. The Story of Goodridge v. Department of Public Health: The Bumpy Road to Marriage for Same-Sex Couples 56 results (showing 5 best matches)
- story begins over thirty years before this landmark decision. For many decades, lesbians, gay men, bisexuals, and transgendered (“LGBT”) people have been working to improve their legal status in this country. Since the 1970s, some LGBT people in the United States have been lobbying and litigating for formal recognition of their relationships. Concurrently, family law in general and the institution of marriage in particular have been evolving in various ways.
- The social, political, and legal activities of LGBT people and egalitarian developments in family law over the last century are part of the story behind the recognition of relationships between people of the same sex. A more proximate cause of the result in in this respect, a fact not evident from the judicial opinions such cases have produced. This chapter offers a glimpse of the strategy that led to this landmark decision. An important part of the story of
- The legal and social landscape for LGBT rights and family law, generally, and the recognition of same-sex relationships, in particular, has changed significantly since Jack Baker and Michael McConnell quixotically sought a marriage license in 1970. Without these various changes, the dramatic ruling of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court would not have been possible. The changed legal and social context alone was not enough. An important part of the Massachusetts case was the stories the plaintiffs told in court filings and in public contexts. The successful “top-down” litigation strategy in
- GLAD wanted to select plaintiffs whose stories would make vivid the harm of not being allowed to marry. In the words of Mary Bonauto, GLAD’s lead attorney in , “[t]he plaintiffs carr[ied] an enormous burden because they bec[a]me the public face of the case and … their story of unfair treatment [was] front and center in the case.” couples had health problems. The couples represented various geographical regions of Massachusetts. Each had compelling stories to tell about how, because they were not married, they had problems getting proper visitation when one of them was hospitalized, how they faced difficulties obtaining family health insurance, how they were limited in the benefits and protections they could provide for the children they were raising together, and how they had to carry extra legal and financial burdens to imitate a fraction of the benefits associated with marriage.
- Professor, and Co–Director of Program in Family Law, Policy and Bioethics, Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law, B.A., Williams College; Ph.D., Massachusetts Institute of Technology; J.D., Yale University.
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Chapter 10. The Scene of a Marriage: McGuire v. McGuire 56 results (showing 5 best matches)
- has a paradigmatic stature in American family law. Though it attracted little attention when decided and has rarely been cited as authority by other courts, it still lives an active life in most family law casebooks, used to introduce the concept of marital privacy and the legal significance of “the intact marriage.” Yet, no one really believes that is “right.” To feminists and divorce law reformers since the 1960s, ...horror story” to illustrate the need for change in the marital regime. No modern casebook editor can resist pointing out the misleading character of the language of “household” in the case, making sure the student understands that the marital entity the case empowers is one in which the relevant decisions are entirely in the husband’s control. In the standard modern rendition, Lydia becomes something close to an abused wife. And her lack of remedy reveals the continuing power of a patriarchal norm of coverture, of a wife locked within her husband’s “household.” “...
- The narrative of women’s rights law reform in the nineteenth century—the story of the slow recognition of a wife’s right to child custody, separate property, her earnings, a separate legal identity, the possession of her own person—was, for the most part, a story about the emergent rights of separated wives, most of whom would never again live with their husbands. Bringing separation to the fore allows us to see marital property reforms as institutionally realistic efforts to deal with the situation of separated wives, who remained otherwise in the law in a state of coverture, subject to their absent husbands and without the legal capacity to contract or act in the world. Legislators were not revolutionaries, but they were making significant changes in the law in response to the separations they saw all around them.
- In an ordinary legal consciousness, say the legal consciousness of Charles McGuire, the law of marriage would have appeared in two guises. The first would have been as the constitutive structure for beginnings and endings. To marry, you usually needed a legal form and a little law. When your spouse died, you needed a legal form and a little law. If you divorced, you needed a lot of law. For the rest, law usually appeared as public interventions into a private relationship. Like private property, marriage was a realm of private choice and freedom, except when the public good required regulation. Government needed strong public reasons to justify entering that private sphere, whether of property or of family. How strong or how well proven that public interest had to be in order to justify intervention varied across the time and space of the United States of America. From an early time before the creation of the United States, local governments had intruded whenever a husband refused...
- Cases and Materials on Family Law, at 151 (Judith C. Areen & Milton C. Regan, Jr. eds., 2006).
- American mobility is the oldest and most durable cliché of post-Revolutionary American historiography. Families moving together across the great American desert. Families moving north to the cities to escape first slavery and then the Jim Crow South. Families coming to America and moving from community to community to look for free, or at least cheap, fertile land or work. On the move.
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Chapter 4. Moore v. East Cleveland: Constructing the Suburban Family 37 results (showing 5 best matches)
- My mother was a contemporary of Inez Moore, and like Inez Moore, she lived most of her life in Ohio. She is now 93. When I told her the story of , she was reminded of the time when her parents bought a home in a German neighborhood of their Ohio town. They were the first African–American family to move into the neighborhood. My mother remembers overhearing her mother talking with one of their new neighbors. The neighbor was explaining that my mother’s family threatened property values in the neighborhood, and so the neighbor and her family were forced to move. But she wanted to tell my grandmother how sorry she was and that my grandmother could not have been a better neighbor. My mother remembers that the neighbor was in tears.
- Herbert Gutman, The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom 216–24 (1976). Carol Stack, All Our Kin: Strategies for Survival in a Black Community (1975). For a historical account of how slavery tore slave families apart, Peggy Cooper Davis, Neglected Stories: The Constitution and Family Values (1997); Saidiya Hartman, Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route (2007).
- A good story will have a coda that takes the reader out of the The story of
- Still, through all of this expansion of family rights jurisprudence, there was a recurring refrain of worry that, as Justice Frankfurter said in his dissent from the flag salute decision, the Court had no warrant to invalidate laws duly enacted by a democratically elected body so long as its members “could in reason have enacted them.”
- Violence was not, of course, the only aspect of ghetto life that worried East Cleveland’s citizens. Family instability was described in as “a characteristic of black urban ghettos” that East Cleveland could and should avoid. Scholar-politician Daniel Patrick Moynihan had issued a highly influential report that identified matriarchal family structure as a central cause of social pathology in black communities. Both popular and academic conceptions of black family structure featured the single-parent, and almost always female-headed, household as a principal source of crime and other urban pathology. The observed that large fatherless families in which mothers worked of necessity left children unsupervised on “the streets of a violence-prone and poverty-stricken world.” In this world, the image of success was not “the responsible husband and father,” but rather the “hustler.” Family disorganization created a “jungle” of crime and exploitation, “characterized by personal insecurity...
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Chapter 1. The Case of Mr. and Mrs. Loving: Reflections on the Fortieth Anniversary of Loving v. Virginia 40 results (showing 5 best matches)
- On many evenings just before sunset, my grandmother and I would sit on our front porch. We lived in the rural black community of Battery, Virginia (approximately forty-five miles east of Richmond), which is located in Essex County. Suddenly, I would hear my grandmother remark: “Well, I see Richard’s gone in for the night.” Turning my head to follow the direction of her gaze, I would see a white man driving his car down the dirt road leading to a house owned by my great-uncle. It was a two-story wood-frame house, which was one of the largest in the neighborhood. Most of the rooms were usually rented out to various family friends, relatives, and occasionally to the families of those who worked at the sawmill—jointly operated by my great-uncle and his older brother, my grandfather.
- Through it all Mildred Loving remains the same intensely shy woman she has always been. Even after forty years of being hailed as a heroine of the civil rights movement (locally she is likened to Rosa Parks), she is still uncomfortable receiving any accolades or recognition. Neither she nor her husband ever sought or welcomed the public notoriety that inevitably accompanied their case. Both preferred instead to lead quiet and simple lives away from the camera’s view. Every five years or so, newspaper and magazine reporters hound Mildred for interviews, but as the years have passed, she has given fewer and fewer, and now rarely grants any at all. In fact, she was not initially interested in talking with television producers who approached her about making a movie about her and her husband’s story, entitled ...consented. Her daughter, Peggy, is the most vocal and usually serves as the family’s spokesperson. Her children are understandably protective of their mother, and they,...
- Then, a photographer snapped a picture of the couple which has appeared in every newspaper story and magazine article ever written about them—his arm around her neck, both of them smiling, and with law books in the background. They had waited more than nine years for vindication, and it had finally come. Suddenly, the phrase “black and white together” took on a whole new meaning.
- Richard and Mildred Loving, along with their children, took up legal residence in Virginia almost immediately after the Court’s ruling. Richard was finally able to build the white cinderblock house he had always wanted for his family. Those of us who lived in Battery did not see quite as much of the famous family as we once did, now that they had officially moved back home to Caroline County. But we still saw them occasionally, especially in the town of Tappahannock. The Lovings had made history and, by our community standards, become famous, but they were treated no differently after the Supreme Court ruling than they had been before. To us, they were still just Richard and Mildred, and that was exactly how they wanted it. As far as Richard was concerned, there was really only one major change worth mentioning: “For the first time, I could put my arm around her and publicly call her my wife.”
- If Richard Loving were to spend any time with his family in the state of Virginia in the early 1960s, he had no choice other than to do so under the cover of darkness. He and his part-black, part-Cherokee wife had been banned from the state in 1959 for violating the state’s miscegenation laws, which prohibited interracial marriage.
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Chapter 9. The Story of Mary Sue and Junior Davis 30 results (showing 5 best matches)
- , Judith Areen, Cases and Materials on Family Law 883 (4th ed. 1999); A. James Casner & W. Barton Leach, Cases and Text on Property 611 (4th ed. 2000); Linda Elrod et al., Cases and Materials on Family Law 365 (5th ed. 2003); Sheldon Kurtz & Herbert Hovenkamp, Cases and Materials on American Property Law 99 (4th ed. 2003).
- Fritz Duda Family Chair in Law, Notre Dame Law School. Thanks to Becca Phillips for able research assistance and to Carol Sanger for her helpful suggestions.
- Jana Singer, a family law professor at the University of Maryland, was quoted as saying that the constitutional doctrine was unnecessary (and harmful to the wider abortion issue):
- The story of Junior and Mary Sue Davis is a cautionary tale about a family destroyed by lost pregnancies and the havoc this causes in a marriage.
- Most romances begin when the couple meets, but the origins of Junior and Mary Sue’s story probably begins even before. Junior Davis came from a broken family.
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Acknowledgments 2 results
- There is one more person I would like to mention. This is Lee Teitelbaum, the former dean of Utah and Cornell law schools, a renowned family law scholar, and a great friend to many in our field. Lee was to have been one of the authors here and he is greatly missed.
- Particular thanks are owed to several Columbia Law School students for their extraordinary efforts in producing this volume. I am especially grateful to Julian Petrin and to Sarah Seo, Kathleen Cochrane, Jay Blackman, Chrissie DeMaso, Patty Robbins, Christopher Hogan, Zaid Zaid and Cari Fais.
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Chapter 12. O’Brien v. O’Brien: A Failed Reform, Unlikely Reformers 49 results (showing 5 best matches)
- American Law Institute, Principles of the Law of Family Dissolution § 4.07, Comment
- It is in fact possible that Emanuelli did not really understand how ordinary New York’s rules were. Perhaps, like many New York lawyers, his only frame of reference against which to view New York’s new law was New York’s old law. The new law was indeed revolutionary when compared to the old, even if unremarkable when compared to the law of the forty-seven other states that had previously adopted either equitable distribution, or community property. If Emanuelli was unaware of the national context, he was in good company. New York’s courts and commentators have historically been surprisingly provincial in their discussions of family law issues. The best-known commentators on New York family law during this era were the team of NYU law professor Henry Foster and New York matrimonial attorney Doris Freed. They had helped draft New York’s equitable distribution reforms. But the contemporaneous edition of their treatise sounds like Emanuelli’s brief: “The Equitable Distribution Law is a...
- The text continues: “This means decisions from other states … which have substantially different statutes … are irrelevant….” Henry H. Foster, Jr., Doris Jonas Freed & Joel R. Brandes, Law and the Family, New York 666–67 (1986).
- New York State Bar Association, Report of the Task Force on Family Law 15 (Aug. 19, 1996); Spencer,
- Family law reformers who had been trying for years to change New York law got their chance in 1979 when the United States Supreme Court decided in that the Equal Protection Clause required gender-neutral alimony laws. Compliance with required New York to amend its divorce law. The New York State Senate Judiciary Committee, which had held up divorce reform legislation for the past three years, was now forced to report out a bill.
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Chapter 3. The Story of Reynolds v. United States: Federal “Hell Hounds” Punishing Mormon Treason 39 results (showing 5 best matches)
- , Judith Areen, Cases and Materials on Family Law (3d ed. 1992); Laurence H. Tribe, American Constitutional Law 1271 (1988). In contrast, casebooks on law and religion recognize its importance. , Leslie C. Griffin, Law and Religion: Cases and Materials 1 (2007); and Michael W. McConnell, John H. Garvey & Thomas C. Berg, Religion and the Constitution 113 (2d ed. 2006).
- should not survive constitutional challenge. Peggy Cooper Davis, Neglected Stories: The Constitution and Family Values 241 (1997). For discussions of First Amendment issues in future challenges to
- The story of demonstrates its limited relevance to same-sex marriage and gay rights. In contrast to the practice and preferences of nineteenth-century Mormons to separate, if not fully secede, from American law and culture, same-sex marriage is fundamentally an assimilationist move for gay people to further integrate into American life. Moreover, thinking about ’ precedential force is its grounding in nineteenth-century ideologies of white supremacy, reflected in the Court’s linking polygamy to “Asiatic and African people.” I develop the race-related story of
- An 1870 sermon by Brigham Young defending autocratic families and government exemplified the kind of talk that inflamed public concerns about Mormonism as a despotic institution threatening democracy. After asserting that polygamous husbands’ power extended beyond the family to “my neighbors and the people around me,” Young referred to himself as a “king” controlling his wives and children by fiat:
- is sometimes regarded as a law school relic—reduced to a note in leading family and constitutional law casebooks President Grant’s 1871 address to Congress echoed a similar need for federal action to combat the influence of marriage law run amok: “In Utah there still remains a remnant of barbarism, repugnant to civilization, to decency, and to the laws of the United States.”
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- This publication was created to provide you with accurate and authoritative information concerning the subject matter covered; however, this publication was not necessarily prepared by persons licensed to practice law in a particular jurisdiction. The publisher is not engaged in rendering legal or other professional advice and this publication is not a substitute for the advice of an attorney. If you require legal or other expert advice, you should seek the services of a competent attorney or other professional.
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- Publication Date: November 15th, 2007
- ISBN: 9781599410203
- Subject: Family Law
- Series: Law Stories
- Type: Overviews
- Description: Sanger’s Family Law Stories presents the historical, procedural, personal, and political background of 11 significant family law cases. The essays, written by leading family law scholars, cover four main areas: Marriage Parenting and custody Separation and divorce The definition of family Other essays investigate well-known state and federal cases on such topics as child kidnapping, the intentional infliction of emotional distress, the Indian Child Welfare Act, and frozen embryos.
