Category Archives: Family Law
Susan Hazeldean, ‘Illegitimate Parents’
ABSTRACT This Article is the first to survey the parentage laws of all 50 states and assess whether they allow both members of unmarried same-sex couples to establish legally recognized relationships with their children. My research shows that only 11 states provide robust legal rights to unmarried same-sex couples and their children, while 30 provide […]
Leslie Katz, ‘David Copperfield’s Legally Incorrect Account of a Suit to Annul a Marriage’
ABSTRACT The paper sets out David’s account of a lawsuit, provides legal context to it, explains the errors in it and speculates as to whether the errors were deliberate on Dickens’s part. Katz, Leslie, David Copperfield’s Legally Incorrect Account of a Suit to Annul a Marriage (November 26, 2021). First posted 2022-02-09 09:00:42
Pamela Laufer-Ukeles, ‘The Children of Nonmarriage: Towards a Child-First Family Law’
ABSTRACT Although family law has traditionally focused on marriage as the framework for supporting children, the modern family is increasingly developing outside of marriage. As such, we must consider whether family law does enough to support the children of nonmarriage, who have less resources available to them, receiving less parenting time and less child support […]
Heled, Lytton and Vertinsky, ‘A Wrong Without A Remedy: Leaving Parents and Children with a Hollow Victory in lawsuits against Unscrupulous Sperm Banks’
ABSTRACT For over six years, parents of children conceived with sperm purchased from the Atlanta-based sperm bank Xytex have sued the company for debilitating genetic conditions allegedly originating from the sperm. These lawsuits rely on a wide range of different legal theories, including fraud, negligent misrepresentation, breach of warranty, professional negligence, product liability, unfair trade […]
‘Against Functional Approaches’
Katharine K Baker, ‘Equality and Family Autonomy’, University of Pennsylvania Journal of Constitutional Law (forthcoming), available at SSRN. As Katharine Baker recounts in her excellent article, ‘Equality and Family Autonomy’, functional analysis was once part of a positive progressive narrative within family law: it was through a functional analysis that scholars and courts (and some […]
Noy Naaman, ‘Timing Legal Parenthood’
ABSTRACT When does a parent become a parent? This Article examines this question through a novel framework that analyzes the tension between an individual’s evolving self-identification as a parent, and the law’s acknowledgment of the individual’s parental status. It focuses on two forms of that tension. The first concerns a scenario occurring after the birth […]
Deirdre Smith, ‘Termination of Parental Rights as a Private Remedy: Rationales, Realities, and Alternatives’
ABSTRACT Terminating a parent’s rights – a drastic measure – is commonly associated with public child welfare proceedings, where a state or county child protective services agency has removed a child from their home based on findings of abuse or neglect. In fact, state laws across the country also permit private individuals to petition a […]
Grajzl and Murrell, ‘Of Families and Inheritance: Law and Development in Pre-Industrial England’
ABSTRACT We examine how pre-industrial English caselaw development on land, inheritance, and families affected, and was affected by, economic and demographic outcomes. Our yearly measures of caselaw development are derived from existing topic-model estimates that reflect a comprehensive corpus of reports on pre-1765 court cases. We estimate a structural VAR model using these caselaw time-series […]
Lisa Martin, ‘Modernizing Capacity Doctrine’
ABSTRACT Federal capacity doctrine – or the rules establishing whether and how children’s civil litigation proceeds – has largely remained the same for more than a century. It continues to presume that all children are incapable of directing their own cases, and that adults must litigate on children’s behalf. But since that time, our understanding […]
Emily Campbell, ‘PQ v RS [2019] EWHC 1643 (Ch): a case note’
ABSTRACT Many older settlements appear to restrict the class of children and issue who may benefit to those who are legitimate. Whether this is the full story and what trustees can do about it, given the impact of the issue on family harmony, was considered by Chief Master Marsh in the recent case of PQ […]