Category Archives: Family Law
Michael Higdon, ‘(In)Formal Marriage Equality’
ABSTRACT In 2015, same-sex couples throughout the United States obtained formal marriage equality. But is the prospective ability to obtain marriage licenses sufficient to achieve Obergefell’s promise of equality? What about individuals whose same-sex relationship did not survive – either through death or dissolution – to see marriage equality become the law of the land? […]
Emily Stolzenberg, ‘Properties of Intimacy’
ABSTRACT Today, 19 million US adults are cohabiting with an intimate partner. Yet family law continues to struggle with the question whether these unmarried partners should have relationship-based rights in one another’s property. Generally speaking, states answer ‘no’. Because cohabitants are not spouses, they’re treated like strangers. As a result, their property rights usually follow […]
Sharon Shakargy, ‘The Outlawed Family: How Relevant is the Law in Family Litigation?’
ABSTRACT The involvement of the law in the family is generally considered inevitable and desirable. The family is often depicted as the locus of important and delicate problems which demand legal intervention through designated tools commonly referred to as ‘family law.’ This paper questions the veracity of this depiction with regards to the paradigmatic family […]
Ram Rivlin, ‘Fairness in Allocations of Parental Responsibilities, and the Limits of Law’
ABSTRACT When families dissolve, familial burdens and benefits as marital property and the burden of child support should be distributed. These allocations, sometimes made by courts and sometimes through private negotiation, are better to be fair. Also requiring allocation is the right and duty to take ongoing care of one’s children. Current legal schemes of […]
Dov Fox, ‘Birth Rights and Wrongs: Reply to Critics’
ABSTRACT Advances in medicine and technology promise to deliver us from the vagaries of the genetic lottery. But the pandemic hasn’t spared reproductive freedom. School closures and clinic restrictions make birth control and fertility treatment harder to get, while new regulations put abortion, surrogacy, and genetic testing out of reach for many in need. My […]
Raymond O’Brien, ‘Marital Versus Nonmarital Entitlements’
ABSTRACT The percentage of adult couples living in intimate nonmarital cohabitation continues to increase. The period of cohabitation is most often for a short period of time and entered into for several reasons. But for a small percentage of these and an increasing percentage of longer-term cohabitants, dissolution during life or at death often results […]
Andrea Mulligan, ‘Protecting Identity In Collaborative Assisted Reproduction: The Right To Know One’s Gestational Surrogate’
ABSTRACT Gestational surrogacy presents a unique form of parenthood: that which is biological but not genetic. This new form of parenthood demands a re-examination of the rights and duties that arise from the parent–child relationship. This article is concerned with the surrogate-born person’s right to know his or her gestational surrogate, an aspect of the […]
Anatoliy Pashynskyi, ‘Property Relations Between Unmarried Cohabitants in International Family Law’
ABSTRACT This article is about the legal regulation of property relations between unmarried cohabitants in national legislation and the attempts to govern the said issues on the international level. The paper classifies states into groups based on their legal approach to unmarried cohabitation with examples from domestic legislation and court practice. The paper highlights the […]
Naomi Cahn, ‘What’s Wrong About the Elective Share “Right”?’
ABSTRACT This Article examines one form of property rights available to a surviving spouse, the elective share. The elective share serves as an override to a testator’s stated intent by allowing the surviving spouse to choose to take a portion of the decedent’s estate – even if the will explicitly disinherits the surviving spouse. The […]
Huntington and Scott, ‘Conceptualizing Legal Childhood in the Twenty-First Century’
ABSTRACT The law governing children is complex, sometimes appearing almost incoherent. The relatively simple framework established in the Progressive Era, in which parents had primary authority over children, subject to limited state oversight, has broken down over the past few decades. Lawmakers started granting children some adult rights and privileges, raising questions about their traditional […]