Family Law Prof Blog

Working Mothers

From the Mail Online:

Most modern mothers understand the difficult balance of work and parenting all too well.

Now, working mothers may take comfort from new research showing, contrary to what we may expect, that working doesn’t lower the quality of parenting or add to the stress load.

The National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) has collated information from families across the U.S. and the resounding outcome points to work as a valuable part of family life.

Read more here.

MR

 

Fake Sham Wedding

From BBC News:

A Castlederg man has rejected an apology from the police after they interrupted his wedding on suspicion it was "a sham marriage".

The police wrongly arrested Neil McElwee and his pregnant fiancee, Yanan Sun, moments before the ceremony at the Guildhall in Londonderry on Tuesday.

Chief Inspector John Burrows said the police had acted in good faith, but sometimes they got things wrong.

Read more here.

MR

On Marriage

The Economist:

“Marriage has become much more selective, and that’s why the divorce rate has come down,” said Bradford Wilcox, director of the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. The project found that divorce rates for couples with college degrees are only a third as high as for those with a high-school degree.

Americans with a high-school degree or less (who account for 58% of the population) tell researchers they would like to marry, but do not believe they can afford it. Instead, they raise children out of wedlock. Only 6% of children born to college-educated mothers were born outside marriage, according to the National Marriage Project. That compares with 44% of babies born to mothers whose education ended with high school.

Read more here.

MR

 

Germany's Female Workforce

From NYT:

COLOGNE — Germany, Europe’s economic powerhouse, does not lack pluck: it rebounded from two world wars, digested reunification and has now powered ahead of neighbors still reeling from the financial crisis. It overhauled a rigid labor market and raised the retirement age to 67 with little fuss. Most recently, it simply decided to abandon nuclear power.

With this boldness at the top comes obedience at the bottom — 82 million Germans will wait at a pedestrian red light, even with no car in sight.

But when it comes to empowering women, no Teutonic drive or deference seems to work — even under one of the world’s most powerful women, Chancellor Angela Merkel.

Read more here.

MR

 

Purvis: "Of Financial Rights of Assisted Reproductive Technology: Non-Marital Children and Back-Up Plans"

Dara Purvis (visiting Univ. of Illinois College of Law) has posted "Of Financial Rights of Assisted Reproductive Technology: Non-Marital Children and Back-Up Plans" (83 S. Cal. L. Rev. Postscript (2011)) on SSRN.  Here is the abstract:

Response to Courtney G. Joslin, Protecting Children(?): Marriage, Gender, and Assisted Reproductive Technology, 83 S. CAL. L. REV. 1177 (2010).

This short response argues that Joslin’s parentage rule assessing intent at conception cannot be utilized without a clearer definition of conception and that it should be expanded to assess intent at any point before birth.

AC

Wardle: "The 'Constitution' of Marriage, and the 'Constitution' of Nations"

Lynn Wardle (BYU Law School) has posted "The 'Constitution' of Marriage, and the 'Constitution' of Nations" (45 Univ. of San. Fran. L. Rev. (2010)) on SSRN.  Here is the abstract:

This article examines the interrelationship between marriage, which is the foundation of society, and the legal constitution, which is the foundation of the legal and political order. In order to understand the constitution of marriage, philosophers from Ancient Greece, the Enlightenment, and the Founding Era of the United States are referenced to illustrate that marriage has been acknowledged as fundamental across society and time. In addition, it has been profoundly linked with democracy and essential principles of self-governance. This article also examines the founding of modern Israel as another reference point for the centrality of family. Because marriage and family are so essential, they are afforded special, unique protection in law. After reviewing the fundamentality of marriage, the article asserts that both the constitution of marriage and the Constitution of the nation are endangered, and including same-sex unions in the definition of marriage will weaken the institution and thus weaken the foundation of liberal democracy.

AC

Divorce Expressway

From wbtv:

CHARLOTTE, N.C. (WBTV) -- Could your commute be bad for your marriage? According to a new study from Umea University,  long distance commuters could be traveling a highway to divorce.

The study found long-distance commuting increases the risk of divorce by 40-percent. It also found most long-distance commuters are men, and when the husband commutes, the wife often takes lower-paying or part-time jobs closer to home and takes on a larger share of the household responsibility.

Women who commute long distances feel more stress, time pressure and less successful at work. Not surprisingly, the study found income and careers benefit from commuting, but the social costs should be considered.

Read more here.

MR

 

The History of Online Dating

The New Yorker recently ran a piece on online dating:

In the fall of 1964, on a visit to the World’s Fair, in Queens, Lewis Altfest, a twenty-five-year-old accountant, came upon an open-air display called the Parker Pen Pavilion, where a giant computer clicked and whirred at the job of selecting foreign pen pals for curious pavilion visitors. You filled out a questionnaire, fed it into the machine, and almost instantly received a card with the name and address of a like-minded participant in some far-flung locale—your ideal match. Altfest thought this was pretty nifty. He called up his friend Robert Ross, a programmer at I.B.M., and they began considering ways to adapt this approach to find matches closer to home. They’d heard about some students at Harvard who’d come up with a program called Operation Match, which used a computer to find dates for people. A year later, Altfest and Ross had a prototype, which they called Project TACT, an acronym for Technical Automated Compatibility Testing—New York City’s first computer-dating service.

Read more here.

MR