Family Law Prof Blog

National Adoption Day

From the Sacramento Bee:

National Adoption Day 2011 will be held on Saturday, November 19. Celebrated across the United States, more than 350 community events are held each year to finalize the adoptions of children in foster care and celebrate adoptive families.

This year, National Adoption Day will include events ranging from courtroom adoptions to local celebrations, in all 50 states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico and Guam. Thanks to the volunteer efforts of adoption advocates, policymakers, judges and lawyers, more than 35,000 children have been adopted from foster care on National Adoption Day during the last 11 years.

Read more here.

MR

The Divorcee Sale

From Good Morning America:

 

MR

Higher Weight, Higher Child Custody Disputes

From the Wall Street Journal:

The nation's waistline is expanding, and so too is the role of obesity in child-custody battles in the U.S.

Family-law practitioners and legal experts say mothers and fathers in custody lawsuits are increasingly hurling accusations at each other about the nutrition and obesity of their children, largely in attempts to persuade judges that their kids are getting less-than-optimal care in the hands of ex- and soon-to-be-ex-spouses.

Read more here.

MR

Padding Divorce Bills

From the Telegraph:

Baroness Shackleton, Britain's highest-profile divorce lawyer, has increased the bills of celebrity clients beyond the time she recorded having spent on their cases...

Madonna and Sir Paul McCartney appear to have been charged hundreds of thousands of pounds more than the hourly rate would have demanded, documents show, a practice known as “marking up”.

The Conservative peer, who represented the Prince of Wales and the Duke of York in their divorces and remains solicitor to Princes William and Harry, appears to have charged her clients more than twice as much as the rate for the actual number of hours she had recorded as having spent on their cases, according to internal time sheets.

Read more here.

MR

If You Don't Want It...Put A Ring On It?

From the Times of India:

For too long, the world's divided the married and the divorced into the haves and the have-nots. And what is it that the married "have"? A husband, babies, that smug smile, but more importantly, they have that ring.

To lessen this chasm, New-York based jewellers Spritzer and Furman have come out with a USD 3200 (Rs 1.48 lakh) divorce ring with 18-carat gold and 4 full-cut diamonds. It's bigger than Kim Kardashian's, and jazzier too! It has a broken golden heart with a diamond lightening bolt piercing through it to make heartbreak a lot more stylish.

Read more here.

MR

 

Eggsploitation

 

AC

Divorce Impacts Small Businesses

From Reuters:

According to the 2009 U.S. Census, there were 9.2 divorces for every 1,000 men and 9.7 divorces for every 1,000 women. Most business owners don't head into marriage thinking about doomsday scenarios, but when divorce is imminent, small businesses are at significant risk, as leadership and financial resources may be stretched thin.

"Are we seeing businesses go under?" said Andrew Zashin, a Cleveland, Ohio-based divorce attorney whose clientele includes high-net-worth small business owners. "The answer is yes."

There is a bright spot. The availability of so-called "no-fault divorce" throughout the entire U.S. is approaching its one-year anniversary in October, twelve months after the state of New York joined the rest of the country by allowing couples to end marriage without allegations or proof of fault.

No fault divorce sidesteps the often-embarrassing litany of legally recognized grounds. Depending on the state, these claims can range from emotional abuse to adultery - and they can make the divorce process a painful, public spectacle.

"(No fault) advances preserving business because it helps people get divorced amicably," said Zashin, who over the years has faced bullying from angry spouses, including one man who brought a concealed sword to his law office and threatened him with it. "They can talk."

Read more here.

MR

Rosenbury: "Working Relationships"

Laura Rosenbury (Wash. U. St. Louis) has posted "Working Relationships" (35 Wash. Univ. J. L. & Policy 117 (2011)) on SSRN. Here is the abstract:

In this Essay written for the symposium on "For Love or Money? Defining Relationships in Law and Life," I extend my previous consideration of friendship to the specific context of the workplace, analyzing friendship through the lens of the ties that arise at work instead of those assumed to arise within the home. Many adults spend half or more of their waking hours at work, in the process forming relationships with supervisors, co-workers, subordinates, customers, and other third parties. Although such relationships are at times primarily transactional, at other times they take on intimate qualities similar to those of family relationships or friendships. Workplaces are thus often sites of both intimacy and production, much like the home is a site of both intimacy and production, even though the law assigns production to the workplace and intimacy to the home.

This combination of intimacy and production means that workplace ties are often a component of workplace success rather than a simple byproduct of that success or a negative distraction from it. Workplace friendships foster connections that may lead to promotions and higher status, and such connections may also provide care and support to workers in increasingly uncertain and competitive workplace environments. Some legal scholars have categorized these effects as favoritism and have considered ways to eliminate that favoritism in order to promote meritocracy and antidiscrimination goals in the workplace. This Essay takes a different tack, examining relationships in the workplace to challenge legal understandings of both work and family, particularly the assumption that purported merit-based success can be separated from intimacy or care. Part I examines the ways that current legal analysis largely ignores relationships at work or constructs them solely as threats to workplace equality. Part II draws on social science literature to illustrate that personal relationships are neither irrelevant to the workplace nor always at odds with antidiscrimination goals, even as they may replicate patterns of inequality not currently addressed by antidiscrimination law. Part III then sets forth an agenda for future legal consideration of affective bonds at work that does not collapse work relationships into family, or define them against family, but instead examines the flow of intimacy in and out of the home, the workplace, and other spaces both public and private, and productive and intimate.

AC