Family Law Prof Blog

Losing Family in Divorce

From the New York Post:

DEAR ABBY: My brother is emerging from a painful two-year-long divorce, during which his two teenage daughters and one grown daughter became estranged from him. His now-ex-wife overshared with them during the divorce and did everything she could to prevent them from seeing him, despite court orders for him to have joint custody, visitation and therapy. 

My brother isn’t perfect, but he loves his girls and wants them in his life. He’s slowly making progress with one of his minor daughters. My problem is his ex has caused them to shun the rest of their paternal relatives. My two sisters (their aunts) and I are pained by the loss of those relationships. 

We still reach out at holidays and birthdays with texts, gifts and well wishes, but we receive no response, not even a polite “thank you.” Because we stood by our brother during a terrible experience, we are “guilty by association.” Should we continue reaching out or leave them alone until they are ready to have a relationship with us again? — VICTIM OF DIVORCE

Read the advice here.

The Sound of Silence Good for Kids' Brains

From NPR:

"Silence is kind of a peak achievement in a child's ability to control themselves," Mejía-Menendez says. "We create the conditions for children to concentrate."

Unlike this classroom, the city outside is full of noise. And studies show that too much noise, particularly loud noise, can hurt a child's cognitive development, notably for language-based skills such as reading. That's because if noise is just, well, noise, it distracts developing brains and makes it more difficult for children to concentrate. But when their environment is quiet enough for them to pay attention to sounds that are important or particularly interesting to them, it is a powerful teaching tool.

"[Young children's] brains are craving sound-to-meaning connections, so it's very important that the sounds around them be nourishing and meaningful," says Nina Kraus, a neurobiologist at Northwestern University.

She believes turning down the noise in our lives starts with embracing — even enjoying — silence.

Read more here.

Memorial Day

How to Parent Adult Children

Child Labor Coming Back to U.S.

From AP:

Lawmakers in several states are embracing legislation to let children work in more hazardous occupations, for more hours on school nights and in expanded roles, including serving alcohol in bars and restaurants as young as 14.

The efforts to significantly roll back labor rules are largely led by Republican lawmakers to address worker shortages and, in some cases, run afoul of federal regulations.

Child welfare advocates worry the measures represent a coordinated push to scale back hard-won protections for minors.

Read more here.

Divorce Recommendation

From CNN:

A New York Times Magazine newsletter has caused a social media storm. In the column, a reader wrote that her husband flies first class, leaving her in economy.

See the video story here.

Paid Family Leave in MN

From ABC:

Minnesota workers will be entitled to paid time off when they're seriously ill or to care for newborns and loved ones starting in 2026 under a bill that Democratic Gov. Tim Walz signed Thursday, making his state the 12th to require those benefits.

The paid family and medical leave program will allow Minnesota workers up to 12 weeks a year off with partial pay to care for a newborn or a sick family member, and up to 12 weeks to recover from their own serious illness. Benefits will be capped at 20 weeks a year for employees who take advantage of both.

Business groups fought to block the proposal, warning that it would impose heavy costs and regulatory burdens on employers and aggravate their staffing problems. But it was hailed by supporters who said it would bring equality and fairness to the workplace.

Read more here.

Missing Children in TX

From a press release:

Today, Texas Center for the Missing (TCM), The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) and Clear Channel Outdoor Americas (CCOA) (NYSE: CCO) launched a new month-long campaign across Texas calling attention to the ongoing searches for local missing children. Coinciding with National Missing Children's Day (May 25), the digital out-of-home (DOOH) campaign will highlight different missing children's cases in Dallas, Houston and San Antonio to help generate leads.

Read more here.

Vasectomies up Post-Dobbs

From the Economist:

Dr Doug Stein estimates that he has performed around 50,000 vasectomy procedures. He has been practising urology for 40 years, but still, achieving that impressive tally has meant “a lot of sunny Saturdays in windowless rooms hovering over scrotum”, he explains. Dr Stein’s experience and reputation, built up over the decades, make him a popular choice for Floridian men looking to get the snip. But in the summer of 2022 demand for his services suddenly surged.

On June 24th last year the Supreme Court issued its ruling in the case of Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organisation, reversing its decision in Roe v Wade, and allowing states to ban abortion. Dr Stein saw registrations from potential vasectomy patients almost triple the next week.

Read more here.

Tina Turner with A Little Help from Friends, Post-Divorce

From People:

After her and Ike's public separation in 1976, [Tina Turner] had been dropped by her label, Capitol Records, and took a brief hiatus from music. In 2004, she revealed in conversation with UK outlet Female First that she was able to get back on her feet because of the help fellow musician Bowie offered.

"In 1983 David Bowie did something very special and significant for me," Turner said. "We were on the same label, but the decision had been taken not to re-sign me. David, however, had just had his contract renewed by Capitol, who wanted to take him out to dinner that night in New York to celebrate. 'I'm sorry,'  he told them, 'but I'm going to the Ritz to see my favorite singer perform.' And that was me."

It was only after Bowie's refusal that the record label "bigwig tagged along" to see Turner perform — and the rest was history. 

"Luckily it was a great show. Seeing it and the crowd's reaction turned 'round how Capitol [Records] viewed me," she continued.

"It was because of David that I got another deal, and everything else followed. I'll be ever thankful to him."

Read more here.

100 Best Children's Books, According to BBC

From BBC:

1          Where the Wild Things Are (Maurice Sendak, 1963)
2          Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (Lewis Carroll, 1865)
3          Pippi Longstocking (Astrid Lindgren, 1945)
4          The Little Prince (Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, 1943)
5          The Hobbit (JRR Tolkien, 1937)
6          Northern Lights (Philip Pullman, 1995)
7          The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (CS Lewis, 1950)
8          Winnie-the-Pooh (AA Milne and EH Shepard, 1926)
9          Charlotte's Web (EB White and Garth Williams, 1952)
10        Matilda (Roald Dahl and Quentin Blake, 1988)
11        Anne of Green Gables (LM Montgomery, 1908)
12        Fairy Tales (Hans Christian Andersen, 1827)
13        Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone (JK Rowling, 1997)
14        The Very Hungry Caterpillar (Eric Carle, 1969)
15        The Dark is Rising (Susan Cooper, 1973)
16        The Arrival (Shaun Tan, 2006)
17        Little Women (Louisa May Alcott, 1868)
18        Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (Roald Dahl, 1964)
19        Heidi (Johanna Spyri, 1880)
20        Goodnight Moon (Margaret Wise Brown and Clement Hurd, 1947)

See more here.

2023 Symposium on Heat: Impacts on Children and Pregnancy

Please join OEHHA and the Children’s Environmental Health Center for a virtual symposium series exploring the effects of heat on children and during pregnancy. This highly interactive four-session symposium will cover physiologic considerations for children and pregnancy, strategies to combat health effects in children and during pregnancy, and important considerations for these populations in the development of heat health warning systems.

Following the sessions, this page will be updated with the links to the recorded videos.

See the sessions here.

Happy Mother's Day

Georgetown Seeking Assistant Teaching Professor

The Women’s and Gender Studies program (WGST) and the Capitol Applied Learning Labs (CALL) at Georgetown University invite applications for a three-year, non-tenure-line Assistant Teaching Professor position in Gender and the Law to begin in August 2023. The position is open as to research and teaching specialization. The ideal candidate will use a feminist lens to assess the legal implications of provisional categories such as gender, sexuality, disability, race, and nativity in the United States.  We welcome a variety of theoretical, methodological, and practical approaches to the teaching of gender and law. We are particularly interested in candidates whose work demonstrates their knowledge and commitment to the discipline of Women’s and Gender Studies.

 

The full description and application process is here: http://apply.interfolio.com/124721

No-Fault Divorce Targetted

From Rolling Stone:

STEVEN CROWDER, THE right-wing podcaster, is getting a divorce. “No, this was not my choice,” Crowder told his online audience last week. “My then-wife decided that she didn’t want to be married anymore — and in the state of Texas, that is completely permitted.” 

Crowder’s emphasis on “the state of Texas” makes it sound like the Lone Star State is an outlier, but all 50 states and the District of Columbia have no-fault divorce laws on the books — laws that allow either party to walk away from an unhappy marriage without having to prove abuse, infidelity, or other misconduct in court. 

It was a hard-fought journey to get there. It took more than four decades to end fault-based divorce in America: California was the first state to eliminate it, in 1969; New York didn’t come around until 2010. (And there are caveats: Mississippi and South Dakota still only allow no-fault divorce if both parties agree to dissolve the marriage, for example.) 

Researchers who tracked the emergence of no-fault divorce laws state by state over that period found that reform led to dramatic drops in the rates of female suicide and domestic violence, as well as decreases in spousal homicide of women. The decreases, one researcher explained, were “not just because abused women (and men) could more easily divorce their abusers, but also because potential abusers knew that they were more likely to be left."

Today, more than two-thirds of all heterosexual divorces in the U.S. are initiated by women.

Republicans across the country are now reconsidering no-fault divorce. There isn’t a huge mystery behind the campaign: Like the crusades against abortion and contraception, making it more difficult to leave an unhappy marriage is about control. Crowder’s home state could be the first to eliminate it, if the Texas GOP gets its way. Last year, the Republican Party of Texas added language to its platform calling for an end to no-fault divorce: “We urge the Legislature to rescind unilateral no-fault divorce laws, to support covenant marriage, and to pass legislation extending the period of time in which a divorce may occur to six months after the date of filing for divorce.” 

Read more here.

Call for Papers

 The Section on Family & Juvenile Law is pleased to announce a Call for Participants for its pedagogy panel on Teaching Reproductive Justice in a Post-Dobbs World.  The program is co-sponsored by the Sections on Minority Groups, Sexual Orientation & Gender Identity, and Women in Legal Education.

The panel will be held during the AALS Annual Meeting in early January 2024 in Washington, DC. The goal of the session is to discuss and share our ideas about teaching reproductive justice, both in regards to the  Dobbs decision and related developments as well as how to create a separate course on reproductive justice.  The panel will show how family and juvenile law professors are integrating these teaching methods into their courses and the overall family and juvenile law curriculum. Presenters will be asked to share relevant materials in advance of the Annual Meeting.

If you are interested in participating, please send a 400-600 word description of what you'd like to discuss. Submissions should be sent to Naomi Cahn, [email protected] and Jeffrey Dodge, [email protected]. The due date for submissions is June 23, 2023.  We will notify the selected presenters by July 1, 2023. 

Please note that the theme of the Annual Meeting is Defending Democracy.

Review of "The Loneliest Americans"

From Kaiponanea Matsumura (Loyola Marymount University), writing for the Family Law JOTWELL (The Journal of Things We Like (Lots)):

I have sometimes wondered whether it matters that the experiences of Asian Americans are nowhere to be found in the family law canon. This omission should be surprising. People from Asia have been skirting the shores of the Americas since the 17th Century. Within two decades of California becoming a state, people from Asia, mostly men from China, made up 25% of the entire work force and played a crucial role in developing the state’s infrastructure.¹ These men, and others in western states, soon faced anti-miscegenation and immigration laws designed to prevent them from marrying and producing American-born children—laws concerning the bread and butter of family law. People from Asia or of Asian descent, some 22.4 million of them, are now the fastest growing minority group in the United States, largely because of family preferences in immigration law. Surely, I have told myself in passing, these and other developments should fit into the story we teach about family regulation. Surely, too, there are legal interventions that could strengthen Asian families or validate their shared experiences. But soon after I begin considering the possibilities, I am waylaid with doubts: What, if anything, are those shared experiences and values, and are they worth preserving, here? And would anyone, even Asian Americans themselves, really care about these stories?

The Loneliest Americans, by New York Times staff writer Jay Caspian Kang, is an epistemology of these ambivalences. Asia, Kang explains, means nothing to the immigrant from Korea, who finds little in common with people from countries like the Philippines or China. (P. 59.) Additionally, the highly skilled workers and their descendants who arrived after the Hart-Celler Act of 1965 (which replaced national origin-based immigration with a preference system favoring family reunification and skilled workers) have at best a tenuous, mostly imagined connection to the exclusion, lynchings, discrimination, and interment experienced by earlier Asian laborers and their descendants. (P. 57.) Above all, Kang provocatively argues, the upwardly mobile contingent of post-Hart-Celler Asian Americans are not invested in an Asian American identity because they hold onto the belief that it is possible on some level to assimilate into whiteness: thus, they hollow out Asian Americanness from the inside.

Read more here.

Predicting Divorce

From Psychology Today:

Shared ambivalence “predicted divorce seven years later through its association with couples’ marital conflict.”

Compared to those who stayed together, “spouses who eventually divorced were more ambivalent toward each other and had greater marital conflict.”

The negative effects of ambivalence were present even in spouses who chose to stay together. Indeed, shared ambivalence correlated with “greater marital conflict and lower couple-level marital satisfaction.”

At the individual level, wives’ and husbands’ own ambivalence (rather than their partners’ or shared ambivalence) was associated with worse assessments of marriage, such as reduced happiness, lower marriage satisfaction, and a greater desire to end the relationship.

These findings agree with the socioemotional selectivity theory, which suggests that as we age, our goals change, and we become more selective.

Read more here.

A Poet's Divorce

From New York Times:

The American poet and writer Maggie Smith exudes a beatific warmth, so it seemed apt — a felicitous pairing of author and venue — that her recent book tour included an evening at a Brooklyn church. The pews were crowded with admirers, many feverishly reading her new memoir even as they waited for her to speak.

The book, “You Could Make This Place Beautiful,” is about the collapse of Ms. Smith’s marriage — from her discovery of her husband’s affair to his decision to walk out — and how writing helped her survive it. Alert readers will recognize the title as a line from her viral 2016 poem “Good Bones,” which became a social-media hit and then a wider cultural phenomenon, a “mantra of hope in hard times,” as Slate put it.

“You Could Make This Place Beautiful,” which just made its debut on The New York Times’s best-seller list in the No. 3 position for hardcover nonfiction, is actually the second book Ms. Smith has written about her divorce. (The first was “Keep Moving,” released in 2020.) Somehow between the publication of “Good Bones” and now, Ms. Smith became that most surprising of things, a celebrity poet.

...

“Did you have the impulse to ask anybody for permission,” one woman asked, “and were you concerned with how your ex-husband would feel?”

Ms. Smith flashed a serene smile. “I so respect and appreciate that question, and um, no, I did not feel the need to ask anyone for permission,” she said. She added: “I can’t make decisions in my life based on fear.”

In the book she describes how, soon after her husband left the house he shared with her and their two children, she emailed him a draft of an essay she’d written about their breakup for the Times’s “Modern Love” column. He responded, she says, with a bossy litany of proposed changes — tiny correctives to details — designed to cast him in a better light. Told by her editor that the changes would “weaken” the piece, she rejected most of them.

Read more here.

Sleep Divorce

From CBS News:

Ever had trouble falling asleep or staying asleep because of your partner?

Whether it's getting disturbed by snoring, stolen covers during the night or differing schedules waking you up before your alarm — you're not alone.

People are taking to social media to talk about "sleep divorces," the idea of sleeping separately from your partner to get a better night's sleep. On TikTok, there are more than 355,000 views for the hashtag #sleepdivorce — and experts say there can be potential benefits.

"There are benefits for some partners to sleep separately," said Dr. Erin Flynn-Evans, a consultant to the American Academy of Sleep Medicine. "Studies demonstrate that when one bed partner has a sleep disorder it can negatively affect the other sleeper. For example, bed partners tend to wake up at the same time when one has insomnia. Similarly, when bed partners differ in chronotype, like when one is a night owl the other is an early bird, these differing sleep preferences can negatively impact both partners' sleep."

On the other hand, sleeping with your partner can help in detecting any conditions you may have been unaware of, Flynn-Evans said, as sleep clinicians use reports from bed partners to help identify patients with sleep disorders.

Read more here.