Archive for family law
Valuing a Child’s Best Interest?
On Tuesday, the Montana Supreme Court decisively ruled that a non-biological parent who had lived with her same-sex partner for some ten years, and with whom she had co-parented the couple’s children, had parental rights under a state statute. An in-depth analysis of the decision, Kulstad v. Maniaci (and a citation to it), is available [...]
Dallas Judge Declares Texas’s Ban on Same-Sex Marriages Violates the Federal Constitution
Courts sometimes find themselves in a bind: Stray too far from public opinion (even if constitutional principles seem to compel doing so), and they risk vilification and loss of the public’s confidence on which they, to an extent, depend for legitimacy. But ignore the reality of the litigants before them, and they run the risk [...]
Dysfunctional Families in Fact and Fiction (and Marriage Equality)
Three events coincided yesterday, giving me occasion to reflect on “family” in all of its glorious and sorrowful messiness.
A friend and I had long discussed going to see August: Osage County on Broadway. Of course, it took the news of its imminent closing to get me to actually go. On the train going up to [...]
Sex-Deprived Kenyan v. Lysistrata’s Daughters, NGO
I find myself unduly interested in the sex life of a Kenyan man.
A while ago, I compared the political courage of Liberian women to the moxie shown by Lysistrata and company. Lysistrata, a creation of the comic playwright Aristophanes, was an Athenian woman who led her Greek sisters in a sex boycott until the men [...]
Equality Forum Day 5: What Now?
After a political eternity, several bills directly relevant to LGBT equality are queued up before Congress. In order of both expected ease of passage and anticipated timeline, these are: hate crimes, which has already passed the U.S. House, and is expected to navigate the more treacherous waters of the Senate and be signed, possibly within [...]
Equality Forum Day 3 (Part 2): It’s Always Personal
Family Law is an exciting yet weird course to teach. The law school model (now admittedly under both siege and reconstruction) emphasizes legal reasoning and analysis, the parsing of cases and statutes, and the occasional foray into broader constitutional issues. Of course, very few legal scholars or students today think that a legal result can [...]