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Abstract:
This book chapter tells the story of the contempt case brought against Elizabeth Morgan, a Washington, D.C., doctor imprisoned for her failure to produce her daughter for extended visitation with the ex-husband she accused of sexual abuse. The chapter sets the stage for the proceeding in terms of the shift in custody law in the mid-eighties from the maternal presumption to a preference for shared parenting and the discovery of and almost immediate backlash against allegations of childhood sexual abuse. It also details Morgan's parents' flight with the child to New Zealand and provides an update of what has happened to the law and the parties since the case ended.

family law, Elizabeth Morgan, Morgan v. Foretich, child sexual abuse, contempt, criminal contempt, parental alienation, incarceration for contempt, child custody, visitation, overnight visitation, sexual abuse allegations, fabrication of abuse claims

Abstract:
Parental responsibility laws impose some form of legal liability on parents for children's misdeeds. They date to at least to the nineteenth century, and the first juvenile court law in 1903 century included a contributing to the delinquency of a minor provision, which is a form of parental responsibility law. Every 20 years or so policymakers seem to rediscover parental responsibility as a solution to problems of youth crime. For almost as long as they have existed, parental responsibility laws have been criticized as ineffective, creating risks of arbitrary and discriminatory enforcement, invading parental autonomy, and diverting attention from more effective solutions. But little is known about their actual implementation and effects. This study of Oregon's statewide parental responsibility law and local ordinances examines what kinds of communities enact and enforce these laws (to the extent that they are enforced at all), how they related to other legal methods of controlling teen crime, and the messages they send about community ideas of the proper relationship between teens and the wider community.

parental responsibility laws, contributing to the delinquency of a minor

Abstract:
In 2007 an Oregon law reform commission charged a large work group of more than 20 attorneys, child support and child welfare agency administrators, judges, and lobbyists with proposing a comprehensive revision of the state's paternity laws, the first in more than 30 years. The group began with the 2002 Uniform Parentage Act as a model but quickly abandoned it, finally settling on a proposal that was enacted into law with few revisions. This article describes the issues and compromises that underlie the law, particularly clashing visions of the appropriate criteria for legal fatherhood, tensions between the interests of adults and children, and the role of judicial discretion in resolving these issues.

paternity, law reform

Abstract:
In contrast to traditional practice, today juvenile courts and child welfare agencies attempt to identify and involve children's fathers in cases as soon as possible. This changing approach to nonresident fathers, in turn, makes child protection cases more complicated. If poorly implemented, it can also threaten to undermine the goals of modern child protection law-insuring children's safety, reuniting children with the parents from whom they were removed when possible, and moving them rapidly into alternate permanent homes when not possible. Most obviously, if the policy of involving nonresidential fathers is implemented woodenly, by requiring that children be placed with the fathers at the outset of the case when little is known about them, the children may be endangered. Less dramatically, efforts to work with fathers can result in children remaining in the system longer. And working with fathers can undermine, or even short-circuit, efforts to reunite children with the mothers from whom they were taken, raising problems of defining children's best interests as well as fairness to both parents in what amounts to state-generated custody contests. This article describes the changing practices and the reasons for them, explores the problems that may be created, and proposes solutions.

fathers' rights, juvenile court, child abuse and neglect, establishing paternity

Abstract:
In the United States today, we have two legal bases for parentage, biology and function. Biological parenthood is usually controlling when the issue is liability for child support, and functioning as a parent is considered, if at all, only when the primary issue is custody or access to a child. These two strands of parentage law derive from what Jacobus tenBroek called the dual system of family law. While the divided law that ten Broek describes is centuries old, until fairly recently, the two strands ran in parallel and did not have much impact on each other. However, in the last several decades they have evolved and, as a result, are today on a collision course when the identity of a child's legal parents must be determined. Child support law has come to be predominantly welfare-driven; in tenBroek's terminology, it has taken on characteristics of "public law," regardless of whether it applies to the poor or to the upper classes.The law that governs private disputes over custody, visitation and the like continues to have the characteristics of "private law." The difference in these approaches is especially apparent in the law of parentage. If child support is the ultimate question, parentage will likely be determined according to biology, the principle favored by the "public law approach." If custody or access is the main issue, private law principles, which tend to respect functional parenthood, are more likely to be invoked. And yet, once legal parentage is determined, it applies to determine the rights and duties of the involved adults vis-a-vis the child, regardless of context. The article argues that as biology-based parentage becomes more pervasive, it threatens to displace rules based on functional parent-child relationships, which would be harmful to many children and their families. To avoid this result, I argue that we need a substantive law of parentage that recognizes the importance of biology while preserving a realm in which functional relationships are protected. To make this law politically viable, we also should reject some child support rules and practices that treat men unfairly and, in so doing, suggest that biology is the only thing that matters for determining legal parentage.

parent-child, child support, child custody, parenthood