Contemporary Family Law

This popular family law casebook engages students by presenting core family law doctrine while exploring significant transformations in American families and cutting-edge policy debates. It highlights the important role of constitutional law--and other areas of state and federal law--in shaping family law. The book invites students to consider questions of family definition and governmental regulation of families in light of family law's purposes. It charts family law's evolving approach to adult-adult and parent-child (and other caretaker-dependent) relationships, emphasizing that contemporary families take a variety of forms. The Sixth Edition updates all chapters to reflect the latest family law developments, such as the legal treatment of nonmarital families (including plural relationships) and nonbiological parenting as well as recent Supreme Court decisions. It integrates material previously covered in separate chapters on ethical issues in family law practice and jurisdiction into the contexts in which they arise, such as divorce, child custody, and division of marital property. The Sixth Edition has new material highlighting the intersection of family law with race, gender, class, immigration, sexual orientation, and gender identity. As with previous editions, the casebook contains ample problems for students to apply doctrine to realistic factual contexts and highlights practical dynamics of family law practice. The 6th edition: Thoroughly examines the impact of recent Supreme Court cases on family law, including Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization (and provides teachers with shorter and longer versions of that case), and Golan v. Saada Includes attention to the role of race and racism in laws that shape and regulate the family, with case law addressing marriage, divorce, and inheritance rights of formerly enslaved persons and a post-Loving v. Virginia case challenging the continued requirement that couples disclose race on a marriage license Provides a restructured chapter on the legal consequences of marriage, spousal roles within marriage, and the gender revolution within family law and related fields Includes new developments on marriage requirements, including state minimum age laws and common-law marriage rules, and addresses First Amendment challenges, post-Masterpiece Cakeshop, to civil marriage equality and state antidiscrimination laws Includes new coverage of the intersection of immigration and family law Addresses changes in legal approaches to nonmarital families, including multi-adult domestic partnerships and the Uniform Cohabitants' Economic Remedies Act Provides updated treatment of custody and parenting time issues, including parenting gender-expansive children Provides a restructured chapter on intimate partner violence (IPV), including updates on various factors impacting IPV and shifting gun control statutes and caselaw affecting civil protection orders Provides new consideration of child support issues, including joint custody and subsequent families Provides revised problems in anticipation of the NextGen Bar Exam

Contemporary Family Law is the first family law casebook entirely conceived and written in the twenty-first century. The text captures the rapid evolution of doctrine, introduces students to emerging policy debates, and explores issues that arise in family law practice including the importance of collaborating with professionals from other disciplines. The book emphasizes that families take a variety of forms, including marital and nonmarital relationships, and that constitutional considerations play an increasingly important role in family law. Contemporary Family Law includes several chapters that do not appear in most other family law casebooks. For example, it devotes separate chapters to lawyering, private ordering, and alternative dispute resolution. And, in contrast to the usual approach, the book treats property distribution and alimony in separate chapters to emphasize each topic's distinctive theoretical and practical aspects. Moreover, because child custody arrangements lead to some of the most acrimonious legal disputes, this casebook devotes two separate chapters to custody: the first treats the initial custody decision, and the second explores disputes that arise over visitation, custody, and key childrearing decisions after the initial disposition. In addition, the book emphasizes the importance of legal practice issues by placing the lawyering chapter at the beginning of the book, and by using problems that enable students to apply doctrine.

This book challenges conventional boundaries of family law providing a solid foundation and edge to students' understanding of the topic.

Offers a comprehensive overview of the key issues facing family law globally, and explores how different countries have tackled them.

This volume examines the state of family law in America. Among its themes is the tension between individual autonomy and governmental regulation in all aspects of family law. It examines both conventional and new definitions of formal and informal domestic relationships.

Family Law addresses contemporary family law issues and analyzes the public and private dichotomy in contemporary family law relationships. Current family law topics addressed in this book include: Marriage and marriage alternatives Support and property rights Conception and reproduction issues Domestic violence and intrafamily torts Care and supervision of children Adoption and termination of parental rights Legitimacy and paternity Divorce or dissolution of marriage Economic consequences of divorce, including spousal and child support, equitable distribution of marital and community property and a discussion of the American Law Institute's proposed principles of the law of family dissolution Child custody and visitation, including a discussion of the Uniform Child Custody Jurisdiction and Enforcement Act and the Uniform Interstate Family Support Act Premarital and postmarital agreements Alternative dispute resolution Ethical issues for the family lawyer While addressing many cutting-edge family law issues, this family law casebook still maintains a realistic balance between theory and practice. The format is manageable, condensed, and user-friendly. Each topic includes a general introduction, a current or landmark illustrative judicial decision, relevant notes and questions analyzing, extending, or questioning each topic, and problems allowing students to analyze particular family law issues and disputes as practitioners, legislators, or jurists would. A Teacher's Manual is available to professors.