Gender Politics and Child Custody: The Puzzling Persistence of the Best-Interest Standard Child Custody Decisionmaking

The best-interests-of-the-child standard has been the prevailing legal rule for resolving child-custody disputes between parents for nearly forty years. Almost from the beginning, it has been the target of academic criticism. As Robert Mnookin famously argued in a 1976 article, best interests are vastly indeterminate – more a statement of an aspiration than a legal rule to guide custody decisionmaking. The vagueness and indeterminacy of the standard make outcomes uncertain and gives judges broad discretion to consider almost any factor thought to be relevant to the custody decision. This encourages litigation in which parents are motivated to produce hurtful evidence of each other\u27s deficiencies that might have a lasting, deleterious impact on their ability to act cooperatively in the actual best interests of their children. Despite these deficiencies, the best-interests standard has proved to be remarkably durable. Although scholars as well as the American Law Institute (ALI) have proposed reforms, legislative efforts to narrow the best-interests standard have been largely unsuccessful. A few states have adopted a rule that bases custody on parents\u27 caretaking, but at least one legislature has responded to a courts\u27 imposition of a primary-caretaking rule by rejecting that rule and reviving the best-interests standard. Repeated efforts by fathers\u27 groups to enact laws favoring joint custody have usually failed as well. The persistence of the best-interests standard presents a puzzle: Are the academic critics wrong or does something other than the utility of the rule explain the reluctance of policymakers to change the status quo? In this article, we confirm the deficiencies of the best-interests standard and seek to explain its persistence despite its obvious limitations. First we argue that the standard\u27s entrenchment is the product of a gender war that has played out in legislatures and courts across the country for decades. Most substantive reforms have been perceived (usually accurately) as favoring either fathers or mothers, and thus have generated political battles between their respective advocates. The primary front in this war has been a protracted battle over joint custody. Fathers\u27 groups have lobbied hard for statutes favoring joint physical custody, but they have been opposed vigorously by women\u27s advocates. As a result of the standoff, little progress has been made (in any direction) toward replacing the best-interests standard with a custody decision rule that would narrow and guide the judicial inquiry. Mothers\u27 and fathers\u27 supporters have also battled over the formulation of the best-interests standard itself, with each group arguing for presumptions that can trump other factors when the standard is applied. Mothers\u27 advocates, allied with law-enforcement groups, have lobbied effectively for a statutory presumption disfavoring the parent who has engaged in acts of domestic violence. Fathers\u27 groups have responded by seeking to persuade courts and legislatures to assign substantial negative weight to one parent\u27s concerted efforts to alienate the child from the other parent. Each of these factors implicates a key policy concern and, in theory, might bring greater determinacy to custody doctrine in important categories of cases. But domestic-violence and alienation claims are difficult to verify, and courts are often ill equipped to separate valid claims from those that are weak or false. This uncertainty encourages contesting parents to raise marginal claims, which, if successful, can trump other factors relevant to the best-interests determination. In turn, excessive use of domestic-violence and parental-alienation claims threatens to diminish the credibility of genuine claimants

Gender Politics and Child Custody: The Puzzling Persistence of the Best-Interests Standard

Part I being the introduction, this article proceeds as follows. Part II describes the deficiencies of the best-interests standard, focusing on the daunting verifiability challenges judges face in applying the standard. Part III explores the political-economy explanation for the persistence of the best-interests standard. It examines the gender war in legislatures, focusing particularly on the repeated battles over joint custody in recent decades. Part IV explores the struggles to elevate the importance of domestic violence and parental alienation respectively as key factors in applying the standard, efforts that create a veneer of determinacy important categories of cases. Part V focuses on the illusion of mental-health expertise as the second key to the entrenchment of the best-interests standard. We challenge the assumption that MHPs enable courts to escape the indeterminacy of best interests and can guide them toward good custody decisions. Part VI proposes substantive and procedural reforms that can improve custody decisionmaking, potentially resulting in arrangements th at conform more closely to the law's policy goal

Cardiac transplantation in patients over 50 years of age

Sixty-two patients underwent cardiac transplantation at the University of Arizona from March 1979 to March 1985. Thirteen patients (11 men and 2 women) were over 50 years of age at the time of transplantation and 49 were under the age of 50. The mean age (± SEM) of the patients over 50 was 53 ± 1 years. Eight of these patients were treated with conventional immunosuppressive therapy (azathioprine, prednisone and rabbit antithymocyte globulin) and Ave, beginning in January 1983, were treated with cyclosporine, prednisone and rabbit antithymocyte globulin.Early mortality (0 to 90 days) was 16% in the group over 50 versus 18% for those under 50. The late mortality (> 90 days) was 36 and 33%, respectively. In both groups, rejection and infection were the principal causes of death. The incidence of infection was 1.9 ± 0.5 episodes per patient in those patients over 50 and 1.9 ± 0.4 in those under 50. The incidence of rejection was 1.3 episodes per patient-year in patients over 50 and 1.7 episodes per patient-year in those under 50. Actuarial survival at 1 year was 72 ± 14% in the group over 50 and 66 ± 7% in the group under 50 years of age.These data indicate that the results of cardiac transplantation for patients over 50 do not differ significantly from those for patients under 50. Therefore, it is concluded that a rigidly defined age criterion for cardiac transplant recipients is not acceptable. Each potential recipient must be evaluated in terms of individual risk and benefit from the procedure

Determinants of Newspaper Circulation

This study offers a new approach to the problem of time-series studies and attempts to set up a model to account for the growth in demand for daily newspapers Using U S data on a state-by-state basis for 1850 to 1970, we have used a marketing approach What conditions were necessary for the survival of a daily newspaper? What conditions were conducive to consolidation? What conditions were a barrier to the adoption of social and technological innovation? The data were grouped into geographic and social regions for analysis, using a special case of generalized least squares Independent variables included price as a proportion of per-capita income, percentage of the work force in nonagricultural labor, education, voting, and urbanization. Price proved the most powerful predictor Corrected R2s range from 22636 (m regions where newspaper growth took place very early or late in the period) to 67543 in the Midwest and Southwest The model will be applied to data from the industrialized countries of Western Europe in later workPeer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/67057/2/10.1177_009365028000700101.pd

Offspring ADHD as a risk factor for parental marital problems: Controls for genetic and environmental confounds

Background: Previous studies have found that child attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is associated with more parental marital problems. However, the reasons for this association are unclear. The association might be due to genetic or environmental confounds that contribute to both marital problems and ADHD. Method: Data were drawn from the Australian Twin Registry, including 1,296 individual twins, their spouses, and offspring. We studied adult twins who were discordant for offspring ADHD. Using a discordant twin pairs design, we examined the extent to which genetic and environmental confounds, as well as measured parental and offspring characteristics, explain the ADHD-marital problems association. Results: Offspring ADHD predicted parental divorce and marital conflict. The associations were also robust when comparing differentially exposed identical twins to control for unmeasured genetic and environmental factors, when controlling for measured maternal and paternal psychopathology, when restricting the sample based on timing of parental divorce and ADHD onset, and when controlling for other forms of offspring psychopathology. Each of these controls rules out alternative explanations for the association. Conclusion: The results of the current study converge with those of prior research in suggesting that factors directly associated with offspring ADHD increase parental marital problems

The Longitudinal association Between Sexual Violence Victimization and Sexual Risk Behavior in adolescence

Being a victim of sexual violence (SV) is generally believed to be associated with subsequent sexual risk behavior (SRB) during adolescence. While this assumption makes intuitive sense, it is based on methodologically limited research, including a reliance on cross-sectional data. to address this gap in research, we test whether experiencing SV victimization in early adolescence is associated with self-reported SRB approximately two years later. The sample comprised 4,618 youth (58% female; 52% Hispanic; 39% Black) attending 44 schools in the southern United States. Self-reported data were collected using an audio computer-assisted self-interview (ACASI). Baseline data were collected when students were in 7th or 8th grade and follow-up data were collected approximately 24 months later when students were in 9th or 10th grade. Indices of SRB included behaviors related to oral, vaginal, and anal sex (e.g., number of partners, number of times without a condom). Girls, but not boys, who reported SV victimization at baseline reported engaging more frequently in all oral and vaginal SRBs at 24 month follow-up compared to their non-victimized female counterparts. Additionally, girls reporting SV victimization reported more anal sex partners than non-victimized girls. Girls who are victims of SV engage in significantly more SRB by early high school placing them at greater risk to contract STIs and become pregnant. Victims of SV should be screened for SRB and provided access to the appropriate resources. Teen pregnancy and STI prevention planning should consider SV victimization in their strategy planning

Global Solar Magnetic Field Evolution Over 4 Solar Cycles: Use of the McIntosh Archive

The McIntosh Archive consists of a set of hand-drawn solar Carrington maps created by Patrick McIntosh from 1964 to 2009. McIntosh used mainly Hα, He-I 10830 Å and photospheric magnetic measurements from both ground-based and NASA satellite observations. With these he traced polarity inversion lines (PILs), filaments, sunspots and plage and, later, coronal holes over a ~45-year period. This yielded a unique record of synoptic maps of features associated with the large-scale solar magnetic field over four complete solar cycles. We first discuss how these and similar maps have been used in the past to investigate long-term solar variability. Then we describe our work in preserving and digitizing this archive, developing a digital, searchable format, and creating a website and an archival repository at NOAA's National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI). Next we show examples of how the data base can be utilized for scientific applications. Finally, we present some preliminary results on the solar-cycle evolution of the solar magnetic field, including the polar field reversal process, the evolution of active longitudes, and the role of differential solar rotation