Bifurcating Settlements

In settling a lawsuit, parties agree on their obligations to one another, but they need not separately address each issue, claim, or remedy that a trial court would have confronted. The legal system, however, can bifurcate the settle-ment process, requiring separate resolution of components of a settlement. Bi-furcation can protect third parties, for example, by preventing divorcing parents from trading child custody for money. In addition to identifying a wide range of contexts in which preventing trade-offs may be desirable, this Article shows that bifurcation will generally have only modest (and sometimes beneficial) effects on settlement rates

Note: English Child Custody Law, 1660-1839: The Origins of Judicial Intervention in Parental Custody

Many legal historians see pre-1839 English child custody law as consisting of near-absolute paternal rights. These historians believe that the weakening of fathers\u27 rights began with the 1839 Custody of Infants Act, which created certain maternal custody rights. Other historians have noted that paternal custody was qualified even before 1839 by the Court of Chancerys application of the doctrine of parens patriae. This Note tells a different story and argues that the origin of incursions into the so-called empire of the father was the 1660 Tenures Abolition Act, a statute that ironically seemed designed to strengthen fathers\u27 rights. The Tenures Abolition Act granted fathers the right to appoint guardians to their children by will. According to Blackstone, the effect of the Act was to extend the father\u27s empire even after his death. But by involving courts in child custody--even as enforcers of fathers\u27 rights--the Tenures Abolition Act created a tradition ofjudicial intervention that would eventually undermine those rights. This Note traces the development from 1660 to 1839 whereby court supervision of testamentary guardians led to court supervision offathers themselves, transforming the empire of the father into the empire of the judge

Rethinking Parental Incarceration

Recent changes in sentencing law, in the wake of cases interpreting Blakely v. Washington and United States v. Booker, have raised the possibility that courts sentencing parents may take children\u27s interests into account more extensively than had previously been permissible. Now is thus an opportune time to reevaluate the merits of considering children\u27s interests when sentencing parents. This Article uses the perspective of family law to offer a new rationale for, and a new approach to, taking children\u27s interests into account when sentencing their parents. It does so by bringing out the connection between the debate over parental incarceration and another ongoing debate within criminal law: the discussion about when we can attribute criminal responsibility to adults. Criminal law holds adults responsible for their actions by treating them as if they are autonomous, even when they are not. Family law\u27s insights about child development, meanwhile, demonstrate that incarcerating parents may diminish a child\u27s likelihood of becoming an autonomous adult. This Article argues that if the criminal law is to treat children as if they are autonomous when they reach adulthood, then it has an obligation to take seriously those actions that may reduce a child\u27s future autonomy, such as incarcerating a child\u27s parent. Parents should not be immunized from incarceration. But a court incarcerating a parent should do so only after assessing the interests of the offender\u27s child, and determining whether it can meet the goals of criminal punishment through means that minimize harm to that child. Articulating children\u27s interests when incarcerating parents would bring childhood experience out from the shadows of family law, and would force courts to acknowledge the extent to which parental incarceration reshapes families and thus alters children\u27s lives

Beyond Family Law

Family law has traditionally been treated as an exceptional field, a marginalized and special case in which the usual rules of the legal canon do not apply. This Article argues that the current challenge to family-law exceptionalism has been largely one way, to the detriment of a central concern of family law: the protection of children and of the parent-child relationship. Family-law scholars have focused primarily on whether and how to import the tools and insights of other areas of law into the zone of family relations, while largely overlooking the possibility that the tools and insights of family law might instead be exported outward, into the rest of the legal canon. In the process, family-law scholars have contributed to an already existing blind spot regarding the extent to which the conditions of child rearing are affected, often profoundly, by jurisprudence that we do not think of as involving family relations, but that affects the conditions of children\u27s development by affecting their parents or caretakers. This Article considers how family law\u27s perspective on children\u27s interests might be exported into areas of law that affect children indirectly. The Article investigates two paradigmatic fields in which children\u27s interests may be affected by cases involving their parents: criminal law and contracts. By using the perspective of family law to examine the relevance of children\u27s interests to criminal law and contracts, the Article shows how taking children\u27s interests into account in cases involving their parents can further the internal consistency and legitimacy of each field. The Article builds upon this rationale to formulate a model for assessing when and how it is appropriate for courts to factor children\u27s interests into their decision making in cases that involve children only indirectly

Nature, Nurture, Narrative, Law: The \u3cem\u3eWellesley\u3c/em\u3e Case, \u3cem\u3eOliver Twist\u3c/em\u3e, and the Victorian Anxiety about Parentage

Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist heralded the popularity in Victorian England of a new type of novel, the novel of child development, that traced the experience of displaced child protagonists as they found their place in the world by working out their relationships with a series of parents and parent-figures. At the same time, the newly prominent field of English child custody law began to articulate why and how parentage matters for a developing child. An examination of one of the first highly publicized English custody disputes, Wellesley v. Beaufort, brings out some of the concerns about parentage at work in Oliver Twist, in a reading that assesses why stories of children and parents became prominent in the Victorian age, and why the novelistic versions of these stories so often intertwined attention to childhood experience with attention to legal themes. Oliver Twist exhibits what would become the defining feature of the Victorian novel of child development: it uses the story of a displaced child to raise questions about the definition and function of parentage, and thus the validity of class distinctions, at what was seen as a time of social and political upheaval. Like many other instances of the genre, Oliver Twist maps these questions onto the terrain of law with a plot that explores the role of law in formulating parentage and therefore identity. While Oliver Twist, like many other Victorian novels, attempts to distinguish law from novelistic narrative as competing enterprises, it at the same time collapses those distinctions by suggesting how narrative and legal innovations could work together to negotiate this upheaval in a way that seemed to question, but ultimately preserved through transformation, the status quo

Severe congenital microcephaly with AP4M1 mutation, a case report

Background: Autosomal recessive defects of either the B1, E1, M1 or S1 subunit of the Adaptor Protein complex-4 (AP4) are characterized by developmental delay, severe intellectual disability, spasticity, and occasionally mild to moderate microcephaly of essentially postnatal onset. Case presentation: We report on a patient with severe microcephaly of prenatal onset, and progressive spasticity, developmental delay, and severe intellectual deficiency. Exome sequencing showed a homozygous mutation in AP4M1, causing the replacement of an arginine by a stop codon at position 338 of the protein (p.Arg338X). The premature stop codon truncates the Mu homology domain of AP4M1, with predicted loss of function. Exome analysis also showed heterozygous variants in three genes, ATR, MCPH1 and BLM, which are known causes of autosomal recessive primary microcephaly. Conclusions: Our findings expand the AP4M1 phenotype to severe microcephaly of prenatal onset, and more generally suggest that the AP4 defect might share mechanisms of prenatal neuronal depletion with other genetic defects of brain development causing congenital, primary microcephaly

Congenital hydrocephalus : new Mendelian mutations and evidence for oligogenic inheritance

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Standardizing Terminology and Assessment for Orofacial Conditions in Juvenile Idiopathic Arthritis : International, Multidisciplinary Consensus-based Recommendations

Objective. To propose multidisciplinary, consensus-based, standardization of operational terminology and method of assessment for temporomandibular joint (TMJ) involvement in juvenile idiopathic arthritis (JIA). Methods. Using a sequential expert group–defined terminology and methods-of-assessment approach by (1) establishment of task force, (2) item generation, (3) working group consensus, (4) external expert content validity testing, and (5) multidisciplinary group of experts final Delphi survey consensus. Results. Seven standardized operational terms were defined: TMJ arthritis, TMJ involvement, TMJ arthritis management, dentofacial deformity, TMJ deformity, TMJ symptoms, and TMJ dysfunction. Conclusion. Definition of 7 operational standardized terms provides an optimal platform for communication across healthcare providers involved in JIA-TMJ arthritis management.publishersversionPeer reviewe