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.

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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.