Browsing by Subject "family law"

Now showing 1 - 7 of 7
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    Alimony's Job Lock
    (2015) Ryznar, Margaret; Robert H. McKinley School of Law
    In family law, courts often prevent people who owe alimony from changing jobs. If a job change is accompanied by a salary decrease, the court will not necessarily readjust the alimony obligation and instead impute the higher income to the obligor. This Article introduces the term “job lock” to describe this situation, borrowing the term from the health care context, wherein job immobility due to health insurance concerns has received significant scrutiny. This Article draws similar attention to the alimony context, proposing a balancing test to assist courts interested in alleviating job lock under certain circumstances.
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    A Crime of Its Own? A Proposal for Achieving Greater Sentencing Consistency in Neonaticide and Infanticide Cases
    (2012) Ryznar, Margaret
    There is currently an area in the criminal law — the application of murder statutes to infanticide cases — that has notably inconsistent sentences, which range from parole to the death penalty. Many judges have remarked on the risks of inconsistent sentencing, and the criminal system has generally avoided such sentencing consistencies. Without recommending a particular sentence, and in the interest of sentencing consistency, this article suggests the statutory separation of infanticide from general murder, as is done in England. The family law perspective of this article, a unique viewpoint in the area of criminal law, supports this proposition.
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    An Empirical Study of Family Law Understanding
    (University of Louisville, 2019) Colby, Helen A.; Ryznar, Margaret; Kelley School of Business - Indianapolis
    This article offers empirical data on the extent of family law understanding among Americans when it comes to creditors’ rights. Our data, composed of surveys, reveal that people’s perceptions of these rights do not change across states despite different legal regimes, and that people who are divorced have no better knowledge than those who have never been divorced. These original findings have important implications for law and policymakers.
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    The Obligations of High-Income Parents
    (2014) Ryznar, Margaret; Robert H. McKinney School of Law
    The Child Support Guidelines, incentivized by federal law, provide rebuttable guidance for setting child support awards, except in low- and high-income cases. This article focuses on the latter, as states continue to grapple with the question of whether the child should receive a proportion of the noncustodial parent’s income regardless of its amount, or whether there should be another limit. This article traces the narrative of child support obligations in high-income cases by considering the development of the economic aspect to the parent-child relationship, as well as the purpose and nature of the child support system. The resulting insights are especially useful for states seeking consistency in child support award decisions.
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    Protecting the Parent-Child Relationship
    (2015) Horvath, Kristy; Ryznar, Margaret
    In 2014, Japan became the last G7 industrialized nation to sign the Hague Convention on Civil Aspects of International Child Abduction. In order for the Convention to provide effective relief to parents in Japan, this Article recommends examining joint custody, visitation, and the best interests of the child standard. This would track the developments in custody law that resulted in the modern custody framework in the United States.
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    A tale of two federal systems
    (2012) Ryznar, Margaret; Stqpieri-Sporek, Anna
    In the United States, the harmonization of family law is not possible under the federal system, and family laws differ based on each state’s sensibilities. However, in another system resembling federalism — the European Union — efforts to harmonize family laws among member states are aggressively being pursued, with the next milestone being the European Union Commission’s pending proposal for the harmonization of matrimonial property regimes. In fact, harmonization is the most dynamic aspect of European family law today, and this significant experiment in the harmonization of family law offers lessons into the roles of jurisdictional autonomy, cultural relativism, and legal absolutes in society, all of increasing significance in an increasingly mobile and international society. The result impacts innumerable marriages, their meaning, and their consequences.
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    Two Direct Rights of Action in Child Support Enforcement
    (2012) Ryznar, Margaret
    Child support enforcement and collection is a familiar problem in both the United Kingdom and the United States, fraught with low enforcement rates and high costs. The United Kingdom had approached the problem by centralizing collection efforts through the Child Support Agency and prohibiting direct action by custodial parents against defaulting noncustodial parents, but permitting judicial review of the Child Support Agency’s actions. The United States, meanwhile, continues to permit direct actions by custodial parents, unless they are on welfare, and supports their efforts through governmental agencies, but does not allow for suit against the relevant government agency. This Article is the first to comparatively consider the merits and drawbacks of each use of the judiciary in child support collection, seeking to maximize child support enforcement in both countries while considering the rights of both parents and their children. The resulting insights are especially useful for the United Kingdom child support system, which is currently being reincarnated in its third form since 1991, illustrating the difficulty of designing an effective and efficient child support system.