Citation

Weiner MH. Va. J. Soc. Policy Law 2023; 30(1): 100-115.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2023, University of Virginia School of Law)

DOI

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PMID

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Abstract

This Article suggests that Joan Meier's excellent article(1), Denial of Family Violence in Court: An Empirical Analysis and Path Forward for Family Law, could have been strengthened in several ways. First, Meier should have focused family law scholars on the ubiquity of family violence and the centrality of gender oppression in addition to her particular concern. Second, Meier should have distinguished between joint custody and supportive coparenting when she rejected shared parenting. Finally, Meier should not have chosen my book, A Parent-Partner Status for American Family Law, to support her argument that family law scholars insufficiently address domestic violence. In fact, the parent-partner status was designed to further primary prevention of domestic violence -- a goal too often ignored by legal scholars.

The ubiquity and persistence of family violence makes it imperative that family law scholars pay attention to it, including how society might prevent it. Primary prevention offers an important component of any strategy to address family violence. Primary prevention will be furthered by reducing the number of children born into violent relationships, by encouraging supportive coparenting in nonviolent relationships from the get- go, and by emphasizing the incompatibility of violence with supportive coparenting. In considering primary prevention, law professors should heed the insights from other disciplines, such as the importance of social roles for influencing behavior. After all, the legal system can create a new legal status and concomitant social role while simultaneously creating specific obligations to remedy particular injustices. In that way, the law can advance primary prevention, including by attacking the root cause of family violence itself.

1 Joan Meier, Denial of Family Violence in Court: An Empirical Analysis and Path Forward for Family Law, 110 GEO. L.J. 835 (2022)

Language: en