Herma Hill Kay

Marvin v. Marvin: Preserving the Options

The number of couples choosing to live together without marriage has increased significantly in recent years. In Marvin v. Marvin, the California Supreme Court redefined the rights of persons living in nonmarital cohabitation to property acquired during their relationship. In this Article, the authors review the statutory and case law prior to Marvin, endorse the courts decision to permit a broad variety of choices for married and unmarried couples, and suggest how the case might be applied to typical couples who choose not to marry.

The Challenge to Diversity in Legal Education

I would like to address the challenge of maintaining diversity in legal education. For a few law schools, including my own, recent decisions and legislation in this area have resulted in a struggle to maintain diversity without using race or ethnicity as criteria for admission. I do not offer here a paper on the constitutionality of affirmative action. Instead, I will speak in somewhat personal terms, because I believe that all of us must examine our own beliefs, feelings, and experiences about these matters before we can understand and communicate our views to each other. I was born in South Carolina in 1934 and, except for a brief stint in Texas, spent my childhood there. In South Carolina I lived in a segregated society and attended first grade in an all-white school. The churches where my father served as minister had no black members. My mother, a third-grade school teacher, had no black students in her class. My earliest impression of the black people who lived in my rural community was that they worked as servants, tenant farmers, or in other low-income jobs. Except for the black ministers who sometimes met with my father, I do not remember ever having seen a black man wearing a suit and tie. Although I did not realize it at the time, the South Carolina of my childhood also offered few options to white women. My mother had been a grammar school teacher when she and my father married. After taking a few years off following my birth, she resumed teaching when I was about three—a rare occurrence for white women with young children in those days. When my sixth grade Civics teacher suggested that I go to law school (after a class debate in which I successfully argued the negative of the question, “Resolved, The South Should Have Won the Civil War”), my mother did not encourage the idea. She told me in no uncertain terms that women could not support themselves in the practice of law and that I would be better off with a teacher’s credential. I graduated from high school in 1952 and left South Carolina, never to return. I entered college at SMU where, out of deference to my mother, I enrolled in elementary education courses, but soon changed my major to the more challenging subject of English Literature, with a minor in Philosophy. At SMU, for the first time, I had black and a few Asian and Mexican-American classmates. Brown v. Board of Education was decided in 1954 as I was finishing my 1

Adoption in the Conflict of Laws: The UAA, Not the UCCJA, is the Answer

In recent years a number of courts in adoption cases have resolved interstate jurisdictional disputes using the Uniform Child Custody Jurisdiction Act (UCCJA). This Article contends that the UCCJA was never intended to be applied in adoption cases, but rather was crafted specifically to meet the very different requirements of child custody disputes following the dissolution of a marriage. Specifically, the UCCJA is designed for situations in which custody determinations are not final judgments and so can be modified to meet changed circumstances. Adoption orders, by contrast, are final judgments, and as such are entitled to full faith and credit in the courts of other states. This Article argues that the proper model for dealing with interstate jurisdictional issues in adoption cases is the Uniform Adoption Act (UAA), which is carefully designed for this purpose. The Article urges state legislatures to enact the UAA, with suggested modifications. Further, the Article urges state courts to begin using the Full Faith and Credit Clause to resolve interstate adoption problems, rather than waiting for legislative action. By continuing to apply the UCCJA in adoption cases, the Article argues, courts risk damage both to the parties in those cases and to the underlying substantive law.

Divorce Reform at the Crossroads

California passed the first pure no-fault divorce law in the United States and some form of no-fault has been adopted in every state - but the divorce revolution it launched remains unfinished. Now specialists in the field have written a book that appraises the situation today, explains how we got where we are, and explores legislative options for the future. This book presents evidence contradicting the view expressed by many critics that allowing no-fault divorce has significantly disadvantaged women. At the same time, it recognizes that many divorced women, especially those with custody of young children, face bleak financial prospects. The authors discuss persisting problems of the financial rights and obligations of divorcing couples, child custody, and the role of step-parents, and they analyze proposals for remedying these problems through legislative action. The book is not only for policymakers, lawyers, and social scientists who study the family but also for anyone concerned about marriage, divorce, and family life in America in the 1990s.