Legal Adoption Research Articles

Single point of entry doctrine in the United States as a form of corporate liability: Рossibilities of legal adoption in the Russian Federation

The article analyzes various aspects of the single point of entry bank resolution strategy in the United States and seeks to determine the viability of legally adopting this approach in the Russian Federation. The single point of entry strategy provides an alternative to “bailing out” large bank groups and bankruptcy proceedings via controlled liquidation of the parent company with simultaneous financial rehabilitation of the subsidiary bank. Orderly Liquidation Authority detailed by Title II of the Dodd-Frank Act provides a legislative framework for the single point of entry strategy, but due to the doctrine only existing as a guideline and not directly regulated by legislation, there are several gaps in legislation that cause various problems in both the practical implementation of the single point of entry doctrine and its scientific evaluation. The insufficiently studied topic of single point of entry doctrine as a form of corporate liability is also examined in the article. Russian legislation and court practices regarding bank rehabilitation and the doctrine of “piercing the corporate veil” are examined to determine the possibility of legally adopting the single point of entry doctrine due to similarities between doctrines. The flaws and merits of the single point of entry doctrine are studied while accounting for potential ways to overcome the legal gaps in the strategy. The article reaches the conclusion that while the single point of entry doctrine is far from perfect, the basic principles can be applied to Russian legislation and serve as a viable alternative to the prevalent “bailout” practice.

MMP-Elections and the Assembly Size

MMP (Mixed Member Proportional) elections for legislatures have ballots with one vote in a local single seat tally and one vote for a party list in a multi-seat tally. In Germany, the multi-seat tally occasionally violated a Participation axiom. The federal Constitutional Court declared this unconstitutional in 2008. Rules were changed. In 2017, the result was a Bundestag with 709 members, 111 of them in extra-ordinary party seats. The paper considers two remedies against excessive assembly size. One is “faithful accounting” of ballot data in each local tally, another a change from Plurality to a Majority method. For this use, we consider IRV, i.e. Instant Runoff Voting, in combination with a 3-candidate Condorcet method. The mayoral IRV election in Burlington 2009 serves as an example, here in the special context of MMP. Violations of the Participation criterion occur also in the usual Majority methods for single seat elections. The legal adoption of a mathematical axiom from election theory have consequences seen in the context of established impossibility theorems.

Moving Children through Private International Law: Institutions and the Enactment of Ethics

This article examines how the Hague Convention on the Protection of Children and Co-operation in Respect of Intercountry Adoption (Hague Adoption Convention) plays a central role in justifying the institution of legal adoption. The Hague Adoption Convention has often been regarded as a response to the challenges that the “global situation” brings to adoption practice. Based on private international law, the agreement contains protocols and norms to ensure the protection of the child in intercountry adoption. In the article, I propose that the Hague Convention can be understood as a “transparency device”; a complex assemblage working in pursuit of global “good governance.” The device, however, also operates as justification within the institutional domain, allowing adoption agencies to make distinctions between legitimate and illegitimate adoptions. Idemonstrate how the logic of transparency disguises as much as it promises to reveal. While the doctrine's aim is to validate adoptability and combat trafficking, it also helps to mainstream Euro-American adoption knowledge to other parts of the world.

Truth in transition? Gender identity and Catholic anthropology

AbstractThere is no high level Magisterial teaching directly on gender dysphoria nor on gender non‐conformity in matters of dress. Nevertheless, the relationship of gender identity to biology raises profound theological questions. Transitioning between gender roles has been construed as an attempt “to alter what is unalterable” and “to establish a false identity in place of one's true identity”. However, the anthropological reality of incongruent gender identity is complex. It has something in common with body dysmorphia, something in common with the feminist criticism of gender roles, something in common with being a eunuch or with having a divergence of sexual development and something in common with homosexuality, but in each case with important differences. This paper sets out a further analogy, between legal gender recognition and legal adoption. Intellectual humility is required to help develop more adequate concepts in this area. At the same time, practical considerations require that one comes to a provisional judgement, at least, concerning this phenomenon. The analogies from divergences of sexual development and from adoption demonstrate that it is possible in principle to affirm the incongruent gender identity without being untruthful or contradicting a sound Catholic anthropology that is adequate to this complex human reality.

Trade secrets and innovation: Evidence from the “inevitable disclosure” doctrine

Research Summary: Does heightened employer‐friendly trade secrecy protection help or hinder innovation? By examining U.S. state‐level legal adoption of a doctrine allowing employers to curtail inventor mobility if the employee would “inevitably disclose” trade secrets, we investigate the impact of a shifting trade secrecy regime on individual‐level patenting outcomes. Using a difference‐in‐differences design taking unaffected U.S. inventors as the comparison group, we find strengthening employer‐friendly trade secrecy adversely affects innovation. We then investigate why. We do not find empirical support for diminished idea recombination from suppressed inventor mobility as the operative mechanism. While shifting intellectual property protection away from patenting into trade secrecy has some explanatory power, our results are consistent with reduced individual‐level incentives to signaling quality to the external labor market.Managerial Summary: While managers often list trade secrecy protection as their most important appropriation mechanism form and basis of competitive advantage (even more often than formal intellectual property protection), researchers have a hard time studying the effect of such secrets. We use a changing trade secrecy legal environment in some U.S. states (the introduction of the inevitable disclosure doctrine [IDD]) to study its effect on inventor‐level innovation. We find that a strengthened employer‐friendly trade secrecy regime adversely affects inventor‐level innovation. While part of the effect is due to substituting trade secrecy protection for patents, we also find that inventors’ diminished external labor market prospects may dampen their innovation output. Consequently, while employers may wish for strengthened trade secrecy protections, the results may paradoxically be against their innovation interests.

Adoption of abandoned children in South Africa: why black citizens are difficult to recruit as prospective adopters

In South Africa, hundreds of black, abandoned children enter the legal child care system on an annual basis and become eligible for adoption. Although these children have a right to be raised in their country of origin, they are often made available for intercountry adoption owing to a lack of prospective domestic adopters. Statistically, middle-class black South Africans present as a significant source of domestic adopters, but the number of black South Africans legally adopting abandoned children is small. A qualitative enquiry, using grounded theory, was conducted to establish what factors dissuade involuntarily childless black South Africans from legally adopting abandoned children. Personal interviews were conducted with 39 purposively selected black participants to gather data. The conclusion drawn is that five main factors dissuade black South Africans from adopting abandoned children: (1) meanings of kinship; (2) racial connotations associated with legal adoption; (3) conflicting Christian beliefs; (4) parenthood, gender and identity; and (5) empowered single women prioritising climbing the socio-economic ladder. Recommendations focus on social marketing strategies, policy and practice innovations and research to promote domestic adoption in the African context.

Легитимация правовых институтов как процесс усвоения юридических ценностей субъектами права

Легитимация правовых институтов как процесс усвоения юридических ценностей субъектами права

Trade Secrets and Innovation: Evidence from the 'Inevitable Disclosure' Doctrine

Does heightened employer-friendly trade secrecy protection help or hinder innovation? By examining U.S. state-level legal adoption of a doctrine allowing employers to curtail inventor mobility if the employee would inevitably disclose trade secrets, we investigate the impact of a shifting trade secrecy regime on individual-level patenting outcomes. Using a difference-in-differences design taking un-affected U.S. inventors as the comparison group, we find strengthening employer-friendly trade secrecy adversely affects innovation. We then investigate why. We do not find empirical support for diminished idea recombination from suppressed inventor mobility as the operative mechanism. While shifting intellectual property protection away from patenting into trade secrecy has some explanatory power, our results are consistent with reduced individual-level incentives to signaling quality to the external labor market.

ПОЛИТИЧЕСКИЕ И ПРАВОВЫЕ ПРОБЛЕМЫ ОРГАНИЗАЦИИ ОПЕРАТИВНОГО РЕАГИРОВАНИЯ И ТЕХНИЧЕСКОГО ОБЕСПЕЧЕНИЯ СИЛ ЗАЩИТЫ ОТ БЕДСТВИЙ МОНГОЛИИ НА ВОЗНИКНОВЕНИЕ КРУПНЫХ ЧРЕЗВЫЧАЙНЫХ СИТУАЦИЙ

Цель. Борьба с крупными чрезвычайными ситуациями (далее – ЧС) является важнейшим направлением государственной политики Монголии, закрепленной нормативным правовым и нормативно-техническим регулированием. Нормативными документами должно быть обеспечено прибытие в зону ликвидации крупномасштабных ЧС в Монголии больших сил специалистов-спасателей и техники. Маршруты, как и этапы выдвижения к районам возникших ЧС следует конкретно установить. Приоритетными должны быть маршруты выдвижения сил ГАЧС Монголии. Необходим учет возможной международной помощи, международного взаимодействия при проведении ликвидации ЧС.
 Метод или методология проведения работы. Основу исследования образуют методы анализа и синтеза, дедукция, индукция, абстрагирование, наблюдение, изучение документов.
 Результаты. Результаты работы заключаются в том, что обоснована необходимость ликвидации противоречия между необходимым и существующим уровнем разработки и применения крупномасштабных организационных, нормативных и технических мер реагирования монгольскими органами управления при крупномасштабных чрезвычайных ситуациях в Монголии. Готовность к такому реагированию является частью государственной политики Монголии, закрепленной нормативными правовыми актами и нормативно-техническими документами на всех уровнях управления. Правовое закрепление должно получить и международное взаимодействие.
 Область применения результатов. Результаты исследования могут быть применены при подготовке политических решений в отношении защиты от крупных чрезвычайных ситуаций в Монголии и формировании необходимой нормативной правовой и нормативно-технической базы.

Intercountry Adoption/Global Migration: A Pacific Perspective

Pacific Islander migration poses a particular challenge to the international framework established to deal with the circulation of children, given divergent interpretations of kinship. The Hague Convention dealing with intercountry adoption cites legal adoption as the paradigm for guaranteeing the rights of children in all cases of circulation. The paradigm prescribes permanent and exclusive parenthood. Pacific Islander practices of child exchange contravene the paradigm, a clash evident in immigration rulings and in the outcome of adoptive transfers. Perceived irregularities in these modes of circulation provoke suspicion of child trafficking. For the West, the ability to systematically identify and track children distinguishes Pacific Island countries that are capable from those that are incapable of securing the proper transfer of children. Meeting international expectations, Pacific Island states still retain definitions of kinship, belonging and the right to move that disrupt the Western framework, with consequences for all modes of child circulation.

“Everything That We Can Do”: A Content Analysis of the Protective Strategies Used by GLBTQ Parents

ABSTRACTDespite increased access to parenting rights through legal marriage and adoption, U.S. gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, and queer (GLBTQ) parents continue to experience varying levels of support for their families. This study explored protective strategies, or actions taken to meet one's safety needs when vulnerable, that GLBTQ parents pursue. This study included 454 GLBTQ parents from a national survey. Participants' open-ended responses about protective strategies were extracted from the survey and analyzed using content analysis. Responses were coded into 10 categories capturing strategies GLBTQ parents used to protect their families. While strategies utilizing legal supports were common, the most cited strategies were symbolic strategies, including creating a family name and developing written statements of parent wishes. Exploratory analyses revealed no difference in mean number of strategies used between parents who reported having legal status as a parent through adoption or listing on the birth certificate and those without legal parenting status. These results suggest that GLBTQ parents, regardless of their legal parenting status, take intentional measures to achieve a sense of safety and increase social support. The findings reiterate the importance of both legal and social support of GLBTQ parents.

From Foster Care to Adoption and Guardianship: A Twenty-First Century Challenge

For nearly four decades, child welfare policy and practice have focused on the achievement of legal permanence for children in foster care. Although federal child welfare policy has resulted in the movement of children from state custody to legally permanent adoptive or guardianship families, little is known about the quality and enduring nature of these placements. A significant challenge of the twenty-first century child welfare system is how to ensure the well-being of children currently living with adoptive parents or guardians. This paper discusses child welfare policy and trends related to post-permanency well-being, including the decrease in Title IV-E foster care caseloads nationwide and the simultaneous increase in Title IV-E adoptive and guardianship caseloads. We highlight the needs of a twenty-first century child welfare system, including increased federal efforts to ensure child permanence and well-being after legal adoption or guardianship has been achieved, as well as more rigorous longitudinal and interdisciplinary research focused on the post-permanency adjustment of children and their families.

A Children's History of (Native) America: The Tales of Peter Parley, about America

A Children's History of (Native) America:The Tales of Peter Parley, about America Gina Marie Ocasion (bio) I hope my little readers will learn this story, so that they can tell it all without the book. Peter Parley1 In 1830 the Indian Removal Act passed the Jackson White House, forcing indigenous peoples of the Southeast into territories west, past the Mississippi River. The act came into being after years of legislative debates over Indian treaties, projecting onto the river all the significations of a political border–a physical division between nations and races. In one of many examples, James Barbour in a House debate in 1828 argues "that the plan of collecting the Indians on suitable lands West of the Mississippi, contains the elements of their preservation," thus embedding the river in a legal codification of removal, exclusion, and oppression.2 The legal adoption of this racial boundary concretized the building anxieties surrounding a definable American identity. Americanness in this moment is best understood by what it denies and pushes "far west over the mountains" or deep into the South.3 Jacqueline Rose points to this emphasis on territory in her seminal text, The Case of Peter Pan: Or the Impossibility of Children's Fiction (1984), when she aptly notes, "in the still 'childlike' state of American civilization, history could be read directly off the land (history based on geography), whereas if you were after the cultural origins of England, then you had to dig for them."4 In this moment, Rose draws [End Page 51] out a connection between the "child" nation and a readable landscape, arguing that American historical narratives are written on the surface, in plain view. There is a way in which histories for children echo in this articulation of nation and narrative: boldly didactic, laboring over a naturalized representation. This reliance on geographies of containment and exclusion are understood as a fantasy. Native peoples endured east of the Mississippi. The contact zones created by such ideological separations complicated an already paradoxical narrative of American experience.5 The narrative is paradoxical in that the desire to see immaterial ideologies of white supremacist, patriarchal, heteronormative Americanness physically constructed requires the embodied representation of what lies outside this figuration. Taking up this unsettled national territory and unstable national identity, this essay will look to a popular children's history, uncovering a process of interpellation into a national body defined by the "material and metaphoric resonances" of racial borders.6 Indeed, the nuances of geographic borders and racialized identities are compounded in this study by childhood as a conceptually bordered space of extended leisure and constant development. In 1827 Samuel G. Goodrich published the first of what was to be a wildly successful series, The Tales of Peter Parley, about America. Selling upwards of seven million copies, engaging canonical authors, and "exert[ing] immense influence over American audiences," Goodrich's Parley occupied a powerful place in the antebellum nineteenth century.7 In the space of twenty-seven years, he published seventy-eight books in this series, and many of them have multiple editions. By virtue of this incredible permeation in early America, these children's books are a site of significant cultural work. Indeed, when Nathaniel Hawthorne and his sister, Elizabeth, were famously compelled to write under Goodrich's name, they collaborated on Peter Parley's Universal History on the Basis of Geography (1837). Taking the job for a meager profit, "evidently, Hawthorne accepted the assignment because he regarded the work as relatively easy. In explaining the project to Elizabeth, he observed, 'It need not be superiour [sic], in profundity and polish, to the middling Magazine articles' (XV: 245)."8 While Hawthorne considered it a trivial project at best, Peter Parley's Universal History was quickly adopted by U.S. schools and sold over one million copies.9 Taken up in both schools and homes as an authority in children's education, the Peter Parley series was a common companion for American youths. The historical records indicating Peter Parley sales and the common reference to this character in the antebellum nineteenth century, including an approval by Lydia Sigourney, affirms the ubiquitous presence of these texts in children...

Foreign Adoption in Ireland: A Case Study of the Irish-American Adoptions, 1947–1952

The Irish-American adoptions were a revolutionary way of dealing with Ireland’s ‘problem of the illegitimate child’. Ireland had long been promoted as a Catholic, and thus, a morally pure country. Having a child out of wedlock often resulted in the mother and child being shunned by their family and community and having little choice but to seek the help of church-run institutions. These institutions began facilitating illegal extraterritorial adoptions in 1947 to relieve the mounting pressures as those seeking their help continued to grow annually. These adoptions were heavily concerned with protecting the religious faith of the child, and this often took prominence over the quality of home. The adoptions were facilitated exclusively by these church-run institutions, allowing for complete control over the selection of prospective parents. The standards of these adoptions fell well below what was expected on the U.S. domestic scale, with no visits to the homes of prospective parents occurring, and crucially, there was no way to facilitate the reversal of an adoption. During the early life of the Irish-American adoptions, the Department of External Affairs had little involvement, only issuing passports for children that had been adopted. This changed however in 1951, as the ‘Jane Russell Case’ attracted front page media attention. The Russell case highlighted the lackadaisical approach of many of those within the Department to the exporting of some of Ireland’s youngest citizens. Undue publicity continued in the early 1950s, notably with the German newspaper, 8 Uhr Blatt. It is this media attention that forced the Department to finally address the glaring issues that severely hindered the success of the Irish-American adoptions. The Department was powerless to do anything once the child had been passed into the care of the adoptive parents. The Adoption Act 1952, marked a major turning point in the care of illegitimate children in Ireland. Legal adoption was opened on the domestic front as well as the international front. The conditions and standards of the Irish-American adoptions improved dramatically under this act, and while they still had their issues, the standard of these adoptions continued to improve through their latter stages.

June Carbone and Naomi Cahn Marriage Markets: How Inequality is Remaking the American Family Oxford University Press, 2014. 272 p. $29.95; 19.95 (pbk.)

Marriage Markets, by legal scholars June Carbone and Naomi Cahn, is ambitious in scope and covers many topics and trends of interest to demographers, sociologists, and other family researchers. These include race and class stratification in family formation, the interplay between economics and norms and values, the culture wars, the rise in executive compensation, and family law. The book's motivating question is why changes in the American family have not affected all socioeconomic groups equally. As many demographers have documented, the family patterns of college-educated Americans have been relatively stable over time, while the retreat from marriage and the rise in nonmarital childbearing and family instability have been concentrated among their less-educated counterparts. Marriage Markets draws on a large body of literature to explain the divergence in family patterns across socioeconomic groups. The authors propose that marriage markets help to explain divergence in family patterns across education groups. Sex ratio imbalances have generally been powerful explanations of cross-sectional differences in family patterns, but whether they can also account for changes over time in such patterns is less clear. The authors write that there are “more successful men seeking to pair with a smaller pool of similarly successful women” (p. 4) and suggest that this helps to explain the stability of marriage for the college-educated, but these assertions are questionable. For their evidence, the authors cite a chart from a blog post showing that the number of college-educated men exceeds the number of college-educated women when we condition on full-time employment and earning over $60,000 a year. There seems to be no strong rationale for conditioning in this way; moreover, we see the opposite picture for the college-educated group as a whole. Overall, the ratio of college-educated individuals has fallen from about 114 men per 100 women in 1980 to 78 per 100 in 2010. The gender ratio for the college-educated group as a whole has moved in a direction that complicates rather than explains the puzzle of why the college-educated have more or less held steady in their family behavior while less-educated groups have led the retreat from marriage. Carbone and Cahn's use of pop cultural references and casual generalizations may appeal to lay readers but is likely to be less appealing for family scholars. The use of stylized narratives throughout the book, based on a pair of couples who are acquaintances of the authors, may also miss the mark for a scholarly audience. This storytelling strategy has been used effectively elsewhere, but here the experiences of these couples are often only indirectly relevant to the arguments being advanced. In spite of such shortcomings the book has merit. The discourse on family change can certainly be enriched by perspectives from outside the usual disciplines—in this case the perspective of legal experts. The book's novel contribution is its discussion of the shifting legal definition of parental obligation and how the implications and effects of these shifts vary by class. In particular, the legal standing of non-biological, “social fathers” has thus far received little attention, and the authors raise important questions about whether and when social fathers should have legal rights and responsibilities for children, in the absence of legal adoption and even in the presence of a child's tie with his or her biological father.

Defining embryo donation: an Ethics Committee opinion

Building families through the adoption of children has been supported by human society throughout history. The ethical appropriateness of patients donating embryos to other patients for family building, or for research, is well established and is affirmed by this Committee. The use of the term ''adoption'' for embryos is inaccurate and should be avoided. This document replaces the ASRM Ethics Committee statement by the same name, last published in 2013 (Fertil Steril 2013;99:1846-7).

Changing Rights to Family Life: Biolegalities in the Globalization of Reproduction

This article focuses on Australian court practices that concern the legalization of parenthood for children born out of overseas surrogacy arrangements. Analysing arguments and decisions from federal and local cases, it demonstrates how a “human rights approach” promoted by judges that act in the “best interest of the child” destabilizes the enforcement of local Australian law regarding commercial surrogacy. Ultimately, the article examines how the law interacts with biotechnological changes and how legal justifications engage with biological and social knowledge that are creating a changing landscape of rights and ethics around surrogacy. Using the concept of “biolegality”, it conceptualizes rights as emerging at the intersection of law and biology in the context of global inequality and migration. It examines the question of which rights-claims are based on genetic truth, and which ones on legal truth. Contrary to conventional understandings that in the pursuit of justice “law lags behind technology,” the article demonstrates how legal knowledge interacts with the life sciences and technologies to build the concept of rights. Moreover, the interaction of information, facts and knowledges includes strong references to “adoption discourse” suggesting a reframing of surrogacy issues through the framework of legal adoption.

The Adoption of Frances T: Blood, Belonging, and Aboriginal Transracial Adoption in Twentieth-Century Canada

This article offers a case study of a transracial adoption involving a mixed-heritage child and a legally Indian adoptive couple. The legal adoption of “Frances T” in 1937, considered to be “in the best interests of the child” by social welfare professionals, took on gendered and racialized meaning in the discourse of the Indian Affairs bureaucrats who subsequently attempted to overturn it. The article uses the case to examine Canadian settler-colonial beliefs about blood and belonging. It also explores the complications that emerged as legally defined Indian people came into contact with provincial child welfare legislation. With the goal of eliminating Indigenous legal and kinship forms, the Indian Act colonized adoption so it could be used as a method of assimilation rather than as a traditional form of Indigenous alliance creation and childcare. The case highlights the themes of Indigenous kinship and sovereignty, legislated Indian identity, and the growing involvement of social workers in the lives of Aboriginal people in the mid- to late-twentieth century.

A "homoafetividade" no cenário adotivo: um debate jurídico

<p>O trabalho proposto busca analisar qual o tratamento jurídico dado à adoção na comarca do Rio de Janeiro quando os processos de adoção são movidos em âmbito da conjugalidade homossexual. A ideia é apreender, por meio da análise de oito documentos dessa ordem, de que forma as concepções sobre família, filiação adotiva e sexualidades foram produzidos por profissionais do universo jurídico responsáveis em conduzir ações de adoção, entre os anos de 2000 até os dias atuais.<strong></strong></p>

Compassion technology: Life insurance and the remaking of kinship in Swaziland's age of HIV

An emergent life insurance market in Swaziland is prompting some families to remake kinship as the entrustment of a generation of deceased relatives’ children. Coincident with high HIV/AIDS mortality and changing economic policies for the financial services sector, Swaziland saw an influx of foreign insurance companies in the early 2000s. Those companies offered incentives like burial coverage and cash stipends, and they compelled families’ legal adoption of children as orphans through the state, an ambiguous contrast to customary child entrustment and caregiving practices. I offer ethnographic insight on financialization in the global South and conceptualize insurance as a biopolitical, moralized “compassion technology,” which enveloped persons’ financial-legal obligations within humanitarian and global health discourses of social regeneration.