Product Detail

Adoption and Assisted Reproduction: Families Under Construction provides an in-depth exploration of the fascinating and controversial issues emerging out of biotechnology and society's expanding understanding of family identity. In this ideal supplement to any Family Law curriculum, authors Appleton and Weisberg combine solid treatment of the law and carefully crafted additional content to elicit analysis and fuel class discussion.

Using a balanced presentation of law, policy, critical perspectives, and depictions in popular culture, this finely honed text features:

• Thorough analysis of important cases, statutes, and regulations, including law reform efforts and the absence of law on some topics
• Opportunities for comparative analysis of law and policy among various states and nations, with exploration of questions of jurisdiction, choice of law, and enforcement
• Critical perspectives on core concepts, such as parentage, the role of the state in the construction of family, and examination of unspoken assumptions about gender, race, and class
• Clear and informative exposition
• Interdisciplinary materials and references to books and films from popular culture, which bring the legal materials to life
• Discussion of professional responsibility and the role of the lawyer in the face of cutting-edge social issues and nascent law and policy
• Notes and Questions that follow the principal cases and illuminate salient themes
• Thought-provoking problems that prompt consideration of new issues, preparing students not only to address the law as it exists, but as it might become

Introduction

Part I: Adoption

1. Origins
2. Ending the Original Parent-Child Relationship
3. Choosing an Adoptive Family
4. Legal Consequences of Adoption
5. Adoption Across State and National Boundaries

Part II: Assisted Reproduction

6. Alternate Insemination
7. In Vitro Fertilization
8. Assisted Reproduction Across State and National Boundaries

Table of Cases
Index

Susan Frelich Appleton

Susan Appleton, a nationally known expert on family law, has been a member of the Council of the American Law Institute since 1994 and has held the office of Secretary since 2004. She has served as an adviser for the ALI's Principles of the Law of Family Dissolution and as a consultant to the New Jersey Bioethics Commission, assisting that agency in its recommendations for laws addressing "surrogate-mother" arrangements. In 2004, she joined the Board of Directors of the American Bar Foundation, and in 2009, she became a member of the Advisory Committee on Private International Law for the United States Department of State, representing the Association of American Law Schools.

Appleton is the co-author of "Adoption and Assisted Reproduction: ; Families Under Construction" and four editions of "Modern Family Law: Cases and Materials." Her recent publications also include "Parents by the Numbers," 37 Hofstra Law Review 11 (2008) "Toward a 'Culturally Cliterate' Family Law?," 23 Berkeley Journal of Gender, Law & Justice 267 (2008) "Gender, Abortion, and Travel After Roe's End," 51 St. Louis University Law Journal 655 (2007) "Presuming Women: Revisiting the Presumption of Legitimacy in the Same-Sex Couples Era," 86 Boston University Law Review 227 (2006).

In April 2000, Professor Appleton became the inaugural recipient of the Lemma Barkeloo and Phoebe Couzins Professorship, named in honor of two individuals who, when they enrolled at this law school in 1869, might well have been the nation's first women law students. During 2009-2010, she also holds the John S. Lehmann Research Professorship.

On September 1, 2003, Professor Appleton returned to her full-time faculty position, after serving more than five years as Associate Dean of Faculty.

Education

A.B., 1970, Vassar College
J.D., 1973, University of California - Berkeley

Professor Weisberg is a lawyer and sociologist. She is a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Brandeis University, from which she also earned a Ph.D. in sociology in 1976. She received her J.D. from U.C. Berkeley in 1979, where she was a member of the California Law Review. Before joining the Hastings faculty in 1982, she worked at the International Commission of Jurists in Geneva, where she conducted legal research on the rights of children during the International Year of the Child. She has taught at Washington University School of Law, St. Louis, Boston University, and Hebrew University, Jerusalem (where she was a Lady Davis Fellow). For the Spring semester 2010, she holds the Hurst Distinguished Visiting Professor at the University of Florida Levin College of Law.

Her research interests focus on issues in family law and children and the law. She has participated in federally-funded studies of juvenile parole, juvenile prostitution, family violence, and sexual exploitation of children. She served as a consultant for the American Bar Association, Women on Law Faculties Study, and for the American Justice Institute, National Juvenile Justice Assessment Center, for a study of child abuse. She testified before the Senate Subcommittee of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, on the relationship between runaway behavior and juvenile prostitution.

She teaches Family Law, Children and the Law, and Wills and Trusts. She is the author of several law review articles and books, including Child, Family, State: Cases and Materials on Children and the Law (co-authored with Robert H. Mnookin) (Aspen Publishers, 5th ed. 2005), Adoption and Assisted Reproduction: Families Under Construction (co-authored with Susan F. Appleton)(Aspen Publishers, 2009), The Birth of Surrogacy in Israel (University Press of Florida, 2005), Modern Family Law: Cases and Materials (co-authored with Susan F. Appleton) (Aspen Publishers, 4th ed. 2009) and Applications of Feminist Legal Theory to Women's Lives (Temple University Press, 1996).