Family Violence Appellate Project Finds Many Family Law Judicial Officers Fail to Respond Appropriately in Domestic Violence Cases

• Publication year: 2017
• Author: Nancy K. D. Lemon and Jennafer Dorfman Wagner

Family Violence Appellate Project Finds Many Family Law Judicial Officers Fail to Respond Appropriately in Domestic Violence Cases

Nancy K. D. Lemon and Jennafer Dorfman Wagner

Nancy K. D. Lemon has been a leading authority on domestic violence law for over three decades. A practicing attorney, she has also provided expert testimony in many types of cases. She has worked to craft many pieces of California legislation affecting survivors of domestic violence and their children. Since 1988, Professor Lemon has taught Domestic Violence Law and the Domestic Violence Practicum at UC Berkeley's School of Law. She authored the first textbook on domestic violence law in 1996, now in its 5th edition. In 2012, she co-founded the Family Violence Appellate Project, where she is the Legal Director.

Jennafer Dorfman Wagner has been a legal services attorney since 1997, including 12 years in a supervisory or managerial role. She has practiced in diverse geographic regions and in multiple subject areas in previous positions at the Mental Health Advocacy Project, a project of the Law Foundation of Silicon Valley in San Jose, California; Legal Action of Wisconsin; Washington DC Legal Clinic for the Homeless, and Nevada Legal Services. Since February of 2013, her practice has focused exclusively on domestic violence appeals and includes supervising pro bono co-counsel, paid and volunteer FVAP attorneys, and fellows. She has been intimately involved in identifying the legal issues facing domestic violence survivors in other areas of the state and developing the appellate legal strategy to address those issues.

Introduction to FVAP

The Family Violence Appellate Project (FVAP) is the only organization in California dedicated to appealing cases on behalf of domestic violence survivors and their children. Founded in 2012, it has so far been responsible for the publication of twenty-four appellate decisions involving domestic violence issues, primarily in family and juvenile courts. In many of these cases FVAP represented one of the parties, and in others the agency identified unpublished appellate decisions and successfully petitioned for their publication.

FVAP has also worked on legislative changes to California's Domestic Violence Prevention Act (DVPA), provided technical assistance to many attorneys and unrepresented litigants around the state, and trained hundreds of attorneys, advocates, mediators, custody evaluators, bench officers, and others regarding domestic violence...