January 2020

• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/fcre.12451
• Author: Barbara A. Babb,Marsha Kline Pruett
• Published date: 01 January 2020
• Date: 01 January 2020

EDITORIAL NOTE

JANUARY 2020

Best wishes to our Family Court Review community for a joyous 2020! It seems like just yester-

day, although two decades have passed, that the world worried about a multitude of potential

glitches when the millennium arrived! We have a New Year’s treat for our readers, including a spe-

cial issue on privacy protections within alternative dispute resolution processes, a feature on non-

marriage, a report from the 2019 Siben and Siben conference, two articles, and two student notes.

Indeed, this issue contains something for everyone.

We are very grateful for the hard work of our special issue editors, Gregory Firestone and

Sharon Press, to assemble a wonderful collection of interdisciplinary and international articles

on “dispute resolution communication protections.”The vast array of family law cases worldwide

increasingly includes some form of alternative dispute resolution, either court-ordered or encour-

aged by lawyers, services providers, and judges. These ADR methods involve varying degrees of

privacy protec tions. The spe cial issue auth ors inform us about the nature of available protections,

some critiques of their limitations, and suggestions designed to improve both the processes and

the outcomes. We thank each of the authors for their valuable contributions to the literature. We

leave it to the special issue editors to introduce the articles in their Introduction/Guest Editorial

Notes.

Our feature on nonmarriage includes an introduction and two articles from a Roundtable on Non-

marriage held at Arizona State University Law School in March, 2019. The guest editors, Albertina

Antognini, Naomi Cahn, Kaiponanea Matsumara, and Emily Stolzenberg, set the stage for a discus-

sion of issues related to cohabitation in their “Perspectives on Nonmarital Relationships.”They

also introduce us to the special feature authors and their articles. We thank everyone involved for

allowing FCR to publish their scholarship on this compelling issue that is affecting the lives of so

many couples and their children.

Emily Stolzenberg summarizes the proceedings from the March 29, 2019, Siben and Siben con-

ference at the Maurice A. Deane School of Law at Hofstra University, “Plain and Simple: Making

the Legal System Accessible to All.”Conference organizers have addressed the need to simplify

language within the laws themselves, as well as in legal processes and forms. Emily’s report sum-

marizes the conference presentations, includes suggestions from five conference working groups,

and alerts us to activities following the conference.

In the first of our two articles, the Honorable Peter Messitte writes about “Getting Tough on

International Child Abduction.”Judge Messitte is one of four American judges who serves on the

International Network of Hague Judges. Readers may recall our April 2019 FCR special articles on

the Hague Convention on the Civil Aspects of International Child Abduction. Judge Messitte’s piece

represents a continuation of that discussion by explaining how the Convention is supposed to func-

tion, problems with its operation, and suggestions for reform. We are thrilled to include Judge

Messitte’s valuable and unique perspective in this issue.

FAMILY COURT REVIEW, Vol. 58 No. 1, January 2020 5–6

© 2020 Association of Family and Conciliation Courts