THE BOOKSHELF

• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1744-1617.2005.00016.x
• Published date: 01 January 2005
• Date: 01 January 2005

FAMILY COURT REVIEW, Vol. 43 No. 1, January 2005 178–179

© 2005 Association of Family and Conciliation Courts

Blackwell Publishing, Ltd.Oxford, UKFCREFamily Court Review1531-2445© Association of Family and Conciliation Courts, 2004431Original ArticleTHE BOOKSHELFFAMILY COURT REVIEW

THE BOOKSHELF

Sanford N. Katz*,

Family Law in America

, xix–268. Oxford University Press, 2003.

Reviewed by Walter Wadlington**

Sanford Katz is one of a small group of still-active law professors who have written and taught

in the field of family law for forty years or more.

1

His long and varied experience has added special

and valuable dimensions to his new book. Not designed simply as a history, it reflects the view that

to understand contemporary family law fully, one must be familiar with the major shifts that occurred

during the second half of the twentieth century. These included movement away from an entrenched

system of limited fault divorce grounds to include one of several breakdown approaches (and some-

times make this the only ground), the recognition of parental rights of fathers of illegitimate children

(and in some jurisdictions the virtual abolition of illegitimacy as a legal status), joint participation of

both spouses in the economic aspects of their marriages, increasing recognition of legal relations

between parties who choose not to marry, and expansion of the structure of child protection. (These

are by no means all of the dramatic changes that occurred during the period, but they may be the most

significant.) Of major importance in some of these developments has been increased federal involve-

ment in an area not long ago widely considered to be the last major bastion of states’ rights under

the Tenth Amendment to the United States Constitution. The first major crack in this wall came in

Loving v. Virginia

,

2

when the Supreme Court of the United States set aside a state prohibition against

miscegenous marriage and, as a result, similar restrictions occurred in more than a dozen other states,

as violative of rights secured under the Fourteenth Amendment. In the Acknowledgments,

3

the author

suggests that his decision to write this new book was stimulated by colleagues in other countries who

would ask him to suggest a book to introduce them to the field. A text such as Professor Homer

Clark’s well regarded

The Law in Domestic Relations in the United States

was more encyclopedic in

coverage than was desired by those to whom he was responding.

4

Aside from not being encyclopedic,

Professor Katz wanted a book that would bridge “the gap between scholarship and practice.”

5

In

Family Law in America

, he has very effectively fulfilled his goals.

In addition to a short but valuable Introduction, the book includes five chapters

6

and an Appendix

containing five Uniform Laws and the Parental Kidnapping Prevention Act,

7

a federal statute which

complements (and in some instances overrides) the two Uniform Laws

8

dealing with child custody across

state lines that also are included. Other Uniform Acts in the Appendix include the Uniform Marriage

and Divorce Act (although not adopted widely in total, this pioneering work has had considerable

effect on reformers); the Uniform Parentage Act; and the Uniform Putative and Unknown Fathers Act.

It should be noted that these provisions in the Appendix are in addition to short summaries of other

model and actual legislation presented earlier in the book. A good example of those is found in

Chapter 4, dealing with Child Protection,

9

which reviews several federal laws dealing with the

federal government’s increased role in child welfare.

I have one or two organizational criticisms. I would prefer to see the book begin with marriage

rather than marriage-like relationships, and I question why some of the topics were included in the

opening chapter rather than the second (Marriage). For example, common law marriage (in a section

of the chapter labeled Informal Marriage)

10

is correctly described as a means for achieving legal mar-

riage status in a dozen jurisdictions

11

and this means that the relationship can be dissolved only

by divorce (or death). This does not seem to me to be a “marriage-like” relationship, which is

largely what Chapter 1 deals with. Also included in Chapter 1 is a discussion of prenuptial or ante-

nuptial agreements,

12

now often a very important aspect of the process of getting married. However,

they are distinct from “living together” or “contractual cohabitation” contracts such as the Supreme