The Legal Times has a great deal more about the litigiousness of Mr. Sibley:
Posts Tagged ‘family law’
Bitten by sister’s cat
Flushing, Mich.: The $122,000 jury award should help balm Michael Sabo’s memory of the injury inflicted by the wanton Siamese, but for some reason the whole affair “has created tension between Sabo and his sister,” Jean Toney. (Mary K. Brunskill, “Court Awards Man $122,400 For Cat Bite”, All Headline News/NCBuy, Mar. 19; AP/CBC, Mar. 18).
“Sperm donor kids win estate”
Most memorable detail: the kids used “tweezers to pluck his eyebrows for DNA testing as he lay dead in a hospital morgue.” The fact pattern in this Australian case was not exactly typical, however: the donor had had a previous romantic relationship with the children’s mother, who subsequently used his donations to conceive three times without informing her lawful husband that the kids were not his. (Janet Fife-Yeomans, AAP/PerthNow, Mar. 16).
Chuck Colson on Miller-Jenkins
I know we’re supposed to give prominent Religious Right figure Chuck Colson a pass because of his compelling life story and the work he’s done with prisoners, but jeepers, does he ever give a misleading account of the Miller-Jenkins case (Vermont-Virginia lesbian custody battle), discussed earlier in this space Aug. 15, 2004, Dec. 16, 2004, Aug. 26, 2006, and Nov. 29, 2006.
Colson begins his column (“Legal Fictions”, syndicated/TownHall, Feb. 28) by announcing that Miller-Jenkins presents “one of the most important legal battles of our time”. In fact, as I noted back in 2004, the case presents the somewhat less epochal issue: can a party dissatisfied with a visitation/custody outcome litigated in one state ignore a resulting court order in order to pursue proceedings in what is expected to be a more favorable state?
Colson cites a recent in-depth story about the case in the Washington Post Magazine (April Witt, “About Isabella”, Feb. 2). Somehow, however, he omits to mention a feature of the case that figured centrally in that account, namely the outstanding court order that Lisa Miller, biological and custodial mom of Isabella, has been defying for years now. Since Colson does not mention that court order, he naturally does not inform readers that it arose after Miller voluntarily submitted to the jurisdiction of a Vermont court dissolving her civil union with Janet Jenkins. Nor do his readers learn that Miller was happy to pocket child support payments from Jenkins, before eventually deciding to blow off the court order, or try to, by cutting off Jenkins’ regular visitations with Isabella.
Nor does Colson describe the current posture of the case. If he did, he would have to acknowledge that both the Vermont Supreme Court and a Virginia appeals panel have ruled unanimously against Miller, who nonetheless continues to defy the court order. There is no indication that Miller’s team of Religious Right litigators is uncomfortable with this posture of hers.
Colson frames the story for dramatic effect as one in which Jenkins, appearing from out of the past, demands custody of Isabella — although the dispute in fact arose over visitation, and although the likely outcome of the case (assuming Miller relents rather than pursuing her contempt of court all the way into a jail cell) is simply going to be the restoration of Jenkins’ visitation rights. Pricelessly, Colson dismisses Jenkins’ legal rights as those of “a woman [Isabella] barely remembers”, without inquiring as to how Miller managed to engineer this state of affairs.
And, no surprise, Colson also fails to mention the relevant federal statute, the Parental Kidnapping Prevention Act, 28 U.S.C. § 1738A, which as Eugene Volokh points out “requires courts [in other states] to adhere to preexisting custody awards generally, not just ones that follow the dissolution of a marriage”.
Probably the most enduring significance of the Miller-Jenkins case will be as an indication of the willingness of many on the Religious Right, even the lawyers among them, to applaud and defend the defiance of court orders when those orders inconvenience the godly or uphold the legal rights of the ungodly. I wonder whether Colson gives a thought to this when he decries, in the column, “our reckless pursuit of getting whatever we want at all costs”.
I also wonder whether the proposition that it’s just fine to violate laws and court orders when one feels impelled by a higher cause — I believe some social conservatives like to label this point of view as antinomian — is a message that Colson is accustomed to spread when he addresses groups of prisoners in the course of his public work. If so, we can only hope the prisoners don’t take the message to heart (& welcome Ed Brayton, MarriageDebate.com, Eugene Volokh readers).
Federalist Society “Law and Morality” conference
Spank-ban solon will try for half a loaf
Or other bread product as appropriate: California Assemblywoman Sally Lieber concedes the votes “simply [are] not there” for her widely derided proposal to ban the spanking of small children (Jan. 22, Feb. 14), but she’ll still try to get the state’s regulatory nose into the nursery by pushing a law banning various parental disciplinary techniques, including spanking that employs an “instrument”. (Mike Zapler, “No-spanking bid softened”, San Jose Mercury News, Feb. 23).
A “fixture” in Gotham courthouses
Michael Melnitzky, whose wife filed for divorce in 1994, “has sued virtually everyone involved: one of his former lawyers, his wife’s lawyer, three banks, five judges and a psychiatrist appointed by the court to evaluate his mental health. In unrelated cases, he has sued a neighbor, a thrift shop, the city and his former employer. And he has almost always lost.” “I used to be an art restorer,“ says Melnitzky, a pro se litigant. “Now I’m a litigator. If you’re going to attack me or assault me on a legal front, and I don’t hit back, I would feel dishonorable with myself.” (Ray Rivera, “The Marriage Lasted 10 Years. The Lawsuits? 13 Years, and Counting”, New York Times, Feb. 19; Above the Law, Feb. 20).
Update: Mich. domestic partner benefits
As we noted back on Mar. 20, 2005, some Religious Right campaigners appear to have talked out of both sides of their mouths on the question of whether their proposed anti-gay-marriage amendments in states like Michigan would put an end to the availability of existing health insurance benefits for the domestic partners of employees at public entities such as cities and universities. When urging voters to approve Proposal 2, these campaigners suggested that the measure would leave existing benefits undisturbed; once it was on the books, they supported efforts to invoke it to nullify the benefits. Now a Michigan appeals court has agreed that Proposal 2 does ban public-employee DP benefits. Ed Brayton of Dispatches from the Culture Wars has details (Jul. 5, 2006; Feb. 4 and Feb. 5, 2007; see also Nov. 22, 2006) on the, um, fancy footwork engaged in by two Religious Right litigation groups, the Thomas More Law Center and the Alliance Defense Fund. For more, see John Corvino, “A tragic lie in Michigan”, Between the Lines/Independent Gay Forum, Feb. 8; Jonathan Cohn, “Spouse Abuse”, The New Republic, Feb. 15; Andrew Sullivan, Feb. 15.
Calif. proposal to ban spanking, cont’d
Turns out there was a law professor behind the idea (Jan. 22):
As for what sparked [Assemblywoman Sally] Lieber’s decision to introduce a bill about spanking, it wasn’t a rash of emergency room visits from 3-year-olds with sore bottoms. The San Jose Mercury News, which first reported the no-spanking story, wrote that Lieber “conceived the idea while chatting with a family friend and legal expert in children’s issues worldwide.” That friend was University of San Francisco Law School professor Thomas Nazario, who fiercely opposes corporal punishment. “It was my idea and I was primarily responsible for coming up with the final draft,” he explains. (Which makes Lieber sound more like Nazario’s pawn than a legislative leader, but I digress.)
(Eilene Zimmerman, “Spanking mad”, Salon, Feb. 5). WryMouth (Jan. 29) has an account of Prof. Nazario’s appearance on the popular Los Angeles radio show “John & Ken” to discuss the idea. Orange County Register columnist Steven Greenhut writes: “I don’t advocate spanking as a rule, but it seems rather harsh to rip a child out of a happy home and put him in some nightmare foster-care scenario and put a parent in jail for doing something that has been widely practiced through the history of parenting.” (“Lawmaker deserves a spanking”, Jan. 28).
“When the courts gag parents”
“[A] wide range of parental speech has been prohibited by family courts, all in the name of the child’s best interests. … Even more courts have based custody decisions partly on parent-child speech and religious upbringing. In Michigan, for example, courts routinely favor the parent who takes the children to church more often. Other courts have denied parents custody based partly on the parents’ teaching their children the propriety of racism, polygamy or homosexuality….
“[F]ew courts have grappled with the question whether judges are allowed under the First Amendment to make such decisions. … Many people would trade all their free-speech rights for the right to teach their own children. And government power to constrain how parents teach their own children is dangerous. Restricting the spread of ideas from parent to child can help today’s majority, or today’s elite, entrench its views. Also, the power to suppress parents’ speech might spread beyond divorces to intact families, too.” (Eugene Volokh (UCLA Law), L.A. Times/Newsday, Feb. 12)(discussion at Volokh Conspiracy).