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Can this Relationship Be Saved? The Legal Profession and Families in Transition
Author(s) -
Tesler Pauline H.
Publication year - 2017
Publication title -
family court review
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.171
H-Index - 4
eISSN - 1744-1617
pISSN - 1531-2445
DOI - 10.1111/fcre.12261
Subject(s) - normative , legal profession , perspective (graphical) , economic justice , transition (genetics) , legal realism , resizing , legal education , law , legal research , family law , political science , psychology , sociology , business , biochemistry , chemistry , gene , european union , artificial intelligence , computer science , economic policy
Looked at from a social problems rather than from a procedural justice perspective, courts perhaps ought to have quite a small role to play in the legal system's normative response to families in transition, particularly given the fragmentary nature of our court system, shrinking court budgets, and the difficulty of implementing broad, durable changes even locally, much less nationally. Clients’ needs seldom appear to them as legal problems and more often as practical, financial, and relational issues, but the underlying professional norms and values taught in our law schools ignore considerations unrelated to the making and proving of a legal case. The practicing family law bar appears to be the best place for efforts at broad scale reform of how the legal profession meets the needs of families in transition. There are no institutional barriers to teaching integrative competencies to practicing lawyers, and the impact of fairly low cost strategies could be substantial.