Margaret Ryznar

This article considers the notable developments in Indiana family law during the survey period of October 1, 2014 to September 30, 2015. The Indiana statutes and published appellate cases surveyed in this article concern same-sex marriage, property division upon divorce, grandparent visitation and parenting time, child custody and child support, CH...

The question of how to prevent another crippling recession has received much attention. The answer in the Dodd-Frank Act is stress testing, which examines through economic models how banks would react to a bad turn of economic events, such as negative interest rates. The first of its kind in the legal literature, this article offers an accurate mod...

Associate Professor of Law, Indiana University Robert H. McKinney School of Law. Thanks to fellow visiting academics at the University of Oxford for conversations on this topic.

The marriage penalty in the federal income tax continues to persist despite universal condemnation of it. This article proposes a novel way to eliminate the marriage penalty: to create another tax filing status for dual-income couples that earn an amount within a particular percentage of each other. This filing status would be the same as the curre...

Until recently, it has been a truism that the trust is a creature of the common law system. A challenge to this truism is currently occurring in Europe in one of the most significant developments in the field of trusts & estates law: the introduction of trust-like devices in civil law countries. Specifically, while France and other civil law countr...

The Child Support Guidelines, incentivized by federal law, provide rebuttable guidance for setting child support awards, except in low- and high-income cases. This article focuses on the latter, as states continue to grapple with the question of whether the child should receive a proportion of the noncustodial parent’s income regardless of its amou...

This article presents the marital property regime of separation of assets with equalization of accrued gains, suggesting a direction for necessary reform that could increase the regime’s popularity in Poland. This article also endeavors to address the usefulness of the marital property regime for families in both the European Union, where efforts t...

In the United States, the harmonization of family law is not possible under the federal system, and family laws differ based on each state’s sensibilities. However, in another system resembling federalism — the European Union — efforts to harmonize family laws among member states are aggressively being pursued, with the next milestone being the Eur...

This encyclopedic entry considers the law and public policy regarding financial support for children of divorce for college.

While divorce law provides for property division, the term “palimony” was coined in the 1970’s to describe a financial settlement made upon the break-up of an unmarried, cohabiting couple (i.e., one that lives together and engages in a sexual relationship outside of marriage). In developing the contours of palimony and determining how property shou...

University tuition costs continue to increase, while education continues to be important. Efforts to alleviate this problem must be undertaken carefully as to not simply aggravate the problem. To this end, this Article proposes that parental contribution towards university tuition be treated more favorably by the tax code, and in particular, be tre...

Family policy is very important in each country. Given the differences between European Union countries, it is a truism that each has its own family policy. However, the challenge of each is similar: to address demographic changes such as lower fertility, emigration, population aging, divorces, same-sex relationships and new models of family, inclu...

This 2005 paper evaluates the Lisbon Strategy that aimed to transform the European Union into the world’s most dynamic and competitive economy between the years 2000 and 2010. The paper notes that the European Union is not meeting the strategy’s goals due to a sluggish internal market, lack of reform in national labor markets, and the failure to ma...

American probate law has not yet managed to prevent will contests and not every will executed will be ultimately upheld. The most common grounds for will contests are undue influence, testamentary capacity, and fraud. These will contests have significant costs, which include failing to give effect to testator’s intent and high litigation and decisi...

This article considers the harmonization of matrimonial property law in the United States and the European Union. In the United States, family law is within the domain of the individual states, which have adopted different approaches to matrimonial property law. Although uniform model legislation has been proposed, federalism, or the balance of pow...

A trend in Poland, as in other countries, is the growth in the number of divorces. Nonetheless, marriage remains a popular institution and family is one of the most important values in Polish life. These contradictory observations have provided the inspiration for this article, which analyzes whether Polish divorce law needs to be modernized. The f...

There is currently an area in the criminal law — the application of murder statutes to infanticide cases — that has notably inconsistent sentences, which range from parole to the death penalty. Many judges have remarked on the risks of inconsistent sentencing, and the criminal system has generally avoided such sentencing consistencies. Without reco...

Child support enforcement and collection is a familiar problem in both the United Kingdom and the United States, fraught with low enforcement rates and high costs. The United Kingdom had approached the problem by centralizing collection efforts through the Child Support Agency and prohibiting direct action by custodial parents against defaulting no...

The Polish rules on the administration of marital common property underwent significant changes in 2005. Previous regulations, having their roots in the pre-1989 communist regime of Poland, appeared insufficient for the current capitalist economy and today’s dynamically developing society. The previous management of common property, based on the un...

In June 2010, the United States Supreme Court handed down a highly anticipated trilogy of decisions that altered white-collar criminal law by restricting the honest-services provision, 18 U.S.C. § 1346, to bribes and kickbacks. This development is the most recent one in the tumultuous existence of the honest-services doctrine, which has been charac...

Although family law requires parents to support their minor children, the question of post-majority support - or child support for adult children - is entirely different. Some states permit this type of child support, while others do not. Those affected by this divergence in approaches include college students, unemployed people, disabled people, a...

Lawmakers and prosecutors continue to take aim at a major subset of global corruption - corporate bribery of foreign government officials. Specifically, while the enforcement of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act in the United States has risen to new records, the United Kingdom has revolutionized its anti-bribery law following global criticism of it...

The Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve has recently promulgated an “ability to pay” rule under the CARD Act that prevents many stay-at-home mothers and homemakers from opening sole-account credit cards. This rule requires credit card issuers to consider only a person’s independent income, and not the household’s income, when underwriting cre...

The United States Supreme Court has enumerated a constitutionally protected parental right to control the upbringing of one’s child that includes the right to direct the child’s education. The states, meanwhile, have differed in their interpretation and application of this principle when foster children’s educational interests conflict with their b...

The increasing popularity of cohabitation, as manifested in the recent American and Polish censuses, has introduced various issues to the courts and legislatures in each country—among the most important being the protection of cohabitants after an unsuccessful cohabitation. However, neither country has recognized a comprehensive law on cohabitation...

When discussing international commercial surrogacy, it is essential to remember that at the heart of this market are women and children, which requires an in-depth analysis of the issues that implicate these parties to a commercial surrogacy. In undertaking such an analysis, this Article considers the rights, interests, and obligations of these par...

The premarital agreement, perhaps one of the world’s most unromantic documents, also happens to be quite powerful and complex. Although its most highly-publicized use has been to control post-divorce property division, the premarital agreement’s most significant importance is in its power to circumvent the statutory defaults governing spouses’ righ...

Eyebrows have recently arched not only at the high sums involved in big money divorce cases, but also at the amount of ink spilled on this relatively small subset of divorce cases. Yet, it is precisely in big money cases, wherein judges have discretion over resources that significantly exceed the needs of the parties, that fairness acquires substan...

Among the most fundamental barriers to the aggressive participation of many married women in the work force are the disincentives for secondary income earners embedded in the federal tax code. Specifically, the current code contains a marriage penalty, which is aggravated by the progressive nature of taxation and any potential increases in income t...

Many American and English courts today permit infant adoptions without notifying or seeking the consent of biological fathers. However, children's best interests would be better served by recognizing their father-child relationship, instead of institutionally denying it. Any legal approach that ignores the biological father devalues the importance...

Family law litigants have long searched for permutations of constitutional principles that gain access to federal courts. Typically, such litigants have been most successful with due process and equal protection arguments--even at the expense of the venerable "best interests of the child" standard in child-related cases. One legal system currently...

This article considers the rules governing marital property upon divorce. The article takes a comparative law approach, analyzing the American rules and their Polish counterpart, offering conclusions drawn from such a comparative analysis.

In the comparative context, this article considers the treatment, upon divorce, of commingled property — marital property mixed with the separate property of spouses. In the United States, separate property becomes commingled, and therefore marital property, if these two property types are mixed together such that they lose their identities. Except...

It is a common principle in many jurisdictions, including Poland and the United States, that parents have a duty to financially support their children. Indeed, few people would dispute the necessity of child support for children — except to the extent that the children at issue are adults. In the case of adult children, parental obligations become...

Eyebrows have recently arched not only at the high sums involved in big money divorce cases, but also at the amount of ink spilled on this relatively small subset of divorce cases. Yet, it is precisely in big money cases that fairness acquires substantial haziness. Is it fair for a high-wage earner to pay an ex-spouse half of his future profits? Or...