Why Do So Many Divorce Litigants Represent Themselves?

In recent years, an increasing number of people seeking divorces have dispensed with lawyers.  What explains this trend?  Judi McMullen and Debra Oswald set out to find some answers by examining a random sample of 567 divorce cases from Waukesha, Wisconsin.  Consistent with national trends, they found high percentages of pro se litigants (43.9 percent of husbands and 37.7 percent of wives).  Given the relative prosperity of Waukesha County, these high rates of self-representation are probably not just a matter of litigants not being able to afford a lawyer.  Rather, the data showed that people tended to represent themselves in the simpler sorts of cases.  When complicating factors like minor children were present, litigants were more likely to obtain counsel. According to McMullen and Oswald, “This suggests that divorce litigants have good, common sense notions about when self-representation is feasible and when it is not.”

The data were not as clear regarding the effects of hiring counsel.  For instance, cases with represented clients took longer to complete, but this may simply reflect the fact that these cases tended to be more complex.

McMullen and Oswald reported their research in a recently published article entitled “Why Do We Need a Lawyer? An Empirical Study of Divorce Cases,” which appeared at 12 J. Law & Fam. Studies 57 (2010).  The article is also available here on SSRN.

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Casey as Conscience Protection?

This past weekend I attended (and delivered a paper) at the annual meeting of University Faculty for Life at Catholic University’s Columbus School of Law. My paper had to do with Justice Breyer’s concept of Active Liberty and current notions of popular constitutionalism and abortion rights,  focusing on the potential changes in the Roe/Casey framework suggested by (if not expressly called for in) Carhart v. Gonzales. But I’ll discuss that some other time.

Right now, I want to highlight a paper by Catholic’s Mark Rienzi. He argues that Casey‘s “sweet mystery” of life passage ought to create a constitutional right on the part of health care providers not to participate in abortion or to prescribe or administer what they regard to be abortifacients. But I think his argument has the potential to move beyond that and that is both its strength and its weakness.

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The Naked Truth About Trademark Licensing

Irene Calboli has a new paper on SSRN entitled “A Critical Analysis of the Doctrine of Naked Licenses in Trademark Law.”  A trademark owner may license others to produce and sell goods bearing his or her mark, but  the owner must normally take steps to preserve control over the quality of the goods or the license may be regarded as “naked” and hence invalid.  Irene’s paper reviews and critiques the development of this doctrine.  She also proposes a new test for validity that focuses on the quality of the licensed goods instead of the degree of control exercised by the trademark owner.

The paper was published as a chapter in volume three of Intellectual Property and Information Wealth: Issues and Practices in the Digital Age, edited by Peter K. Yu.  The abstract appears after the jump. 

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