GRANDPARENT VISITATION RIGHTS

In recent years, legislators in all fifty states have given grandparents rights to petition for visitation privileges with grandchildren that can be enforced over parental objections. Grandparent visitation rights reflect an effort to protect meaningful relationships children enjoy with nonparental caregivers, enlist the assistance of extended family when the child's nuclear family is disrupted, and defend the interests of grandparents themselves. This psycholegal analysis explores the direct and indirect consequences of grandparent visitation statutes for family functioning. Statutory provisions are summarized, and the effects of these statutes are evaluated in light of what is known about the role of grandparents in child development, how courts evaluate children's "best interests" in grandparent visitation disputes, and how these statutes can alter family functioning in informal ways. The authors conclude that there are risks as well as benefits to children and families in grandparent visitation statutes, and suggest directions for procedural and statutory reform.     

A unique case of congenital bilateral absence of parietal bones in a neonate

The remains of an unidentified female neonate were discovered in a field in central Missouri. Examination revealed bilateral absence of the parietal bones. A search of the literature describing similar defects suggests that the present case represents a unique condition, described here for the first time.     

Preparing to Be Colonized: Land Tenure and Legal Strategy in Nineteenth-Century Hawaii

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, throughout the Pacific Rim, European and American colonizers reorganized indigenous systems of property rights in land to make them look more like European property systems, with disastrous effects for the indigenous people involved. The very first of these schemes, however, was the Māhele of 1845–1855, which took place not in a colony but in the independent Kingdom of Hawaii. Why did the Hawaiians do this to themselves? I argue that the Māhele was a sophisticated and partially successful response to the prospect that Hawaii would soon be colonized. The object of the Māhele was to ensure that in the event of annexation, Kamehameha III and other elite Hawaiians would not be dispossessed of their landholdings. The strategy was to convert those landholdings into a legal form that would be recognized by an incoming colonial government—whether American, British, or French—as private property.