The Case for Abolishing Family Court, with Jane Spinak

This week we talk with Jane Spinak, author of The End of Family Court: How Abolishing the Court Brings Justice to Children and Families. Jane is a Clinical Professor of Law Emerita at Columbia Law School, where she directed clinical programs in family regulation for forty years. In this episode, Jane traces her journey from working…

Read More

Catching Up with Michael Farris

This week we talk with Michael Farris, constitutional law scholar, founding president of ParentalRights.org, and the former CEO and president of Alliance Defending Freedom. In this episode, Michael responds to a recent Washington Post article about his role in the parental rights movement and gives us an update on the projects he’s been working on recently. 

Read More

New York’s ACS and Disproportionality with Joyce McMillan

This week, we talk with Joyce McMillian. Joyce is a thought leader, advocate, community organizer, educator, and the Founder and Executive Director of Just Making A Change for Families (JMACforFamilies).  Joyce walks us through her work advocating for families that find themselves caught up in New York’s child welfare system, the Administration for Children’s Services…

Read More

Giving the Choice to Parents, with Melissa Moschella

This week, we talk with Melissa Moschella, Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the Catholic University of America, where her teaching focuses on bioethics and the moral and political status of the family. Melissa is also the author of To Whom Do Children Belong? Parental Rights, Civic Education, and Children’s Autonomy. Melissa explains her argument that parental…

Read More

Family Court and the Fourth Amendment, with Anna Arons

This week, we talk with Anna Arons. Anna is the Impact Project Director at the New York University Defense Clinic and formerly the acting assistant professor of lawyering at the New York University School of Law. She’s also an assistant professor of law at the Saint John’s University School of Law.  In this episode, Anna…

Read More

Meet the Vice President, with William Wagner

This week, Michael talks with William Wagner, vice president of the Parental Rights Foundation. William is a distinguished Professor Emeritus of Law at the Western Michigan University Cooley Law School, and founder of Salt and Light Global. William has served as a federal magistrate judge in the U.S. Courts, as Legal Counsel in the U.S…

Read More

Advocating for Parents’ Rights with Erin Phillips

This week, we talk with Erin Phillips, president of Power2Parent, an organization uniting parents who want to advocate for their children’s education. Power2Parent is based in Nevada, but maintains chapters in many states. Erin tells us about recent challenges to parents rights in Nevada that her organization has faced, plus victories in Nevada and across…

Read More

Preserving Family Connections, with Vivek Sankaren

Vivek Sankaren is a clinical professor of law at the University of Michigan Law School, and director of their Child Advocacy Law Clinic and the Child Welfare Appellate Clinic. He’s authored over three dozen journal and law review articles, including “The Ties That Bind Us: an Empirical, Clinical, and Constitutional Argument Against Terminating Parental Rights”.…

Read More

Littlejohn v. School Board of Leon County, Florida, et al

Read the Brief Parental rights are fundamental. And because of this, public schools cannot lie to parents and tell 13-year-old children to also lie to their parents. That is what our friend of the court brief to the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals in the case of Littlejohn v. School Board of Leon County, Florida,…

Read More

Reforming the Child Welfare System from the Inside, with Jerry Milner

This week, we talk with Jerry Milner, former Associate Commissioner of the Children’s Bureau in the US Department of Health and Human Services. Far too often, the US child welfare system creates incentives to unnecessarily separate families, harming the children it tries to protect. During his tenure with the Children’s Bureau, Jerry worked to create…

Read More