Lead Articles

Throughout the years, I have witnessed many friends and acquaintances struggle with naming decisions during the occasions of marriage, birth of children, divorce, and remarriage. Naming decisions are deeply personal, and as expected, people choose different paths; they change their names to their spouses’ last names, keep their birth names, hyphenate their names, and alternate the last names of their children. In particular, two friends, who upon marriage adopted their husbands’ last names, decided to resume using their birth names during the course of their marriage; both felt as though they had lost a piece of themselves and sought to reclaim their identity by reclaiming their birth name. Their individual identities, however, were not reclaimable by themselves as individuals; each [...]

When John Adams wrote the Massachusetts Constitution during the American Revolution, he included a provision allowing for alimony awards in divorce cases. Thus Massachusetts has recognized awards of spousal support longer than any other state. From a national perspective, the evolution of alimony law began to undergo changes in the last half of the twentieth century in many states, including time limits on the obligation, use of rehabilitative orders, and greater flexibility to modify. The introduction of equitable property division in divorce actions in the last decades of the twentieth century throughout the United States helped to reduce the need for alimony in many cases. Changes in societal habits, including the growing ability of women to become self-supporting, played a [...]

The Supreme Court in Snyder extolled the protected status of hate speech as essential to First Amendment values, even when targeting a private funeral where it caused significant emotional harm to grieving family members. The Court in essence ruled that hate speech, no matter how offensive and intentionally hurtful, is protected if it addresses a matter of public concern in a public place. This article contends that the near-absolutist position the Court espoused in Snyder does not comport with established First Amendment jurisprudence, which acknowledges several categories of unprotected or less protected speech. Nor can the Court’s analysis be reconciled with other decisions, which recognize that in some contexts concerns for human dignity, equality, and privacy outweigh First Amendment values. [...]

While the phenomenon of hoarding is not new, the media scrutiny accompanying it has reached heights undreamt of even in 1947, when the living situation of the famous Collyer brothers became front-page news.  Along with numerous recent newspaper and magazine accounts of the problem, and an increased focus from the medical community, the term “hoarding” has burrowed into popular culture through ubiquitous reality shows as one of those amusing extreme behaviors to which the human experience occasionally gravitates.  However, in discussing hoarding, it is surprising how commonly we find that we know “hoarders,” either as neighbors, friends, parents of friends, coworkers, or even family members. It seems that everyone knows someone or knows someone who knows someone who could become a reality television star if [...]