This guest post is courtesy of Elijah Stacks, Regent Law 2023
If you are reading this blog, there is a significant chance you are a lawyer or a law student. So, I am sure we have all heard it said that the purpose of law school is to teach you to “think like a lawyer.” And this is undoubtedly true. Law school changes how you see the world. Ever since my 1L year, I cannot watch television shows without thinking about the torts characters are committing or the contracts to which they are binding themselves. I am sure many of you can relate.
In my final semester of law school, I enrolled in the family law course offered at Regent University School of Law. I studiously studied how to validly enter a marriage. I uncovered how putative fathers can establish paternity and how maternity is established when couples use surrogates or other assistive reproductive technologies. I now know how spouses can seek divorce and how to handle property division, alimony, child custody, and child support. In the throes of learning the minute details of family law—the rules, the elements, the factors—it is easy to fall into simply thinking of family “like a lawyer.”
This semester, two important events happened in my own family life. Over spring break, I married the love of my life. Just a few weeks before, I had been studying the formal and substantive requirements of a valid marriage. The morning of the wedding, I caught myself thinking of those requirements. Perhaps it was the lawyer in me wanting to make sure they were all satisfied to prevent any legal issues down the road. But, I caught myself doing so and had to chuckle. Undoubtedly, nobody else in attendance was thinking about marriage’s legal requirements at our celebration of love and commitment (except perhaps any other lawyers or law students present). I know I never thought about them before attending law school. And ultimately, the day was not focused on the legalities of “family.” Rather, it was an opportunity for my wife and me to celebrate our love and the start of our life together with the people we hold most dear. That is what family is truly about—your relationships with the people you love.
After a brief honeymoon over spring break, my wife and I returned to law school. (She is also a law student.) And after only a few days back, the second important event happened—my great-grandmother passed away. “Grandma Golding,” as she was known, passed at 101 years old. She was the mother of thirteen children, the grandmother of thirty grandchildren, the great-grandmother of seventy-six great-grandchildren, and the great-great-grandmother of twenty-four great-great-grandchildren. (Those numbers do not even include all of those who have married into the family.) Despite the size of my extended family, we have always been a very close-knit group, and that was principally due to our matriarch, Grandma Golding. At her funeral, many people shared stories about her love for her family and how it permeated throughout the rest of the family and into the community at large. As I sat in the service, I was reminded about what family truly is. It is not the rules of law. It is not the elements. It is not the factors in a balancing test. Those things are important, to be sure. But family is so much more. It is the people who God places in your life. It is the ones we hold dear, whether you are related by blood or by law. And it is important we do not forget that underlying the codes and cases we study and apply, there are real people whose lives are really impacted by the law.
So, as I reflect on my semester studying family
law, I felt inspired to write this reminder to other law students and those
practicing family law. Certainly, the law of family law is important.
But, it is paramount we never forget the families the laws impact. While
it may be easy to fall into the habit of “thinking like a lawyer,” remember
those the law impacts—because they almost certainly will not see it the same
way you do.
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