How legal education can reshape custody decisions, protect children, and transform the future of family law.
Every year, family courts make life-altering decisions about where children will live, who will care for them, and what happens when allegations of abuse, neglect, coercive control, or family violence collide with competing claims of parental rights. Family court decisions are delivered by judges, argued by attorneys, influenced by custody evaluators, and shaped by legislation. But long before any of those professionals enter a courtroom, they pass through another institution first: law school.
For decades, efforts to reform family courts have largely focused on legislation, judicial elections, policy advocacy, and procedural changes. Yet, one of the most powerful and underutilized levers for reform may be sitting in plain sight. Law schools do not simply teach family law; they shape the people who will ultimately define it.
Every future family court judge, guardian ad litem, custody attorney, appellate advocate, policymaker, and legal scholar learns how to think about families, evidence, conflict, justice, and child welfare.
If family courts consistently struggle to recognize trauma, understand coercive control, or balance parental rights against children’s developmental needs, legal education must ask an uncomfortable question. What exactly are we teaching?
As new research challenges long-held assumptions about custody, attachment, family violence, and child well-being, law schools have an opportunity not only to respond to those developments, but to lead them.
What Future Lawyers Might Not Be Learning
The American Psychological Association’s (APA) 2022 Guidelines for Child Custody Evaluations provide a roadmap for what modern family court decision-making should look like.
They emphasize that custody evaluations should be grounded in the best interests of the children and include screening for family violence, coercive control, maltreatment, and substance use disorders. They also stress the importance of understanding developmental needs, attachment relationships, trauma, cultural context, and parent-child dynamics.
Perhaps most importantly, the guidelines reject formulaic approaches to custody. The “best interests of the child” standard, according to the APA, is a child-specific determination that depends on the unique circumstances, relationships, and developmental needs of each one.
Yet many legal professionals historically received far more training on concepts such as parental alienation than on these critical issues.
That imbalance has had significant consequences, according to Joan Meier, founding director of the National Family Violence Law Center at George Washington University Law School and lead researcher of the first national empirical study examining family court responses to abuse and alienation claims.
“Judges are not effectively trained on family violence, especially child abuse,” Meier says. “Legal culture prioritizes parenting time for fathers at nearly all costs.”
According to Meier, parental alienation claims frequently receive more attention than evidence of abuse, creating an environment where legitimate safety concerns can be minimized or overlooked.
“Parental alienation is used as a trump card to negate abuse claims,” she says.
The implications extend far beyond individual cases. When future attorneys, judges, and policymakers are not adequately educated on these topics, blind spots become embedded throughout the legal system itself.
Why Law Schools Matter
Today’s law students become tomorrow’s decision makers. That gives legal education the unique ability to influence the future of family law.
If law schools want to produce attorneys equipped to navigate increasingly complex custody disputes, legal doctrine alone is not enough.
A single custody case may involve developmental psychology, trauma science, domestic violence research, attachment theory, substance abuse knowledge, mental health awareness, and family systems dynamics.
Yet, legal education often remains siloed from the very disciplines generating the research that family courts increasingly need. This disconnect creates a significant opportunity.
Rather than treating family law primarily as a legal dispute between parents, law schools could embrace a more interdisciplinary approach that prepares students to understand how children experience divorce, conflict, attachment disruption, trauma, and family violence. Such an approach would not replace legal analysis. It would strengthen it.
A Statewide Experiment in Retraining the System
Evidence that education can change professional practice is already emerging.
Danielle Hawkes, a Utah family law attorney and former chair of the Family Law Executive Committee at the Utah State Bar, has spent years helping develop family law education programs for judges and legal professionals throughout the state.
Her experience provides a striking example of how professional training can reshape legal culture.
“I was trained through AFCC,” Hawkes says, referring to the Association of Family and Conciliation Courts. “I was used to always being really hyper-vigilant for alienation. And I was not trained on domestic violence in my first 10 years of practice.”
That experience, she says, was not unusual. For many years, family law professionals were encouraged to focus heavily on preserving parent-child relationships and identifying signs of alienation, while receiving comparatively little education about other factors.
As new research emerged and Utah adopted reforms designed to improve family court responses to domestic violence and coercive control, Hawkes says many professionals began reassessing longstanding assumptions.
She has been involved in statewide efforts to bring judges, attorneys, guardians ad litem, custody evaluators, and mental health professionals together for training on family violence and child welfare issues.
Those educational initiatives have exposed these family court participants to research that was often absent and have encouraged more nuanced discussions about how to evaluate allegations of abuse.
Rather than treating family law primarily as a legal dispute between parents, law schools could embrace a more interdisciplinary approach that prepares students to understand how children experience divorce, conflict, attachment disruption, trauma, and family violence. Such an approach would not replace legal analysis. It would strengthen it.
Today, family law professionals across Utah are receiving significantly more education on family violence dynamics than they did even a few years ago.
“We are hearing about it now,” Hawkes says. “We are learning about it as lawyers and judges and commissioners.”
She emphasizes that the goal is not to replace one rigid framework with another, but to better understand the realities families bring into court.
This kind of additional training gives decision makers additional tools for evaluating evidence and assessing risk, particularly in high-conflict custody cases where children’s safety and well-being may be at stake.
Hawkes also notes that meaningful change requires ongoing education. Judges rotate assignments, new attorneys enter a family law practice, and evolving research continues to reshape understanding. Sustained professional learning, she says, is essential if courts are going to keep pace with emerging evidence.
The Power of Interdisciplinary Learning
For law schools, the next frontier may be deeper collaboration across disciplines. Many of the most important questions in family court are not purely legal questions.
How do children form secure attachments? What does trauma look like in children? How does coercive control affect parenting capacity? How should courts interpret a child’s fear of a parent? What developmental factors should influence parenting schedules? These questions require expertise beyond traditional law school curriculum.
Law schools are uniquely positioned to bridge that gap through interdisciplinary clinics, joint degree programs, collaborative research initiatives, and partnerships with departments of psychology, social work, education, public health, and child development.
Some institutions are already moving in this direction (see page 26 for some Insight Into Academia Excellence in Innovation Award: Law School winners). Family law clinics increasingly expose students to real-world custody disputes. Trauma-informed legal education programs are expanding, and scholars across disciplines are collaborating on topic-related research.
The opportunity is not simply to graduate better family lawyers. It’s also to produce future judges, policymakers, and scholars who understand both the law and the science behind the lives the law affects.
Moving Past Mathematical Fairness: Let’s Not Split the Baby
One of the most significant debates in family law today centers on the distinction between parental fairness and child well-being.
Conversations about custody often focus on equal parenting time. Developmental science asks a different question: What does this child need?
Research supporting ideal shared custody arrangements generally reflects situations in which both parents maintain healthy relationships with the child and are capable of effective co-parenting. But that is not always the reality.
Those findings do not necessarily apply in situations involving abuse, coercive control, significant conflict, neglect, or safety concerns.
That distinction matters.
The goal of family court should not be to achieve mathematical equality between adults but rather to create arrangements that best support children’s emotional, psychological, developmental, and physical well-being.
The APA’s custody evaluation guidelines reinforce this principle, emphasizing individualized assessments over rigid formulas. Law schools are uniquely positioned to help future legal professionals understand that difference.
The Future of Family Court Reform Begins Here
Law schools often describe themselves as institutions that shape the future. In family law, that is literally true.
The theories students learn today will become tomorrow’s judicial opinions, custody evaluations, statutes, courtroom arguments, and public policy decisions. Law school curriculum will shape the lives of children and families in the future.
If legal education continues to approach family law primarily as a dispute between adults, family courts will continue producing adult-centered outcomes.
But if law schools begin incorporating the understanding of child development, trauma, coercive control, attachment, and family violence with the same rigor they teach precedent, procedure, and constitutional doctrine, they have the power to transform the system itself.
The next generation of leaders driving and enacting this change is sitting in law school classrooms right now.
