Harvard Law article on Family courts.........

Alec Baldwin is on a roll - just recently, the affable actor won an Emmy Award for his role on the critically-acclaimed sitcom, 30 Rock. But the 50 year old Baldwin wasn't smiling when he entered Ames Courtroom last Thursday, September 25. He was making his second appearance at HLS to engage in a serious discussion with Professor Jeannie Suk on the problems of divorce courts and custody proceedings.

Baldwin's encounter with the world of family law began in 2000, when he and his then-wife Kim Basinger agreed to separate. The proceedings dragged on to 2004, when the two were awarded joint custody of their daughter, Ireland Eliesse. In 2007, when Ireland failed to answer a call from her father, Baldwin left a now-famous phone message deriding her as a "rude, thoughtless little pig". A recording of the comment was released to the media, and it immediately set off a firestorm. It also led to a messy lawsuit in which Baldwin accused Basinger of leaking the tape.

Against this backdrop, Baldwin's frustration with the family law system - which he saw extending far beyond courts and into the mindsets and attitudes of the public at large - was palpable throughout his discussion with Suk. Baldwin said his new book, which chronicles the experience of his divorce, was filled with "pain, regreat, and anger about the law," as well as his "frustration [and] confusion with the [legal] process". His custody battle, he reported, was "arduous, slow, glacial".

Baldwin reserved much of his consternation for the gender biases which he believes pervade family law. He was concerned when, from the outset, he was assured the specific custody officer his case had been assigned was noted as "good for fathers". "It was troubling," he observed, "that other [custody offices] might have been bad."

Professor Suk noted that Baldwin's experiences of gender bias had led him to become a pioneer of the fathers' rights movement in California. Baldwin, pointing out that this effort now went by the term "shared parenting", discussed his reasons for becoming involved.

Different genders, he noted, were tarred with different stereotypes by courts - men were seen, in particular, as "abusers". "Men walk into a courtroom with a cloud of male aggression overshadowing them," Baldwin said. Adversaries in custody proceedings could often reconstruct otherwise neutral events post facto, he claimed, by using courts' presumptions of male behavior to make them seem like episodes of abuse.

Professor Suk agreed at least that the definition of violence had expanded too far; any instance of "bad behavior" could be used to determine that custody by a parent might not be in the best interest of a child. "The pendulum has swung too far," Baldwin concurred, recounting an incident in which a representative of the National Organization for Women told him the group thought of wrongfully-convicted men as "collateral damage" as long as one abused spouse or child could be saved under the current legal regime.

As a consequence of such sentiments, Baldwin asserted, fathers were often alienated from their children throughout divorce proceedings, and sometimes for long thereafter. He emotionally recounted how the fathers of children's friends came to play more of a role in their lives than their own, and how fathers would wind up spending more time talking to lawyers than to their children. The actor characterized parental alienation as a form of child abuse itself.

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