Julie Shapiro is a Seattle University Law Professor who writes like a human being.  In her blog, Related Topics, she discusses issues around the nation, including, for example, the proposed ban against adoptions by unwed couples in Kentucky and anti-fertility drug legislation in Georgia (in reaction to the recent Octuplet outrage).

This week Professor Shapiro discusses how marriage creates a presumption of fatherhood:

Here’s the story:  A woman is getting married.   She is pregnant.   The baby is (as she puts it) “not the groom’s.”   He knows this, as do all their close friends and family.   The concern expressed … is what and how to tell others about the parentage of the child.

Now, I’ll admit that my first question is … why on earth one would feel compelled to tell anyone anything.   The answer to this seems to be that the bride is afraid that people will make assumptions; that is, people will assume the the groom is the father of the child.

Well, here’s the beauty of the law:  the groom actually is the father, or will be once the child is born. [Washington law presumes that the husband is the father of the child, whether biologically true or not.]   Isn’t that tidy?   There’s no need to say anything because there is actually nothing to say.  The child’s parents will be just who everyone at that wedding will think they are.

Read the rest of this post at Related Topics.

Professor Shapiro’s wide-ranging blog is more pensive than practical.   As she explains:

I hope to create a forum for intelligent and sustained discussion of some of the more compelling family law issues.  I have started here with questions of parentage–who are the parents of a child.  It’s not as simple as it seems.  But it is a terribly important one.  By building slowly, case by case, story by story, I hope to slowly develop a rich and layered understanding of what it means to be a parent, one that perhaps, some day, the law can learn from.