ABSTRACT
It seems a kind of poetic injustice that courts hearing matters concerning children and families in most states appear to be “stepchildren” of the justice system. Unfortunately, they are not stepchildren in the modern, positive sense, where the children become part of a resilient hybrid family, but rather in the classic sense of Hansel and Gretel, whose stepmother abandoned them in the forest. Under this analogy, the idealized figure of justice holding the scales is the biological mother who died in childbirth, the father who provided financial resources to the family died after remarrying, and the stepmother directs her limited resources to raising her own biological children-preferred matters such as commercial litigation and criminal prosecutions. In contrast, the courts that hear cases about children and families are truly disfavored. Fragmented and lacking resources, they are places in which only relatively few, exceptionally dedicated, legal professionals wish to spend their careers.1
