Solangel Maldonado
Professor of Law
Professor Solangel Maldonado’s research focuses on the law’s regulation of children’s relationships with parental figures. She has written several articles examining the law’s responsibility for paternal disengagement and inter-parental hostility after divorce and is currently exploring whether the law can facilitate forgiveness between divorcing parents and children. Her work also examines the legal and social implications of transracial and transcultural adoptions.
Professor Maldonado is also interested in comparative work. She is one of the co-authors of the second edition of Family Law in the World Community: Cases, Materials, and Problems in Comparative and International Family Law, and has conducted research on paternal involvement in nonmarital families at McGill University-Faculty of Law in Canada. She delivered the keynote address at the New Zealand Family Law Conference in 2007.
Prior to joining the Seton Hall faculty, Professor Maldonado was a litigation associate with Kaye, Scholer, Fierman, Hays & Handler, LLP and with Sidley, Austin, Brown & Wood in New York. She was also a law clerk for the Honorable Joseph A. Greenaway, Jr., United States District Court for the District of New Jersey. She received her B.A. from Columbia College and her J.D. from Columbia Law School, where she was a Harlan Fiske Stone Scholar and the Managing Editor of the Columbia Journal of Gender and Law. Professor Maldonado is a member of the Hispanic National Bar Association and, in that capacity, she and five other law professors drafted a comprehensive report on the jurisprudence of U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor in connection with her nomination and confirmation to the U.S. Supreme Court. This report -- Report of the HNBA in Support of the Confirmation of the Honorable Sonia Sotomayor as Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States -- was entered into the Hearing Record of the United States Senate, Committee on the Judiciary. Professor Maldonado has served on the New Jersey Commission on Higher Education, the Board of Directors of the Dominican Bar Association, and the New York Supreme Court Judicial Screening Panel. She is currently the chair of the Diversity Council at Seton Hall Law.
Professor Maldonado came to Seton Hall in 2001 and was awarded a Dean’s Fellowship in 2006. She was named the Joseph M. Lynch Research Fellow in 2007.
Publications
Law Review Articles
Permanency v. Permanent Ties: The Case for Post Adoption Contact, Capital L. Rev. (forthcoming 2008) (paper delivered at symposium at Capital University Law School, “Hearing the Child’s Voice: Selected Adoption and Child Welfare Topics”)
Taking Account of Children’s Emotions: Anger and Forgiveness in “Renegotiated Families”, 16 VA. J. SOC. POL’Y & L. 443 (2009) (Symposium)
Permanency v. Permanent Ties: The Case for Post Adoption Contact, Capital L. Rev. (forthcoming 2008) (paper delivered at symposium at Capital University Law School, “Hearing the Child’s Voice: Selected Adoption and Child Welfare Topics”)
Cultivating Forgiveness: Reducing Hostility and Conflict after Divorce, Wake Forest L. Rev. (2008)
Deadbeat or Deadbroke: Redefining Child Support for Poor Fathers, 39 U.C. DAVIS L. REV. 991 (2006) (Symposium)
Discouraging Racial Preferences in Adoptions, 39 U.C. Davis L. Rev. 1415 (2006) (Abridged Version Reprinted in FAMILY LAW: BALANCING INTERESTS AND PURSING PRIORITIES 260 (Lynn D. Wardle & Camille S. Williams eds., 2007))
Deadbeat or Deadbroke: Redefining Child Support For Poor Fathers, 39 U.C. Davis L. Rev. 991 (2006)
Beyond Economic Fatherhood: Encouraging Divorced Fathers to Parent, 153 U. PA. L. REV. 921 (2005)
When Father (or Mother) Doesn’t Know Best: Quasi-Parents and Parental Deference After Troxel v. Granville, 88 IOWA L. REV. 865 (2003)
Law Journal Article
Race, Culture, and Adoption: Lessons From Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians v. Holyfield, 17 Colum. J. Gender & L. 1 (2008)
Recidivism and Paternal Engagement, 40 FAM. L.Q. 191 (2006)
Text Book
FAMILY LAW IN THE WORLD COMMUNITY: CASES, MATERIALS, AND PROBLEMS IN COMPARATIVE AND INTERNATIONAL FAMILY LAW, Carolina Academic Press, 2nd ed. (2009) (D. Marianne Blair, Merle H. Weiner, and Barbara Stark)
Book Chapters
The Story of the Holyfield Twins: Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians v. Holyfield, in FAMILY LAW STORIES 113, Carol Sanger ed. (2007)