Debra H. Lehmann, Chair of the American Bar Association’s Section of Family Law has appointed John DeWitt Gregory, Sidney and Walter Siben Distinguished Professor of Family Law, to serve as a member of the Family Law Quarterly Editorial Board of Editors for the 2010-2011 year. The appointment will begin at the conclusion of the 2010 ABA Annual Meeting in San Francisco and will continue until the conclusion of the 2011 Annual Meeting in Toronto Canada.

John DeWitt Gregory recently became a member of the National Interdiciplinary Colloquium on Child Custody Law (NICCCL). The Colloquium is an independent group of practicing and academic lawyers, mental health professionals and judges.

Professor Gregory has recently published an article titled Pet Custody: Distorting Language and the Law, in Volume 44, No. 1 of the FAMILY LAW QUARTERLY (Spring 2010). An abstract of the article appears below:

Pets or companion animals are the property of those who own them. In this article, I shall show that pets that are the subject of disputes between divorcing spouses or separating unmarried couples should continue to be characterized as property under a rational legal system. Proposals in the law review literature and halting, early attempts by some courts to place pets in some category other than property, which flirted with a standard derived from the prevailing best-interest-of-the-child doctrine in conventional child custody and visitation cases, are, at best, vanity. Such proposals do violence to both the language and the law of child custody, create uncertainty in a well-established area of divorce law, and offer no discernible prospect of improving the welfare of companion animals.