期刊名称：Utah OnLaw: The Utah Law Review Online Supplement
出版年度：2013
卷号：2013
期号：1
语种：English
出版社：Faculty of Education
摘要：Utah’s procedures and requirements present a maze that unwed putative fathers must successfully navigate in order to preserve their parental rights. The requirements are both complex and idiosyncratic; they defy cultural notions of inherent rights, such that a father who is unfamiliar with the law is unlikely to guess the steps he needs to take to preserve his rights. This is because, first, under Utah law, the courts of other states—competent in nearly every other capacity to offer a person within their jurisdictions protection—are impotent to protect a father’s rights. And second, the law denies a father protection whose actions, while reasonable and made in good faith, do not precisely align with the law’s intricate requirements and procedures. John Wyatt’s case—along with other unwed putative fathers, Cody O’Dea and Robert Manzanares—illuminate the ways in which the law, in its unforgiving stringency, can fail to accord proper weight to the interests of a father who, despite failing to comply in some trivial way, has acted in good faith to preserve his rights and to become a responsible parent to his child. Using Wyatt’s, O’Dea’s, and Manzanares’s stories—recounted in Section II—as frames of reference, this Note will explore the recent developments in Utah adoption law, explain it in its current state, and discuss its likely implications for unwed fathers in Section III. Section IV recommends modifications to Utah’s statutory adoption scheme.
