I am writing a paper about some of my long-time concerns about the family courts. It's a little hard to put in a nutshell, but my concern is probably rooted in the fact that so many family court judges have told me over the years that their overriding concern is for the children whose families are caught up in the courts. While this sounds fine—even noble—it has me wondering and worrying about the abstract concept of neutrality. To put it bluntly, if courts are for the kids, where is the neutral decision maker? I think this neutrality problem is very much compounded in the family courts because they so often appoint experts to make investigations in the cases before them. If the expert is appointed by the court, she is referred to as a "neutral" expert, and this neutrality gives her evidence and recommendations great power.

Last year, during my sabbatical, I was a visiting scholar at UMass Medical School, attached to the Child and Family Forensic Center. There, I saw first hand how these "neutral" reports are constructed and prepared. My paper tries to relate what I learned there to this larger question of neutrality, as well as exploring what I see as a poor fit between the diagnostic paradigm of the psychologists and the courts' need to reach and impose judgments. I think most people who have never been through this process might be shocked by the level of legal intrusion. So that's what my work is about—how to bring legal norms and limitations back to a system that has lost sight of them in its warm embrace of mental health norms.

This wasn't my case, but it came up at a judges' seminar where I was presenting. A hospital emergency room called the on-call judge to say that there had been a terrible motorcycle accident, and a young man had been killed. The call came because the young man's parents were at the hospital insisting that the doctors do a semen extraction so that they could have grandchildren. Let my colleagues top that one!

I finally crossed the border, or something like that: last November I published an article in a psych journal. I'm sure we all read Child Development Perspectives and can't wait to read my piece on the approximation rule.

I'm embarrassed because books sit in my "must read" pile for so long, but last year I picked up Jon Krakauer's Under the Banner of Heaven and couldn't put it down.

Be outdoors. One might have guessed that I am not a jock, but my dog and I think we could probably walk across North America. We'd certainly like to try.

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