Legal Concerns
Where paternity of the child is in question, a party may ask the court to determine paternity of one or several possible fathers (called putative fathers) based initially upon sworn statements and then upon testimony or other evidence.
A successful application to the court results in an order assigning paternity to a specific man, possibly including support responsibility and/or visitation rights.
Once a father has established paternity and, if he wishes to be part of the child's upbringing, he can effectively establish his parental rights with his child by filing a parenting plan. In the United States, law requires parents to file a parenting plan with a district court which outlines how the biological parents will share parental responsibilities on matters such as legal custody, physical custody (parenting time or visitation), and medical insurance.
Some paternity laws assign full parental responsibility to fathers even in cases of women lying about contraception, using deceit (such as oral sex followed by self artificial insemination (State of Louisiana v. Frisard) or statutory rape by a woman (Hermesmann v. Seyer)
If the context of inheritance rights, it will be the heirs of the deceased person who are attempting to dispute or establish paternity. In some states, DNA testing will be dispositive to establish paternity. In most states, however, there are a variety of rules and time restrictions that can deny inheritance rights to biological children of a deceased father.
Read more about this topic: Paternity (law)
Famous quotes containing the words legal and/or concerns:
“There are ... two minimum conditions necessary and sufficient for the existence of a legal system. On the one hand those rules of behavior which are valid according to the system’s ultimate criteria of validity must be generally obeyed, and on the other hand, its rules of recognition specifying the criteria of legal validity and its rules of change and adjudication must be effectively accepted as common public standards of official behavior by its officials.”
—H.L.A. (Herbert Lionel Adolphus)
“Science asks no questions about the ontological pedigree or a priori character of a theory, but is content to judge it by its performance; and it is thus that a knowledge of nature, having all the certainty which the senses are competent to inspire, has been attained—a knowledge which maintains a strict neutrality toward all philosophical systems and concerns itself not with the genesis or a priori grounds of ideas.”
—Chauncey Wright (1830–1875)