"One morning in November 2008, Diana Montoya Alvarez left her London home to take her three-year-old daughter to nursery school and never returned." That's the gripping first line of Lisa Havilland's paper, "One Year Isn’t Enough: How The Hague Abduction Convention’s One-Year Limitation Encourages Abductors to Conceal Their Child’s Whereabouts," which the ABA Section of Family Law selected as the winner of its 2016 Howard C. Schwab Memorial Essay Contest.
Ms. Havilland's paper evaluates the Hague Convention on the Civil Aspects of International Child Abduction, which provides a procedure for a wrongfully taken child's immediate and automatic return. The Convention includes a limitation that judicial or administrative proceedings must commence within one year of abduction, or return of the child to the left-behind parent is no longer automatic if the court finds the child "well-settled" in the new environment. The paper argues that a child should not be considered "well-settled" when an abducting parent hides the whereabouts of the child for more than a year, preventing the start of any judicial proceedings. It concludes that the Convention could be improved by using "equitable tolling," which would pause running the one-year period until the child's whereabouts are discovered.
When the ABA Section of Family Law contacted her, Ms. Havilland was surprised to learn that she won the competition.
"I’ve been studying for the Maryland bar exam non-stop for the past two months and had forgotten about the essay contest. It was such a wonderful surprise, which made studying for the bar a bit more bearable. It is also important to me that other people thought my essay topic was important."
—Lisa R. Havilland, JD '16
In part, she credits Professor Catherine Ross with helping her through the process. She took Professor Ross' Family Law class during law school and later worked for her as a summer research assistant. While helping research and write for a family law textbook, Professor Ross assigned her a chapter on international child abduction, which sparked her interest. Ms. Havilland wrote a Note on the topic to submit to the International Law Review, and Professor Ross encouraged her to edit and submit it to the contest as an essay.
Family Law has long been an area of interest for Ms. Havilland. While at GW Law, she took courses in the subject, worked in the Family Justice Litigation Clinic with Professor Laurie Kohn, and served as a law clerk at Miles & Stockbridge P.C. with two lawyers who specialize in family law and the Hague Abduction Convention. She hopes family law will be in her future, too. After completing the bar exam, she will clerk for the Honorable Julie S. Solt in the Frederick County Circuit Court in Maryland for a year and then pursue work in the field.
The entire list of winners and the essay can be seen on the ABA Section of Family Law website.